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Government Officials Knew of Muslim MP Bugging |
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Friday, 08 February 2008 |
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday sleepwalked into another
damaging row over the competence of his government when the opposition
Conservative Party accused him of being a liar and demanded a fresh House of
Commons statement over the bugging of the Labour MP from Tooting, Sadiq Khan, by
anti-terrorism security services.
This follows yesterday’s remarkable revelation that the Home Office and Ministry
of Justice officials were told about the incident in December. Counter-terrorism
officers secretly recorded two conversations in 2005 and 2006 between Sadiq Khan
and Babar Ahmad, one of his constituents and a childhood friend, who is in a
British prison awaiting deportation to the US, where he is wanted on charges
relating to propagating terrorism.
Babar Ahmad is accused by the US authorities of running websites supporting the
Taleban and Chechen terrorists, though he faces no charges in the UK. Justice
Secretary Jack Straw, who has denied any knowledge of the bugging, yesterday
asked Chief Surveillance Commissioner Sir Christopher Rose, a former Court of
Appeal judge, to head an inquiry into the allegations. Rose’s main mandate is to
find out under whose authority the bugging was carried out.
Straw insisted that a chief police officer had to authorize eavesdropping
operations and that “ministers play no part in these authorizations.” Both Straw
and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that they only became aware of the incident
when they read about it in a report carried by The Sunday Times over the
weekend.
The bugging incident was revealed following a leak to the media after a claim by
Mark Kearney, a former police intelligence officer at Woodhill Prison in Milton
Keynes, that he bugged the conversations between Sadiq Khan and Babar Ahmad
under “significant pressure from the Metropolitan police.”
Kearney yesterday insisted that he was against the bugging of the MP’s
conversation and stressed in an interview with the BBC that his life may be at
risk, but promised full cooperation with the inquiry commissioner. “I believe it
puts my life and safety at risk. I would also like to say I am quite prepared to
cooperate with any inquiry so it can reach a proper conclusion.”
According to The Sunday Times, the bugging device was hidden inside a
hollowed-out table in the jail’s main visiting hall. Potentially, it could
record anyone visiting the jail, although the target was the prisoner, not the
visitor. The newspaper says it has seen a document showing there were internal
concerns about bugging the MP, who is also a lawyer, but it went ahead anyway.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said the case made Brown a “liar” as it
countered prime ministerial pledges to protect MPs from bugging. Labour Commons
leader Harriet Harman has demanded an apology from Davis warning that such
language was unparliamentary.
The incident raises several serious issues. Was Sadiq Khan singled out because
he happened to be a Muslim member of Parliament? What are the implications for
the other two or three Muslim MPs in the House of Commons? Does this breach the
prime ministerial undertaking to Parliament that MPs would not be bugged and
that their conversations with their constituents would be subject to the same
privacy and confidentiality that say lawyers and doctors have with their clients
and patients? Who is in charge of surveillance and eavesdropping in the UK? And,
if it did happen without ministerial knowledge, why was this the case? When it
was discovered in December, why weren’t Justice Secretary Jack Straw or Home
Secretary Jacqui Smith informed?
Davis yesterday stressed that Straw admitted that “these intercepts have broken
a prime ministerial promise. This is a very serious issue. It is a breach of a
prime ministerial undertaking to Parliament, so it makes the prime minister a
liar, basically.” He accused Straw and Smith of having little control of their
respective departments.
The undertaking or prime ministerial promise is a 40-year-old code known as the
Wilson Doctrine which forbids — or was thought to forbid — the covert recording
of conversations between MPs and their constituents. This doctrine was first
introduced in 1966 under Prime Minister Harold Wilson to allay fears that MI5,
the British intelligence service, might be monitoring left-wing politicians with
no oversight or authorization.
Wilson gave an undertaking there would be no tapping of MPs’ phones. This was
later widened to include all forms of communication and to include peers in the
House of Lords. The doctrine has been confirmed by subsequent prime ministers.
Yesterday, Downing Street appeared to clear Scotland Yard of any wrongdoing over
the bugging, and some officials are arguing that given the era of the suicide
bomber and the so-called “war on terrorism,” it may be time to ditch the Wilson
Doctrine.
Source: Arab News
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