John Le Carré, the consummate spy story writer, insists that
his first best-seller, was a figment of his own fevered imagination. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was simply,
“a bad dream”, he says, in an article to mark the 50 years since its
publication.
His story was set in the shadowy world of post-war Berlin , when Western secret services set out to make Germany “safe
for democracy”. Somewhat paradoxically, Le Carré says, this saw British and US security
heads “positively mollycoddling” former Nazis. It was an ugly process which
disillusioned and repelled those who thought the war had been about getting rid
of Fascism.
That all seems a very long time ago. But the hunger strike at
the Guantanamo
prison camp where so-called terror suspects are still being held that erupted over
the weekend into open clashes with guards, shows that the secret state retains
a corrosive and corrupting power.
Military guards at what is being dubbed Obama’s “gulag”, wrestled
protesting detainees into single cells – a process known as “Forcible Cell
Extractions” or FCEs. As prisoners’ resisted,
guards fired four “less-than-lethal rounds” of ammunition.
According to their lawyers, some 130 out of the 166 inmates are
on hunger strike, many since February. Some are being force-fed espite the
brutal practice being outlawed for decades by the United Nations and the World
Medical Association.
The prisoners are hunger-striking
out of despair. Many are still being, although a majority have been cleared for
release. Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith says that his client, Saudi-born British
resident Shaker Aamer, who was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and
brought to Guantanamo in February 2002 has been cleared not once but twice, in
2007 and then by the Obama administration in 2009. At the same time, hundreds
of thousands of defence
emails have been handed over to the prosecution in a clear breach of
procedure.
Not only does Guantanamo
remain open, Obama is now directly involved in signing off “kill lists” which
decide the life and death of Taliban fighters and other individuals not only in
Afghanistan but also in Yemen , Somalia
and Pakistan .
A
new book by New York Times journalist
Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife,
shines light on how Obama has presided over an exponential expansion of the
“military-intelligence complex”. From attempting to withdraw from its killing
programme, the CIA is now consumed with man-hunting in what Mazzetti says is a
“third war”, following Iraq
and Afghanistan .
So much so, that some
operatives, US and British intelligence chiefs
included – as well as Republican and Democrat politicians have became queasy
about drone warfare.
Mazzetti describes how Richard Dearlove, head of Britain ’s MI6 counter-intelligence agency until
2004 was at CIA headquarters in Virginia
in 2001. Watching a strike on a pickup truck in Afghanistan live on a screen, he
said “It isn’t very sporting, is it?”
But after 2009, instead of curbing the power of the CIA and
the “intelligence” community, Mazzetti document’s how the power of the agency
has grown hugely. Under Obama’s slogan,
“The CIA gets what the CIA wants”,
concerns by diplomats like the US
ambassador to Islamabad
and even Hillary Clinton are ruthlessly overridden.
So, back to Le Carré’s closing
thought.
Today, the same man [the spy chief], with better teeth and hair and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the 21st century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semi-automatic weapons, and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one's perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them. Or, as a loyal servant of his corporation, assuring us that smoking is harmless to the health of the third world, and great banks are there to serve the public.
One could and should add, however, that in today’s
hollowed-out “democracy”, their political counterparts have truly lost
legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of people.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
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