The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Full and Honest and Open and Transparent

An official inquiry into Britain's connivance in rendition (or, in Standard English, kidnapping and torture) has raised twenty-seven questions over the involvement of ministers and intelligence officers. The heads of MI5 and MI6 have each been given a month to formulate their denials and decide which rotten apples will be removed and what lessons will be learned; whereupon their answers will be submitted to the intelligence and security committee, the Press Complaints Commission of the spook world, which censors its reports according to the whims of the agencies it supposedly investigates.

Britain's Head Boy proclaimed, within a few weeks of prancing into Downing Street, that "I do not think for a moment that we should believe that the ISC should be doing this piece of work. For public confidence, and for independence from parliament, party and government, it is right to have a judge-led inquiry." Naturally, the situation has changed since then; and pending the statement's exile unto the Dark Web along with all those other pledges, the ISC chairman and mercenary contractor Malcolm Rifkind duly pronounced the intelligence and security committee thoroughly effective and effectively thorough. Accordingly, Daveybloke wheeled out his Old Expendable, Ken Clarke, to belch forth a few words of praise for Jack Straw, who as Foreign Secretary wrote to David Blunkett asking about the possibility of setting up a few black sites in Britain itself. Doubtless mindful of the perils of torture tourism, Blunkett wrote back saying that the difficulties involved in undermining the law sufficiently were too great even for New Labour.

Strangely enough, the Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair and its acolyte, the Other Miliband, apparently could not be reached for comment about their approaching exoneration.

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