Adeyinka Makinde Interviewed on The Mind Renewed: Can the British State Convict itself? (Part Two: “Rendition” & “The Troubles”)

TMR 160: Adeyinka Makinde: Can the British State Convict itself? (Part Two: “Rendition” & “The Troubles”)

PART 2

The second part of a wide-ranging nterview with Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed about my proposed paper, “Can the British State Convict itself?” This segment looked at Britain’s role in the American-led extraordinary rendition of Islamist terror suspects involving the former foreign secretary Jack Straw and the former head of counter-intelligence at MI6, Mark Allen and Britain’s counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland which was initiated in the early 1970s by the then Brigadier Frank Kitson.

Julian Charles: Hello everybody! Julian Charles here of The Mind Renewed dot Com coming to you as usual from the depths of the Lancashire countryside here in the UK, and very straightforwardly this week we’re going to be listening to the second part of my interview with the lawyer and university lecturer Adeyinka Makinde on the subject of his forthcoming academic paper, “Can the British State Convict Itself?” Now in the first part last week, we talked about then U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, and also we talk about the fact that a good deal of legal opinion considered that decision to have involved participation in a conspiracy to wage an aggressive war in contravention of established international criminal law. Well, in this second part now we go on to discuss Britain’s role in the U.S.-led so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’ of Islamist terror suspects and consider to what extent former U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was involved in that, and, indeed, the former head of counter-intelligence at MI6 Mark Allen. And we end with a look at Britain’s counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland which was initiated in the early 1970s by then Brigadier Frank Kitson. Of course, if you haven’t heard the first part, I do highly recommend that you go back and listen to that before listening to this part, not only because that discussion about the Iraq War and Tony Blair was very interesting in its own right, but because Adeyinka gives some very important background to all this about international and U.K. domestic law, which I think helps to frame the whole discussion, so please do go back and listen to that first part if you haven’t read it already. So as I say, in this part we move on to questions surrounding rendition and also the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and continue to ask that question, can the British state convict itself? O.K, so I’d like briefly to look at the other couple of examples. We took a long time –I thought this was going to be a very interesting in-depth conversation- I hope you don’t mind.

Adeyinka Makinde: Oh no, don’t worry.