International Law

The Guardian - MI5 Restricted document - Understanding radicalisation and violent exrtremism in the UK - whistleblower leak or propaganda briefing ?

The Guardian newspaper (Thursday 21st August 2008) claims a Front Page Exclusive story with three articles and a bloated 350Kb .pdf image scan of a single page:

MI5 report challenges views on terrorism in Britain

Exclusive: Sophisticated analysis says there is no single pathway to violent extremism

Background: the makings of an extremist

Explainer: counter-terrorism strategy

Why has the Americanism "Explainer" crept in to The Guardian ?

Picture: the MI5 briefing note

N.B. this is only a 350 Kb .pdf image scan of the the front page of the Restricted research document, not, as you ight have expected, the full document itself. This provides only a few paragraphs more than the 30Kb jpg graphics file used to illustrate the first article. (which shows the top half of the report's front page)

There are no claims about the provenance of this document, except for the phrase:

according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian.

To our suspicious minds, this makes it more likely to be a cynical bit of Whitehall propaganda spin and media briefing, rather than a principled leak by a courageous whistleblower.

Will this briefing be used to help to justify secret snooping and surveillance on millions of innocent people's travel and communications, no matter how expensive, inefficient, inept and disastrously error prone, this is likely to be ?

One Obvious Question not mentioned in the "Key Points" or in The Guardian's articles, is to what extent "radicalisation" is influenced by the cockups and mistakes whereby heavy handed or inept Police and Security Agency actions, which sweep up innocent or neutral or marginal terrorism supporters, and who refuse to promptly admit, publicly apologise and make generous financial compensation for their mistakes, contributes to the conversion of these people and their relatives, into more extreme supporters or into actual terrorists, exactly as used to happen in Northern Ireland.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on August 20, 2008 (boomark / email).