It is a great pity that the Centre for Policy Studies, whose normally shrewd and thoughtful contributions have added much of value to political debate over the years, should have published something as ignorant and absurd as this pamphlet by Peter Oborne which claims that the government has grossly politicised and misused the threat of terrorism in the UK by telling the British public ‘half-truths, falsehoods and lies’.
He looks in particular at two cases – the ‘ricin plot’ and the alleged terrorist conspiracy to blow up Old Trafford stadium. In early 2003, the police announced that they had foiled a terrorist ring in its attempt to launch a chemical attack in Britain using the deadly poison ricin, which was being manufactured in a London flat. This ‘ricin plot’ ended last year in the conviction of Kamel Bourgass for conspiracy to use poisons, the acquittal of his co-defendants and the aborting of a second planned related trial. Oborne says that the Prime Minister and other ministers claimed that ricin had been found in the flat even though in fact no ricin was ever found there. His implication is that this claim was cynically used to whip up British public support for war against Saddam Hussein.
But the facts are that the initial tests for the presence of ricin in the flat, carried out by the biological research establishment Porton Down, were positive. Subsequently, as Oborne says, Porton Down changed its mind and said further tests had showed no traces of ricin. This correction was not communicated to the police for several months, an oversight for which Porton Down has apologised. So when ministers said ricin had been found, they were speaking in good faith and in accordance with what was believed to be true. As Oborne himself acknowledges, by the time the error was revealed the matter was sub judice and couldn’t be mentioned. So why blame the government?
It must also be borne in mind that ricin, like other chemicals, degrades over time and so it is possible that traces which originally were present had disappeared by the time the second tests were carried out. But in any event, whether or not ricin was present was irrelevant. What mattered was whether there was a plot to make the stuff. And what the police found in that flat showed there was indeed just such a conspiracy to make ricin and other poisons. The police found:
•Four sets of poison recipes
•Two further lists of chemicals
•More than 20 castor beans, the key ricin ingredient, plus ground cherry stones, the ingredient for cyanide
•Acetone, the key chemical for extracting poisons from seeds
•Apparatus for making chemical compounds
•One sealed jar of nicotine poison
•An Arabic CD-rom with jihadi content and information about making electronic circuits, bombs and timing devices
The fact that the jury convicted Bourgass of conspiracy to use poisons showed that it agreed that this was indeed evidence of a poisons plot. The implication of their verdict is that, by acquitting his co-defendants, they believed the conspiracy had been committed with others not brought to justice. Yet Oborne complains that
The press has continued to report the ricin plot as if it was real, while the Government has never formally announced that there was never any ricin at the Wood Green flat.
But it was real. And why should the government have announced there was never any ricin, when a) this had been revealed in court and b) it was irrelevant to the threat?
Next, Oborne claims that the ‘Old Trafford’ plot was also a fiction. In 2004, Manchester police arrested and held a number of people who were eventually released with no charges laid. This was nevertheless written up in the press as a foiled plot to bomb Old Trafford stadium. From the absence of charges and apparently from his own interviews with some of the suspects, Oborne concludes that such a plot never existed.
But why does that follow? It might simply have been that the police could not find the evidence they needed to make a case stand up in court – a common occurrence. There is no evidence whatever that the claim was a lie. And while there are legitimate questions about leaks from the police and the treatment of these claims by the media, as Oborne himself acknowledges the government cannot be blamed for the behaviour of the police and the media. So why include this case in an argument that the Prime Minister has needlessly terrified the British people out of their wits over the terrorist threat?
Some of Oborne’s other criticisms have more substance. The government’s anti-terrorism package has been variously ill thought-through and badly presented and has owed less to substance than to rhetoric. Much of the rest of his argument revolves around his criticism that the government smashed the chance of consensus between the parties over anti-terror measures because it was determined to look tougher than its opponents, and failed to make an adequate case to Parliament for them. There may be some truth in some of this, although one might equally say that it was the opposition that decided to ride the civil liberties bandwagon and thus smashed the possibility of consensus. And Oborne also fails to acknowledge the very strong case made in a police paper for detaining terror suspects for up to 90 days. He says:
The Prime Minister’s suggestion that the Security Services were demanding new powers in order to deal with a new category of terrorist suspect turns out to have been nonsense.
But it wasn’t nonsense, at least as far as the police were concerned. That was precisely what they were arguing in their paper.
Next he claims that the Prime Minister’s observation that there were ‘several hundred [terrorists] in this country who we believe are engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts’ seemed to have been ‘plucked out of thin air’. But this was not so. The security service was reported as saying precisely this. And Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said publicly that up to 200 terrorists trained by Osama bin Laden would commit atrocities in Britain if they could. Reports that had crossed his desk, he said, ‘made my hair stand on end’.
The reason why this report is so inadequate is that the real agenda here – laid out unmistakeably in its foreword by Anthony Barnett and in its conclusion – is opposition to the war in Iraq. It is the same belief that ‘since no WMD were found they never existed and so Blair lied to us’ which inspires the claim here that since no actual ricin was found, no ricin plot ever existed; and since no-one was charged over the Old Trafford plot, no Old Trafford plot ever existed.
These are, of course, irrational non sequiturs; but such is the toxicity of the feeling against the Iraq war, and so deep have the lies about ‘Blair lied’ penetrated the national psyche that irrationality is now the dominant motif of British public debate. And it unites left and right. Thus, absurdly, the terrorist threat to Britain is presented, as in this pamphlet, as the result of the Iraq war – and therefore it is Blair’s fault, to be covered up by spinning it to terrify and bamboozle the public. But the real spin is surely in this pamphlet.
Oborne is right to say that there is now a massive problem of a loss of public trust. But that problem – potentially lethal at a time of war -- is hugely exacerbated by reports such as these.
UPDATE:
In response to this item Dai Richards, producer/director of Dispatches – Spinning Terror transmitted on Channel 4 on 20 February, wrote:
I write in response to your weblog article – The deadly poison of irrationality – attacking Peter Oborne’s pamphlet ‘The Use and Abuse of Terror’. I do so because much of the information in Peter’s pamphlet comes from the Channel 4 programme Spinning Terror which I produced (and Peter reported).
You claim that Peter’s pamphlet is ignorant and absurd. Yet it is your own critique of it which displays ignorance and is full of partial truths.
You start by critiquing Peter’s comments on the ‘ricin case’, in which eight Algerians were arrested following the discovery of recipes and ingredients for making poisons, including ricin. In his pamphlet, Peter drew attention to a number of claims made about this case which were self-serving, prejudicial to a fair trial and misrepresented the evidence – sometimes unwittingly, sometimes wittingly.
Following the raid on the north London flat, the police issued a press release, which was co-signed by the deputy chief medical officer. It stated that 'a small amount of the material... has tested positive for the presence of Ricin poison.' and further that 'tests have confirmed the presence of toxic material'. The first of these statements was misleading, the second plain wrong.
You wrote: 'the facts are that the initial tests for the presence of ricin in the flat, carried out by the biological research establishment Porton Down, were positive.'
What you fail to mention is that this initial test was simply a screening test, namely one which is known to be approximate and to err heavily on the side of safety. So it should, for it is a procedure designed to ensure the safety of those entering premises where toxins might be present. As such, it offers no proof of the presence of poison but only suggests it might be present. The police, and particularly the deputy chief medical officer, ought to have known this, yet they still claimed emphatically that the presence of toxins had been confirmed.
You go on to say that 'Porton Down then changed its mind and said further tests had showed no traces of ricin'. Thus you imply that the scientists at Porton Down simply altered their opinion, as if on the balance of probabilities. In fact the second test, carried out the very next day, is specific to ricin and is a conclusive test, unlike the initial screening test. It showed there was no ricin.
You assert that:
'when ministers said ricin had been found, they were speaking in good faith and in accordance with what was believed to be true'.
By writing this, you imply that Peter claimed otherwise. In fact, his assertion was that it was premature to make such a claim, and prejudicial to any subsequent trial. But it is strange that nobody in the police, the Home Office or the Health Department – for which the deputy chief medical officer works – contacted Porton Down to find out whether the initial screening test had been confirmed. Even though it was clear that a second, ‘Elisa’ test would have to follow the first – approximate – test, nobody enquired about its result. Strange too that Porton Down sat on the true result of the Elisa test - showing there was no ricin - for two months, while world leaders cited the ricin ‘find’ in support of the Iraq war. Testimony at the trial on this point from people at Porton Down was almost farcically confused and full of contradictions.
You claim that: 'by the time the error (ie the false claim that ricin had been found) was revealed, the matter 'was sub judice and couldn’t be mentioned. So why blame the government?'
Are you seriously suggesting that a publicised claim which is utterly prejudicial to the defendants in a trial and is completely wrong cannot be corrected because it is sub judice? The law is not such an ass. It’s noteworthy that the truth about the absence of ricin came out in a pre-trial hearing and was reported by the Sunday Times. At that time it was still sub judice, but nobody suggested the Sunday Times be prosecuted for contempt of court.
You write that, in making public utterances about ricin having been found and the plotters being connected to Al Qaeda, the Prime Minister and others – including Colin Powell in his speech to the UN in support of waging war against Saddam Hussein – acted 'in good faith.'
In fact they acted recklessly. As well as the error in claiming ricin had been found in the first place, they claimed a link between the ricin “found” in London and an Al Qaeda poison factory in northern Iraq. There was no such link. They implied ricin could kill thousands. In fact ricin really has to be injected to be fatal, so is quite impractical as a WMD. Further, for months the prosecution claimed the ricin recipe found in north London was copied from an Al Qaeda poisons manual. This link too was false; when investigators working for the defence showed that the recipe was copied from a Californian Survivalist website, the prosecution dropped this claim.
Yet you attack Peter for: His implication... (that the ricin case) was cynically used to whip up British public support for war against Saddam Hussein.
It is you who choose the word 'cynically'. Peter put no adjective to it. I believe it was shocking that this case was cited in support of something so crucial as taking us into war against Saddam, given that the claims made were generally presented as fact, whereas in truth no facts had yet been established. Most of it was therefore surmise, and much of the surmise turned out to be wrong.
You then criticise Peter’s references to another case, in which nine Kurds and North Africans and a young English woman were arrested on apparent suspicion of plotting to blow up Old Trafford on match day. You claim that:'There is no evidence whatever that the claim (that suspects planned to attack Old Trafford) was a lie.'
Peter did not say it was a lie, but that it was untrue – ie wrong. My information, direct and indirect, from the intelligence services is that they believed at the time that it was untrue, and have not altered their opinion since. All nine suspects were of course freed without charge.
In other respects your critique of Peter Oborne’s pamphlet is simply confused. For instance you say that, in his pamphlet, Peter criticised Tony Blair for claiming in support of the current terrorism bill that: 'there are several hundred (people) in this country who we believe are engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts...'
In fact the Prime Minister made this statement in arguing for an earlier anti-terrorism bill, which created Control Orders. You dispute Peter’s assertion that the Prime Minister’s reference to 'several hundred' plotting against us was unsubstantiated.
Yet the day after Tony Blair made this claim, intelligence officers informed several newspapers that they disagreed with the Prime Minister’s assertion. The Daily Mail, the newspaper for which you write, reported: 'Even Blair's own security chiefs - normally the next in the queue after the nation's chief constables to warn that the Armageddon question is not if but when - pour cold water on Blair's call to panic stations.'
One reason why Peter was asked to report this film was that he had already written extensively about Downing Street spin (eg 'The Rise of Political Lying', Free Press, 2005) When I joined the production team, Peter was keen that I undertake most of the research, because he wanted it to be done by someone with investigative experience who had a fresh perspective and an open mind on the subject. The elements which made up the film – and Peter’s pamphlet – were included because I found them disturbing and compelling. I did not set out with an agenda. To do so leads to poor journalism, for it prejudices objective scrutiny of the evidence - as your critique demonstrates.
In response to this, I wrote to Dai Richards:
I have now read your letter and re-read Peter’s pamphlet and my own original remarks. The first thing to say is that I did not see your Dispatches programme. My observations are therefore confined solely to the pamphlet.
You say of the police press release: 'It stated that "a small amount of the material...has tested positive for the presence of Ricin poison" and further that "tests have confirmed the presence of toxic material". The first of these statements was misleading, the second plain wrong.'
They were neither misleading nor wrong. Tests DID confirm the presence of toxic material: nicotine poison in a Nivea jar, as well as ricin in 22 castor beans, which was listed in these terms by Porton Down. So your statement that this was ‘plain wrong’ is plain wrong. Or don’t you think that nicotine poison is toxic?
On the first statement, as you yourself acknowledge, the initial test did find that ricin was present. My statement that 'the facts are that the initial tests for the presence of ricin in the flat, carried out by the biological research establishment Porton Down, were positive.' was therefore true.
You then claim that although this initial test was positive for ricin it was ‘simply a screening test’ and that ‘The police, and particularly the deputy chief medical officer, ought to have known this, yet they still claimed emphatically that the presence of toxins had been confirmed’.
The police believed that the first test had found ricin. They say they had no reason to believe that this test was dubious in any way.
You say: ‘You go on to say that “Porton Down then changed its mind and said further tests had showed no traces of ricin” .Thus you imply that the scientists at Porton Down simply altered their opinion, as if on the balance of probabilities.’
This is demonstrably untrue. I did not imply this. I stated explicitly that they said ‘further tests had showed no traces of ricin'.
The fact that the second test(s) were carried out the following day is irrelevant. This negative result was not communicated to the police for months. According to Porton Down, this was because of ‘a breakdown in procedures’.
You say ‘nobody in the police, the Home Office or the Health Department – for which the deputy chief medical officer works – contacted Porton Down to find out whether the initial screening test had been confirmed.’ My understanding is that Porton Down did confirm the initial (false) positive test, a confirmation which was in itself clearly wrong, before finally communicating the correct negative findings.
As you yourself say, Porton Down’s evidence in the case was ‘almost farcically confused and full of contradictions’. This implies bungling incompetence, which I believe to have been the case. Yet in your letter to me, you imply a conspiracy. There is no evidence for this whatever – quite the reverse.
There is therefore no reason to suppose that the police and everyone else were acting in anything other than good faith when they spoke of the discovery of ricin in the flat. You suggest that the pamphlet did not claim otherwise, merely that ‘it was premature to make such a claim, and prejudicial to any subsequent trial.’
To claim that the pamphlet was not claiming bad faith is disingenuous, to put it mildly. The whole purpose of including the ricin chapter in this pamphlet was to claim that the ricin plot was used to ‘persuade the British people to wage war against Saddam Hussein in order to prevent him distributing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists...’ -- but that there was no such plot. The implication that the police and politicians acted in the worst possible faith throughout this whole episode, and that Porton Down was part of a conspiracy to mislead the public in order to bounce them into war, is built into the entire chapter. Yet the facts suggest that this fevered suggestion is wholly without foundation.
You say: ‘Are you seriously suggesting that a publicised claim which is utterly prejudicial to the defendants in a trial and is completely wrong cannot be corrected because it is sub judice?’
Yes. You are clearly ignorant of the law. Ministers and police officers are not. I suggest you purchase a copy of 'Essential Law for Journalists'.
Any claim that ricin could kill thousands was indeed an exaggeration.
You say: ‘Further, for months the prosecution claimed the ricin recipe found in north London was copied from an Al Qaeda poisons manual. This link too was false; when investigators working for the defence showed that the recipe was copied from a Californian Survivalist website, the prosecution dropped this claim...’
The police had good reason for thinking that the recipe was taken from an Al Qaeda manual because of distinctive similarities it bore with material seized in al Qaeda training camps inAfghanistan. In court, however, this was impossible to prove because that material was not available to the prosecution, and it was clearly the case that other recipes were available on the net. That does not prove, as you claim, that this link was false.
Most important of all, however, the ricin chapter misses the main point altogether. The presence of ricin in the flat was irrelevant. There was a plot to produce it. The fact that ricin was not found didn’t make that plot any less dangerous. The pamphlet says: The press has continued to report the Ricin Plot as if it was real...’ But it WAS real. A poisons factory was discovered with apparatus and ingredients to make poisons, an actual jar of nicotine poison and blueprints for a bomb. A man was convicted of conspiracy to use poisons. To state therefore that the plot was not real demonstrates a quite remarkable inability to acknowledge reality.
The pamphlet not only fails to acknowledge any of this but uses this episode to back up the claim of a ‘false narrative’ – ie, a lie. It states ‘the British public has been fed half-truths, falsehoods and lies’ and that ‘New Labour has set out to politicise terror, to use it for narrow party advantage.’ It uses the ricin case at great length to support this claim. It is therefore undeniable that the pamphlet imputes to the government the most cynical of motives.
As for the Old Trafford case, you claim that ‘Peter did not say it was a lie, but that it was untrue – ie wrong.’ Yet the second paragraph of this chapter states ‘It was a complete fabrication’ and ‘The police and, to an extent the media, are responsible for the invention.’ Do you not understand what a lie is?
In short, by a combination of omission, misrepresentation and the most perverse interpretation possible, this pamphlet was deeply misleading. Your letter signally fails to show otherwise, and even manages to misrepresent what the pamphlet said.
In response to this, Dai Richards wrote further:
It still seems to me – in fact more so now than when I read your initial piece – that you come to the subject with a determination to find the evidence to back your existing standpoint, rather than studying at the evidence in the various examples we gave in the pamphlet and the film and then drawing a conclusion.
You know as well as I do that no argument is entirely black and white, no story really has all good on one side and all bad on the other. It is always possible to find something in an event to back one’s argument, even if that something goes against the generality of how the event unfolded. Personally, I think that’s what you have tended to do in scrutinising Peter’s pamphlet: you have tended to use the exception to prove the rule, so to speak.
So, for instance, you claim the quote we gave from the police press release about ‘confirming the presence of toxic material’ could have been referring to nicotine or castor oil beans. I cannot see how you can genuinely reach that conclusion. For a start, I believe the beans themselves would not be classified as “toxic material”, but that’s by the by. A fuller quote from the press release runs:
'A small amount of the material recovered from the Wood Green
premises has tested positive for the presence of Ricin
poison. Ricin is a toxic material which if ingested or inhaled can
be fatal. Our primary concern is the safety of the public and the
police have worked closely with the Department of Health
throughout. Tests were carried out on the material and it
was confirmed on the morning of 7.01.03 that toxic material
was present.
This clearly implies that there was an initial test which found ricin and also a confirmatory test. Ricin is mentioned throughout the press release. There is no mention at all of finding castor oil beans or nicotine poison. But it does not suit your argument that the press release should be misleading, so you look for a way to demonstrate that technically it could be correct.
Your statement that the first test for the presence of ricin was positive is of course right, but you fail to tell the whole truth. The point we made was that this test simply showed ricin might be present. As explained to me by toxicologists, this test gives a positive result when other elements with the same structure as ricin are present. So it was wrong for the police and deputy chief medical officer not to point out that this was only an approximate test.
What’s more, I have seen no evidence that the Home Office or Dept Health, for instance, enquired about the result of the Elisa test, which is the confirmatory test. It was normal procedure in these circumstances to undertake such a test. The authorities knew or ought to have known that an Elisa test would be done. I have not seen or been told of any enquiry about the undertaking of or result of such a test.
Your assertion that the police had 'good reason for thinking that' Bourgass’s recipe was an Al Qaeda recipe is telling. Good reasoning is not evidence. Bourgass’s ricin recipe looked like an Al Qaeda ricin recipe. They were similar. But they contained differences. Someone jumped to the conclusion that Bourgass’s was copied from Al Qaeda’s, without wondering why they contained several notable differences. They then put forward their guess as fact, whereas in fact it was based on assumptions. Not surprisingly, the recipes may have had the same root – but one was not copied from the other. Yet you still entertain the possibility that they were copies one of the other. If you had wanted, you could have searched out the truth on this point. You have not done so.
Your summation of the ricin publicity in your critique of the pamphlet makes it all sound most straightforward. It was not, and surely you know that. The claims made by Tony Blair and Colin Powell were reckless. They put forward as facts untested prima facie evidence. That is the point we made. We never claimed Blair knew there was no ricin or knew there was no connection to Al Qaeda poison camps in Iraq or knew ricin was not a WMD, but that, without being certain one way or the other, he was content to allow these uncertain claims to be presented as facts, and gave them his backing. To do so to help justify something as critical as going to war was wrong.
My first career – many years ago – was as a barrister. Not that that made me an expert on sub judice. But I do know something about it and the case law, rather than a book for journalists, does not preclude the police correcting a public statement which they made and which was germane to the case, prejudicial to the defendants and now known to have been erroneous at the time it was made. As I pointed out to you, this is what happened anyway, when The Sunday Times reported the absence of ricin, and no law officer took action. They would have known about the article. They were the prosecution.
On the Old Trafford case, you are disingenuous. It is completely clear that Peter was not accusing the police of lying . He specifically wrote that the police had presumably based their leaks about their suspects’ targeting Old Trafford on information and evidence they had found. He detailed the Manchester United paraphenalia and tickets found at the flat of two of the accused. So you know quite well that he was accusing them of reckless talk and - once again – of jumping to premature and prejudicial conclusions. Not of lying.
Mr Richards has asked me to make his responses public, which I am happy to do here. Readers can judge the exchanges for themselves.
