Intelligence

March 31, 2005

Bush pledge over US intelligence

BBC NEWS | Americas | Bush pledge over US intelligence

President George W Bush has welcomed a study that says US intelligence agencies know "disturbingly little" about enemy weapons programmes.

Presidential Intelligence review

March 31, 2005 at 10:18 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Dissent on Intelligence Is Critical, Report Says

Yahoo! News - Dissent on Intelligence Is Critical, Report Says

By Walter Pincus and Peter Baker, Washington Post Staff Writers

A presidential commission assigned to look into the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war will recommend a series of changes intended to encourage more dissent within the nation's spy agencies and better organize the government's multi-tentacled fight against terrorism, officials said yesterday.

In a report to be made public tomorrow, the officials said, the panel will propose more competitive analysis and information-sharing by intelligence agencies, improved tradecraft training, more "devil's advocacy" in the formation of national intelligence estimates and the appointment of an intelligence ombudsman to hear from analysts who believe their work has been compromised.

The report will also suggest the creation of a new national nonproliferation center to coordinate the fight against weapons of mass destruction, according to officials who have read the 700-page classified version of the report and declined to be identified because it has not been released. But unlike the trend toward greater centralization enshrined in a new intelligence law signed by President Bush, the report envisions the center as a facilitating body and urges the government to keep its specialists dispersed in various intelligence agencies.

The net result, according to officials, would be to move away from the intelligence community's tradition of searching for consensus, in favor of opening up internal debate and including a more diverse spectrum of views. The goal is to provide policymakers a fuller understanding of the state of the government's knowledge.

Bush appointed the panel, officially known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in February 2004 after initially resisting any further examination of the assessments that preceded his decision to invade Iraq.

Like other studies, the commission report offers a scathing review of the CIA for concluding that Saddam Hussein had secret weapons that ultimately were never found, while also taking aim at the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other agencies, according to officials. In addition, it examines the performance of intelligence agencies in Iran, North Korea, Libya and Pakistan, but the Iran and North Korea sections remain classified.

The White House, while refusing to disclose the contents of the report, embraced it as the authoritative account of what went wrong in Iraq. Bush was briefed on the report yesterday by aides who have reviewed it. The president will meet with the panel's co-chairmen, Senior U.S. Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), at the White House tomorrow and then join the two at a briefing for reporters.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan praised the report as "a very thorough job" and suggested that Bush would adopt many, though not necessarily all, of its ideas. "We will carefully consider the recommendations and act quickly on the recommendations, as well," he told reporters at his daily briefing. "They build upon the steps we've already taken to improve our intelligence-sharing and -gathering."

But McClellan offered no second thoughts about the Iraq war despite the intelligence failures documented in the commission report. "Saddam Hussein's regime was creating instability in the region, and we are better off with his regime out of power," he said.

In analyzing the preparation of Iraq intelligence, the commission singled out case studies that demonstrated faulty conclusions. Among those highlighted was the allegation that Iraq had built unmanned aerial vehicles that could be loaded with weapons of mass destruction and sent to attack the United States. The report noted that Air Force analysts expressed serious doubts about such a scenario, but were disregarded.

The panel also dissected the use of information from an Iraqi exile nicknamed "Curve Ball," a German intelligence source who was never questioned by the CIA but provided information on Iraq's supposed mobile biological weapons production facilities. Curve Ball's assertions provided the basis for some statements by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the U.N. Security Council, but the information was later questioned by the Germans and eventually by U.S. intelligence.

The panel's conclusions and recommendations will be made public in a declassified version of the report that runs over 500 pages and is summarized in a 40-page overview, all of which will be posted on the Internet tomorrow, officials said. Some findings were reported yesterday in the New York Times.

The commission's plan for remedying the problems it found follows a reorganization of the intelligence community that Bush signed into law in December, a move also motivated by dissatisfaction with the misjudgments on Iraq. The legislation led to the recent nomination of longtime diplomat John D. Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence, charged with coordinating the government's 15 disparate intelligence agencies, and the commission offers him guidance on how to proceed once he assumes the job.

Among other things, the panel plans to recommend that the FBI move more quickly to modernize its computer systems and broaden access to its security information, and that the Justice Department create a new national security division, according to officials.

The changes to intelligence-gathering were meant to emphasize improving the quality of the analysis, officials said. Government specialists should be left in their jobs rather than moved to other fields, and intelligence analysis should be made into more of a career track, the panel concluded. Rather than smothering disagreement, analysts would be encouraged to explain why they reached different conclusions.

March 31, 2005 at 12:10 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

March 23, 2005

George Kennan: Economist Obituary

Economist.com | Obituary

Mar 23rd 2005
From The Economist print edition

George Kennan, diplomat and historian, died on March 17th, aged 101

IN LATER life, George Kennan felt his words had been much misunderstood. Worse, they had “inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff.” Yet he always chose his words skilfully, making an art of cables and memos as well as his 22 books. Dean Acheson, whom Mr Kennan served when he was secretary of state, once put it this way: “The trouble with George is that he writes so beautifully, he can convince you of anything.” Then he put it another way: George reminded him of his father's old horse, which, when crossing wooden bridges, would frighten himself with the noise he had made.

Mr Kennan's most resonant words had been about the Soviet Union. He had sent them in a famous “Long Telegram”—in fact, five separate cables, to avoid suspicion—that was tapped out from the American embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington on February 22nd 1946. The telegram explained that the Soviet regime was fundamentally insecure; that it feared foreign contact, and any intimation of the truth by its own people; that the regime was implacably opposed to the United States, and that its designs on the world were violent destabilisation.

This cable, one of the most shocking to come into the State Department, was followed in 1947 by an article on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by “X” (Mr Kennan, with his hat-brim down) in Foreign Affairs. His observations, together with Russia's behaviour in those years in Eastern Europe, set a tone in America's foreign policy that led to the founding of NATO, the post-war arms-race in both conventional and nuclear weapons, the huge growth of the secret-ops arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the disaster of Vietnam. Mr Kennan had not meant this at all.

He had certainly talked of containing Russian power by meeting it with “counterforce” wherever it began to threaten western institutions. Hence “containment”, the word that was ever after linked to him. He also proposed, in a secret memo of May 1948, a covert “political warfare” unit that would aim to roll back communism rather than merely limit it. The pressure on Russia, though, was to be pre-eminently political, diplomatic and cultural (with a shot of propaganda, such as Radio Free Europe) rather than military. To Mr Kennan's horror, the generals and politicians took his words and ran with them.

He knew Russia better than any other American at the time. He had watched the Soviet experiment from the beginning; his first Soviet memo had been sent in his 20s, when he was third secretary in Riga, predicting that the system would fail. His Russian was faultless, and he had seen the yellow of Stalin's eyes. But many Americans concluded, when the Soviet Union eventually fell, that it was Ronald Reagan's doing, and his arms race that had tipped it.

The outsider

Mr Kennan loved Germany even before he loved Russia, learning the purest form of the language at the age of eight in Kassel. He was a chief architect of the Marshall Plan, and got into deep trouble in the 1950s for proposing a unified, neutral Germany from which both America and Russia would withdraw their troops. Suggestions like this got him labelled, falsely, as a liberal. Joe McCarthy's word was stronger.

He was never, in fact, accepted in the inner circles of power. Though his height, his charm and his intellect suggested that he came from the east-coast foreign-policy elite, he hailed from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and had no private fortune. In 1953, when a jealous John Foster Dulles had fired him from the foreign service, he had no income at all. Shy and scholarly (“X” cited both Gibbon and Thomas Mann), he was a historian rather than a diplomat, and could be contrarian to a risky degree. Stalin had him expelled from Moscow in 1952, when he had been ambassador a mere five months, for being too frank about Soviet surveillance.

Despite his enormous influence under Harry Truman, Mr Kennan spent much of his time in the foreign service feeling bypassed and ignored. Though he was revered in his later years as America's greatest living diplomat, and continued to dispense sharp and sought-after commentary from Princeton, his style of big-power diplomacy inevitably came to look old-fashioned. For his part, by the end of his long life, he began to judge American foreign policy as out of focus and adrift.

At the core of his whole containment idea had been what he called “spiritual vitality”. America's destiny, he firmly believed in the 1940s, was to set an example to the world of how great democratic ideals might be put into practice. By daily and hourly proving the worth of its founding principles of liberty, justice and tolerance, America would defeat communism. History “plainly intended” it.

By the 1990s, Mr Kennan seemed to change this view. He wanted America to withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights: “this whole tendency to see ourselves as the centre of political enlightenment and as teachers...strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable.” Behind this apparent shift, however, was the old George Kennan, who had always advocated caution, subtlety and patience in the use of power, without shrillness or pushiness, and had been proved right.

March 23, 2005 at 10:59 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Cats' eyes in the dark

Economist.com | Britain's intelligence services

Can challenging and questioning be made a part of the spy culture?

Click to enlarge

AS THAT shrewd spy-chronicler, John le Carré, noted once, secret services can be most revealing of the deeper character of the countries they protect. A distinguished British practitioner of the craft recently agreed with him, declaring that intelligence work “is the last expression of national identity and sovereigntyâ€�.

Britain is perhaps the prime example. Its secret servants of the state remain tiny in numbers and budgets compared with the United States. The so-called single intelligence account disbursed by the Treasury is £1.3 billion ($2.5 billion). The American government spends roughly five times as much on the bits that are its equivalent of the three British agencies: the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6); the domestic Security Service (MI5) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). And American help is vital. A baffled Edward Heath, when he was prime minister in 1970-74, once asked what Britain was getting in return for making all kinds of facilities available to the Americans. The answer came back that, without the intelligence provided by America, Britain would be instantly reduced to “the same position as other European members of NATO”—in other words, to the second rank of world intelligence powers.

But Britain's spy agencies preserve a certain cachet. Some of this, oddly enough, comes from James Bond films, by which the doings of a wildly fictionalised MI6 agent have seized the world's imagination. Old MI6 hands do not knock Mr Bond; he helps reduce that gap in spending power between the Brits and the Americans. CIA veterans acknowledge that, where they may need a brown envelope stuffed with dollars, an officer from MI6 can sometimes rely on brand image alone. A former “C” (as MI6 chiefs are traditionally known) has claimed that, after long and careful cultivation of a potential agent, when one of his officers made the final pass, his subject would often “virtually stand to attention, such was the honour”.

Yet, for all the swash and buckle, Britain's intelligence services have been feeling their limitations lately. Two events, above all, have forced a rethink in the way things are done—and have led to the most substantial reshaping of the intelligence community since 1946-48, when Stalin was ensconced in Moscow and when MI6 did not officially exist.

Ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, as a seasoned operator put it, “the community has come together because abroad has come home”. Terrorist-related intelligence gathered in a hard and remote area, or by surveillance of a single individual with a particular suitcase in a European hotel room, now has to be passed to the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) beside the Thames, assessed and put on several desks in Whitehall (including, very often, the home secretary's) sometimes within minutes, rather than hours, of its gathering. The secret part of Britain's new “protective state” knows it is pitted now against a threat with no geography, whose consequences (as in Parliament's recent bitter debate on anti-terrorist legislation) often play directly into the political issues of the hour. The nature, provenance, analysis and use of intelligence have never before had such a central or prominent place in British politics.

Iraq provided its own extra jolt to the system. Britain's intelligence services, like America's, took an enormous hit when Iraq's expected remaining stock of weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise. They, and the politicians they were advising, seemed to have forgotten the wise remark of Sir Colin McColl, a former chief of MI6, that the most intelligence can provide is “cats' eyes in the dark”. But that sense of spying's limitations vividly coloured Lord Butler's report, last summer, on WMD, intelligence and Iraq, and has not left the minds of the queen's secret servants since. The failure in Iraq was ever-present in the minds of the Butler implementation group chaired by Sir David Omand, the co-ordinator of security and intelligence, whose report has recently gone before the small group of ministers on Tony Blair's Cabinet Committee on Security and Intelligence.

There is no trace, in this report, of a purge mentality driven by politicians or committees seeking to name and shame the “guilty”. The Britishreview has been pushed by the very intelligence figures who were in the frame of the Butler report. It recommends:

• Full acceptance of the Butler criticisms, especially the need to keep testing key pieces of intelligence—and the assumptions shaping their interpretation—before they are included in assessments sent to ministers and customers in the civil and diplomatic services and the armed forces. And the testing should be more rigorous than it was before the war in Iraq.

• To help achieve this, the Cabinet Office's 30-strong assessment staff will grow by about a third. It will also develop a separate team to challenge assessments, precisely to diminish the risk of “group think” which worried Lord Butler, and to improve longer-term thinking about possible future threats.

• Intelligence analysts, whether in the secret agencies, in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or at the Ministry of Defence, will become part of a new joint analytical community with its own head of profession and shared training facilities.

All in all, the new post-Butler system is intended to give the technical specialists more weight, to engender greater scepticism (including among ministers) about the material gathered, and to licence every member of the British intelligence community, when necessary, to speak truth to power. That, at least, is the hope.

Can the post-September 11th changes and the prescriptions of the Omand report, taken together, achieve what needs to be done? Necessary reforms include ensuring that future politico-military policy does not place a weight upon intelligence that it cannot bear. They must try to draw maximum value from the existing intelligence community, and create a wider picture of current threats from the mosaic of tactical intelligence. They must carve out time and space to consider what some intelligence officers (borrowing the phrase of a French historian, Fernand Braudel) like to call “the thin wisps of tomorrow”, from which future anxieties may arise.

They also need to protect secrets in circumstances where, within minutes, terrorist-related intelligence has to be both shared with allies and transmitted down the line to the British Transport Police or to traffic wardens in the centre of London. And they have to improve communication with Parliament, press and the public about immediate threats, intelligence capabilities and future anxieties in a world where it is no longer possible or satisfactory to say, simply, “Trust us”.

A licence to be awkward

The first “never again” reform was in place within six months of Lord Butler's team reporting. MI6 restored a separate requirements department after a decade or so in which, for economy reasons, that activity had been blended with operational groups. The new head of what is known colloquially as the “R” function has a licence to be awkward, and is given seniority and independence.

His sizeable team is a mixture of seasoned analysts and officers with recent experience in the field. They have almost completed the considerable task of going back and re-evaluating all M16's significant networks, not just those connected with Iraq, and applying new standards of rigour. So far, the networks have survived.

The Cabinet Office, for its part, will shortly be appointing a challenger-in-chief to work within the assessments staff to test material at the final stage of processing before it reaches the “high table” of British intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The challenge section will also probe existing assumptions, to check that new material is not fitting in too comfortably and readily. As part of the post-Butler guidance, ministers, too, are being asked to raise their game in terms of the scepticism and care with which they approach the “CX” reports (the code indicates it is MI6-generated, and is short for “from ‘C' exclusively”), the JIC's assessments and the whole sheaf-full of intelligence and security material they receive daily and weekly.

Perhaps the most significant attempt to maximise the use of intelligence resources took place before the Iraq war, with the creation of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. After the September 11th attacks, the Security Service, MI5,createdits own Counter-Terrorism Analysis Centre, CTAC. But in the summer of 2002, realising something more substantial was needed, it suggested relinquishing some of its traditional turf to create the JTAC. The centre began work on May 1st 2003 and, by the end of that year, was up to its full complement of 100 officials drawn from a range of agencies, departments and the armed forces. In its first year of life, it analysed and assessed some 60,000 items of intelligence.

Roughly speaking, the JTAC now concentrates on what al-Qaeda and its penumbral groups are doing, while the JIC works on the implications of this for the wider world. Advocates of the twin system argue that it frees the JIC to do more strategic thinking of the sort it did 40 or 50 years ago.

Who should know, and how much?

The success and work-rate of the JTAC—and the understandable preoccupation of politicians, press and public with this aspect of Britain's intelligence output—have led some insiders to fear a growing “tyranny of the tactical”, with insufficient attention paid to the longer-term and deeper meaning of the flood of incoming material. Even before the Omand report, however, the JTAC was increasingly producing longer-term pieces. Now, too, as part of the assessments staff's new “challenge” section, a greater focus is developing on those “thin wisps of tomorrow”.

Every six months, the prime minister and the small number of ministers on his inner-intelligence loop will receive a “wisp list” of about ten items dealing with potential problems over the horizon up to ten years ahead, such as possible failed or failing states. The prime minister will then be asked if he would like more work done on them. The regular flow of assessments looking six months to a year ahead will not, it is hoped, be diminished, and Lord Butler's strictures about not mixing analysis with policy prescription will be, it is hoped, observed. The JIC's customers will be alerted if the committee's members have failed to reach the consensus for which they traditionally strive.

How much of the workings of the new secret state will reach Parliament, press and public? The oversight body, the Intelligence and Security Committee of parliamentarians, operates inside the Whitehall ring of secrecy and will be the chief quality-controller reporting to the prime minister (though Parliament will continue to get its ISC reports with the sensitive detail removed). “Dossiers”, of the kind that caused such trouble before and after the Iraq war, are unlikely to re-appear. On the rare occasions when they are used once more, the intelligence analysis will be ruthlessly and clearly kept separate from what ministers make of it or may want to do on the strength of it.

It was noticeable last month that the Home Office's background document to its immensely controversial Prevention of Terrorism Bill went out in the name of Charles Clarke, the home secretary, and did not directly quote intelligence material. The document confined itself to declaring that “Our understanding of the threat has advanced both from an increasing intelligence base and through the investigation of both successful and thwarted attacks.” An intelligence dossier was considered, but was rejected.

Expect more such background papers in future. Whitehall knows that, since Iraq, the threshold of intelligence and security credibility in Britain has been raised to a level probably higher than it has ever been. The detention, without trial, of foreign terrorist suspects in Belmarsh prison has served to keep it there. The problem of secret intelligence activity must always be acute in any open society worthy of its name. Trust depends on clandestine methods being confined to those aspects of domestic or international risk where only secret sources can penetrate to expose, and prevent, potential catastrophe.

Much secret intelligence, however, will need to be kept secret. Insiders, especially the old guard, worry a good deal about this. Theirs is traditionally a world of shadows, far removed from oversight, dossiers and inquiries such as Lord Butler's, which quoted chunks of intelligence material and even revealed (to the horror of many officers) the precise number of agents MI6 had been running in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Occasionally, you hear a cry for a tough new Official Secrets Act to run alongside the Freedom of Information Act (from which all three secret agencies are exempt), to improve the chances of genuinely sensitive material remaining safe.

These days, JTAC's findings can pass within minutes—via the Police International Counter Terrorism Unit, which sits alongside it in MI5's headquarters—to the hands of an ordinary officer in a police patrol car. Yet it is still, in intelligence terms, “safe”. So-called “tear-line” procedures mean it carries no hint of the secret sources and methods by which it has been derived. The same applies to material pooled with those overseas secret services (beyond the old America/Canada/Australia loop) with whom the British agencies have operational links. But there will be no other deeply multilateral arrangements. You will not, for example, find a single serious advocate of a European Union security and intelligence service inside the British agencies. Such relations can flourish only after years of trust-building.

No end of a lesson

Will the new system work? Insiders certainly hope so. Turf fights and unnecessary demarcations are much diminished, though they have not vanished. The idea of merging MI6 and MI5 into a single security and intelligence service, which was briefly considered in the decade between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attack on the twin towers, is no longer a runner; the certain disruption such a move would cause far outweighs the speculative gains. The new joint analytical community will encourage co-operation, though it will take some bedding in.

An IT programme, known as SCOPE, is due to be fully installed by the end of 2006. The idea is to link analysts and customers more swiftly, fully and effectively, while giving the expert a greater capacity to have his or her dissenting view heard, however inconvenient to those higher up the intelligence chain or unwelcome to its top ministerial consumers. The aspiration is there; but will the other ranks truly be convinced the officer class wants to hear? There are many different analytical traditions, too, within the agencies and across the departments. Sending them all for training to the Defence Intelligence Staff's centre at Chicksands in Bedfordshire may be neither possible nor genuinely effective in creating an analytical community.

The twin shocks of September 11th and Iraq have provided, as Rudyard Kipling said of the Boer war, “no end of a lesson”. But will the learning continue if Britain suffers no terrorist outrage in the next few years? Much will depend on the successors to Sir David Omand (who retires next month, to be replaced by the Home Office's Bill Jeffrey) and the current chairman of the JIC, William Ehrman, as well as the yet-to-be-appointed head of the analytical profession.

A catastrophic event would place great strain on the new arrangements and produce instant pressure for yet another rethink. Parliament might press for a free-standing select committee of the House of Commons to replace the existing Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs and peers. The press, even without a terrorist outrage to trigger a hunt for the culpable in Whitehall and the secret services, will be pressing for greater transparency and accountability. Even if a trauma is prevented, media scepticism of the intelligence feed into policy is unlikely to diminish. And the more skilful journalists and scholarly researchers will find ways of using the Freedom of Information Act to prise material from the Cabinet Office and the Defence Intelligence Staff, which are not exempt from the statute's reach.

New methods of recruitment and training may matter a great deal. MI6, for example, has been working much more closely with the armed forces recently. Its operators in Afghanistan or Iraq have, in some ways, more in common with the behind-the-lines Special Operations Executive (which MI6 absorbed in 1946) than with the crypto-diplomatic spies of old. Such conditions are likely to persist, and a new breed of British intelligence officer could develop to match new requirements.

If there is one theme that links all the systemic and human changes in Britain's secret world—and applies to all levels, from the MI6 agent in the field to the most senior reader in 10 Downing Street—it was articulated by Lord Butler. “Intelligence”, he said last month during a discussion on the purposes of the business, “is not uniquely worthy of belief. Intelligence is uniquely worthy of scepticism.” That, decorated by cats' eyes in the dark, should be emblazoned on the banner of the reformed British intelligence community.

March 23, 2005 at 10:04 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

March 22, 2005

Examining al-Qaeda: How to Read Intelligently (Courtesy Winds of Change & Command Post)

Had to keep this for reference.

The Command Post - Global War On Terror - Examining al-Qaeda: How to Read Intelligently

To simplify this entire post into one sentence, Jonathan Schanzer is a superb counter-terrorism analyst and his book, Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups & The Next Generation of Terror is something that should probably be on any aspiring terror watcher's reading list. The broader context of the post, however, deals with all of the terror literature that has cropped up since 9/11 and why I think that we need more books of this nature in stores.

* Predominant Literature on al-Qaeda
* Differing Methodologies
* Where Schanzer Fits In
* My Own (Winds of Change's) Reading List

Posted by Winds of Change at March 21, 2005 04:54 AM

March 22, 2005 at 11:52 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

March 20, 2005

Syria, from biblical past to Baathist present

TheStar.com - Syria, from biblical past to Baathist present

Overview: Biblical land's history stretches back to the Stone Age, with evidence of civilization traced to the area around the city of Aleppo, circa 2500 BC.

What is now Syria was once the domain of Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Arameans and more. Its conquerors include Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus II of Persia, Alexander the Great and Pompey the Great, who made the region a Roman province in 64 BC.

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In AD 636, the then-Byzantine territory was conquered by Muslim forces from the south and became part of the Caliphate of Islam.

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Power changed hands several times in various parts of the region from the 9th through the 15th centuries, with Egyptians, Turks, Crusaders and Tamerlane all in the mix.

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Syria became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1516 and began 400 years of relative prosperity and stability.

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After the Ottoman Empire was broken up during World War I, Syria was administered by the French until becoming independent by League of Nations mandate on April 17, 1946.

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In the 1967 Six Day War, Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel, which still occupies the border area.

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The Baathist party's Hafez Assad ruled from 1970 until his death in 2000, when power passed to his son, Bashar Assad.

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Syria joined U.S.-led coalition forces in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991.

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Syria is currently withdrawing its troops from Lebanon, where they, and a pervasive Syrian intelligence network, have been ensconced since 1976, ostensibly as peacekeepers.

Population: 18 million, including nearly 414,000 Palestinian refugees. The population is about 90 per cent Arab, 74 per cent Sunni Muslim.

Compiled by Pat McCormick

March 20, 2005 at 08:29 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Where few Westerners tread

TheStar.com - Where few Westerners tread

Middle East bureau chief Mitch Potter journeys through desert

and mountains, fuelled by bottomless cups of coffee and kindness

MITCH POTTER
MIDDLE EAST BUREAU

Placed just about anywhere else on the planet, this ancient desert oasis would be teeming with travellers. Today, you could shoot a cannon through its forest of Greco-Roman columns and not hit a single one.

A strategic crossroads through nearly four millennia — and for a time, 2,000 years ago, arguably the single most important junction in the Silk Road upon which East met West — Palmyra now is visited by only a smattering of European brave hearts.

So much to see, and so few to see it.

The ruins of Palmyra rise lonely, breathtaking and remarkably intact some 240 parched kilometres northeast of the Syrian capital of Damascus, which itself is as beguiling a hive of Old World authenticity as ever you will find.

An arid stretch of desert lies in between, and its one landmark offers a kind of reality check: the intersection where the road to Damascus meets the road to Baghdad. Three separate homesteads beckon with handwritten signs in English, advertising "Baghdad Café." For Western faces such as ours, that direction means danger.

But here in Syria, it may surprise many to know, the opposite is true.

If Syria equals terror, then it should follow that Syria is terrifying. Only it isn't, not even a little, as we learned for ourselves last week behind the wheel of a rented Kia — 1100cc's of pregnant roller skate.

Warm smiles and instant invitations to coffee and tea came with every welcoming breath.

They don't see many Canadians in these parts and even fewer of those like my travelling companion, radio reporter Aaron Schachter. Since he is 1) an American and 2) Jewish, you'd think he'd be the sort of person that Syrians hate most.

Call it a socio-political search for the real Syria. We just wanted to go beyond lovely Damascus, and to ditch the leather-jacketed Mukhabarat security agents who seemed to appear out of nowhere at our every stop in the big city.

Back in the capital, the walls have ears. Out here, we drove straight into a welcoming wall of adab.

Adab is another of those Arabic words that makes translators crazy. It can mean courtesy, good manners, good breeding or even the literary arts.

In this context, adab speaks to the time-honoured custom of elevating hospitality to an almost sacred act. The entire Arab world is encoded with the urge to be kind to strangers, but for whatever reason, nowhere more so than Syria.

This is an extremist place after all, extreme in the lengths to which its citizens will go to feed you coffee and cake, or perhaps to settle you in their spare room for a month or two, if you would so honour them.

The bottomless cups of kindness continued through every stop toward the ancient ruins.

When we reach Palmyra, we find an empty government tourist office with postered walls advertising events that have long since passed.

Eventually, a young man is found in the back offices. Fadi Assad, 25, is surprised to see us but wastes no time in proudly producing two brochures about the site, in French and German.

Palmyra appears to have long ago given up on the English press run.

As the requisite coffee boils, we ask in our pidgin Arabic why so few North American visitors ever venture into the region. Assad understands and shrugs sadly.

"Please understand the people here," he says. "Very, very clean heart."

Abu Hassan is summoned. His English is better, honed over decades of showing travellers through the ruins when they came in greater numbers.

He walks us through the ancient colonnade, pointing to the temple of Baal, the agora, the amphitheatre, the granite pillars hauled triumphantly from Egypt when Palmyra's power stood second to none.

Abu Hassan isn't easily diverted from the historical lecture he has perfected in his many tours through the site. But he eventually understands that we're less interested in who once lived here than in why so few come here now.

"I understand," he says. "The outside world seems to love the wrong information. But don't you feel safe? You see how peaceful Syria is? We want you to know we love peace.

"Here, you can walk anywhere, day or night, and feel you are at home."

We find lodging for the night and encounter a Dutch traveller who is utterly at ease with our surreal surroundings. Learning of Schachter's citizenship, he remarks: "American! Hey, you aren't supposed to be here, are you?"

Back in Damascus, we'd put the question of Syria's reputation to a range of folk.

Cabinet minister Bouthaina Shaaban was the first to readily acknowledge "a crisis of public relations."

"In Arab culture," she said, "there is the belief that if you are good, everyone will know you are good. And if you have a right, then the entire world by itself will acknowledge that you have a right.

"Unfortunately, in modern times, this is not necessarily true. We feel there is a huge media campaign against Syria, and there's no response, at least no sufficient response, from our side.

"Whether in our media or our diplomatic relations, we fall short of what we need to do."

Tourism Minister Saadalla Agha al-Kalaa provided the hard numbers. Despite the draw of an estimated 3,000 cultural and archaeological sites — some dating back 12,000 years — Syria draws 77 per cent of its visitors from within the Arab world. Last year's visitors included 300,000 Europeans and just 35,000 Americans. Canadians were so rare that they didn't bother to count us.

"People probably are afraid to come to Syria, but that's because they don't know the truth," said Kalaa, who described Damascus as the true launching pad of Christianity, in the hands of a proselytizing St. Paul.

"Christianity took root in Palestine, but it took off in Damascus," the minister explained. "The reality is that Syria is a very safe country. This safety is something that's a tradition because of the way of life between Christians and Muslims, who live in harmony."

Yet the officious and guarded pose of Syrian border guards can be a hindrance, even if one subtracts politics from the equation.

One taxi driver told of a three-hour delay recently trying to enter from Jordan with a minibus carrying eight Italian travellers. Seven were stamped and welcomed, but the eighth Italian was stalled because her passport listed occupation as "artist."

"We waited and waited to see what the problem was, and finally they admitted they were afraid that `artist' meant `belly dancer,'" the driver said.

"What they hadn't noticed on her passport was the birth date. She was over 70 years old.

"I ran to the van to get her, and when I told her what the problem was, she thought the whole thing was hilarious. She danced her way into the customs office and put a smile on everyone's face. She was quickly approved and we carried on to Damascus."

We are heading westward now, slowing down for what appears to be an army roadblock. No, it's actually a soldier in need of a ride. He plops himself into the backseat. He's in his mid 30s and wears the regalia of an officer — but an officer without transport.

We've heard stories about the neglected state of the Syrian army. In Damascus, one mother fretted about the living conditions of her son, who is doing his compulsory military service.

Two weeks ago, his unit exhausted its supply of drinking water at its desert outpost, she told us. When no replenishments arrived, the soldiers resorted to siphoning the radiators of their jeeps to stay hydrated.

Our officer jumps out at a highway intersection and we decide on a detour to the nearby city of Hama — site of Baathist Syria's most ruthless chapter. If there is fear to be found in Syria, perhaps it is here.

Once a bastion of the revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic militants of Hama rose up against the state 23 years ago, only to be crushed by the late president Hafez Assad's scorched-earth retribution, a military raid that left at least 10,000 dead.

Today, some Damascus analysts observe dryly that Assad was simply pursuing in the 1980s what George W. Bush is undertaking now: a zero-tolerance policy toward religious militancy.

But Hama today shows few of its scars to the world. The inner city is a place of devout serenity, where piety is demonstrated publicly in traditional costume — ankle-length dishdashes for the men, black-veiled abiyas for the women.

It seems a city at peace with itself, wholly unfazed by the uncommon sight of Western wanderers in its midst. We are drawn toward an eerie, rhythmic moan from the Orontes River. Closer inspection reveals the sound to be the rattle and hum of some 10 ancient norias — enormous Vitruvian waterwheels that use the energy of the river to raise water into channels and cisterns above.

The technique dates to the time of Christ, and Hama's wheels turn still.

Getting directions in Hama is another matter. Few here see themselves in relation to the points on a compass.

And such is the sense of adqb that, even if a local has no idea where you want to go, he is duty-bound to tell you how to get there.

(In the Arab world, even the landmarks can be transient. Not long ago, a Palestinian gave me these directions: "Keep driving until you see the old man standing beside the road. Then, turn left.")

So, we gleefully lose our way a dozen times, eventually to turn the right corner and draw our collective breath at the sight of Krak des Chevaliers — the fabled Castle of the Knights.

Our odyssey southwest from Hama has taken us through a verdant citrus belt and up into the electrifyingly spring-green mountains that separate Syria from Lebanon. It looks like the Appalachians in May, replete with the babbling brooks.

A Syrian Christian youth in the last mountain village leading to the fortress approaches with surprisingly good English. He, too, invites us for tea.

"Ah, yes, the castle," he says. "You are welcome to our paradise. America? I hate your government, but I love your people. You are welcome."

Church steeples and mosque minarets compete in the skyline beneath the most invincible Crusader castle of them all.

Saladin, the greatest Muslim general ever, is said to have stood here in 1188, surveying the defences of Krak des Chevaliers, only to shrug and walk away. He sacked elsewhere.

What T.E. Lawrence once described as "perhaps the most wholly admirable castle in the world" is in fact a castle within a castle, doubly defended by slabs of medieval masonry 25 metres thick at their base.

Stone for stone, the battlements are so picturesque that one almost expects the cast of Monty Python to rise en masse from high above, vowing to unclog their noses in our general direction.

Inside the fortress's darkened passageways, one finds mounds of basketball-size boulders, still waiting all these centuries later to be loaded into the catapults of war.

It's closing time at the Krak, but an attendant agrees to trade his time for 100 Syrian pounds ($2.30 Canadian) and give us a sunset tour of the empty edifice.

Inside are stables and foundries, a viaduct-fed cistern and olive press and other necessities for a garrison of 2,000 men equipped with enough provisions to endure a five-year siege.

Krak des Chevaliers was never breached, withstanding 12 enemy sieges through a century-and-a-half in Crusader hands.

In the end, the paltry few Christian knights who remained in 1271 were tricked — persuaded to surrender upon reading a forged letter, supposedly from their superiors in Tripoli, saying the cause was lost.

Ayman Abdel Nour, an outspoken Syrian writer whose daily Internet newsletter All4Syria.com was blocked last year by government decree, laughs at how the misunderstandings of the Crusader era echo today in Syria's global image.

"I've read a lot of Crusader history," he says. "Their biggest problem was that the Christian fighters didn't want to fight. They wanted to integrate and live here.

"That's why so many Syrians have red hair — the Crusader blood. And that's why we are so varied today.

"If the world could only see that we have so many different kinds of people here we can't possibly be racist. What would the race be?

"But we don't promote ourselves. We have pride. Instead of saying `Look at us, come see who we really are,' when the world calls us terrorist, we get our backs up."

Additional articles by Mitch Potter

March 20, 2005 at 08:22 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Andalusia's connection

TheStar.com - Andalusia's connection

One year after the Madrid bombings, calls for made-in-Spain imams grow stronger in a region that still reflects on its past Muslim glories

SANDRO CONTENTA
EUROPEAN BUREAU

At the Jamal Islamiya mosque in this seaside town, a Muslim lament of historic proportions is proclaimed in large letters on a framed poster: "In 1492, we lost everything."

For the mosque's leader, and much of the Muslim world, the year marks the traumatic conclusion of Islam's golden age, a time remembered like a collective wound.

It's a period when the last piece of Muslim-held territory in Spain fell to Catholic monarchs, ending almost 800 years of Moorish rule on the Iberian peninsula.

Centuries when poetry, science and architecture flourished under Islamic caliphs expired with bonfires of Arabic manuscripts, mass expulsion and extermination in the Inquisition.

To the east, the Muslim empire of the Ottomans would reign for another four centuries. But many would trace its long decline to the fall of Al Andalus, the Moorish name for Andalusia.

The result is a yearning that today makes Spain, more than any other European country, a battleground in the name of Islam.

"They stole 500 years of history from us," says Omar Checa Garcia, who heads the Jamal Islamiya mosque and cultural centre. "We want it back, but we don't want revenge."

Others are not so accommodating. Osama bin Laden uses what he calls the "tragedy of Al Andalus" as a rallying cry for his deadly brand of Islamic jihad against "the crusaders and Jews."

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, bin Laden's chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, drew a parallel between the loss of the Iberian peninsula and the struggle of Palestinians.

"We will not accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus be repeated in Palestine," he said.

The taped sermons of some militant Islamic clerics admonish followers with the legend of "The Moor's Sigh."

Having surrendered Granada to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Castile and Aragon, a tearful Sultan Boabdil was scolded by his mother: "You weep like a woman for what you could not hold as a man."

On March 11, 2004, a cell of mainly Moroccan extremists, calling themselves "the brigade situated in Al Andalus," detonated 10 bombs that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.

Many Spaniards blamed their conservative government's support of the Iraq war for making them targets.

Three days after the bombings, they swept the Socialist party to power and it moved quickly to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.

But jihad fuelled by the lost glory of Al Andalus suggests that won't be enough to take Spain off the target list.

In a communiqué claiming responsibility for the March 11 bombings, the cell invoked the name of the Moorish warrior who conquered the Iberian peninsula in 711.

"We will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tarik Ben Ziyad," it said.

Says Gustavo Aristiquie, an opposition MP and terrorism expert: "Spain is considered an apostate country that must be reconquered for Islam. It's a sacred duty, and that's why the jihadis are attacking."

The bombings also focused attention on Spain's estimated 1 million Muslims, most of them North African immigrants.

Illegal immigration is rapidly increasing their numbers, making integration one of Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's biggest challenges.

Warnings that mosques are increasingly falling under the control of radical clerics are coming from anti-terrorism experts and representatives of Spanish converts to Islam, a community estimated at 20,000.

They also warn of tensions between the growing number of immigrants adhering to fundamentalist brands of Islam and right-wing groups rooted in the alliance of fascism and the Catholic Church during Franco's dictatorship, which ended in 1975.

Spanish converts are lobbying the government for funds to train homegrown imams, arguing that defusing social tensions requires clerics who preach an Islam in harmony with European values, which they insist reflects the true spirit of Al Andalus.

"If we don't do this, it's war," says Abdelkarim Carrasco, head of the Federation of Spanish Islamic Entities, one of two Islamic umbrella groups that negotiates with the government.

Carrasco, 56, is a real estate agent in Granada, where members of the March 11 cell spent time in safe houses before the attacks.

Framed by the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, Granada was the peninsula's last Moorish kingdom to fall.

Its symbolic significance is heightened by the Alhambra palace, home and seat of government of the Nasrid rulers. The only Muslim palace to survive from the Middle Ages, it stands above the city on the Assabica hills, revered by Muslims and celebrated by tourists.

"I tell my Christian friends, `You are eating from the stones left by the Moors,'" says Carrasco, referring to Granada's booming tourist industry.

On a hilltop directly across from the Alhambra, the first Granada mosque to be built in 500 years opened its doors in 2003. Before construction, the choice of the highly symbolic site met with two decades of resistance from local authorities, not least because it is squeezed between a Catholic church and a nun's convent.

"The church hierarchy is very hostile to Islam," says Abdulhasib Castineira, director of the Great Mosque, which was built largely with funds from Morocco, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates.

Homegrown Spanish Muslims have joined anti-terrorism experts in warning that mosques are increasingly falling under the control of radical immigrant clerics
"I think they feel threatened, actually, because if you come to this mosque on a Friday, it's packed. The church next door is only opened for weddings."

Down the hill, hidden among the steep alleyways of the ancient Moorish quarter of Albaicin, is the Al Taqwa mosque, which is also fronted by a Spanish convert but financed by the United Arab Emirates.

"My responsibility here is to make sure that Andalusia returns to being an Islamic country," says Zakaria Maza, whose mosque has two clerics from Mauritania as imams.

Maza recently spearheaded a drive to allow Muslims to pray in part of the former mosque in Cordoba, north of Granada.

Cordoba was the seat of power when the caliphate of the Umayyad clan was at its height, commanding what was then considered Al Andalus — the whole of the Iberian peninsula except for Galicia. (Today, Andalusia refers to the southern-most of Spain's 17 autonomous regions.)

As the political and religious authority, the Cordoba caliphate rivalled other Islamic dynasties based in Damascus and Baghdad. But internal feuds saw it disintegrate into competing Islamic kingdoms in 1031.

By then, the Umayyads had built a masterpiece of Islamic art, the vast Cordoba mosque. But Catholics conquered the city in 1236, built a cathedral in the middle of the mosque and barred Muslims.

Maza, a 54-year-old native of Cordoba, points in disgust to a notice on tickets handed to tourists who visit it: "Keep in mind that you are visiting a Catholic temple."

"This is terrible," he says. "We ask that everything goes back to how it should be."

Maza argues that allowing Muslims to share the former mosque would be a "sign of tolerance to the world." But he leaves the door open to eventually taking over the whole site.

The request to share the cathedral had the backing of the government MP for the area, Juan Luis Rascon, who also sits on the parliamentary inquiry into the March 11 attacks. But the Vatican dismissed the idea, urging Muslims to "accept history."

Still, Maza says victory is only a matter of time.

"Islam's time has come again, whether people like it or not. We can predict that Andalusia will once again be Muslim."

Most Muslim immigrants in the region end up working at vegetable farms around centres like Almeria, with its white stucco buildings set between desert hills and the sea east of Granada.

Five years ago, after a Moroccan murdered a Spaniard, race riots broke out in a neighbouring town and the shacks of migrant workers were burned. Area residents regard the incident as a cautionary tale, but it hasn't stopped the migratory pull of the local economy.

In Almeria's port district, the peaceful reconquest of this originally Moorish city seems well under way. The neighbourhood teems with North Africans sipping mint tea in coffee shops and streaming into the Al Muhsinin mosque.

The mosque's Palestinian cleric, Abdallah Mhanna, says at least 80,000 Muslims live in the area, some 30,000 of them illegally. Many complain of being exploited with low wages and poor housing.

Mhanna, 41, arrived six years ago from Gaza and says he was immediately struck by Andalusia's Islamic past.

"I can see the soul of Islam here," says Mhanna, who studied at Islamic University in Gaza, where the militant Hamas group wields much influence.

"We are not looking to Andalusia as our land, no. This is the land of Spanish people. But it is part of our Islamic civilization."

Andalusia is the "land of daawa" — a place where Islam is to be spread by the word and not by the sword, he says.

He flatly rejects the methods of the March 11 bombers — "killing civilians is terrorism" — but embraces the hard-line ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which rejects secular tendencies in Islamic states.

Formed in Egypt in 1928, the brotherhood is the mother of several Islamic radical groups, including Hamas. But it also has branches that reject violent activity, and those are the ones Mhanna says he supports.

At Jamal Islamiya, Almeria's only other mosque, Garcia isn't reassured.

Having adopted Islam 20 years ago, he says many of the 7,000 Spanish converts in the Almeria area are, like him, leftists who rediscovered their true Andalusian roots.

"The real identity of Andalusia was crushed by Spain and the Catholic Church, which forced our grandparents to become Catholics," he says.

Garcia is an Andalusian nationalist. He sees the brand of Islam brought by most North African immigrants as "reactionary" and foreign.

He several times blocked bids by North African Muslims to take over his mosque, including one group that camped inside for three days before he threw them out.

Last fall, five of the nine people arrested in connection with a plot to blow up the High Court in Madrid lived in the Almeria area, including the imam of a mosque in a nearby town.

"This generation of immigrants is lost. It's under the influence of these reactionary mosques," Garcia says.

He insists social harmony depends on government backing to train Spanish imams for a homegrown Islam that embraces a multicultural and multi-faith society where women are equal, religion is a private matter and laws are secular.

Otherwise, Garcia warns, "there could be a disaster. March 11 could happen again."

Additional articles by Sandro Contenta

March 20, 2005 at 08:22 PM in Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

A Nobel for Sistani

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: A Nobel for Sistani

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

As we approach the season of the Nobel Peace Prize, I would like to nominate the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for this year's medal. I'm serious.

If there is a decent outcome in Iraq, President Bush will deserve, and receive, real credit for creating the conditions for democratization there, by daring to topple Saddam Hussein. But we tend to talk about Iraq as if it is all about us and what we do. If some kind of democracy takes root there, it will also be due in large measure to the instincts and directives of the dominant Iraqi Shiite communal leader, Ayatollah Sistani. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that there had to be a direct national election in Iraq, rejecting the original goofy U.S. proposal for regional caucuses. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that the elections not be postponed in the face of the Baathist-fascist insurgency. And it was Mr. Sistani who ordered Shiites not to retaliate for the Sunni Baathist and jihadist attempts to drag them into a civil war by attacking Shiite mosques and massacring Shiite civilians.

In many ways, Mr. Sistani has played the role for President George W. Bush that Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev played for his father, President George H. W. Bush. It was Mr. Mandela's instincts and leadership - in keeping the transition to black rule in South Africa nonviolent - that helped the Bush I administration and its allies bring that process in for a soft landing. And it was Mr. Gorbachev's insistence that the dismantling of the Soviet Empire, and particularly East Germany, be nonviolent that brought the Soviet Union in for a soft landing. In international relations, as in sports, it is often better to be lucky than good. And having the luck to have history deal you a Mandela, a Gorbachev or a Sistani as your partner at a key historical juncture - as opposed to a Yasir Arafat or a Robert Mugabe - can make all the difference between U.S. policy looking brilliant and U.S. policy looking futile.

Mr. Sistani has also contributed three critical elements to the democracy movement in the wider Arab world. First, he built his legitimacy around not just his religious-scholarly credentials but around a politics focused on developing Iraq for Iraqis. To put it another way, says the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen, "Sistani did not build his politics on negating someone else." Saddam Hussein built his politics around negating America, Iran and Israel. Arafat built his whole life around negating Zionism - rarely, if ever, speaking about Palestinian economic development or education. The politics of negation has a deep and rich history in the Middle East, because so many leaders there are illegitimate and need to negate someone to justify their rule. What Mr. Sistani, the late Lebanese Sunni leader Rafik Hariri and the new Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas all have in common is that they rose to power by focusing on a positive agenda for their own people, not negating another.

The second thing that Mr. Sistani did was put the people and their aspirations at the center of Iraqi politics, not some narrow elite or self-appointed clergy (see: Iran), which is what the Iraqi election was all about. In doing so he has helped to legitimize "people power" in a region where it was unheard of. In Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine - where Hamas recently said it would take part in parliamentary elections - the ballot box and popular support, not just the gun, are showing signs of becoming real sources of legitimacy. Both Hezbollah and Hamas will have to prove - with turnout, not terrorism - that they are entitled to a larger slice of power.

Third, and maybe most important, Mr. Sistani brings to Arab politics a legitimate, pragmatic interpretation of Islam, one that says Islam should inform politics and the constitution, but clerics should not rule.

The process of democratizing the Arab world is going to be long and bumpy. But the chances for success are immeasurably improved when we have partners from within the region who are legitimate, but have progressive instincts. That is Mr. Sistani. Lady Luck has shined on us by keeping alive this 75-year-old ayatollah, who resides in a small house in a narrow alley in Najaf and almost never goes out the door. How someone with his instincts and wisdom could have emerged from the train wreck that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq, I will never know. All I have to say is: May he live to be 120 - and give that man a Nobel Prize.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

March 20, 2005 at 08:18 PM in Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Irish terror groups 'to hit London'

The Observer | UK News | Irish terror groups 'to hit London'

· Police and MI5 issue warning to British businesses
· 'Substantial threat' from dissident republican groups

Martin Bright and Henry McDonald
Sunday March 20, 2005
The Observer

Police have issued a stark warning that mainland Britain faces a 'substantial threat' of an Irish republican bombing campaign, The Observer can reveal.

Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism section sent out an email about a new threat to businesses across London on Friday evening, following intelligence received from MI5 about an increase in activity from breakaway groups such as the Real IRA.

The chilling note, seen by The Observer, states: 'Reporting indicates that dissident Irish republican terrorists are currently planning to mount attacks on the UK mainland.'

It goes on to explain that methods used by dissident groups in Northern Ireland could be transferred to Britain. These include 'incendiary and improved explosive devices' used in recent republican campaigns, 'postal devices' and 'shooting attacks'. The police warning adds that hoax calls have also been made 'to amplify the disruptive effect of such attacks'. The level of the threat is now said to be 'substantial', just one stage below the 'severe general' threat from al-Qaeda.

The email seen by this newspaper was sent from Martin Gurney, an inspector from the counter-terrorism section of the Metropolitan Police, to London First, a campaign group that works with 300 major firms to promote the capital. It was received just after 5.30pm on Friday by Denica Lundberg, who co-ordinates the organisation's dealings with the police.

Police and the intelligence services warned of an increase in the threat from the Provisional IRA at the beginning of February after strong signals that they would return to the armed conflict following the breakdown of negotiations over arms decommissioning.

One Whitehall intelligence source warned of making too clear a distinction between dissident groups and the IRA itself. 'It is often convenient for the security services to talk about "provisionals" and "dissidents", but there are an awful lot of grey areas and blurring of the edges,' he said.

Irish police have been concerned about the 'cross-fertilisation' between the IRA and dissident members who have been working together. There were two separate incidents in the Republic over the last month in which supposed dissidents turned out to be members of the Provisional IRA. One officer said it was even possible that dissidents were being used as cover.

Police counter-terrorism sources said that existing resources would be sufficient to cope with the heightened risk as anti-terror police were already in a state of readiness to cope with al-Qaeda.

In early February the IRA issued a statement to the British and Irish governments saying: 'Do not underestimate the seriousness of the situation.'

The note came 24 hours after it withdrew an offer to decommission weapons.

The spectre of a new bombing campaign has raised the stakes. It was thought that the Real IRA, which was responsible for the Omagh bomb in August 1998, had been largely dismantled. It is not known if the new threat comes from a newly revived version of the breakaway organisation, another group such as the Continuity IRA or a new splinter group altogether.

Dissident groups are thought to be in disarray and heavily infiltrated, although there is some overlap between them and mainstream IRA in South Armagh, Cork and Dublin.

Last night, a senior Irish detective said that while it was unclear if the entire IRA organisation had decided to sanction an attack on Britain, there were forces inside mainstream republicanism in favour of a short, sharp attack.

A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police confirmed that the threat level had been raised on Friday. She said the warning was sent out as part of a system to inform companies and businesses in the City of London to remain vigilant against terrorism.

The upgrading of the threat level will raise fears about the collapse of the peace process - already under pressure after allegations of IRA involvement in the murder of Robert McCartney and the raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast last December in which £26 million was stolen.

Prior to the collapse of all-party talks in December, a group of republicans still inside the Provisional IRA contacted The Observer . They passed on a statement opposing any moves to decommission weapons as part of a deal to get Sinn Fein into government in Belfast with Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party.

Senior detectives in Dublin believe that the Northern Bank robbery was sanctioned by IRA leadership because it was seen as an alternative to a renewed bombing campaign in Britain. The heist has been described as a 'bloodless spectacular' against the British state.

On Friday, Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy said that there was 'no hope' of political progress until the question of IRA criminality had been dealt with. Speaking from Washington, where he had celebrated St Patrick's Day, he said the onus was now on Sinn Fein to deal with IRA lawlessness.

He added: 'As far as the political process is concerned, to all intents and purposes we are not talking about any future negotiations or discussions until the issue about criminal activity on the part of the IRA is addressed.'

March 20, 2005 at 08:11 PM in IRA | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Text of the Magna Carta

Magna Carta translation

Introductory Note

As might be expected, the text of the Magna Carta of 1215 bears many traces of haste, and is clearly the product of much bargaining and many hands. Most of its clauses deal with specific, and often long-standing, grievances rather than with general principles of law. Some of the grievances are self-explanatory: others can be understood only in the context of the feudal society in which they arose. Of a few clauses, the precise meaning is still a matter of argument.

In feudal society, the king's barons held their lands `in fee' (feudum) from the king, for an oath to him of loyalty and obedience, and with the obligation to provide him with a fixed number of knights whenever these were required for military service. At first the barons provided the knights by dividing their estates (of which the largest and most important were known as `honours') into smaller parcels described as `knights' fees', which they distributed to tenants able to serve as knights. But by the time of King John it had become more convenient and usual for the obligation for service to be commuted for a cash payment known as `scutage', and for the revenue so obtained to be used to maintain paid armies.

Besides military service, feudal custom allowed the king to make certain other exactions from his barons. In times of emergency, and on such special occasions as the marriage of his eldest daughter, he could demand from them a financial levy known as an `aid' (auxilium). When a baron died, he could demand a succession duty or `relief' (relevium) from the baron's heir. If there was no heir, or if the succession was disputed, the baron's lands could be forfeited or `escheated' to the Crown. If the heir was under age, the king could assume the guardianship of his estates, and enjoy all the profits from them-ven to the extent of despoliation-until the heir came of age. The king had the right, if he chose, to sell such a guardianship to the highest bidder, and to sell the heir himself in marriage for such price as the value of his estates would command. The widows and daughters of barons might also be sold in marriage. With their own tenants, the barons could deal similarly.

The scope for extortion and abuse in this system, if it were not benevolently applied, was obviously great and had been the subject of complaint long before King John came to the throne. Abuses were, moreover, aggravated by the difficulty of obtaining redress for them, and in Magna Carta the provision of the means for obtaining a fair hearing of complaints, not only against the king and his agents but against lesser feudal lords, achieves corresponding importance.

About two-thirds of the clauses of the Magna Carta of 1215 are concerned with matters such as these, and with the misuse of their powers by royal officials. As regards other topics, the first clause, conceding the freedom of the Church, and in particular confirming its right to elect its own dignitaries without royal interference, reflects John's dispute with the Pope over Stephen Langton's election as archbishop of Canterbury: it does not appear in the Articles of the Barons, and its somewhat stilted phrasing seems in part to be attempting to justify its inclusion, none the less, in the charter itself. The clauses that deal with the royal forests (§§ 44, 47, 48), over which the king had special powers and jurisdiction, reflect the disquiet and anxieties that had arisen on account of a longstanding royal tendency to extend the forest boundaries, to the detriment of the holders of the lands affected. Those that deal with debts (§§ 9-1l) reflect administrative problems created by the chronic scarcity of ready cash among the upper and middle classes, and their need to resort to money-lenders when this was required. The clause promising the removal of fish-weirs (§ 33) was intended to facilitate the navigation of rivers. A number of clauses deal with the special circumstances that surrounded the making of the charter, and are such as might be found in any treaty of peace. Others, such as those relating to the city of London (§ 13) and to merchants (§ 41), clearly represent concessions to special interests.

Translation

(Clauses marked (+) are still valid under the charter of 1225, but with a few minor amendments. Clauses marked (*) were omitted in all later reissues of the charter. In the charter itself the clauses are not numbered, and the text reads continuously. The translation sets out to convey the sense rather than the precise wording of the original Latin.)

JOHN, by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects, Greeting.

KNOW THAT BEFORE GOD, for the health of our soul and those of our ancestors and heirs, to the honour of God, the exaltation of the holy Church, and the better ordering of our kingdom, at the advice of our reverend fathers Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England, and cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Henry archbishop of Dublin, William bishop of London, Peter bishop of Winchester, Jocelin bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh bishop of Lincoln, Walter Bishop of Worcester, William bishop of Coventry, Benedict bishop of Rochester, Master Pandulf subdeacon and member of the papal household, Brother Aymeric master of the knighthood of the Temple in England, William Marshal earl of Pembroke, William earl of Salisbury, William earl of Warren, William earl of Arundel, Alan de Galloway constable of Scotland, Warin Fitz Gerald, Peter Fitz Herbert, Hubert de Burgh seneschal of Poitou, Hugh de Neville, Matthew Fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip Daubeny, Robert de Roppeley, John Marshal, John Fitz Hugh, and other loyal subjects:

+ (1) FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.

TO ALL FREE MEN OF OUR KINGDOM we have also granted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs:

(2) If any earl, baron, or other person that holds lands directly of the Crown, for military service, shall die, and at his death his heir shall be of full age and owe a `relief', the heir shall have his inheritance on payment of the ancient scale of `relief'. That is to say, the heir or heirs of an earl shall pay £100 for the entire earl's barony, the heir or heirs of a knight l00s. at most for the entire knight's `fee', and any man that owes less shall pay less, in accordance with the ancient usage of `fees'

(3) But if the heir of such a person is under age and a ward, when he comes of age he shall have his inheritance without `relief' or fine.

(4) The guardian of the land of an heir who is under age shall take from it only reasonable revenues, customary dues, and feudal services. He shall do this without destruction or damage to men or property. If we have given the guardianship of the land to a sheriff, or to any person answerable to us for the revenues, and he commits destruction or damage, we will exact compensation from him, and the land shall be entrusted to two worthy and prudent men of the same `fee', who shall be answerable to us for the revenues, or to the person to whom we have assigned them. If we have given or sold to anyone the guardianship of such land, and he causes destruction or damage, he shall lose the guardianship of it, and it shall be handed over to two worthy and prudent men of the same `fee', who shall be similarly answerable to us.

(5) For so long as a guardian has guardianship of such land, he shall maintain the houses, parks, fish preserves, ponds, mills, and everything else pertaining to it, from the revenues of the land itself. When the heir comes of age, he shall restore the whole land to him, stocked with plough teams and such implements of husbandry as the season demands and the revenues from the land can reasonably bear.

(6) Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing. Before a marriage takes place, it shall be' made known to the heir's next-of-kin.

(7) At her husband's death, a widow may have her marriage portion and inheritance at once and without trouble. She shall pay nothing for her dower, marriage portion, or any inheritance that she and her husband held jointly on the day of his death. She may remain in her husband's house for forty days after his death, and within this period her dower shall be assigned to her.

(8) No widow shall be compelled to marry, so long as she wishes to remain without a husband. But she must give security that she will not marry without royal consent, if she holds her lands of the Crown, or without the consent of whatever other lord she may hold them of.

(9) Neither we nor our officials will seize any land or rent in payment of a debt, so long as the debtor has movable goods sufficient to discharge the debt. A debtor's sureties shall not be distrained upon so long as the debtor himself can discharge his debt. If, for lack of means, the debtor is unable to discharge his debt, his sureties shall be answerable for it. If they so desire, they may have the debtor's lands and rents until they have received satisfaction for the debt that they paid for him, unless the debtor can show that he has settled his obligations to them.

* (10) If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.

* (11) If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children that are under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.

* (12) No `scutage' or `aid' may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry our eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable `aid' may be levied. `Aids' from the city of London are to be treated similarly.

+ (13) The city of London shall enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water. We also will and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall enjoy all their liberties and free customs.

* (14) To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an `aid' - except in the three cases specified above - or a `scutage', we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter. To those who hold lands directly of us we will cause a general summons to be issued, through the sheriffs and other officials, to come together on a fixed day (of which at least forty days notice shall be given) and at a fixed place. In all letters of summons, the cause of the summons will be stated. When a summons has been issued, the business appointed for the day shall go forward in accordance with the resolution of those present, even if not all those who were summoned have appeared.

* (15) In future we will allow no one to levy an `aid' from his free men, except to ransom his person, to make his eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry his eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable `aid' may be levied.

(16) No man shall be forced to perform more service for a knight's `fee', or other free holding of land, than is due from it.

(17) Ordinary lawsuits shall not follow the royal court around, but shall be held in a fixed place.

(18) Inquests of novel disseisin, mort d'ancestor, and darrein presentment shall be taken only in their proper county court. We ourselves, or in our absence abroad our chief justice, will send two justices to each county four times a year, and these justices, with four knights of the county elected by the county itself, shall hold the assizes in the county court, on the day and in the place where the court meets.

(19) If any assizes cannot be taken on the day of the county court, as many knights and freeholders shall afterwards remain behind, of those who have attended the court, as will suffice for the administration of justice, having regard to the volume of business to be done.

(20) For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. In the same way, a merchant shall be spared his merchandise, and a husbandman the implements of his husbandry, if they fall upon the mercy of a royal court. None of these fines shall be imposed except by the assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighbourhood.

(21) Earls and barons shall be fined only by their equals, and in proportion to the gravity of their offence.

(22) A fine imposed upon the lay property of a clerk in holy orders shall be assessed upon the same principles, without reference to the value of his ecclesiastical benefice.

(23) No town or person shall be forced to build bridges over rivers except those with an ancient obligation to do so.

(24) No sheriff, constable, coroners, or other royal officials are to hold lawsuits that should be held by the royal justices.

* (25) Every county, hundred, wapentake, and tithing shall remain at its ancient rent, without increase, except the royal demesne manors.

(26) If at the death of a man who holds a lay `fee' of the Crown, a sheriff or royal official produces royal letters patent of summons for a debt due to the Crown, it shall be lawful for them to seize and list movable goods found in the lay `fee' of the dead man to the value of the debt, as assessed by worthy men. Nothing shall be removed until the whole debt is paid, when the residue shall be given over to the executors to carry out the dead man s will. If no debt is due to the Crown, all the movable goods shall be regarded as the property of the dead man, except the reasonable shares of his wife and children.

* (27) If a free man dies intestate, his movable goods are to be distributed by his next-of-kin and friends, under the supervision of the Church. The rights of his debtors are to be preserved.

(28) No constable or other royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment, unless the seller voluntarily offers postponement of this.

(29) No constable may compel a knight to pay money for castle-guard if the knight is willing to undertake the guard in person, or with reasonable excuse to supply some other fit man to do it. A knight taken or sent on military service shall be excused from castle-guard for the period of this servlce.

(30) No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent.

(31) Neither we nor any royal official will take wood for our castle, or for any other purpose, without the consent of the owner.

(32) We will not keep the lands of people convicted of felony in our hand for longer than a year and a day, after which they shall be returned to the lords of the `fees' concerned.

(33) All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.

(34) The writ called precipe shall not in future be issued to anyone in respect of any holding of land, if a free man could thereby be deprived of the right of trial in his own lord's court.

(35) There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russett, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardised similarly.

(36) In future nothing shall be paid or accepted for the issue of a writ of inquisition of life or limbs. It shall be given gratis, and not refused.

(37) If a man holds land of the Crown by `fee-farm', `socage', or `burgage', and also holds land of someone else for knight's service, we will not have guardianship of his heir, nor of the land that belongs to the other person's `fee', by virtue of the `fee-farm', `socage', or `burgage', unless the `fee-farm' owes knight's service. We will not have the guardianship of a man's heir, or of land that he holds of someone else, by reason of any small property that he may hold of the Crown for a service of knives, arrows, or the like.

(38) In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

+ (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

+ (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

(41) All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. This, however, does not apply in time of war to merchants from a country that is at war with us. Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property, until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too.

* (42) In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision.

(43) If a man holds lands of any `escheat' such as the `honour' of Wallingford, Nottingham, Boulogne, Lancaster, or of other `escheats' in our hand that are baronies, at his death his heir shall give us only the `relief' and service that he would have made to the baron, had the barony been in the baron's hand. We will hold the `escheat' in the same manner as the baron held it.

(44) People who live outside the forest need not in future appear before the royal justices of the forest in answer to general summonses, unless they are actually involved in proceedings or are sureties for someone who has been seized for a forest offence.

* (45) We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well.

(46) All barons who have founded abbeys, and have charters of English kings or ancient tenure as evidence of this, may have guardianship of them when there is no abbot, as is their due.

(47) All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly.

* (48) All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the county, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably. But we, or our chief justice if we are not in England, are first to be informed.

* (49) We will at once return all hostages and charters delivered up to us by Englishmen as security for peace or for loyal service.

* (50) We will remove completely from their offices the kinsmen of Gerard de Athée, and in future they shall hold no offices in England. The people in question are Engelard de Cigogné', Peter, Guy, and Andrew de Chanceaux, Guy de Cigogné, Geoffrey de Martigny and his brothers, Philip Marc and his brothers, with Geoffrey his nephew, and all their followers.

* (51) As soon as peace is restored, we will remove from the kingdom all the foreign knights, bowmen, their attendants, and the mercenaries that have come to it, to its harm, with horses and arms.

* (52) To any man whom we have deprived or dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties, or rights, without the lawful judgement of his equals, we will at once restore these. In cases of dispute the matter shall be resolved by the judgement of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace (§ 61). In cases, however, where a man was deprived or dispossessed of something without the lawful judgement of his equals by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once render justice in full.

* (53) We shall have similar respite in rendering justice in connexion with forests that are to be disafforested, or to remain forests, when these were first a-orested by our father Henry or our brother Richard; with the guardianship of lands in another person's `fee', when we have hitherto had this by virtue of a `fee' held of us for knight's service by a third party; and with abbeys founded in another person's `fee', in which the lord of the `fee' claims to own a right. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice to complaints about these matters.

(54) No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.

* (55) All fines that have been given to us unjustly and against the law of the land, and all fines that we have exacted unjustly, shall be entirely remitted or the matter decided by a majority judgement of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace (§ 61) together with Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, if he can be present, and such others as he wishes to bring with him. If the archbishop cannot be present, proceedings shall continue without him, provided that if any of the twenty-five barons has been involved in a similar suit himself, his judgement shall be set aside, and someone else chosen and sworn in his place, as a substitute for the single occasion, by the rest of the twenty-five.

(56) If we have deprived or dispossessed any Welshmen of lands, liberties, or anything else in England or in Wales, without the lawful judgement of their equals, these are at once to be returned to them. A dispute on this point shall be determined in the Marches by the judgement of equals. English law shall apply to holdings of land in England, Welsh law to those in Wales, and the law of the Marches to those in the Marches. The Welsh shall treat us and ours in the same way.

* (57) In cases where a Welshman was deprived or dispossessed of anything, without the lawful judgement of his equals, by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. But on our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice according to the laws of Wales and the said regions.

* (58) We will at once return the son of Llywelyn, all Welsh hostages, and the charters delivered to us as security for the peace.

* (59) With regard to the return of the sisters and hostages of Alexander, king of Scotland, his liberties and his rights, we will treat him in the same way as our other barons of England, unless it appears from the charters that we hold from his father William, formerly king of Scotland, that he should be treated otherwise. This matter shall be resolved by the judgement of his equals in our court.

(60) All these customs and liberties that we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom in so far as concerns our own relations with our subjects. Let all men of our kingdom, whether clergy or laymen, observe them similarly in their relations with their own men.

* (61) SINCE WE HAVE GRANTED ALL THESE THINGS for God, for the better ordering of our kingdom, and to allay the discord that has arisen between us and our barons, and since we desire that they shall be enjoyed in their entirety, with lasting strength, for ever, we give and grant to the barons the following security:

The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.

If we, our chief justice, our officials, or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons, they shall come to us - or in our absence from the kingdom to the chief justice - to declare it and claim immediate redress. If we, or in our absence abroad the chiefjustice, make no redress within forty days, reckoning from the day on which the offence was declared to us or to him, the four barons shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons, who may distrain upon and assail us in every way possible, with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, or anything else saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children, until they have secured such redress as they have determined upon. Having secured the redress, they may then resume their normal obedience to us.

Any man who so desires may take an oath to obey the commands of the twenty-five barons for the achievement of these ends, and to join with them in assailing us to the utmost of his power. We give public and free permission to take this oath to any man who so desires, and at no time will we prohibit any man from taking it. Indeed, we will compel any of our subjects who are unwilling to take it to swear it at our command.

If-one of the twenty-five barons dies or leaves the country, or is prevented in any other way from discharging his duties, the rest of them shall choose another baron in his place, at their discretion, who shall be duly sworn in as they were.

In the event of disagreement among the twenty-five barons on any matter referred to them for decision, the verdict of the majority present shall have the same validity as a unanimous verdict of the whole twenty-five, whether these were all present or some of those summoned were unwilling or unable to appear.

The twenty-five barons shall swear to obey all the above articles faithfully, and shall cause them to be obeyed by others to the best of their power.

We will not seek to procure from anyone, either by our own efforts or those of a third party, anything by which any part of these concessions or liberties might be revoked or diminished. Should such a thing be procured, it shall be null and void and we will at no time make use of it, either ourselves or through a third party.

* (62) We have remitted and pardoned fully to all men any ill-will, hurt, or grudges that have arisen between us and our subjects, whether clergy or laymen, since the beginning of the dispute. We have in addition remitted fully, and for our own part have also pardoned, to all clergy and laymen any offences committed as a result of the said dispute between Easter in the sixteenth year of our reign (i.e. 1215) and the restoration of peace.

In addition we have caused letters patent to be made for the barons, bearing witness to this security and to the concessions set out above, over the seals of Stephen archbishop of Canterbury, Henry archbishop of Dublin, the other bishops named above, and Master Pandulf.

* (63) IT IS ACCORDINGLY OUR WISH AND COMMAND that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever.

Both we and the barons have sworn that all this shall be observed in good faith and without deceit. Witness the abovementioned people and many others.

Given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign (i.e. 1215: the new regnal year began on 28 May).

Sources and Further Information

Claire Breay, Magna Carta: Manuscripts and Myths, British Library, 2002

JC Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd rev. edn, Cambridge University Press (1992)

The British Library Board

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The Long Telegram

The Kennan ‘Long Telegram’

George Kennan

Moscow

22 February 1946

Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb. 3,11 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts, subjects of which will be roughly as follows:

(1) Basic features of postwar Soviet outlook.

(2) Background of this outlook.

(3) Its projection in practical policy on official level.

(4) Its projection on unofficial level.

(5) Practical deductions from standpoint of US policy.

I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once. There follows:

Part 1: Basic Features of Postwar Soviet Outlook as Put Forward by Official Propaganda Machine, Are as Follows

(a) USSR still lives in antagonistic "capitalist encirclement" with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers: "In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.

(b) Capitalist world is beset with internal conflicts, inherent in nature of capitalist society. These conflicts are insoluble by means of peaceful compromise. Greatest of them is that between England and US.

(c) Internal conflicts of capitalism inevitably generate wars. Wars thus generated may be of two kinds: intra-capitalist wars between two capitalist states and wars of intervention against socialist world. Smart capitalists, vainly seeking escape from inner conflicts of capitalism, incline toward latter.

(d) Intervention against USSR, while it would be disastrous to those who undertook it, would cause renewed delay in progress of Soviet socialism and must therefore be forestalled at all costs.

(e) Conflicts between capitalist states, though likewise fraught with danger for USSR, nevertheless hold out great possibilities for advancement of socialist cause, particularly if USSR remains militarily powerful, ideologically monolithic and faithful to its present brilliant leadership.

(f) It must be borne in mind that capitalist world is not all bad. In addition to hopelessly reactionary and bourgeois elements, it includes (1) certain wholly enlightened and positive elements united in acceptable communistic parties and (2) certain other elements (now described for tactical reasons as progressive or democratic) whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be "objectively" favorable to interests of USSR. These last must be encouraged and utilized for Soviet purposes.

(g) Among negative elements of bourgeois-capitalist society, most dangerous of all are those whom Lenin called false friends of the people, namely moderate-socialist or social-democratic leaders (in other words, non-Communist left-wing). These are more dangerous than out-and-out reactionaries, for latter at least march under their true colors, whereas moderate left-wing leaders confuse people by employing devices of socialism to serve interests of reactionary capital.

So much for premises. To what deductions do they lead from standpoint of Soviet policy? To following:

(a) Everything must be done to advance relative strength of USSR as factor in international society. Conversely, no opportunity must be missed to reduce strength and influence, collectively as well as individually, of capitalist powers.

(b) Soviet efforts, and those of Russia’s friends abroad, must be directed toward deepening and exploiting of differences and conflicts between capitalist powers. If these eventually deepen into an "imperialist" war, this war must be turned into revolutionary upheavals within the various capitalist countries.

(c) "Democratic-progressive" elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests.

(d) Relentless battle must be waged against socialist and social-democratic leaders abroad.

Part 2: Background of Outlook

Before examining ramifications of this party line in practice there are certain aspects of it to which I wish to draw attention.

First, it does not represent natural outlook of Russian people. Latter are, by and large, friendly to outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it talents they are conscious of possessing, eager above all to live in peace and enjoy fruits of their own labor. Party line only represents thesis which official propaganda machine puts forward with great skill and persistence to a public often remarkably resistant in the stronghold of its innermost thoughts. But party line is binding for outlook and conduct of people who make up apparatus of power--party, secret police and Government--and it is exclusively with these that we have to deal.

Second, please note that premises on which this party line is based are for most part simply not true. Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible. Basic internal conflicts in advanced countries are no longer primarily those arising out of capitalist ownership of means of production, but are ones arising from advanced urbanism and industrialism as such, which Russia has thus far been spared not by socialism but only by her own backwardness. Internal rivalries of capitalism do not always generate wars; and not all wars are attributable to this cause. To speak of possibility of intervention against USSR today, after elimination of Germany and Japan and after example of recent war, is sheerest nonsense. If not provoked by forces of intolerance and subversion, "capitalist" world of today is quite capable of living at peace with itself and with Russia. Finally, no sane person has reason to doubt sincerity of moderate socialist leaders in Western countries. Nor is it fair to deny success of their efforts to improve conditions for working population whenever, as in Scandinavia, they have been given chance to show what they could do.

Falseness of these premises, every one of which predates recent war, was amply demonstrated by that conflict itself. Anglo-American differences did not turn out to be major differences of Western world. Capitalist countries, other than those of Axis, showed no disposition to solve their differences by joining in crusade against USSR. Instead of imperialist war turning into civil wars and revolution, USSR found itself obliged to fight side by side with capitalist powers for an avowed community of aims.

Nevertheless, all these theses, however baseless and disproven, are being boldly put forward again today. What does this indicate? It indicates that Soviet party line is not based on any objective analysis of situation beyond Russia’s borders; that it has, indeed, little to do with conditions outside of Russia; that it arises mainly from basic inner-Russian necessities which existed before recent war and exist today.

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted Russian rulers rather than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundations, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smouldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for the first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, become a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes. This is why Soviet purposes must always be solemnly clothed in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate importance of dogma in Soviet affairs. Thus Soviet leaders are driven [by] necessities of their own past and present position to put forward a dogma which [apparent omission] outside world as evil, hostile and menacing, but as bearing within itself germs of creeping disease and destined to be wracked with growing internal convulsions until it is given final coup de grace by rising power of socialism and yields to new and better world. This thesis provides justification for that increase of military and police power of Russian state, for that isolation of Russian population from outside world, and for that fluid and constant pressure to extend limits of Russian police power which are together the natural and instinctive urges of Russian rulers. Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused. But in new guise of international Marxism, with its honeyed promises to a desperate and war-torn outside world, it is more dangerous and insidious than ever before.

It should not be thought from above that Soviet party line is necessarily disingenuous and insincere on part of those who put it forward. Many of them are too ignorant of outside world and mentally too dependent to question [apparent omission] self-hypnotism, and who have no difficulty making themselves believe what they find it comforting and convenient to believe. Finally we have the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in this great land actually receives accurate and unbiased information about outside world. In atmosphere of oriental secretiveness and conspiracy which pervades this Government, possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite. The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth--indeed, their disbelief in its existence--leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world. Here there is ample scope for the type of subtle intrigue at which Russians are past masters. Inability of foreign governments to place their case squarely before Russian policy makers--extent to which they are delivered up in their relations with Russia to good graces of obscure and unknown advisers whom they never see and cannot influence--this to my mind is most disquieting feature of diplomacy in Moscow, and one which Western statesmen would do well to keep in mind if they would understand nature of difficulties encountered here.

Part 3: Projection of Soviet Outlook in Practical Policy on Official Level

We have now seen nature and background of Soviet program. What may we expect by way of its practical implementation?

Soviet policy, as Department implies in its query under reference, is conducted on two planes: (1) official plane represented by actions undertaken officially in name of Soviet Government; and (2) subterranean plane of actions undertaken by agencies for which Soviet Government does not admit responsibility.

Policy promulgated on both planes will be calculated to serve basic policies (a) to (d) outlined in part 1. Actions taken on different planes will differ considerably, but will dovetail into each other in purpose, timing and effect.

On official plane we must look for following:

(a) Internal policy devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of Soviet state: intensive military-industrialization; maximum development of armed forces; great displays to impress outsiders; continued secretiveness about internal matters, designed to conceal weaknesses and to keep opponent in the dark.

(b) Wherever it is considered timely and promising, efforts will be made to advance official limits of Soviet power. For the moment, these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm. However, other points may at any time come into question, if and as concealed Soviet political power is extended to new areas. Thus a "friendly" Persian Government might be asked to grant Russia a port on Persian Gulf. Should Spain fall under Communist control, question of Soviet base at Gibraltar Strait might be activated. But such claims will appear on official level only when unofficial preparation is complete.

(c) Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see opportunity of extending Soviet power or of inhibiting or diluting power of others. Moscow sees in UNO not the mechanism for a permanent and stable world society founded on mutual interest and aims of all nations, but an arena in which aims just mentioned can be favorably pursued. As long as UNO is considered here to serve this purpose, Soviets will remain with it. But if at any time they come to conclusion that it is serving to embarrass or frustrate their aims for power expansion and if they see better prospects for pursuit of these aims along other lines, they will not hesitate to abandon UNO. This would imply, however, that they felt themselves strong enough to split unity of other nations by their withdrawal, to render UNO ineffective as a threat to their aims or security, and to replace it with an international weapon more effective from their viewpoint. Thus Soviet attitude toward UNO will depend largely on loyalty of other nations to it, and on degree of vigor, decisiveness and cohesion with which these nations defend in UNO the peaceful and hopeful concept of international life, which that organization represents to our way of thinking. I reiterate, Moscow has no abstract devotion to UNO ideals. Its attitude to that organization will remain essentially pragmatic and tactical.

(d) Toward colonial areas and backward or dependent peoples, Soviet policy, even on official plane, will be directed toward weakening of power and influence and contacts of advanced Western nations, on theory that insofar as this policy is successful, there will be created a vacuum which will favor Communist-Soviet penetration. Soviet pressure for participation in trusteeship arrangements thus represents, in my opinion, a desire to be in a position to complicate and inhibit exertion of Western influence at such points rather than to provide major channel for exerting of Soviet power. Latter motive is not lacking, but for this Soviets prefer to rely on other channels than official trusteeship arrangements. Thus we may expect to find Soviets asking for admission everywhere to trusteeship or similar arrangements and using levers thus acquired to weaken Western influence among such peoples.

(e) Russians will strive energetically to develop Soviet representation in, and official ties with, countries in which they sense strong possibilities of opposition to Western centers of power. This applies to such widely separated points as Germany, Argentina, Middle Eastern countries, etc.

(f) In international economic matters, Soviet policy will really be dominated by pursuit of autarchy for Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated adjacent areas taken together. That, however, will be underlying policy. As far as official line is concerned, position is not yet clear. Soviet Government has shown strange reticence since termination hostilities on subject foreign trade. If large-scale long-term credits should be forthcoming, I believe Soviet Government may eventually again do lip service, as it did in 1930’s, to desirability of building up international economic exchanges in general. Otherwise I think it possible Soviet foreign trade may be restricted largely to Soviet’s own security sphere, including occupied areas in Germany, and that a cold official shoulder may be turned to principle of general economic collaboration among nations.

(g) With respect to cultural collaboration, lip service will likewise be rendered to desirability of deepening cultural contact between peoples, but this will not in practice be interpreted in any way which could weaken security position of Soviet peoples. Actual manifestations of Soviet policy in this respect will be restricted to arid channels of closely shepherded official visits and functions, with superabundance of vodka and speeches and dearth of permanent effects.

(h) Beyond this, Soviet official relations will take what might be called "correct" course with individual foreign governments, with great stress being laid on prestige of Soviet Union and its representatives and with punctilious attention to protocol, as distinct from good manners.

Part 4: Following May Be Said as to What We May Expect by Way of Implementation of Basic Soviet Policies on Unofficial, or Subterranean Plane, i.e., on Plane for Which Soviet Government Accepts No Responsibility.

Agencies utilized for promulgation of policies on this plane are following:

1. Inner central core of Communist parties in other countries. While many of persons who compose this category may also appear and act in unrelated public capacities, they are in reality working closely together as an underground operating directorate of world communism, a concealed Comintern12 tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow. It is important to remember that this inner core is actually working on underground lines, despite legality of parties with which it is associated.

2. Rank and file of Communist parties. Note distinction is drawn between these and persons defined in paragraph 1. This distinction has become much sharper in recent years. Whereas formerly foreign Communist parties represented a curious (and from Moscow’s standpoint often inconvenient) mixture of conspiracy and legitimate activity, now the conspiratorial element has been neatly concentrated in inner circle and ordered underground, while rank and file--no longer even taken into confidence about realities of movement--are thrust forward as bona fide internal partisans of certain political tendencies within their respective countries, genuinely innocent of conspiratorial connection with foreign states. Only in certain countries where communists are numerically strong do they now regularly appear and act as a body. As a rule they are used to penetrate, and to influence or dominate, as case may be, other organizations less likely to be suspected of being tools of Soviet Government, with a view to accomplishing their purposes through [apparent omission] organizations, rather than by direct action as a separate political party.

3. A wide variety of national associations or bodies which can be dominated or influenced by such penetration. These include: labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines, publishing houses, etc.

4. International organizations which can be similarly penetrated through influence over various national components. Labor, youth and women’s organizations are prominent among them. Particular, almost vital, importance is attached in this connection to international labor movement. In this, Moscow sees possibility of sidetracking Western governments in world affairs and building up international lobby capable of compelling governments to take actions favorable to Soviet interests in various countries and of paralyzing actions disagreeable to USSR.

5. Russian Orthodox Church, with its foreign branches, and through it the Eastern Orthodox Church in general.

6. Pan-Slav movement and other movements (Azerbaijan, Armenian, Turcoman, etc.) based on racial groups within Soviet Union.

7. Governments or governing groups willing to lend themselves to Soviet purposes in one degree or another, such as present Bulgarian and Yugoslav governments, North Persian regime, Chinese Communists, etc. Not only propaganda machines but actual policies of these regimes can be placed extensively at disposal of USSR.

It may be expected that component parts of this far-flung apparatus will be utilized, in accordance with their individual suitability, as follows:

(a) To undermine general political and strategic potential of major Western Powers. Efforts will be made in such countries to disrupt national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity. All persons with grievances, whether economic or racial, will be urged to seek redress not in mediation and compromise, but in defiant, violent struggle for destruction of other elements of society. Here poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, etc.

(b) On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts will be made to weaken power and influence of Western Powers [on] colonial, back