Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: I fill the same for the American!

Tony Blair piu`che G.Bush dovra` fare i conti col suo elettorato. Le ragioni
sono ovvie e spiegate chiaramente da Le Carre in questa intervista.
Segue dal mio post "John le Carré, un anno fa" ; questa e`il testo
dell'intervista quasi tutta trascritta parola per parola  fatta da Tim
Sebastian nel programma "Hardtalk" a John Le Carré , autore del libro
"Absolute friends" .
Per me vale la pena leggerla, anche se i fatti , tutti o quasi , sono noti.
Giano
Tim Sebastian : Interview with John Le Carré
Britain’s intelligence service endure a harsh spot light in the Hutton
enquire, in particular for the mandatory claim that Iraq could launch his
WMD in 45 minutes.
The boss of MI 6 British external Security Service , appear before lord
Hutton in a voice only link and strongly defend that 45 minutes “claim” from
a single source ; so what a former spy and global stories selling author
make of his former employer ?
------------
TS-
John Le Carré , a very warm welcome to the program.
The Intelligence Service has been so much in the limelight in recent months
; do you see much of the same in the Intelligence these days?
JLC-
I felt I have had a great filling of sympathy for them and a great sense of
sadness about the way they were treated .
I think they have had a poor intelligence on Iraq , but by a very good
reason for that. By 2001 the Americans were declaring in public there were
no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Iraq therefore wasn’t a major
target on the list; the customer in the Whitehall were not screaming for
Iraq…..
TS-
Who’s the “customer”?...
JLC-
…the customer being , in our democracy, the people that give to the Secret
Service their remit ; the S.S. don’t write their own ticket, they get a
remit from either the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense or any other
Ministry, this is how they make their priority.
TS-
Do you think they were told to come out with evidence…?
JLC-
I am saying, once the decision to go to war were been taken , which we
believe was some decided two years ago or even longer, they were given a
crash-order to get in there and find the reason to go to war.
We were not looking for reason…we were looking for excuse !
TS-
When you look to some characters emerging , John Scarlett (1) for instance,
who was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Comity (J.I.C.)…
JLC-
…my blood boils over Scarlett ; I simply hope he will leave the J.I.C. and
keep walking, because I think he will not find the home-back in that J.I.C.
TS-
So!...the spook today is coming with media training and loyalty is the top
requirement for the politician ?
JLC-
No, I don’t see them coming with media training . I think Scarlett cuts a
very evasive and rather lofty figure…and the strangled voice of Sir Richard
Dearlove (2) with a smear…they were actually questioning the word “claim”,
it was an Intelligence claim, it was put as a “claim”;
…I actually didn’t interrupt you in the introduction, but it wasn’t a
 “claim”, it was a piece of excellent Intelligence.
Now…, you can imagine a situation in Whitehall, in our political community,
where the Secret Service come forward and say: “No, we thought some quite
different…we were misrepresented”?
It’s not possible, there’s more than their survival, and they simply cannot
do that. So you get this poor invasive disembody voice coming over a
mike(parola che puo` essere tradotta con=sporco disordine) saying that
everything, in the garden, was lovely; I don’t believe anything , in the
garden , was lovely at all; I think it was absolute chaos!
TS-
When you look back at your time in the Intelligence Office, how do you could
fit with this people?
JLC-
I was the sort of a very lonely one and mostly I’ve worked in the field ,
rather than behind the desk.
I was a cold-warrior;…we did…not all the thinks that I wrote…and probably
not  as well I’ve described (!), but there was a rule…a law…, believe it or
not, and that was to do everything with the objective truth.
Now you must understand, I know you do, in the intelligence community, one
is constantly tempted by fabricators, mercenary sort of people; all people
with intelligence their self. There’s a big, hot, rich market of people
telling you everything “you” want to hear and then, in addition, people that
are telling things “they” want you to hear; these will be liaisons services.
This situation, for argument sake, coming from Israeli intelligence or Greek
intelligence, or whatever it was; then in top of that you have the horror
story of the pressing indeed , the young officer in the field that try to
massage his message to the head office.
For all this reasons the S.S. has got the ears completely prickled up, ready
to receive any sort of false intelligence; then they have the analyst, then
the customer and finally the Joint Intelligence Community that’s assessing
all the bag.
Now, for Dearlove, after, to claim that this was a single source, the single
source by itself to be an authentic one and is a perfectly normal single
practice, is , in a word…nonsense.
Nothing of that importance would be handling by the J.I.C. without
authentication and collaterals.
TS-
Do you think they were a bunch of liars?
JLC-
No, I don’t say they are a bunch of liars; they just don’t have a P.R.
(public reporter?) presence; they very often get it when they have some
embarrassing defectors or go public on them, they don’t have a status, and
they don’t have a smooth talker to come forward.
TS-
The spooks do not enjoy the limelight…because it will bring accountability?
What is at steak there?
JLC-
They live in an half life , they are in an half world; they do not like to
identify themselves. It’s really against all their nature, to talk about
source , with the two things you never miss with : the sanctity of your
relation with the source plus their identity and the truth itself.
Now, our intelligence community, our S.I.S, has not a front officer so far
as public concerns. At the time of Stella Remington (the former head of
MI-5) we began, little by little; the spook start to put the tail in the
water of P.R.(public reporter), but still quite uncertainly and still they
have not status, no spokesperson to speak with.
When Bush appears to make his announcement about WMD, George Tenet is there
at is back, looking like always is ready to be the sand-bag for him; nobody
was standing behind Blair, when he made the similar claim about some
material acquired in Africa or whatever else toke us to war.
TS-
Do you miss the certainty of the cold war, where everyone played its own
role? You have had this shambolic deceit for democracy in one side and the
terrible, boring, stagnant repression on the other?
JLC-
I think…paradoxically, I miss the ambiguity of the cold war; what I fear is
that combination of the U.S. industries of corporate media and government;
they reduce policy in such simplistic terms that the ambiguity disappear…we
have had shade of opinion about communism, we ought to have the same about
terrorism treat; I don’t have any nostalgia for the cold war, I have simply
a terrible anxiety about the present situation.
TS-
Do you get angry about this situation?
JLC-
I get impatience, I’ve had a strong sense of service and commitment at the
time of the cold war; I recognize its ambiguity and I wrote about it; I have
to behave now.
I recognize two things; the contribution that many people made to the cold
war has been dissipated; at the end of the cold war a golden age really did
back, there was a possibility for America to go toward the Eastern World,
the Russian world that was so hostile with. If we have been constructive, I
think, something could have been achieved,
Instead of that we have seen America go to isolation , America becoming
unilateral, abandoning the international treaties, I think seriously
threaten the stability of the world.
TS-
Your critics talk about le Carre like a runt, indulging against big oil
colonialist adventure; you are angry; are you angry more than before?
JLC-
I don’t think you can go away with polemic in a novel; you get to tell the
story; the environment on which I set the story is the one I have deceived.
I think we are in a cliff-anger in this world; I think this adventurous mead
east invasion will allow going forward, as is presently perceived by the
Neoconservative bunch, almost the anointers; I would say… the world is in
great serious danger; I am writing now with big worry, in the atmosphere I
am breathing with.
TS-
A novelist that step out of fiction and write of daily events is loosing the
own protection?
JLC-
I was very careful on writing only once about this war; I was writing the 15
January 2003; it attracts an astonishing amount of correspondence,
particularly from U.S., practically all positive, mostly from people I’ve
never known, I’ve never eared of them, saying ‘thank you to say that for us’
; because the real scandal of what happen is not so much the bunch of
crazies that have taken the power, but the opposition to that seems to be
vag (slang for ‘vague’). Everything that looks like criticism has been
suppressed and the media falling with that; this has been a big betrayal of
the media of its duty.
TS-
Somebody said you’ve had the duty in criticizing the war and Saddam Hussein,
but you didn’t offer anything on behalf; how do you think the Iraq could
have been changed without topping Saddam?
JLC-
I would it began quite differently. First of all wasn’t necessary to get rid
of him. I think at the time the inspectors have done their job, that they
did, no imminent danger was in place; a middle class of Iraqi was emerging,
very capable to govern themselves, mostly of them were of the Baath party,
but the regime, on my perception, was in decline and those people weren’t
completely supporter of Saddam.
I think a gradual transition would have been perfectly possible by other
means rather than to impose democracy in Iraq.
There’s not the right the duty neither for the West to go around imposing
democracy on other countries which have no tradition of it and will find the
own way of popular representation…or even give them a chance…
TS-
They have a chance now?
JLC-
I don’t know if the chaos of this scale is a prerequisite for finding a
democratic balance.
TS-
You attribute Bush go to war for the need of oil…if it’s only oil…!
JLC-
I attribute his motif basically on the desire of power, a strong desire of
it, and in that respect he was driven by this extraordinary group of
neoconservative theologians behind him, and oil plus geopolitics playing a
big part, but this messianic voice which we are now driven by, is behind
oil, is actually something as spooky as a crusade and it seems to me leading
down a terrifying cul-the-sac.
It is quite impossible for people of the limited political sophistication of
westerners to mess with all the shape of Islam…to keep those countries in
being through our very-very simplistic westerners eyes.
TS-
…but wasn’t the war the simple result of 9/11, one attempt to remake the
world?
JLC-
The war was a “fabricate” response to 9/11; 7 persons out of 10 in U.S. are
still believing that Saddam Hussein have something to do with the twin
towers; that’s a monstrous failure of the forces of enlightenment,
particularly of the media.
The war was planned long before; Osama provide the excuse for it and
thereafter we may expecting other campaign in other places; the great ‘Axis
of evil’ must still be addressed in full.
I think that somehow all of this must be stop; I am not of the left or the
right, this is simply as best I can make it; the most detached judgment of
what happen to us and I am concerned about our security.
TS-
…but you “cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s
sophistries
to this colonialist adventure.”
(vedi l’articolo “The United States of America has gone mad” postato da me
in “John le Carre un anno fa”)
Indeed I do! And for me he is politically speaking bankrupt, derelict; I
think to have taken that decision when he toke it, to go to war with Bush,
with or without the U.N. approval, to come back and withhold that truth when
he was addressing the parliament and the British people, was an unforgivable
act.  In my view, it was an immoral thing to do, to attach that to his role
of minstrel for the American effort and at the same time giving away British
foreign policy and British defense policy.
TS-
How much choice did he have?
JLC-
I think every choice, I think the worse part of the story is ‘the tail could
have wagged the dog’…
TS-
…but he try, didn’t he?
JLC-
Certainly he didn’t take Bush to the wire!... ( nel senso di ‘non ha messo
Bush alle corde’).
TS-
...he toke him to the U.N.!
JLC-
He toke him to the U.N., kicking and screaming, but I think, if he actually
said, with the support of the foreign office, ‘this is gone to far, we
cannot even begin to try to bring Europe in this situation’, if Blair have
had the courage or the vision to do that…
TS-
You are saying that he didn’t believe of what he was saying to believe? He
was insincere…
JLC
I’m saying, he decides to go to war and he kept pretending the option was
over.
TS-
That’s even worse!...
JLC-
That’s I think is very bad indeed and I think that this charade of the
Hutton enquire overlook the fact that in principle Gilligan was right, the
BBC was right, the dossier was embellished…God bless! We need the BBC!
The representation is vastly important when you are selling your
intelligence to the ordinary man of the street; is how you emphasize it, how
you press it; any journalist knows that…presentation is part of the truth.
TS-
We talk about the cold war, the ambiguity of it; “Absolute friends” is still
a bitter and twisted world? What do you think the book is saying about you,
now that you have developed as a writer?
JLC-
I suppose it’s saying I’m an impatience old fool, I think it’s also says for
me that I don’t owe anything to anybody and I can write of politic without
bending on anybody.
I feel to be one of the few people on the world who could write of politics
that he can  back; nobody can dishonor me, nobody can condemn me.
TS-
You wrote about dirty war in the past that seems to have an awful necessity
about them, to fight war, a cold war, that you believe was right…
JLC-
That’s exactly the point, we were caught like flies in the Aspic, during the
cold war; at the moment we are taking choices and the wrong one, and we
should not have to be fighting in this war.
I think we should be buried, our generations, with a Kipling quote in the
coffin:
“Here lies a fool who tries to harass the East”
This is how I see the fate of the good men and women at the moment.
TS-
…Helpless, totally helpless…it’s how you see the human condition?
JLC-
I think because I found no political contest which suppresses my opinion,
that’s because I found no platform outside what my critics calls ‘the runt’
which enable me to express myself politically through channels.
TS-
…and you are not a kind of elector either, but when you say they are shaking
their shoulder and you march in numerous demonstrations…
JLC-
…thanks, I was there with my wife, we march and, even if I am sure neither
you nor I will agree on all what John Pilger is saying, but he said in a
documentary, and I agree, that in the world was United States and public
opposition; these are the two forces nowadays.
I think the U.S. after these huge demonstrations against the war in Iraq,
two millions here, two millions in Spain, will learn an important lesson,
that they cannot push around people and go away with it.
American like to be loved ! I’ve got good credential for it, nine
grandchildren and numberless of American friends.
Rather like the Jews retailer, Kressler, hiding in Dresden during the WW2
saying:
“I’m waiting for the true German to come back”
I fill the same for the American!
----------
vedi:
(1)-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/hutton/keyplayers/story/0,13842,1031810,00.htm
l
    -
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1019008,00.html
(2)-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/hutton/keyplayers/story/0,13842,1043936,00.htm
l

I think they have had a poor intelligence on Iraq,
E se lo dice lui...
*ROTFL*
-Stefano