Many of you may have seen the filthy lying Daily Mail story “Still think he isn’t a danger, Mr Blair? Fury at Labour government’s £1 million compensation for innocent Brit,” this Brit being Jamal al-Harith who following release from Guantanamo Bay and gaining a million quid in compensation subsequently went to Syria to fight for the islamic fascists of ISIS. A few people on my social network have and have vented their collective spleen on this seemingly scandalous payment, made by the last Labour government. They were livid, absolutely furious with Tony Blair and Labour, chucking our money – OUR MONEY!!! – at a terrorist. And because it was in the Daily Mail, it had to be true, didn’t it?
But it wasn’t true. The payment wasn’t made by the last Labour government: it was made by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition, following a vociferous campaign led by…er…the Daily Mail and strongly supported by the Conservative Party, whose biggest complaint when al-Harith was released from Guantanamo in 2004 was that it should have taken place long before.
I am not even going to try to get you to think objectively about Tony Blair, because to many people his name along is toxic because of Iraq. But this isn’t about Iraq. It’s about a national newspaper lying through it’s teeth (again) and displaying the most arrogant form of hypocrisy you could ever imagine.
Blair knows how he is regarded by many people and rarely feels the need to correct the lies told in his name, but this time he has and I don’t blame him.
To help set the record straight, here are Blair’s own words:
“I would not normally respond to daily stories about events which happened during my time in office but on this occasion I will do so, given the utter hypocrisy with which this story is being covered. The Daily Mail is running a story entitled “Still Think He Wasn’t A Danger, Mr Blair? Fury at Labour government’s £1m compensation for innocent Brit”, regarding news a former Guantanamo Bay detainee launched a suicide attack on behalf of ISIS this week.
It is correct that Jamal al-Harith was released from Guantanamo Bay at the request of the British Government in 2004. This followed a Parliamentary and massive media campaign, led by the Daily Mail, the very paper that is now supposedly so outraged at his release and strongly supported by the then Conservative Opposition. The Mail headline shortly after he was released after months of their campaigning was “Freedom At Last for Guantanamo Britons”. They then quoted with approval various human rights activists saying ‘clearly by what’s happened they’re not bad guys, they are entirely innocent.’
He was not paid compensation by my Government. The compensation was agreed in 2010 by the Conservative Government.
When his release was announced in very measured terms in 2004, pointing out the risks which remained with Guantanamo detainees, the Conservative MPs reacted by strongly criticising not the release but why it had taken so long.
The fact is that this was always a very difficult situation where any Government would have to balance proper concern for civil liberties with desire to protect our security, and we were likely to be attacked whatever course we took. The reason it did take a long time for their release was precisely the anxiety over their true affiliations.
Pressed again in 2004 on the remaining British detainees at Guantanamo I told the Liaison Committee: “The difficulty for us is this: we all know that we are faced with a significant terrorist threat. Let us be clear, all of these people…were picked up in circumstances where we believe, at the very least, there are issues that need to be resolved, let us say, in respect of those individuals. Certainly from what I have seen about those individual cases, I would need to be very, very clear that there was in place in this country a sufficient infrastructure and machinery to be able to protect our own security”.
But those who demanded their release should not be allowed to get away with now telling us that it is a scandal that it happened.”
