Blogmocracy in Action
Guest Blogger: Moe Katz
We’re all no doubt aware of Obama’s bizarre and inexplicable CIA interrogation probe, which he’s refusing to stop despite an appeal from seven former CIA heads. Now, a similar story is unfolding in Britain, where the domestic intelligence agency MI5, roughly equivalent to the FBI, is facing lawsuits in civil courts as well as an investigation by the Metropolitan Police for collaborating with intelligence agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere that used abusive interrogation methods on suspects in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans, while stating that his agency does not ‘condone torture,’ argues that intelligence obtained from other countries that may have used such methods of interrogation has saved countless British lives in the face of “many attacks.” In Evans’s words,
“We had seen nearly 3,000 people killed in the United States, 67 of them British. We were aware that 9/11 was not the summit of al-Qaeda’s ambitions. And there was a real possibility that similar attacks were being planned, possibly imminently.
“Our intelligence resources were not adequate to the situation we faced and the root of the terrorist problem was in parts of the world where the standards and practices of the local security apparatus were very far removed from our own.”
The dilemma MI5 faced was whether to work with those security services which had experience of dealing with al-Qaeda on their own territory, or risk cutting off a potentially vital source of information that could prevent attacks on the West.
“In my view we would have been derelict in our duty if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this country from attack.”
Read the rest.
