Nerve Gas in Salisbury, Drones in Syria: Is There a Moral Difference?

WRITTEN BY SIMON JENKINS ON 09 MARCH 2018. POSTED IN NEWS & COMMENT

The attempted murder of a former Russian spy is rightly condemned. Yet Britain advocates the execution of its own citizens in the Middle East. It’s sheer hypocrisy

"Both these sagas may fall into the category of small earthquake, not many dead. What is indefensible is the hypocrisy on the British side. Both are instances of the arrogance of power taking the law into its own hands."

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In 2015 a British student from Cardiff, Reyaad Khan, was killed in Syria by an RAF drone bomb, presumably “piloted” from Lincolnshire. A House of Commons report later accepted that he was “orchestrating and inciting” terrorist attacks in Britain, but could not discover how imminent the attacks were or the legal basis for his killing. His British associate, Junaid Hussain, was killed by an American drone. Two years later, Hussain’s widow, Sally Jones, and their 12-year-old son were similarly wiped out. No trial preceded these executions of British citizens on foreign soil. They died by executive action for being a threat to national security. If we assume someone in Moscow took the same view of Russian spy Sergei Skripal, what is the difference?

The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, implied this week that Britain was now a victim of Russian “acts of war”, notably cyber-attacks. He implied that if the Skripal case was traced to the Kremlin, he would “look again at sanctions”. He is right that the murder of anyone on a British street is terrible and, if sanctioned by a foreign power, is, in diplomatic jargon, “unacceptable”. But murder is a criminal act against individuals. It is silly to merge it into an act of war.

Khan and Hussain were apparently involved in much savagery in Syria and in plotting terrorism in Britain. Yet there was no indication that killing them was the sole way of preventing further crimes. Hussain’s wife appears to have been extremely unpleasant on social media. But Britain is not at war with Syria – any more than Russia is at war with Britain.

For governments to go about the world killing people without judicial process offends every international law, even if not much can be done about it. But for a British government to kill its own citizens without trial defies Magna Carta. When, in 2011, President Obama authorised the drone execution in Yemen of the US citizen and al-Qaida propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, it provoked outrage as an offence against American liberty. Obama claimed Awlaki “posed a continued and imminent threat to US persons or interests”. The result was years of legal dispute, the case championed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times, no less.

In Britain there was no outcry at the killings of Khan and the Hussains, just a mumble from the opposition. We were merely told that 21 passports had been revoked from unnamed Britons, presumably to leave them vulnerable to drone killing. This suggests the Home Office accepted that a passport ought to confer judicial protection. The absence of any legal debate of drones is a sure sign of a guilty Whitehall conscience.

Do such doubts appear at the defence ministry? In December the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, advocated the drone killing of “all” British citizens on the wrong side in Middle East wars. The implication is that UK citizens abroad cannot consider themselves immune from extrajudicial killing by their own government, should they meet with government disapproval. Does this include gangsters on the Costa Brava?

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http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/news-comment/2922-nerve-gas-in-salisbury-drones-in-syria-is-there-a-moral-difference