John le Carre's 'A Delicate Truth' - secret courts

[marjoramblues]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... n-le-carre

Didn't know about the book until I read Carre's recent article, excerpts:

'In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.

[Secret courts and compensation]

...A loyal British soldier sees his comrades being mown down by friendly fire? From now on, he will have to air his grievance in the secret courts. Compensation for the afflicted families? Maybe. But no apology or explanation. That's "policy" or, in plain English, you can't argue...

...The true reason for the existence of these gruesome secret courts, I suggest, beyond the desire to protect our state from embarrassment about the nature of our wrongdoing, is twofold: the disproportionate influence of the US/UK intelligence community on our democratic institutions, and the urgent need of our respective political establishments to import a Bush-style secret state to Britain. For Barack Obama, far from dismantling Bush's secret state when he took power, has diligently recrafted and extended it...

Does anyone remember how we got dragged into the Iraq war – apart obviously from the dodgy dossier composed with the complicity of MI6? We went to war on the strength of information supplied by two ingenious fabricators. One of them, aptly named Curveball, was a fast-talking Iraqi refugee flying on the seat of his pants who, assiduously cultivated by his German keepers, provided us with Saddam's nonexistent mobile bio-labs – the same illusory vehicles that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations with much panache and the help of the CIA's colourful visual aids. Remember "slam-dunk"? That was the happy phrase with which George Tenet, at that time director of the CIA, personally verified the fabricated intelligence to his president, George Bush...

...We're sliding back to where we started. We're either with them or we're with the terrorists...

..."And those secret courts?" I hear you exclaim. "They're just ATMs for terrorists to sting Joe Public out of millions of pounds of compensation, for heaven's sake!"

But they're not. Joe Public is being stung all right – just not by the terrorists on this occasion, but by the people he pays to preserve his hard-won freedoms.

So, has anyone read 'A Delicate Truth' - it has mixed reviews - tempted to buy, given the link to recent events; but then...have I been manipulated?

[Skip]

I've not started reading it yet. Just borrowed it from a friend who finished it in two days. He says it's up to standard and a worthy final novel. He also reads LeCarre, not as fiction, but as history unfolding - as a more enjoyable substitute to news broadcasts.