Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

A tale of two men and modern Britain

In recent weeks, two men from such vastly different backgrounds that they could be from different planets have dominated media headlines in Britain — one as the victim of a cynical political system and the other as the public face of a laissez faire economic culture that is responsible for the current global crisis.

Between them, albeit in different ways, the two men have come to be identified with the idea of a Britain that critics say appears to have mislaid its much-touted “moral compass” in pursuit of short-term interests. So, who are these two men and what makes their stories so special?

One is an alleged terror suspect whose case is at the centre of an international row over allegations that Britain colluded with American authorities in “extraordinary rendition” and torture of people held on allegations of terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Binyam Mohamed, a British resident just released from the notorious Guantanamo Bay after four years, has become the poster boy for rights campaigners who are demanding an independent public inquiry into Britain’s role in the way he and others like him were treated.

The allegations are already being investigated by the Attorney-General, and Foreign Secretary David Miliband is to be questioned by Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. In a telling sign of the government’s nervousness, he and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith have reportedly refused to appear before a cross-party committee of MPs on human rights.

The story of Mr. Mohamed reads like the stuff of gangster novels and the violence-soaked B-grade Hollywood movies of the 1960s. Except that what Mr. Mohamed claims happened to him was no fiction. He has described his experience as a “nightmare” and said it was still difficult for him to believe that he was “abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways — all orchestrated by the United States government” in alleged collusion with British intelligence agencies.

“I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares. Before this ordeal, torture was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim,” he said after his release from Guantanamo Bay.

Thirty-two-year old Ethopia-born Mohamed came to Britain in 1994 as an asylum-seeker. Although refused asylum, he was given exceptional leave in 2000 to remain in the U.K. for four years. His nightmare began in 2001 when he fell under the influence of radical Muslim groups, gave up his job and studies and travelled to Afghanistan — first going to Pakistan. He claims that he simply wanted to see what the Taliban-run Islamic regime in Afghanistan was like and had no formal links with the Taliban. While he was still there, 9/11 happened and he was caught up in the “war on terror.” He fled to Pakistan where he was arrested in 2002 and accused of being an al-Qaeda activist.

Mr. Mohamed alleges that the case against him is based on confession extracted from him under torture. According to him, after he was arrested in Pakistan his American captors flew him to Morocco where he was beaten, deprived of sleep and his genitals were cut with a scalpel. He further alleges that MI5 knew what was happening to him: an MI5 agent who interviewed him allegedly told him that the agency could discuss with Americans “what could be done for him” if he told the truth. Later, MI5 reportedly fed information to American authorities to help them with their interrogation.

The High Court has been sufficiently impressed with the evidence produced by Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers to rule that MI5 actively colluded with U.S. intelligence agencies in their use of illegal methods of interrogation to extract confession from him following his arrest. In a scathing judgment in August last year, the court held Britain guilty of “wrongdoing” in facilitating Mr. Mohamed’s interrogation by Americans while he was in detention in Pakistan. In the view of the court, Mr. Mohamed’s detention itself was “unlawful” and it was compounded by the way he was treated.

Commenting on MI5’s role, Lord Justice Thomas observed: “By seeking to interview BM in the circumstances found in Pakistan and supplying information and questions for his interviews, the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States authorities went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.”

The “BM” saga is part of a bigger story — that of Britain’s complicity in some of America’s worst excesses in its war against terror. Twice, the government has been forced to apologise for its previous denials that it knew anything about extraordinary extradition or torture. It now admits that the British base in the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia was used by America for rendering terror suspects and that its troops in Iraq handed over at least two militants detained by them to American security forces who then took them to Afghanistan.

This after years of insistent and angry denials such as this one from Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary at the time of Iraq invasion. Giving evidence before the Foreign Affairs Committee in December 2005, he mocked the government’s critics and said: “Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say that Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition.”

Revelations of Britain’s covert involvement in some of the most flagrant human rights abuses have prompted the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture to warn that London could be in breach of international law. He is reported to have already alerted the British government about his concerns. So, the plot has started to thicken.

Now, about the other character in our story: Sir Fred Goodwin, a high-flying banker with a starring role in Britain’s deepening banking crisis having almost single-handedly managed to bring one of the country’s most famous and successful banks to its knees with a series of high-risk deals. A former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, he has become a national hate figure as details of how he caused its collapse emerge. In the words of one commentator, he is a “potent symbol of profligate mismanagement … with a record of fecklessness, hubris and incompetence.”

There have been calls for Sir Fred to be stripped of his knighthood that he was given in 2004 for (guess what?) his “services” to the banking industry. The question being asked is whether, having brought shame to banking, he is still entitled to being called “Sir.” There is also fury over his £700,000 a year pension but it seems the government can do little to deprive him of it except flexing its muscles (of which there has been quite a lot in recent days) because it is written in his contract.

The real issue, however, is not Sir Fred’s pension. It is about a culture that allowed him to do what he did to RBS and the failure of the much-vaunted regulatory system that Gordon Brown put in place when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Financial Services Authority, which is supposed to regulate the country’s financial services, was either sleeping on the job or chose to look the other way while bankers and hedge-managers played footsie with every rule in the book. Regulators claim that they were under pressure from Ministers to keep a hands-off approach as far as possible. “Light-touch regulation” was the buzzword. The fear was that if men like Sir Fred (and he was not alone; there is a whole gallery of rogue bankers with peerages and knighthood) were leaned too heavily, they might take their business (and talent) elsewhere.

With hindsight, it is all too easy to heap all the blame on the government but the truth is that when the times were good and the goose was happily laying the golden eggs all over the place nobody wanted to annoy it. The Tories, who are now baying for Mr. Brown’s blood, were the biggest opponents of regulation. So, there was a culture of risk-taking encouraged by politicians of all hues in which the likes of Sir Fred were led to believe that what they were doing was legitimate.

Of course, Sir Fred and Mr. Mohamed must answer for their individual actions (Mr. Mohamed had no business flirting with dangerous extremists or travelling on forged passport as he admits he did) but does that make the government and the system it represents any less culpable? At some level and in their own very different ways, the two men are symbols of modern Britain — whether as victims or villains.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Realignment in Orissa
Woes of bandit capitalism
A tale of two men and modern Britain
World Bank forecasts a global economic shrink
Is 2009 Harvard’s annus horribilis?
Commonwealth is a true agent of progress
Corrections and clarifications
On Musharrafspeak
Srikrishna report
A relief

Copyright © 2009, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu