John SawersA curious, clumsy, and perhaps dangerous intervention by the head of Britain's foreign intelligence service....
Speaking at a public event in London, MI6 chief John Sawers declared that Iran is “two years away” from becoming a “nuclear weapons state” and that, “when that moment came”, Israel and/or the US would have to decide whether to launch a military strike.
Fatima Bouchar's case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.
Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar's husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.
Among the revelations are the following:
* Oil was a key motivating factor behind the efforts to remove Saddam. "The removal of Saddam remains a prize because it could give new security to oil supplies," the officer writes.
* MI6 did not believe that Saddam or Iraq were supporting al-Qa'ida. "There is no convincing intelligence (or common-sense) case that Iraq supports Sunni extremism," it says. But in January 2004, Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Commons: "We do know of links between al-Qa'ida and Iraq. We cannot be sure of the exact extent of those links."
* Britain believed America was planning military action to remove Saddam long before it was officially acknowledged.
Britain, Jack Straw, MI6, Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair 
The far right, to win votes, capitalises on a fear of Muslim extremism, especially terrorism. That aids extremists by playing into a narrative long cultivated by a spectrum of radicals, including Osama bin Laden.
In this narrative, Islam is under attack from western Christian nations as part of a clash of civilizations. Muslim-bashing in the West becomes further evidence that Muslims are unwelcome in these places and will never be accepted because of their religious faith. Alienation rises, and the most alienated are drawn into the web of the extremist recruiters and potentially into terrorism cast as defenders of the faith. If a terrorist act ultimately occurs, then that is more fuel for the far right. And so on and so on in a potentially long-running cycle.
If this cycle has begun and when it will end are questions that go far beyond the English Defence League and indeed beyond "England".
I am not sure the main story is in the first paragraph of this article by Richard Norton-Taylor of The Guardian of London: the real stunner would have been if the head of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, had announced that his officers were regularly waterboarding and breaking kneecaps.
In lieu of that, I think the real take-away here --- in the first public speech by an MI6 head in the agency's century of existence --- is the levels of barricades that Joh Sawer set up to prevent any exposure of MI6 activities.
In short, the unprecedented appearance was to push back against the pressure, as in the legal case of Binyam Mohamed, the UK resident abused on three continents, for British intelligence to comply with demands for information. That includes placing MI6 above the legal process: no court can be allowed, in Sawers' view, to have access to documents or testimony.
