Annie Machon

A Tale of Two Cases

The first case, the one hitting the headlines this week, is that of Jordanian-born alleged terrorist supremo Abu Qatada, who arrived in the UK using a forged passport almost 20 years ago and claimed asylum, and has already been found guilty twice in absentia of terrorist attacks in Jordan. He is reportedly also wanted in seven other countries for terrorist-related offences.  He has been labeled Bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe, and over the last few years in the UK has been variously interned, placed under control order, and held in maximum security prisons.  

The UK courts ruled that he should be deported to stand trial in his native country, but these rulings were recently overturned by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), as it had concerns that Jordanian diplomatic assurances that he would not be tortured could not be relied on, and that evidence against him in any retrial there might have been obtained using torture. 

As a result, Mr Justice Mitting of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) has ruled that he should be released under a strict T-PIM (the new control order).  This decision has predictably roused the frothing wrath of the Home Office and the readership of the Daily Mail.  Politicians of all flavours have rushed out their sound bites condemning the ECtHR decision.  

But can they not see that it is the complacency and the very disdain for law that the British political and intelligence infrastructure has displayed for the last decade that has created this mess in the first place?  If, instead of kidnapping, torture, assassination, and indeed internment without trial within the UK, the rule of law had been followed, the country would not currently find itself in this legal quagmire.  

There used to be a notion that you used due process to investigate a terrorist suspect as you would any other suspected criminal: gather the evidence, present the case to the Crown Prosecution Service, hold a trial in front of a jury, and work towards a conviction. 

How quaintly old-fashioned that all seems today.  Instead, since 9/11 and the inception of the hysterically brutal "war on terror" led by the USA, we have seen people in the UK thrown into prison for years on the secret word of anonymous intelligence officers, where even the suspects' lawyers are not allowed to see the information against their clients.  The British legal system has become truly Kafkaesque.

Which leads me to the second case.  This was a quote in yesterday's Guardian about the Abu Qatada ruling:

"The Conservative backbencher Dominic Raab echoed Blunkett's anger: "This result is a direct result of the perverse ruling by the Strasbourg court. It makes a mockery of human rights law that a terrorist suspect deemed 'dangerous' by our courts can't be returned home, not for fear that he might be tortured, but because European judges don't trust the Jordanian justice system.""

In the case of Julian Assange, can we really trust the Swedish justice system? While the Swedish judicial system may have an ostensibly more fragrant reputation than that of Jordan, it has been flagrantly politicised and manipulated in the Assange case, as has been repeatedly well documented. Indeed, the Swedish justice system has the highest rate per capita of cases taken to the ECtHR for flouting Article 6 - the right to a fair trial.

If Assange were extradited merely for questioning by police - he has yet to be even charged with any crime in Sweden - there is a strong risk that the Swedes will just shove him straight on the next plane to the US under the legal terms of a "temporary surrender".  And, to bastardise the above quote, who now really trusts the American justice system?

A secret Grand Jury has been convened in Virginia to find a law - any law - with which to prosecute Assange.  Hell, if the Yanks can't find an existing law, they will probably write a new one just for him.

Forget about the fact that Wikileaks is a ground-breaking new form of high-tech journalism that has exposed corrupt practices across the world over the years.  The US just wants to make an example of Assange in retaliation for the embarrassment he has caused by exposing US double dealing and war crimes over the last decade, and no doubt as a dreadful example to deter others.  

The alleged Wikileaks source, US soldier Private Bradley Manning, has been kept in inhumane and degrading conditions for well over a year and will now be court-martialed.  The general assumption is that this process was designed to break him, so that he would implicate Assange and possibly other Wikileaks associates.  

In my view, that means that any US trial of Assange could essentially be relying on evidence obtained under torture.  And if Assange is extradited and and judicially rendered to the US, he too will face torturous conditions.

So, to summarise, on the one hand we have a man who is wanted in eight countries for terrorist offences, has already been convicted twice in his home country, but who cannot be extradited.

And on the other hand we have a man who has not been charged, tried or convicted of anything, but is merely wanted for questioning on minor and apparently trumped up charges in another country, yet who has also been imprisoned in solitary confinement and held under house arrest.  And it looks like the British authorities are happy to collude in his extradition.

Both these men potentially face a mistrial and both may potentially experience what is now euphemistically known as "degrading and inhumane treatment".

But because one faces being sent back to his home country - now seen for the purposes of his case as a banana republic with a corrupt judicial system that relies on evidence extracted under torture - he shall probably not be extradited.  However, the other faces being sent to an alien country well known as a beacon of civil rights and fair judicial system oops, sorry, as a banana republic with a corrupt judicial system that relies on evidence extracted under torture.

The UK has become a legal laughing stock around the world and our judicial framework has been bent completely out of shape by the requirements of the "war on terror" and the rapidly developing corporate fascism of our government.  

The UK is currently celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens.  Perhaps the time has come to pause and think about some of the issues he discussed in one of his best-known novels, "A Tale of Two Cities".  Do we want our country to slide further down the path of state terrorism - a phrase adopted from the original Grande Terreur of the French Revolution? 

We need to seize back our basic rights, the due process of law, and justice.

One man's terrorist is another man's activist

Here we go again.  In this heartwarming article in today's Guardian newspaper, British MPs on the Home Affairs Committee have decided that the internet is the most significant factor in the radicalisation of violent extremists and conclude that Something Must Be Done.

One paragraph leapt out at me:

"The Commons home affairs committee says internet service providers need to be as effective at removing material that promotes violent extremism as they are in removing content that is sexual or breaches copyright." (My emphasis.)

Most of us are aware of the recent dogfight in the US about the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws to crack down on copyright infringement and, as a result, there is a somewhat belated but steadily increasing outcry in Europe about the imminent imposition of ACTA across the continent.  

I have written before about how such laws provide the military-intelligence complex with the perfect stalking horse for a panoptic surveillance state, and the campaigning writer, Cory Doctorow, summed it up beautifully when he wrote that "you can't make a system that prevents spying by secret police and allows spying by media giants".

And, lo, it is now apparently coming to pass.  The Parliamentary half-wits are now proposing to use commercial legislation such as the utterly undemocratic ACTA as a benchmark for countering potential terrorists and extremists.  Might they have failed to notice the plethora of existing counter-terrorism and eavesdropping legislation, put in place for this very purpose and already much used and abused by a wide range of public bodies in the UK?

This yet again highlights the mission-creepy Big Brother corporatist group-think.  Rather than having to spell it out in boring old linear text, here is some useful linkage - what I like to think of as 3-D writing: 

Protester = activist = domestic extremist = violent extremist = terrorist  

I'm sure you can see where I am heading.  To name but a few notorious abuses, we already live in a world where western governments and spy agencies collude in the kidnapping, torture and assassination of alleged terrorist suspects; the NDAA now endorses these practices within the US; British police spy on innocent protest groups for years; legitimate protesters can be "kettled", beaten up and maced; activists can be pre-emptively arrested as easily in the UK as in Syria; and where American politicians want to designate the high-tech publishing organisation Wikileaks as a terrorist group.

There is an old aphorism that one man's terrorist was another man's freedom fighter.  I think the time has come for an update:

One man's terrorist is another man's activist.  

And we are all increasingly at risk. 

Libya, MI6, and torture - interview on Press TV

Libya, MI6, torture, and more happy subjects discussed recently on "Africa Today" on Press TV. 

The programme was interesting, informed and balanced.  Do have a watch:

Libyans caught between a rock and a hard place

This article in today's New York Times, particularly these following two paragraphs, sent a shiver down my spine for the fate of the Libyan people:

"The most powerful military leader is now Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the former leader of a hard-line group once believed to be aligned with Al Qaeda.The growing influence of Islamists in Libya raises hard questions about the ultimate character of the government and society that will rise in place of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s autocracy.....

....Mr. Belhaj has become so much an insider lately that he is seeking to unseat Mahmoud Jibril, the American-trained economist who is the nominal prime minister of the interim government, after Mr. Jibril obliquely criticized the Islamists."

The Libyans, finally free of Gaddafi's 42-year dictatorship, now seem faced with a choice between an Islamist faction that has stated publicly that it wants to base the new constitution on Sharia - a statement that must have caused a few ripples amongst Libya's educated and relatively  emancipated women - or a new government headed up by an American-trained economist. 

And we all know what happens to countries when such economists move in: asset stripping, the syphoning off of the national wealth to transnational mega-corps, and a plunge in the people's living standards.  If you think this sounds extreme, then do get your hands on a copy of Naomi Klein's excellent "Shock Doctrine" - required reading for anyone who wants to truly understand the growing global financial crisis.

Of course, this would be an ideal outcome for the US, UK and other western forces who intervened in Libya. 

Mr Belhaj is, of course, another matter.  Not only would an Islamist Libya be a potentially dangerous result for the West, but should Belhaj come to power he is likely to be somewhat hostile to US and particularly British interests.  

Why?  Well, Abdul Hakim Belhaj has form.  He was a leading light in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist organisation which bought into the ideology of "Al Qaeda" and which had made many attempts to depose or assassinate Gaddafi, sometimes with the financial backing of the British spies, most notably in the failed assassination plot of 1996.

Of course, after 9/11 and Gaddafi's rapprochement with the West, this collaboration was all air-brushed out of history - to such an extent that in 2004 MI6 was instrumental in  kidnapping Belhaj, with the say-so of the CIA, and "extraordinarily rendering" him to Tripoli in 2004, where he suffered 6 years' torture at the hands of Libya's brutal intelligences services.  After this, I doubt if he would be minded to work too closely with UK companies.

So I'm willing to bet that there is more behind-the-scenes meddling from our spooks, to ensure the ascendency of Jibril in the new government.  Which will be great for Western business, but not so great for the poor Libyans.....

Spy documents found in Libya reveal more British double dealing

A cache of highly classified intelligence documents was recently discovered in the abandoned offices of former Libyan spy master, Foreign Minister and high-profile defector, Musa Kusa.  

These documents have over the last couple of weeks provided a fascinating insight into the growing links in the last decade between the former UK Labour government, particularly Tony Blair, and the Gaddafi regime.  They have displayed in oily detail the degree of toadying that the Blair government was prepared to countenance, not only to secure lucrative business contracts but also to gloss over embarrassing episodes such as Lockerbie and the false flag MI6-backed 1996 assassination plot against Gaddafi. 

These documents have also apparently revealed direct involvement by MI6 in the "extraordinary rendition" to Tripoli and torture of two Libyans.  Ironically it has been reported that they were wanted for being members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, the very organisation that MI6 had backed in its failed 1996 coup. 

The secular dictatorship of Col Gaddafi always had much to fear from Islamist extremism, so it is perhaps unsurprising that, after Blair's notorious "deal in the desert" in 2004, the Gaddafi regime used its connections with MI6 and the CIA to hunt down its enemies.  And, as we have all been endlessly told, the rules changed after 9/11...

The torture  victims, one of whom is now a military commander of the rebel Libyan forces, are now considering suing the British government.  Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary at the time, has tried to shuffle off any blame, stating that he could not be expected to know everything that MI6 does. 

Well, er, no - part of the job description of Foreign Secretary is indeed to oversee the work of MI6 and hold it to democratic accountability, especially about such serious policy issues as "extraordinary rendition" and torture.  Such operations would indeed need the ministerial sign-off to be legal under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act.

There has been just so much hot air from the current government about how the Gibson Torture Inquiry will get to the bottom of these cases, but we all know how toothless such inquiries will be, circumscribed as they are by the terms of the Inquiries Act 2005.  We also know that Sir Peter Gibson himself has for years been "embedded" within the British intelligence community and is hardly likely to hold the spies meaningfully to account.

So I was particularly intrigued to hear that the the cache of documents showed the case of David Shayler, the intelligence whistleblower who revealed the 1996 Gaddafi assassination plot and went to prison twice for doing so, first in France in 1998 and then in the UK in 2002, was still a subject of discussion between the Libyan and UK governments in 2007. And, as I have written before, as late as 2009 it was obvious that this case was still used by the Libyans for leverage, certainly when it came to the tit-for-tat negotiations around case of the murder in London outside the Libyan Embassy of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in 1984.

Of course, way back in 1998, the British government was all too ready to crush the whistleblower rather than investigate the disclosures and hold the spies to account for their illegal and reckless acts.  I have always felt that this was a failure of democracy, that it seriously undermined the future work and reputation of the spies themselves, and particularly that it was such a shame for the fate of the PBW (poor bloody whistleblower).

But it now appears that the British intelligence community's sense of omnipotence and of being above the law has come back to bite them.  How else explain their slide into a group-think mentality that participates in "extraordinary rendition" and torture?

One has to wonder if wily old Musa Kusa left this cache of documents behind in his abandoned offices as an "insurance policy", just in case his defection to the UK were not to be as comfortable as he had hoped - and we now know that he soon fled to Qatar after he had been questioned about the Lockerbie case.

But whether an honest mistake or cunning power play, his actions have helped to shine a light into more dark corners of British government lies and double dealing vis a vis Libya....

How the Light Gets In festival - my talk

My recent talk at the excellent How the Light Gets In philosophy festival at Hay-on-Wye.  With credit and thanks to IAI TV and the staff of the Institute of Art and Ideas, the organisers the event.

 

If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide....

"Well, if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.  Why object to increasing state surveillance powers?"

I speak regularly at international events about basic freedoms, civil liberties and encroaching police states, and this is one of the most frequently asked questions.

This question is usually posed in the context of the ubiquitous CCTV cameras that infest the streets of Britain, where it is estimated that you can be photographed hundreds of times a day going about your daily business in London. 

Not to mention the talking CCTV cameras in the North of England, nor the increasing use of spy drones (as yet, reportedly, unweaponised - at least lethally)  over the skies of Britain.  Nor the fact that the police officers in charge of CCTV units admit that the technology is only useful as evidence in 3% of cases, and that violent crime has actually gone up since the spread of CCTV, so we're certainly no safer on our streets.

Nor do the well-meaning people asking this question (who, one presumes, have never-ever done anything wrong in their lives, even to the extent of not dropping litter) seem to grasp the historical evidence: they retain an optimistic faith in the long-term benign intentions of our governments.

Yet as we've seen time and time again in history, more dubious, totalitarian and malignant governments can indeed gain power, and will abuse and extend the surveillance laws and available technology against their own peoples.  And I'm not just talking about Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s or the East German Stasi, although I'm in agreement with UK Education Secretary Michael Gove at the moment in saying that history lessons are never a waste....

But we also need to learn more recent lessons: the UK in the 1970s-1990s, where the Irish community as a whole was targeted because of fringe Republican terrorism; or the Muslim community post-9/11, which lives with the real fear of of being arrested, extraordinarily rendered, tortured, or even assassinated on the say-so of unaccountable intelligence agencies; or even peaceful protest groups in the USA and UK who are infiltrated and aggressively investigated by Stasi-like police officers.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put in place for a very good reason in 1948: to prevent the horrors of state terrorism, violence and genocide from ever happening again.  Amongst the essential, internationally-agreed core principles are the right to life, the right not to be tortured, freedom of expression, and the right to individual privacy. 

Which brings me neatly back to the start of this article.  This is precisely why increasing state surveillance is a problem.  Because of the post-9/11, over-inflated, hyped-up threat from soi-disant terrorist groups, we are all being penalised.  The balance of power is shifting overwhelmingly in favour of the Big Brother state.

Well, almost.  The Wikileaks model is helping to level the playing field, and whatever happens to this trail-blazing organisation, the principles and technology are out there and will be replicated.  The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

So, why not pose the very question in the title of this piece back on those who want to turn back the clock and eradicate Wikileaks - the governments, mega-corporations, and intelligence agencies which have been outed, shamed and embarrassed, and which are now trying to suppress its work?

If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.....

Libya: my enemy's enemy is my friend, until he becomes my enemy again...

UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, reportedly made the startling statement recently that the military intervention in Libya "unlike Iraq, is necessary, legal and right". 

Would it not be wonderful if he could take the next logical step towards joined-up thinking and consider sending our esteemed Middle East Peace Envoy, a certain Mr T Blair, over for a spot of porridge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague?  After all, Cameron has now clearly implied that the Iraq war was "unnecessary, illegal and wrong".....

But back to Libya.  With the ongoing crisis - now war - much is being written about how the previous UK government collaborated with the Gaddafi regime in the last decade - while tacitly glossing over the last year of Coalition government where, no doubt, similar levels of cooperation and back-slapping and money-grubbing were going on at the highest levels to ensure the continuing flow of oil contracts to the UK.

But, yes, we should be dissecting the Labour/Gaddafi power balance.  Gaddafi had New Labour over the proverbial (oil) barrel from the late 1990s, when MI5 whistleblower David Shayler exposed the failed and illegal MI6 assassination plot against Colonel Gaddafi, using as fall-guys a rag-tag group of Islamic extremists.  The newly-elected Labour government's knee-jerk response at the time was to believe the spook's denials and cover-up for them.  Perhaps not so surprising, as the government ministers of the day were uncomfortably aware that the spies held files on them.  But this craven response did leave the government position exposed, as Gaddafi well knew.

The CIA was fully cognisant of this failed plot at the time, as were the French intelligence services.  The Gaddafi Plot is once again being referenced in the media, including the Telegraph, and a recent edition of the Huffington Post.  The details are still relevant, as it appears that our enterprising spooks are yet again reaching out to a rag-tag group of rebels - primarily Islamists and the Senussi royalists based around Benghazi. 

The lessons of the reckless and ill-thought out Gaddafi Plot were brushed under the carpet, so history may yet again be doomed to repeat itself.  Yes, Gaddafi has been one of the biggest backers of terrorism ever, and yes he has brutalised parts of his own population, but if he were deposed how can the West be sure that those stepping into the power vacuum would not be even more dangerous?

The Libyan government continued to use the 1996 MI6 assassination plot as leverage in its negotiations with the New Labour government right up until (publicly at least) 2009.  Musa Kousa, the current Foreign Minister, played a key role throughout.  For many years Kousa was the head of the Libyan External Security Organsiation and was widely seen as the chief architect of international Libyan-backed terrorism against the USA, the UK and France. 

Another apparent example of this moral blackmail caught my eye recently - this report in the Daily Mail.  Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was afforded MI6-backed protection when he was finally allowed into the UK in September 2002 to study at the LSE. 

The timing was particularly interesting, as only months earlier Saif had won a libel case against the UK's Sunday Telegraph newspaper.  A grovelling apology was made by the newspaper, but Saif refrained from asking for "exemplary damages" - which he would almost certainly have won.  The resulting pay-off for this restraint appears to be that a mere five months later he was welcomed into the UK with MI6-facilitated protection.

Saif's relations with the UK had not always been so rosy. As background to this case, in 1995 the Sunday Telegraph had fallen hook, line and sinker for a MI6 classic propaganda operation.  As The Guardian reported, the secretive MI6 media manipulation section, Information Operations, (I/Ops), had successfully spun a fake story to hapless spook hack, Con Coughlin, that Gaddafi Junior was involved in currency fraud.  This story was fake, but the paper trail it produced was used by the spies as a pretext to prevent Saif from entering the UK at the time. 

By 2002 this was all old history, of course.  Saif was welcomed to the UK, officially to study for his MA and PhD at the London School of Economics (and showing his gratitude to that august institution with a hefty donation of £1.5 million - it makes the new tuition fees for UK students seem better value for money), and unofficially to chum up to various Establishment enablers to end Libya's pariah status, open up lucrative trade channels, and get the SAS to train up Libya's special forces. 

The UK military must be just loving that now.....

So I get the feeling that the UK government has over the last decade indeed "danced with the devil".  After decades of viewing Libya and Colonel Gaddafi as a Priority One JIC intelligence target, the UK government fell over itself to appease the Gaddafi regime in the wake of the bungled assassination attempt in 1996 and the libelling of his son.  These were the sticks Gaddafi used; the carrots were undoubtedly the Saif/MI6-facilitated oil contracts. 

Of course, all this is now pretty much a moot point, following Dave Cameron's "necessary, legal and right" military intervention.  If the wily old Colonel manages to hang on grimly to some semblence of power (and he has an impressive track-record of surviving against the odds), then I doubt if he'll be happy to cooperate with British oil companies in the future.  At the very least. 

Gaddafi has already threatened "vengeance" against the West, and it was reported today that MI5 is taking this all-too-preditable risk seriously.

If Gaddafi is deposed, who can realistically predict the intentions and capabilities of those who will fill the power vacuum?  We should have learnt from Afghanistan and Iraq: my enemy's enemy is my friend - until he becomes my enemy again.....

 

RTTV interview - West caught between a rock and a hard place re Libya

Here is an interview I did today for RRTV about the evolving war in Libya:

 

The spies and Libya - time to dust off their conscience

As I've mentioned before, the former heads of UK intelligence agencies have a charming habit of speaking out in support of the rule of law, civil liberties, proportionality and plain common sense - but usually only after they have retired. 

Perhaps at their leaving parties their consciences are extracted from the security safe, dusted off and given back  - along with the gold watch?

Even then, post-retirement, they might try to thrice-deny potentially world-changing information, as Sir Richard Dearlove did when questioned by the fearless and fearsomely bright Silkie Carlo about the leaked Downing Street Memo at his recent speech at the Cambridge Union.  (The links are in two parts, as the film had to be mirrored on Youtube - Dearlove claimed copyright on the orginal Love Police film and had it taken down.)

And "out of context", my left foot - he could potentially have saved millions of lives in the Middle East if he'd gone public with his considered professional opinion about the intelligence facts being fitted around a preconceived war policy in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Wouldn't it be lovely if these esteemed servants of the state, replete with respect, status and honours, could actually take a stand while they are still in a position to influence world events?

My former boss, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, has been unusually vociferous since her retirement in 2007 and elevation to the peerage.  She used her maiden speech to the House of Lords to object to the proposed plans to increase police detention of terrorist suspects without charge from 28 to 42 days; she recently suggested that the "war on terror" is unwinnable and that we should, if possible, negotiate with "Al Qaeda" (well, it worked with the Provisional IRA); and that the "war on drugs" had been lost and the UK should treat recreational drug use as a health rather than a criminal issue. She steals all my best lines....

But credit where credit is due.  Despite the fact that she used the full power of the British state to pursue terrorist suspects up until 2007 and investigate drug barons in the 1990s, she did apparently try to make a stand while en poste in the run-up to the Iraq War.  Last year she gave evidence to the Chilcot Enquiry, stating that she had officially briefed the government that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to the UK.

So it's obvious that once a UK Prime Minister has come over all Churchillian he tends to ignore the counsel of his chief spooks, as we've seen with both the Downing Street Memo the Chilcot Enquiry. 

With that in mind, I've read with interest the recent press reports that the UK authorities apparently knew about Colonel Gaddafi retaining stockpiles of mustard gas and sarin (despite the fact that the world was assured in 2004 that it was his renunciation of WMDs that allowed him back into the international diplomatic fold) . 

So the key question is surely: is this another erroneous "45 minutes from attack" moment, with Gaddafi's alleged stockpiles of WMD a perfect scaremongering pretext to push for a full-on regime change in Libya; or is this genuine, and we were all lied to about Gaddafi's destruction of his WMD stockpiles for economic advantage and fat, juicy oil contracts?

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article quoting the concern of "government insiders" about Gaddafi's potential future terrorism threat against the West, up to and including WMDs, should he cling on to power.  Well, yes, it would hardly be surprising if he were now to be as mad as a wasp with his ex-new best buddies.  Despite the sordid rapprochement in the last decade, he has been for much of his life an inveterate enemy of the West and sponsor of worldwide terrorism.

Rather than waiting for his "K" and his retirement, would it not be wonderful if the current head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, could extract his conscience from that dusty security safe and make a useful and informed statement to shed some light on the mess that the Libyan war is rapidly becoming?  He could potentially change the course of world history and save untold lives.

Libya Interview, RTTV 23 February 2011

My interview for RTTV about the current Libyan crisis:

 

Cambridge Union Society, 28th January 2011

Well I had a fab time revisiting the old place last week to do a talk at the Union Society - somewhere I spent many happy hours, oh, aeons ago!

Many thanks to Rebecca and the rest of the team for organising and hosting the event, and to Silkie for setting the whole ball rolling.

It was a busy weekend.  The Friday evening began with an all-too-brief appearance at the first meeting of a new group, MI7 - can I say that, or is it a state secret? - organised by Silkie and Charlie Veitch of the Love Police. 

It was strange to go back to the Union as a speaker after so long and so many unusual experiences.  The audience seemed to stay wide awake for my hour-long talk, and the questions afterwards were interesting, lively and varied.  I was also encouraged to see that ideas deemed to be "radical" only a few years ago are now going mainstream.

The next day was taken up with interviews for The Cambridge Student and Varsity student newspapers, Sky 203 Channel,  and a photo shoot with QH Photography for a gallery exhibition in London later this year.

The Cambridge Student journalists gamely allowed the interview to be film by Sky 203 - not the easiest of scenarios.

"Varsity" newspaper did a colourful and intelligent interview - thanks Olivia! - which was rapidly followed on the newspaper website today with this puff piece about MI6. 

I can only assume that this is merely balanced news reporting, especially as the Master of Pembroke College, Chair of the Trustee Board of the Union Society, and former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, will be speaking at the Union in a couple of weeks..... 

Certainly an interesting juxtaposition!

The photo shoot was fun, and the results will be appearing in London at the end of this year.  As you can see from the photo on the left, Huy takes a mean picture.

I also ran into Ryan J-W Smith, who is in the process of completing his intriguing film, 2Plus2Makes4.  Limited private and festival screenings are expected this summer.

The film synopsis asks some fundamental questions:

"How close are we to sliding into Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, ‘1984’? Controversial, shocking, powerful and honest - starring Tony Benn, Gore Vidal, former MI5, CIA, FBI agents, Senators, Presidential Nominees, etc.  A ‘Must-See’ feature documentary from award-winning filmmaker, Ryan J-W Smith. Smith’s previous films have received 16 International Film Festival Selections, 5 ‘Best Film’ Nominations, and 4 ‘Best Film’ wins."

The murder of Pat Finucane

Moving swiftly past the prurient, thigh-rubbing glee that most of the old media seems to be exhibiting over the alleged details of Julian Assange's love life, let's re-focus on the heart of the Wikileaks disclosures, and most importantly the aims underpinning them: transparency, justice, and an informed citizenry living within fully-functioning democracies.  Such quaint notions.

In the media maelstrom of the Cablegate disclosures, and the resulting infantile and thuggish threats of the American political class, is easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the leaked documents refer to scandals, corruption and cover-ups in a range of countries, not just the good old US of A.

One document that recently caught my attention related to the notorious murder twenty-one years ago of civil rights activist, Pat Finucane, in Northern Ireland.  Finucane was a well-known lawyer who was shot and killed in front of his wife and three small children.  There has long been speculation that he was targeted by Protestant terrorist groups, in collusion with the NI secret police, the army's notorious and now-disbanded Forces Research Unit (FRU), and/or MI5.

Well, over a decade ago former top plod, Lord (John) Stevens, began an inquiry that did indeed establish such state collusion, despite having his inquiry offices burnt out in the process by person/s allegedly unknown half-way through the investigation.  Stevens fought on, producing a damning report in 2003 confirming the notion of state collusion with Irish Loyalist terrorist activities, but never did clarify exactly what had happened to poor Pat Finucane.

However, Finucane's traumatised family has never stopped demanding justice.  The recent disclosure shines a light on some of the back-room deals around this scandal, and for that I'm sure many people thank Wikileaks.

The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland - such a quintessentially British understatement, in any other country it would have been called a civil war - were deceptive, murky and vicious on both sides.  "Collusion" is an elastic word that stretches beyond the strict notion of the state.  It is well-known that the US organistion, NORAID, supported by many Americans claiming Irish ancestry, was a major fundraising channel for, um, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, from the 1970s onwards. 

Such networks provided even more support than Colonel Gaddafi of Libya with his arms shipments, and the cash well only dried up post-9/11.  As you can see in this recent article in the The Telegraph, even the incoming Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, New York Congressman Peter King (who ironically called for the designation of Wkileaks as a "foreign terrorist organisation") appears to have been a life long supporter of Sinn Fein.

With this in the back of our minds, it appears that Dublin and Washington kept pushing for a full inquiry into Finucane's murder - and in 2005 it looked like MI5 would finally co-operate. 

However, the devil was in the detail. Coincidentally, 2005 was the year that the UK government rushed through a new law, the Inquiries Act, which scandalously allowed any department under investigation (in this case MI5) to dictate the terms and scope of the inquiry. 

Collusion by any state in the unlawful arrest, torture, and extrajudicial murder of people - whether its own citizens or others - is state terrorism.  Let's not mince our words here.  Amnesty International provides a clear definition of this concept.

As the The Guardian  article about Finucane so succintly puts it:

"When a state sanctions the killing of citizens, in particular citizens who are lawyers, it puts the rule of law and democracy in jeopardy. And when a state enlists auxiliary assassins, it cedes its monopoly over state secrets: it may feel omnipotent, but it is also vulnerable to disclosure."

Indeed.  Northern Ireland was like a Petri dish of human rights abuses: torture, Diplock courts (aka military tribunals), kidnappings, curfews, shoot-to-kill, informers, and state collusion in assassinations.

The infection has now spread.  These are precisely the tactics currently used by the US, the UK and their "auxiliary assassins" across great swathes of the Middle East.  Perhaps this explains why our nation states have been outflanked and have ceded their monopoly over secrets.

Will justice ever be done?  In the past I would have said, sadly, that would be highly unlikely.  However,  courageous organisations like Wikileaks and its ilk are improving the odds.

The Ghost of Daniel Ellsberg

This is an excellent article from a European technology strategist and futurist.  It succinctly sums up all that is wrong with the old media's coverage of the Wikileaks story over the last year, where people obsess about the technology, the website and the personal life of Julian Assange.

As the article says, we should be focusing on the core issues: illegal wars, war crimes, murder, torture, corporate and political corruption, and diplomatic duplicity.

Let's address the message, not attack the messenger, and certainly not the medium.

 

 

Blitz Spirit?

The most senior police officer in the UK, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Stephenson no less, is saying that the British citizens are not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough.  "Al Qaeda" could strike at any minute, the enemy is within etc, etc....

Now, for a man of his seniority, one presumes that he has served as a policeman for a fair few years - possibly in the 1970s, certainly the 80s and 90s.  Which means that he should have a memory of what it means to be under the real, daily threat of bombs exploding that aimed to maim, kill and terrorize the civilian population of London and the rest of the UK.  After all, throughout those decades the Provisional IRA, backed by the fund-raising activities of certain American citizens and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya - that erstwhile patron of freedom fighters everywhere, now a staunch ally of the West in the "war on terror" - was pretty much putting bombs down at will on UK streets.

During these years the UK has endured Lockerbie, Omagh, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf, and Manchester, to name but a few major atrocities.  A good summary of the terrorist attacks against London alone over the last 150 years can be found here, with the first Tube bombing occurring in 1885.  A pilot, Patrick Smith, also recently wrote a great article about aircraft security and the sheer scale of the terrorist threat to the West in the 1980s - and asks a very pertinent question: just how would we collectively react to such a stream of atrocities now? 

Putting aside my professional life at the time, I have personal memories of what it was like to live and work in London in the 1990s under the shadow of terrorism.  I remember making my way to work when I was a fledging MI5 intelligence officer in 1991 and commuting through Victoria train station in London 10 minutes before a bomb, planted in a rubbish bin, exploded on the station concourse.  One person was killed, and many sustained severe injuries.  One person had their foot blown off - the image haunted me for a long time.

I also vividly remember, two years later, sitting at my desk in MI5's Mayfair office, and hearing a dull thud in the background - this turned out to be a bomb exploding outside Harrods department store in Knightsbridge.  And let's not forget the almost daily disruption to the tube and rail networks during the 90s because of security alerts.  Every Londoner was exhorted to watch out for, and report, any suspicious packages left at stations or on streets.  Yet because of the preceding couple of decades, this was already a normal way of life in the city. 

Londoners have grown used to inconvenience; they grumble a bit about the disruption and then get on with their lives - echoes of the "keep calm and carry on" mentality that evolved during the Blitz years.  In the 1990s the only noticeable change to London's diurnal rhythm was that there were fewer US tourists clogging up the streets - an early indication of the disproportionate, paranoid US reaction to a perceived terrorist threat.

Separate from the IRA, in 1994 a car bomb exploded outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, London.  Despite initial reports that Iranian-backed groups were responsible (and, it turns out, MI5 may have dropped the ball), Palestinian activists were blamed and convicted, wrongly it turns out, as MI5 assessed that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, had pulled a dirty trick.

Terrorism on the streets of London was nothing new.  In the early 1980s my father was in London attending an investigative journalism course and narrowly missed two bombings - one in a restaurant at Marble Arch a couple of hours after he and the rest of the course members had been eating there, and another later that night close to the hotel he was staying in at Lancaster Gate. 

My Pa had another near miss in 1970 when he was a young airline pilot flying VC-10s around the world for BOAC. He was supposed to be the pilot of the VC-10 that ended up at Dawson's Field in Jordan - hijacked by members of the PFLP and eventually blown up.  He had been prevented from flying from Bahrain that day as he was suffering a bad dose of the 'flu.

To this day, his view about both these incidents is to shrug and carry on.  Yes, it was a close shave, but if you allow incidents like that to colour the rest of your life, then the concept of terrorism has already won.

The UK and its citizens have had plenty of hands-on experience of living with the reality of war, political violence and terrorism.   As a result, I'm constantly flabbergasted by the global security crackdown since 9/11 and particularly in the UK after 7th July 2005.  It was ghastly, and my heart bleeds for the victims, families, and survivors, but major terrorist atrocities are hardly new to the UK. 

The UK government seems now to have forgotten hard-learned lessons from the 1970s and 80s in the war in Northern Ireland: that draconian measures - torture, shoot to kill, internment, military-style tribunals -  not only don't work, but also are counter-productive and act as recruiting grounds for terrorist groups.  The flagrant miscarriages of justice around cases like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six reinforced this perspective.  

And the UK has not been alone in Europe when it comes to living with the daily reality of terrorism: the Spanish have endured Basque separatist attacks for four decades, as have the French - in addition to those perpetrated in Paris with devastating results by Algerian Islamic groups in the 1990s.  Germany successfully dealt with the Baader-Meinhof Gang (Red Army Faction), and other European countries, such as Belgium and Italy, have endured Operation Gladio style terrorist attacks over recent decades.

But in all those years, none of our countries gave up on the concept of basic values and freedoms - indeed they seemed to learn useful lessons from the repressive, failed experiment in Northern Ireland.  So why are we now falling in line, unthinkingly, with the hysterical and brutal US response post 9/11? 

In the UK we are effectively living under a Big Brother surveillance state, as I have previously and extensively written.  Other Northern European countries are constantly pressured to fall in line with the US "war on terror" fear mentality.  To its credit Germany is reacting cautiously, even in the face of the current, hyped-up terror threat.  But then we Europeans know the lessons of history - we've lived them, and Germany more than most.  The ghosts of the Gestapo and the Stasi still create a frisson of fear in the collective Germanic memory.

But returning to that doughty crime fighter, Sir Paul Stephenson.  The day after he ticked off the UK public for not taking terrorism seriously enough, he is once again in the media, predicting an era of growing civil unrest in the wake of the student riots in London, and chillingly stating that the rules of the game had changed.  Forget about trying to negotiate with campaigners - now the only way to deal with them is to spy on them, as The Guardian reported:

"We have been going through a period where we have not seen that sort of violent disorder," Stephenson said. "We had dealt with student organisers before and I think we based it too much on history. If we follow an intelligence-based model that stops you doing that. Obviously you realise the game has changed. Regrettably, the game has changed and we must act."

Last year the same newspaper revealed that ACPO, the senior police officers' private association, was running an illegal unit to spy on "domestic extremists" (read politically active citizens).  In response to the public outcry, the head of ACPO, Sir Hugh Orde, promised to stop this Stasi-like practice.  In the wake of the student protests, Sir Paul will probably see a renewed need for the unit, no doubt under another name.  Big Brother grows apace - because, of course, we all know that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia......

Sir John Sawers, head of MI6, makes historic public appearance

For the first time in 100 years "C", the head of the UK foreign intelligence service SIS (commonly known as MI6) has gone public.

Former career diplomat Sir John Sawers (he of Speedo fame) yesterday made a speech to the UK Society of Editors in what appeared to be a professionally diplomatic rear-guard action in response to a number of hot media topics at the moment.

Choosing both his audience wisely and his words carefully, he hit on three key areas:

Torture: Legal cases are currently going through UK courts on behalf of British victims of torture, in which MI5 and MI6 intelligence officers are alleged to have been complicit.  The Metropolitan Police are currently investigating a number of cases.  Over the last week, a British military training manual on "enhanced" interrogation techniques has also been made public. However, Sawers unblushingly states that MI6 abides by UK and international law and would never get involved, even tangentially, in torture cases.  In fact, he goes on to assert that the UK intelligence agencies are training the rest of the world in human rights in this regard.

   

Whistleblowing: In the week following the latest Wikileaks coup - the Iraq War Diaries, comprising nearly 400,000 documents detailing the everyday horror of life in occupied Iraq, including war crimes such as murder, rape and torture committed by both US and UK forces - Sawers states that secrecy is not a dirty word: the intelligence agencies need to have the confidence that whistleblowers will not emerge to in order to guard agent and staff identities, as well as maintaining the confidence of their international intelligence partners that their (dirty?) secrets will remain, um, secret.  One presumes he is advocating against the exposure of war crimes and justice for the victims.

This, one also presumes, is the justification for US politicians who propose cyber-attacks against Wikileaks and the declaration by some US political insiders that Julian Assange, spokesman of the organisation, should be treated as an unlawfully designated "unlawful combatant", subject to the full rigour of extra-judicial US power, up to and including assassination. 

Spurious media claims of unverified "damage" are the hoary old chestnuts always dragged out in whistleblower cases.  After Wikileaks released its Afghan War Blog in July, government and intelligence commentators made apocalyptic predictions that the leak had put military and agent lives at risk.  US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has since gone on the record to admit that this was simply not true. 

During the Shayler whistleblowing case a decade ago, the government repeatedly tried to assert that agent lives had been put at risk, and yet the formal judgement at the end of his trial stated that this was absolutely not the case.  And again, with the recent Wikileaks Iraq War Blog, government sources are using the same old mantra.  When will they realise that they can only cry wolf so many times and get away with it?  And when will the journalists regurgitating this spin wake up to the fact they are being played?

Accountability:  Sawers goes on to describe the mechanisms of accountability, such as they are.  He accurately states, as I have previously described ad nauseam, that under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, he is notionally responsible to his political "master", the Foreign Secretary, who has to clear in advance any legally dubious foreign operations (up to and including murder – the fabled “licence to kill” is not fiction, as you can see here).

The 1994 ISA also established the Prime Minister's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in Parliament, which many commentators seem to believe offers meaningful oversight of the spies.  However, as I have detailed before, this is a mere fig leaf to real accountability: the ISC can only investigate issues of policy, finance and administration of the spy agencies.  Disclosures relating to crime, operational incompetence or involvement in torture fall outside its remit.

But what happens if intelligence officers decide to operate beyond this framework? How would ministers or the ISC ever know?  Other spy masters have successfully lied to their political masters in the past, after all.

Sir John has the gall to say that, if an operation is not cleared by the Foreign Secretary, it does not proceed.  But what about the Gadaffi Plot way back in 1996, when MI6 was sponsoring a group of Islamic extremist terrorists in Libya to try to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi without, it has been asserted, the prior written approval of the then-Foreign secretary, Tory politician Malcom Rifkind?  This was reported extensively, including in this article by Mark Thomas in the New Statesman. What happens if rogue MI6 officers blithely side-step this notional accountability - because they can, because they know they will get away with it - because they have in the past?

In the interests of justice, UK and international law, and accountability, perhaps a new Conservative/Coalition government should now reassess its approach to intelligence whistleblowers generally, and re-examine this specific disclosure about Libya, which has been backed up by international intelligence sources, both US and French, in order to achieve some sort of closure for the innocent victims in Libya of this MI6-funded terrorist attack? And it is finally time to hold the perpetrators to account - PT16, Richard Bartlett, and PT16B, David Watson, who were the senior officers in MI6 responsible for the murder plot.

As civilised countries, we need to rethink our approach to the issue of whistleblowing. Lies, spin,  prosecutions and thuggish threats of assassination are beneath us as societies that notionally adhere to the principles of democracy.  If we can only realistically hope that the actions of our governments, military forces, and intelligence agencies are transparent and accountable via whistleblowers, then we need to ensure that these people are legally protected and that their voices are heard clearly.

 

Upcoming New York Conference: how the world changed after 9/11

Looking forward to speaking at this conference next weekend!

A timely and necessary debate about the vital, but increasingly fragile, state of our democracy and basic civil rights.

And what a great line up - well done to the organisers! 

Some of the other speakers are old friends I've worked with before, some I look forward to meeting for the first time.

Dirty Tricks in Iraq and UK Media

An interesting example of press manipulation appeared today in the UK media.  Britain is in the throes of a general election and many pundits are saying that the result is too close to call - the feeling being that the UK's third party, the Liberal Democrats, may hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.  The Daily Mail, one of the most rabidly right-wing of the national newspapers, chose today to print a story about the arrest and subsequent rescue of two UK soldiers in Iraq in 2005. 

The general thrust of the piece was that the Labour government was willing to sacrifice our soldiers by refusing to authorise their rescue, in order to avoid political embarrassment.  This story appears to be a fairly obvious attempt by The Daily Wail to encourage military personnel and their families to vote against the incumbent government, which was willing to sacrifice our boys' lives for political expediency.

However,I would suggest that there is another level to this story.  Many remember when the news first broke: how two SAS soldiers, working under cover and disguised as Arabs, failed to stop their car at a checkpoint and engaged in a shoot-out that killed one Iraqi and injured three more.  The SAS operatives were arrested and taken to a police station where the authorities discovered that their car contained weapons and explosives. The SAS launched a rescue, ploughing into the police station with tanks, and then tracking their targets to a local militia house nearby, fighting their way in and saving their comrades.  All heroic stuff.  However, the obvious follow-up questions are:

1) What the hell were these two soldiers doing in disguise, and with a car-load of weaponry?

2) Precisely why was the government so embarrassed about the potential political fall-out?

I think these two questions are inter-dependent.  Dirty tricks and collusion are a standard methodology for the SAS and the intelligence community - a well-documented tactic they used in the war in Northern Ireland over three decades.  So just what was the intended destination of the weaponry?  Would they have been used for an attack subsequently blamed on "insurgents" or "Al Qaeda"?

As for the potential political embarrassment, the Daily Mail's excuse - that the British government didn't want to undermine the perceived sovereignty of the Iraqis at that time - is just too feeble to stand up.  The issue of political embarrassment makes far more sense if seen in terms of UK government awareness of the use by the British military of dirty tricks, collusion or false flag terrorism in Iraq. 

Of course, this is a perfectly standard tactic used by many countries' military and intelligence infrastructures.  It would be naive to think it does not happen, but it is a retrograde, risky and counter-productive tactic. 

In the 21st century it is more naive to think that such activity is either effective or acceptable in a world where the spread of democracy and the application of international law and human rights are the way forward.

MI5 looking for a Needle in the Haystack

The Xmas Day "Al Qaeda" terror attack on a transatlantic flight bound for Detroit is an interesting one.  Awful for those on the flight, of course, and my heart goes out to them for the fear they must have experienced.

But which are the governments most staunch in their prosecution of the war on terror?  Let's call them the "Axis of Good".....

The USA, the UK, and the Netherlands.

So it must be just nuts to them that the immediately identifiable Al Qaeda terrorist is reported to be a Nigerian-born UK engineering student who is flying via Schiphol airport in NL to the USA.  Even better, he acquired his "bomb" in Yemen - interestingly, a country that is under increasing assault by the US military at the moment. 

This ticks a number of useful national security boxes, reminding us what a threat our nations face. 

The alleged terrorist is reported to have been on the watch list of the US security apparatus, but not on the "no fly" list - which is unverifiable anyway, but reportedly contains the names of over a million people. So yet another break-down in this unwieldy security system.

We already have a situation where all citizens of the US, UK and NL are effectively treated like criminals every time they take a plane, as well as everyone else attempting to fly into these countries.  However, this incident has demonstrated that the security around flying is not just a slow irritant - a "Big Brother Lite" with its stupid restrictions around liquids, maquillage, shoes, belts and laptops - it has been dramatically shown not to work.

Identifying potential terrorists is like looking for a needle in a haystack.  This has become an establishment cliche these days: the terrorists have to be lucky only once, and the security services have to be constantly lucky to stop an attack.  The odds are acknowledged to be impossible. 

What used to be agreed within British and other European spook circles is the view that the best intelligence comes from tricky-to-run human sources.  They may have their flaws, but they can occasionally provide precise and lifesaving intelligence. The US approach has long been diametrically opposed to this approach - instead they sit back and hoover up every scrap of information via data mining and hope to sieve something out of it.  They then tend to respond with whizz-bang, hands-off gadgetry, much like a deadly video game.

So, that said, let's make two guesses how this new attack will be interpreted and used by our governments and security forces:

1) They admit that they need to reassess their approach to the "war on terror".

2) Focus on ever more draconian data mining measures at the point of travel - whether they work or not, whether they slide us ever nearer a police-state or not - until we are effectively prisoners in our own countries. 

A difficult prediction for 2010. 

The final annoyance will, at least from a personal perspective, be that they now ban the carrying of powders as well as liquids on board a flight.  If they stop me travelling with my Max Factor, that's it.  Trains only in the future.

Happy New Year!

Vers la Verite, Paris, October 2009

So the Vers la Verite events in Paris earlier this month were a great success.  I've organised a few international tours and events in my time, but this was one of the most concentrated series of different happenings I've been involved in.  Thanks go to Debora Blake for all her work in situ in Paris, and also to the ReOpen posse, who offered a lot of practical support and were major sponsors of the weekend.

Vers la Verite was a gathering of campaigners and activists from across Europe and North America, who met to discuss "geopolitically incorrect issues" (as Debora likes to call them!), such as the illegal wars in the Middle East, media spin, intelligence manipulation, the erosion of our civil liberties in the name of the unending "war on terror" - and the need for a new, independent enquiry into the tragic events of 9/11, the nexus of so many of these issues.  It was fantastic to see so many old and new friends in Paris - what a show of commitment to making the world a safer and more equitable place.  It gave me hope.

We were also privileged to have campaigners of the calibre of the 2008 US Green Party presidential candidate Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, journalist and  recent MEP Giulietto Chiesa, Professor Niels Harrit of Copenhagen University, and French actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz at the events. 

The weekend started with a press conference on Friday 9th October at the Mairie of the 2nd arrondissement in Paris, kindly hosted by the Mayor, himself a Green Party politician.

In the evening, while the activists met up at the all-night watering hole, Cafe L'Etincelle on the Rue de Rivoli, Cynthia was the guest of honour at a sponsors' dinner at the famous Le Procope brasserie.  This is the oldest restaurant in Paris, and has hosted Benjamin Franklin (who reputedly worked on the draft of the American Constitution there), as well as Voltaire.

The Saturday was the main day of events, starting with a light lunch for  international activists at Les Halles des Oliviers at La Bellevilloise, with impromptu music from Dr Jazzz.  In the afternoon we convened for a planning session, followed in the evening by a public meeting.  Debora ably hosted the event with Cynthia McKinney, Giulietto Chiesa and Niels Harrit and myself as the speakers, discussing different aspects of government cover-ups and lack of accountability, all drawn from our own experiences.  The film "Zero", directed by Giulietto Chiesa, was screened, as well as excerpts from "American Blackout" featuring Cynthia, and the work of wonderful French comedian and campaigner, Jean Marie Bigard.

A surprise and very welcome attendee was Mathieu Kassovitz, who successfully bid in the auction for the collector's edition of the excellent "Global Outlook" research publication, signed by Cynthia.

The weekend wrapped up with a demo on Sunday morning, marching from Place de la Republique to Place Bastille - two resonant locations - before an informal farewell Parisian lunch.

It was fantastic to meet so many inspiring people, who are committed to changing the world for the better. Thank you all for taking the time and trouble to get to Paris for the weekend  - it was great to see so many old and new friends!

And thanks once again to Debora, AtMoh, Marc, Jean Marc, Christophe (x2!), Arno and the rest of the Paris posse. Also to Cynthia, Giulietto and Niels for their professionalism, dedication and sheer joy, all in the face of adversity.