Thursday, November 03, 2005
Plausible deniability

1. The ability to lie or disclaim responsibility convincingly.
2. The inability to lie or disclaim responsibility convincingly.

Don Watson (Weasel Words) defines plausible deniability as:

“A political doctrine developed in the 1950s ad applied to CIA operations. Deliberately loose chains of command enable the President and others in high office to deny giving any instructions that have gone wrong.”

“The doctrine failed in the case of Watergate because the President was not plausible. It also fails when those given the instructions take the combination of the President’s blessing and his apparent unwillingness to know anything about the consequences as a license to do what they like.”

So what are we to make of this statement about the existence of secret ‘black sites’ from Whitehouse spokesman Scott McClellan:

"I am not going into discussing any specific intelligence activities”

"I would say that the President's most important responsibility is to protect the American people."

The Washington Post article and McClellan’s comments make it pretty clear that the US has been maintaining off-shore prison camps around the world. Here, ‘suspects’ (of what???) are being held indefinitely and beyond the reach of US law, unlike those fortunate souls being held at Guantanamo Bay.

A Four Corners report last week focused on the plight of Australian man David Hicks, now into his 4th year of military detention in Cuba, without recourse to civil law. Hicks has been abandoned by the Australian government and is now suffering from severe mental illness, having spent the last 12 months in solitary confinement.

Hicks’s US military appointed lawyer, who will be representing him in the quasi-legal court in Cuba paints a very different picture of Hicks’s involvement with Taliban from that suggested by John Howard, the Whitehouse et al. Rather than being a singularly dangerous terrorist, capable and willing to blow up New York tomorrow, it is alleged that Hicks did not even fire a shot in Afghanistan and was even in Pakistan, travelling, on 9/11.

When the Northern Alliance captured him, he was waiting at a Taxi rank, looking for lift out of there. He was sold to the Americans for $1,000.

The truth maybe somewhat different from his lawyer’s story, but it is clear that Hicks is not a clear and present danger to global (or American) security interests, which justifies his continued unlawful incarceration as political prisoner. His lawyer even proffered that he was ‘the token white man’, locked up solely to sell the message that the US was not just going after Arabs.

So if Hicks is detained on spurious grounds, we have ample reason for doubting America’s intentions and justification for secret camps for political prisoners.

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