- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: found
UK Foreign Policy and Intelligence in the Post-Truth Era: Radical Violent Extremism and “Blow-Back”
Abstract
Recent terrorist attacks in the UK have raised questions over the relationship between Britain's foreign policy and terrorist attacks in the UK. The main arguments made by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, his critics and the views of those charged with defending the UK from terrorism are summarized. The article argues that the UK government's reasons for denying a relationship between foreign policy and terrorist attacks are because of (1) evidence that Britain's foreign policies have contributed to violent radical extremism and (2) links between some “terrorists”, designated jihadist groups and Britain's intelligence services.
Content
Author and article information
Notes
“Blowback” is the unintended adverse results of a political action or situation. To civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as “random” acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause, because the public – in whose name the intelligence agency acted – are unaware of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack).
Mukhabarat is the Arabic term for intelligence, as in “intelligence agency”. In this context, the term mukhabarat state is used to describe a “security-led state”, or the state's “security apparatus”.
Of the 25 people who signed PNAC's founding statement of principles, 10 went on to serve in the administration of President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
It re-emerged a few years later as a new think tank called the Foreign Policy Initiative.
While the main reason why Africa was of such strategic importance to the USA at that time was oil, US policy towards Africa could not be reduced to nor explained solely by America's increasingly serious energy crisis. Africa had much else to offer the USA. For instance, besides oil, the USA was dependent on Africa for many other raw materials such as manganese (for steel production), cobalt and chrome, both vital for alloys especially in aeronautics, vanadium, metals in the platinum group, antimony, gold, fluorspar, germanium, industrial diamonds, and many other lesser known materials such as columbite-tantalite (coltan for short), a key component in everything from mobile phones and computer chips to stereos and VCRs ( Keenan 2009: 127– 129).
The term post-truth was first used in 1992, but became the title of several works in 2004. American journalist Eric Alterman ( 2004) spoke of a “post-truth political environment” and coined the term “the post-truth presidency” in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11. See also Keyes ( 2004). Post-truth or post-factual politics is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of “talking points” to which factual rebuttals are ignored. While described as a contemporary problem, with the Brexit debate and the Trump presidency often cited as key examples, it has long been a part of political life, but was less notable before the advent of the Internet. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell cast a world in which the state changed historic records daily to fit its propaganda goals of the day.
US Joint Chiefs of Staff ( 1962). The Northwoods document was published online in a more complete form by the National Security Archive on 30 April 2001.
A false flag operation is one that is conducted by one party or government and made to appear as though another party sponsored it.
This was technically the second operation: a first attempt at kidnapping European tourists in October 2002 was botched (Keenan 2009: 172–175).
Questions still need to be answered about how much the British government knew of MI6's relationship with the DRS. The initial response of Prime Minister David Cameroon to the In Amenas fiasco, which was to publicly lambast the Algerian authorities for their incompetence, suggests it was very little. However, this changed radically two days later after Cameron had been accompanied on a trip to Algeria by Sir John Sawers, the then head of MI6. On his return to London 24 hours later, having been briefed by Sawers, Cameron was effusive in his praise for the Algerian authorities.
Because of its own intelligence shortcomings, Britain's foreign policy towards Algeria has therefore been strongly influenced by the aims and objectives of the DRS, with the result that its policy became blinkered and closed to other sources of information. The result is that the British government became incapable of evaluating the reality of the Algerian state and of being able to see how its policy towards Algeria made it complicit in Algerian state crimes and came to present a security threat to the British people, as eventually demonstrated in the 2013 In Amenas attack (Keenan 2016b).