Andrew Parker - Nosey DG of MI5 criminal outfit

[TonyGosling]

Is it just me 'cos I see no sign of a soul on this man's face.
What strange and terrible thing did he do to lose it?

MI5's Andrew Parker lives in a different world
The new MI5 chief's recent defence of security services does not stand up in my experience, or in that of my client Shaker Aamer
Clive Stafford Smith
theguardian.com, Thursday 10 October 2013 10.05 BST
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/10/mi5-andrew-parker -different-world-shaker-aamer



It has often been said that MI5 operates in a shady, parallel world. Unfortunately, the recent public comments of Sir Andrew Parker, the new head of MI5, makes it all too clear that he does not live in the same world as the rest of us. Thirty years in MI5 have apparently left him a little short on perspective.

If one is to believe Parker (as interpreted by the Daily Mail), the Guardian's recent revelations about the security services have "handed a gift to terrorists".

Parker claims his is "a highly accountable service". MI5 is "overseen independently by parliament through the ISC [intelligence and security committee], inspected by two independent commissioners (usually senior judges), held to account on any complaints from the public by a senior and independent tribunal of judges and lawyers … Rightly, these arrangements are tough and testing," he concludes.

First, it must be said that there is nothing in the Guardian's revelations that has been shown to help terrorists in the least, and Parker did not give a single concrete example to demonstrate this.

However, the Guardian has cast light on some worryingly broad snooping by his service. This is a real concern in a democratic society. I have myself, for example, been assured by those in the know that various intelligence agencies like to intercept my own legal correspondence concerning people being mistreated in the name of the "war on terror". I don't appreciate this, and I challenge Parker to assure me that neither MI5, MI6 nor GCHQ have snooped on my legal discussions. (How could it possibly compromise national security to promise me that my attorney-client privilege has not been breached?)

As for the accountability of MI5, my own experiences clash somewhat with his claims. He cites the ISC as one aspect of this strict and independent process. Of course, the ISC did nothing about the British "policy" that allowed agents to witness torture in 2002 until we forced it on them years later. Here we are after a decade: Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the ISC chair, recently wrote to one of my clients (Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo Bay) saying that it was not within their remit to consider individual cases.

Indeed, the rigorous accountability Parker expects from this quarter comes from Rifkind, who seems to spend more of his time insisting that he is being rigorous than he does actually holding the agencies to account. It is not just me questioning Rifkind's approach: Lord King, himself the Conservative longest-serving former chair of the ISC, recently told the Guardian that Rifkind's swift endorsement of the work of GCHQ was "unfortunate".

"I think their response was pretty quick," said King. "It came at a time when revelations were still coming out. It is very important the ISC maintains public confidence as a scrutiny committee." Dame Stella Rimington, former director general of MI5, spoke in similar tones to the Times: "I'm not sure that Malcolm Rifkind going on the telly and saying we've scrutinised all this and it's all OK, is enough."

The next "tough" layer of accountability is "a senior and independent tribunal of judges and lawyers", by which Parker presumably means the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). The IPT has no more teeth than the proverbial sloth. I recently submitted a complaint by Shaker Aamer to the IPT concerning the false statements being made by the security services to the Americans that have been the basis for Aamer's unconscionable detention in Guantánamo Bay. Shaker was cleared by the US in 2007 but is still there in large part because of briefing against him by British agents.

The IPT invited us to respond to the security services' assertion that the claim was "vexatious", but was unable to tell us what their substantive response was – because the security services did not consent to Shaker knowing whether they had actually been defaming him in secret. We wait with bated breath to see how rigorous this accountability turns out to be. The prognosis is poor: of the 194 complaints determined in 2011 (the last year the IPT published figures), not a single one found in favour of the complainant.

Parker says accountability measures have just been "strengthened by the Justice and Security Act". Actually, the act creates secret courts to help MI5 cover up embarrassing cases. The case of our Libyan clients who were kidnapped and "rendered" to Gaddafi's prisons in 2004 – among them a pregnant woman and young children – is coming up for a hearing this month. The government wanted to delay the case until the act came into force – so that they can try to keep it secret. At the same time, the government is so desperate to avoid genuine responsibility for their actions that they are asking that British law should not be applied at all – maybe we should consider using the legal framework of Colonel Gaddafi's Libya to decide whether it was okay to render Abdel Hakim Belhaj to several years of torture?

Perhaps all is well in Parker's happy land. Or perhaps we agree with Dame Rimington that it takes a little more than "going on the telly and saying we've scrutinised all this and it's all OK" before we will be sure that our British liberties are secure.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

7/7 terror hunter Andrew Parker named as new MI5 boss
BRITAIN’S new spy boss has been named as Andrew Parker, the current deputy director at MI5.
00:00, Fri, Mar 29, 2013
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/387836/7-7-terror-hunter-Andrew-Park er-named-as-new-MI5-boss

New MI5 boss Andrew ParkerNew MI5 boss Andrew Parker
He will take over when director general Sir Jonathan Evans quits next month.

The Cambridge-­educated spook is a specialist on Middle Eastern and Northern Irish terrorism, counter espionage and organised crime. He led MI5’s response to the 7/7 London bombings in 2005.

The following year his teams helped stop an Al Qaeda plot to attack transatlantic passenger jets in mid-air with bombs hidden in drinks bottles.

Great honour

Mr Parker, 50, has worked for British intelligence for more than 30 years, starting when he was still a student. He is married with two children and is a keen bird watcher and wildlife photographer.

He said his new role was “a great honour”.


The appointment comes as intelligence experts claim more and more UK-based jihadis are travelling to terror training camps while police warn that atrocities as big as the London bombings are being foiled every year.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Who is Andrew Parker?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6280438/mi5-chief-andrew-parker-salary-t error-threat/
Andrew Parker, 55, is married with two children.

He studied natural sciences at Cambridge University’s Churchill College and is a keen ornithologist and wildlife photographer.

He joined the Security Service in 1983, and went on to lead the MI5’s international terrorism division in 2005.

Within seven months, Mr Parker dealt with the London bombings.

Although he was accused by some, of failing to keep track of Mohammad Sidique Khan, believed to be the leader of the July 7, 2005, attack.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

The head of MI5 has lost the plot. Britain is safer than ever in its history
Simon Jenkins
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/18/mi5-lost-plot-br itain-safer-than-ever-andrew-parker-terror
Andrew Parker seems to have suffered a panic attack this week. Random acts of terror don’t threaten the UK’s existence
Wed 18 Oct 2017 15.00 EDT Last modified on Mon 27 Nov 2017 10.13 EST

Oh my God, the Muslims are going to get us. Watch out. Our national security is “more under threat than ever”. Our lives are seeing a “dramatic upshift” in threat levels, with “plots from overseas, plots online, complex scheming and crude stabbings, lengthy planning but also spontaneous attacks”. MI5 boss Andrew Parker seemed close to a panic attack on Tuesday. He found threats “at the highest tempo I have seen in my 34-year career”. We should clearly be shaking in our shoes, and give Parker every penny he demands.

UK facing most severe terror threat ever, warns MI5 chief

From a head of state security, this is rubbish. During the years of IRA terrorism, annual killings ran at 10 to a hundred times the present rate. But ever since they “came out” in the 1990s, spy chiefs have built bureaucratic empires on the blackmail of fear. It is a revival of Eisenhower’s notorious “military-industrial complex”.


Parker’s primary obligation is to keep Britain’s borders, its institutions and its economy safe from enemy attack. By no stretch of a spy’s fervid imagination can random terrorist incidents constitute an assault from a plausible enemy. Britain today must be safer from siege, conquest or revolution than at any time in history.

A secondary obligation on Parker is to be a source of reassurance, not a purveyor of fear, least of all when there is nothing the public can do in response. Fear is the most toxic of all authoritarian weapons. It should not emanate from the mouth of a British public servant. Parker’s obligation is to secrecy, discretion and proportion. He shows none of them.


MI5 chief warns of 'unprecedented' UK terror threat – video
After the collapse of Soviet communism, the security services were bereft of a commensurate enemy. At first, they chased drug lords and money launderers, to no effect. Then they found a saviour in Tony Blair’s “weapons of mass destruction”. Saddam’s rusting silos, Gaddafi’s yellowcake uranium and the ayatollahs’ centrifuges were a godsend. Any dodgy dossier would do. A half-baked Birmingham bomb factory or a demented tube stabbing was good for “an attack on the nation and its values”. Police budgets were cut; spies boomed.


Fear and hysteria soon gained traction as politicians were terrorised by counter-terrorism. They forgot that terror is not an ideology but a methodology – a means to an end, not an end in itself. Every text on terrorism stresses that it cannot be “defeated”, as Blair promised, any more than a knife or a bomb is defeated. Terrorism is the use of criminality for an ulterior motive.

Islamist supremacy may be a perverted motive for mayhem. But to suggest that such mayhem undermines the security of prosperous and well-defended states demeans the robustness of such states. It is an abuse of language. Worse, it is exactly the abuse terrorists want to hear. How stupid can we get?

The wars Britain has been fighting in various parts of the Middle East since 2001 have neither improved – nor worsened – Britain’s security one iota. They have merely spent billions of pounds attacking poor countries and killing thousands of people who never posed any threat to Britain. They have been inexcusable. My bookshelf groans with their cruelty and counter-productivity, a catalogue of fallacious excuses, bombings, killings and drone attacks, all occasioned by a single act of terror, by Osama bin Laden on 9/11.

What these wars have done is incite a spate of killings on British streets, the precise opposite of their justification by Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Some of these killings have been conspiratorial, some “lone wolf”. Many have been thwarted by the police and security services, which is their job. All have been tragedies to those killed and injured. But personal tragedy is not the same as a “threat to national security”.


If you want terror in modern Britain, note what was happening as Parker was making his pitch. Two more moped stabbings in west London took the epidemic of killings in the capital to 133 in the past 12 months, compared with 106 the year before. Figures do not record how many were of or by Muslims. Because few were accompanied by cries of “Allahu Akbar”, they went down as common murders, rather than an assault on the integrity of the British state.

Parker boasts that he has foiled “20 terror plots in four years”, which is what his office is paid to do. But what of gang violence up 18% and youth killings up 84% in the capital while resources have been bled from the police into his? “Terror” crime is up too. But clothing it in the language of statism, war and patriotism does not alter the fact that his terrorists, like London’s gangsters, are really just another grim statistic from Britain’s hidden margins of urban life – and best treated that way.

The use of explosive violence for quasi-political ends is as old as dynamite. The violence achieves its end, if at all, not by its horror but by how society reacts to it. British governments were right in the 1970s and 1980s to treat IRA terrorist acts as criminal not political, even though they were aimed specifically at breaking up the United Kingdom and thus political and “existential”. Murders were regarded as murders, and other channels were used to confront the IRA’s motives.

The best weapon to de-radicalise Isis returnees? Our own humanity | Sanam Naraghi Anderlini

This is why the government’s misnamed and ham-fisted “Prevent strategy”, to sow British values in Muslim neighbourhoods, does at least make sense. There is simply no alternative. It is also why there is no glamorous “military” substitute for the hard grind of local intelligence through local policing, in the communities where killers may lurk. If MI5 has any role in this, it is surely its best-kept secret, not trumpeted from the rooftops.

Hence the warning of that sober student of terror, Richard English of Queen’s University Belfast, that the “most serious danger currently posed by terrorists is their capacity to provoke ill-judged, extravagant and counter-productive state responses”. It is not acts of terror that we should fear, but our inability to modulate our reactions to them. These reactions include the words we use to describe these acts and the liberties we curb to constrain them.

Terrorist killings are appalling, but they are not threats to national security. As long as the head of MI5 cannot tell the difference, I fear for national security.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

[TonyGosling]

MI5 provides immunity for agents' criminal acts, tribunal told
Secret Service policy is so secret that judicial oversight was not initially acknowledged
Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent @owenbowcott
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/04/mi5-sought-immunity-fo r-agents-criminal-acts-tribunal-told

Thu 4 Oct 2018 15.42 BST First published on Thu 4 Oct 2018 12.40 BST

MI5 grants its informants legal cover to participate in crimes that may extend to murder, torture and sexual assaults, a tribunal has heard.

The policy, in existence since the early 1990s, is likely to have enabled the Security Service to conceal wide ranging illegal activity, Ben Jaffey QC, representing an alliance of human rights group, told the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Thursday.

The policy was so secret that even judicial oversight of the practice, introduced in 2012, was not initially acknowledged. Sir Mark Waller, a retired judge appointed to oversee the policy, was instructed by the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, not to comment on its legality.

Known within the intelligence services as “the third direction”, a letter from Cameron to Waller dated 27 November 2012 said his “oversight would not provide endorsement of the legality of the policy”.

Cameron continued: “You would not be asked to provide a view on whether any particular case should be referred to the prosecuting authorities; and your oversight would not relate to any future consideration given by prosecuting authorities to authorisations.”

Waller was the intelligence services commissioner at the time, charged with independent judicial oversight of the conduct of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

Cameron’s letter explained that in protecting national security, MI5’s agent-handlers permit informants to participate in “crime, in circumstances where it is considered [that] involvement is necessary and proportionate in providing or maintaining access to intelligence” that would disrupt more serious crimes or security threats.

He added that he had considered whether his letter should be published for transparency purposes, but “concluded that it should not on the basis that doing so would be detrimental to national security and contrary to the public interest”.

Some details of the policy were also disclosed on Thursday during the hearing. A heavily redacted copy of a three-page MI5 document, entitled Guidelines on the use of agents who participate in criminality (official guidance), was released.

The document shows that MI5 sought to give its agents even greater freedom to commit criminal offences than that usually proffered to police informers. “The service has established its own procedure for authorising the use of agents participating in crime,” it states.

It says any authorisation to commit crimes “has no legal effect and does not confer on either agent or those involved in the authorisation process any immunity from prosecution. Rather, the authorisation will be the service’s explanation and justification of its decisions” should the police investigate.

The IPT case, which is potentially embarrassing for the government, has been brought by Privacy International, Reprieve, the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the Pat Finucane Centre.

MI5’s policy is illegal if it breaches fundamental human rights, such as the ban on the use of torture, Jaffey told the tribunal.

The policy appears to be the equivalent of MI6’s powers created under the Intelligence Services Act 1994. Section 7 of the act is sometimes known as the “James Bond clause” because it provides a legal amnesty for spies to commit abroad what would otherwise be crimes.

The MI5 guidelines date back to the early 1990s and, it is believed, attempted to formalise the legal gap exposed earlier during the Troubles in Northern Ireland when special branch agent-handlers sought clarity from Downing Street on how far they were permitted to go in allowing informants to participate in crimes without facing prosecution themselves.

At that stage, in the 1980s, the office of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was unwilling to give clear guidance. Those exchanges were carefully documented in the De Silva report into the murder of the Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane.

Sir James Eadie QC, representing the intelligence agencies, the Home Office and the Foreign Office, told the the IPT that details of MI5’s conduct had to be kept secret and could not be aired in open court. He argued that the claim should be restricted to investigating over a “sensible time period”, at most six years.

For part of the day, the IPT went into closed session from which the press, public and lawyers for the claimants were excluded.

Reprieve’s director, Maya Foa, said: “We want to know if it’s government policy to let MI5 agents get away with serious crimes such as torture and murder.

“While our intelligence agencies have an important role in keeping this country safe it does not follow that agents can be permitted to break the law without limits. If this is indeed the government’s position it must inform MPs and the public, and open the policy to legal and parliamentary scrutiny.”

[TonyGosling]

MI5 agents can commit crime in UK, government reveals
Secret order on authorised criminality by spies made public after legal battle by rights groups
Jamie Grierson
@JamieGrierson
Fri 2 Mar 2018 11.24 GMT Last modified on Fri 2 Mar 2018 22.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/02/mi5-agents-are-allowed -to-commit-in-uk-government-reveals

MI5 agents are allowed to carry out criminal activity in the UK, the government has acknowledged for the first time.

The prime minister was on Thursday forced to publish the text of a direction to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office, the spying watchdog, on governing “security service participation in criminality”.

It instructs the IPCO to oversee the participation of MI5 agents in criminal activity, which was previously conducted by the now-defunct office of the Intelligence Services Commissioner, under a secret order referred to as the “third direction”.

However, guidance about when British spies can commit crimes, and how far they can go, remains confidential.

The commissioner, Lord Justice Sir Adrian Fulford, said: “I welcome the government’s decision to make public my oversight of this sensitive area of work.”

The order was published after a legal battle by the human rights groups Reprieve and Privacy International.

Maya Foa, the director of Reprieve, said: “After a seven-month legal battle the prime minister has finally been forced to publish her secret order but we are a long way from having transparency.

“The public and parliament are still being denied the guidance that says when British spies can commit criminal offences and how far they can go.

“Authorised criminality is the most intrusive power a state can wield. Theresa May must publish this guidance without delay.”

Millie Graham Wood, a solicitor at Privacy International, said there was no justification why the secret direction was not published earlier.

“Had we not sought to challenge the government over the failure to publish this direction, together with Reprieve, it is questionable whether it would have ever been brought to light,” she said. “It is wrong in principle for there to be entire areas of intelligence oversight and potentially of intelligence activity, about which the public knows nothing at all.”

The MI5 website says agents are “one of the most significant information gathering assets we have”, adding “intelligence from our agents is critical to keeping the UK safe”.

It also states: “Public views of what MI5 agents do are often based on fiction and not always accurate. There are many misunderstandings about what our agents do, as we cannot say much about those who help us, given our commitment to protect their identity.”

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