Craig:

"I am astounded that, having obtained the first two documents under the Freedom of Information Act last November, no mainstream media outlet will mention them and refer to them, despite acres of reporting on whether Ministers had an intelligence from torture policy".

Is this not good reason for starting your own TV forum--a programme of current political events?

The present mafia crowd are not serving democracy, or human rights--and are getting away with cover-ups, due to a complicit media.

You may need some donations to start--if you do seriously start--include me for a donation. I'm sure shareholders will follow the success of such an obviously needed venture.

Dame Edna Everidge stated last night that she was astonished to find, AFTER all this time, that she was a man!

Reverse all the other statements by this shameless UK establishment, and you are somewhere in line with reality.

Craig,

It occurs to me that you are covered by a DA-notice. It would explain many failures by corporate media to mention you.

I was as flabbergasted hearing this barefaced announcements by her than you are.
Why is the establishment keeping this issue in the news, are they really that guilty that they have ignored their own methods?
Fact seems to be that everything you have achieved and nailed on to the mast is frozen out.
The media is playing their electioneering games and on the issue of torture there is even less than a fagpaper of difference between all of them so it looks like.

John's idea is not bad and with digital technology this could be done, no doubt somebody on here would be able to give a ball point figure of costs.
What would be the biggest hurdle is that every last fibre left in this rotten system would oppose the idea and start throwing all sorts of hurdles in the way.
How about using a more liberal country such as Holland to set it up?, getting a company like ENDEMOl interested in producing a pilot, but have the studio here and do the programme here, studio's are struggling, at least here in Norwich.

The mainstream, corporate, media, are not "free" to just report anything they like for whatever reason. What is left out is often more interesting than what's left in, for example Craig's torture evidence.

It doesn't take much effort to "kill" unfortunate information, that undermines the government's carefully constructed facade, just a few phone calls pointing out the national security implications of publication of "secret" information.

Of course the system doesn't even need direct intervention, the elaborate filtering processes involved in selecting leading journalists and editors, exclude those individuals who don't exhibit due respect for our core democratic values, and respect for vested interests and power. People learn what's expected of them, if they seriously wish to succeed in their careers. Access to success can be removed just as quickly as it can be taken away. The "is he one of us" rule.

"Well, she would say that, wouldn't she ?"

Your piece has been linked on Medialens Craig. The facts are both shocking and outrageous. The barbarians are certainly in power.

I read this yesterday on Medialens and I found that I was barely able to read the details of waterboarding.

We don't torture we're a civilised nation
Posted by Hidari on March 10, 2010, 7:57 am

'Recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice... was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.'

http://www.salon.com/news/torture/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/03/09/waterboarding_for_dummies

(Headline, of course, a reference to this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO3xKGT4ucE)

We all know we are censored, but it is still amusing to read Larry from US, peeing himself because stuff that has been censored is seeing the light of day.
writerman, please don't tell us we have been misinformed. It's like asking someone who's been electric shock therapied if they thought the treatment had worked.

Once again, the scandal for me isn't only that the Dame should emerge from retirement to spin the lie that knowledge of the torture policy (& hence the responsibility for collusion) didn't go to the very top, it's that there should be so little challenge to her obvious lies by the media.

BBC Radio 4's "security correspondent" Gordon Carrera cannot have a defence that he is ignorant of the documents you have obtained & publicised; if he is then he shouldn't be holding that job. Therefore we must surmise that he is deliberately not broadcasting what he knows as part of a joined up attempt to get the Dame Elizas and Jack Straws of the world off the hook for what they know could be an arrest warrant & indictment awaiting them on any trip abroad to a country signed up to the Intermational War Crimes tribunal.

Sorry, forgot the link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8559000/8559118.stm

I haven't even looked, but should I assume the BBC web team is censoring any posts picking up this issue on the BBC website?

I looked at her on the screen and (not recognising her immediately) thought, "Who is this idiot?"

Clear as day now.

I look back at my teens and twenties and remember how I took everything I heard on the News as truthful and accurate. Have things got vastly worse, or were they always like this?

No, my bad, I saw her reported.
The one I didn't recognise when I saw her speaking was Baroness Butler-Sloss. Not Baroness Manningham Buller. They all look the same to me (j/k!).

I hadn't noticed that Dame E-liar has now been ennobled by Labour to become Baroness Porkypie.

So she gets a seat for life in the House of Lords. No wonder she's anxious to spin a tale to explain away the bloodstains all over her ermine.

Craig's previous post was "the election: what's the point?". After all the fun & games, on 7 May, Lady Porky will still have a seat for life in our legislature, unembarrassed by any action by the media or Amnesty International.

A democracy with a free media? My fucking arse.

Bercow is trying hard to quell the election fever rowdiness going on in PMQ now. He is calling Order Order endlessly. He might just as well be shouting Ordure Ordure.

http://www.annaraccoon.com/politics/calling-the-blind-mans-bluff-with-bercow/

"it is still amusing to read Larry from US, peeing himself because stuff that has been censored is seeing the light of day"

Was that on this thread? Can't find it. Has Craig censored it?

I fear Craig has been too kind in his creative variation of her name. Eliza Manningham Bullshitter?

mary, are you sure it was not an expression of disgust at the stench that eminates through the House, maybe you misheard him saying 'odour,odour'?

Quite Ingo. Augean stables. A shovel and wheelbarrow is urgently needed.

As a woman I never understand how other women like these monsters E M-B and Pauline Neville-Jones, and others, make this dirty business their life's work. A woman naturally creates life and nurtures the children. These women are involved in doing the very opposite.

I see that E M-B (do they all have double barrelled names?) had a strange father, nicknamed Bullying-Manners by Bernard Levin. All chips off the old block and products of our rotten class system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Manningham-Buller,_1st_Viscount_Dilhorne

someone should give her a taste of some torture then she might start tellling the truth or waking up

Well indeed.

The plot is thickening and the guilty are panicking to cover their guilt.

Most interesting.

O dear, O dear

Every time chemical Ali was accused of something he said 'Alhamdulillah' i.e. yes, thank God, I did it.

If this lot were brought to trial, they would say the same because they really believe that working for the narrow interests of the UK, and ignoring the sufferings of all others, is a worthy cause.

This level of lying, self-justification and lack of remorse proves that they are the same as the dictator they deposed in Iraq. No they have not murdered thousands of their critics, but they will go on to murder thousands of others in the future because the UK public still take their word on trust.

Same as chemical Ali's conscience was clean about murdering Shi'a and Kurds, these establishment bastards' consciences are clean about the murder and torture of foreigners.

Was it the same jinns that told Blair and Bush to invade Iraq, as told the Yorkshire Ripper to murder prostitutes?
They have been subjected to the same de-humanising processes in their training as the worst regimes. Indeed OUR trainers taught the dictators' training staff.

When we put Doom Eliza on the scaffold, she has the excuse that her humanity was destroyed in her training. Comfort for her before her head is cut off.

Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, Viscount Dilhorne, Lord High Chancellor. Gilbert and Sullivan would have had a field day. All that's needed is a Lord High Executioner.

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral ...

Most people believe what they read in the newspapers, just as much as they believe what they see in the news on TV. Anyone who proposes an alternative analysis of some real event, is dismissed as a nutter or a wild conspiracy theorist, to be mentally bracketed within the cult of David Icke.

The Independent piece is a very heavy piece of propaganda. The strong message is not about "US hid torture tactics from UK", but is subtley contained within, and mentally consumed without any critical reasoning, passing the neural taste buds without question.

"Guantanamo Bay", "9/11 attacks", "provided his captors with useful intelligence", "She was surprised at the extent of the information coming"...

The message is basically, that he did 9/11 and he was held in Guantanamo Bay because he was an evil terrorist, and the security services were completely justified in the action they took, because of all the information it revealed, to save us from even more dastardly attacks from these incredibly evil people.

So "Carry on Torturing. You Know it Makes Sense".

Whilst most of the audience just want the torture to be followed by execution, and think the authorities are soft for releasing him. It never occurs to them that they have probably tortured someone who is completely innocent.

The Politicians are thus condemned for being too soft. The Audience wants More Torture, More Executions, More Blood.

Check out the film 1984.

The Independent is Disgraceful in its Complicity.

Tony

"The plot is thickening and the guilty are panicking to cover their guilt."

Craig will be vindicated. Watch things roll.

"She was surprised at the extent of the information coming from Mr Mohamed as Britain's previous experience of questioning terrorism suspects during the Troubles in Northern Ireland was that they remained silent."

Bullshit. Is that to cover the use of water-torture there too? Because I have no doubt that they spoke, and told many things. Nobody's superhuman. Nobody's immune to torture. The IRA were just men and women, not super-demons.

"British Army officers subjected prisoners in Northern Ireland to controversial "waterboarding" interrogation techniques during the 1970s, it has been reported."

http://tinyurl.com/ych937p

Funnily enough, the university which gave birth and is home to The Mile End Group is Harold Pinter's old college, Queen Mary University.

It's come a long way since then, loads of government funding its development.

Not too many pintoresque characters as speakers. They seem mostly to come from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

What is achieved by these evil acts? Is it the adrenolin of lying, like my ex-wife?
Is it revenge for a damaged childhood? Is it the thrill of legal criminality? Is it camouflage for the rest of the FCO Chilcot liars? To let us quickly lose focus on the load of lying tripe ALL the other diplomats and politicians at Chilcot have said?
Yes, all of these things, but worst of all they drag the good name of the UK and ourselves through their own disgrace.

Several reports have noted that the British Army (in Iraq. I haven't noticed them re: Afghanistan yet) are still doing the things they promised the ?European Court of Human Rights? they'd never do again, back in the '70s. (I think that's who it went to, can't remember exactly). I haven't noticed any reports that the court plans to follow it up.

Craig,

You keep serving up these documents as if they prove your case. Read them. They don't.

Where in those records or otherwise are the statements supporting your claim that "...I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law"?

I can't see them. Can anyone else?

And (to repeat) when the specific issue you raised (namely that HMG's possession of material known or suspected to have come from torture ipso facto amounted to 'complicity' in torture under the Convention) went to the House of Lords, the Law Lords flatly rejected your view.

Time to move on?

Charles

@ Charles Crawford

The complicity arises in MI5 officers being present at and providing questions in the knowledge that answers will be extracted under torture.

Neither the Law Lords nor the Supreme Court have looked at this new evidence, but it's clear that three very senior judges have done so.

Do you remember what they said?

No wonder you want to move on.

There's been quite a desperate media blitz on this today.

The arguments presented are quite interesting.

It's either the ticking timebomb defence or the "we didn't know" defence.

Unsurprisingly, neither works.

@ Charles Crawford

Is that a "let's move on" in the same sense Tony Blair said it when pressed on where Iraq's non-exitent WMD were?

Or a "lets' move on" because this is becoming mightily uncomfortable/embarrassing for us?

Either way it's a piss poor statement.

Mind you,having visited your blog i must say it doesnt surprise me.Your self-aggrandising careerist pomposity is quite breathtaking.

Charles Crawford: I am not sure whether you are arguing:

1) HMG was not knowingly receiving any information obtained from torture, and these documents report a completely hypothetical discussion as whether it would be legal.

or

2) HMG _was_ knowingly receiving information obtained under torture, and it is not illegal under international law to do so.

Please would you clarify, thanks.

I suspect Charles Crawford is arguing for an increase in pension or knighthood or both.

By the time this business is over though, the new regime will more likely be hoping Craig will accept a knighthood.

Poor Charles.

Thank you for that piece, Tony.

Charles,

I am with Cide on this one. What do you think those documents do show? Presumably they do have some point, or the various authors would not have created them. What do you think it was that Jack Straw was agreeing with?

Craig

Craig,

Laughing Out Loud.

dreoilin,

That piece always makes me cry.

I realise I can't say any more.

Tony

The SS? The SIS? Oh, in essence, they're just a bunch of killers and/ or facilitators of killers. Agents of imperialism. The enemy.

Craig..

Interesting thread about Manninham-Buller's speech in todays Grauniad.I post as Dreadmorayeel and have referenced your blog there,and its extreme relevance to the article.

However,Matt Seaton of said aprish seems to think you're in dispute or vexed with the Gruaniad hence wont play media-ball.I have expressed my doubts about this.

Maybe you should contact him to clarify?

Regards

And here we have the new young footsoldiers to come, the rosy cheeked political proffessionals. Wonder whether MS. Cloe Smith was part of this Tory mating club for extremists.

Anybody knows some more of this latest incarnation of the Mussolini appreciation society?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/06/tory-madrasa-young-britons-foundation

Off topic but there is a big mob (including the likes of the EDL) assembling at a planning meeting in Camberley. There is a proposal to demolish a (listed?) Victorian school building that is disused and to replace it with a mosque including two minarets.

It is very near the boundary of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.

Us racist? Nous?

I do not envy the planning committee their task.

Charles Crawfull

It really is just a game for you, isn't it?
What's the weight difference between a tonne of steel and a tonne of feathers?
You think that if there was the smallest chance a UK service person was going to be tortured, as for example when they were encarcerated in Basra, commandos should be instantly despatched , as they were, to blow out the side wall of the prison. But it doesn't matter how many wogs rot in the torture cells.

Therefore, the implication that UK take intelligence from the CIA which has been derived from torture, has no significance to you. You are a disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist. Your kind have destroyed the pride of the United Kingdom after Nazism was defeated by our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. You and your peers are incapable of any strategy except lying. You have shredded the international justice embedded in the Geneva Convention.

If you had the slightest understanding of the implications of your snotty drivel, you would be looking for a new identity in South America like your Nazi predecessors.

Manningham-Butler,according to one of her critics who spoke to Gordon Thomas for the latter's Inside British Intelligence book from last year,

"has an imperious way of looking down her nose when someone annoys her.Rebuke delivered,she sails away like a galleon in full sale(12)."

Consider youself rebuked Mr Murray!

In his unduly sympathetic portrait Thomas notes a "high point" in Butler's career was when she led the MI5 investigation of the Lockerbie Bombing.

That's the outrage many believe saw a passenger airliner being shot out of the sky though the official line was that Libyan secret agents had wired up an explosive transistor radio!

At any rate most investigators have pinpointed the likelihood of Lockerbie being a CIA inside job.

Strange it is then that the year after her resounding success in uncovering the true perpetrators of Lockerbie Butler was posted to Washington as MI5 liason officer with the CIA and FBI during the first Gulf War.Butler was known to be an admirer of the former outfit.

Butler once likened Al Qaeda to "a piece of crochet.It is complex,interwoven and inpenetrable.You think you have one bit of it,then suddenly the whole thing unravels in your hand(66)."

In the light of her frankly absurd denials of London's complicity in US torture we might find these words somewhat incriminating.

Just which bit did the torturers watch unravel in their hands?

"DUCK AND DODGE" - NAME OF THE LAW FIRM WILLNG TO TAKE OVER THE CASE:-

The problematic brief:-

"There's been quite a desperate media blitz on this today.

The arguments presented are quite interesting.

It's either the ticking timebomb defence or the "we didn't know" defence.

Unsurprisingly, neither works."

ADVICE - " DUCK AND DODGE"!

Charles Crawford...the shallow,self-interested man's coward and toady.

@ Larry form St Louis

Is it overtime yet Daddy huh?

Ah, our little troll is back!

Larry you've ducked the question too often now. Why won't you just tell us why you hate America so much?

Larry , thanks for pointing out the conspiracy theorist nature of this blog. Good work, you can log off now, fill in your time sheet and head home, your works done, again.

Also, I think its great LARRY, that what it IS you do is point out lies against the C.I.A.

After failing to put my name, I decided to copy and paste and sign my name to a repeat of the message. But the U on my keyboard is sticking so it ended up as 'Tits'. ha ha ha ha . Still Larry deserves to have a focus on his messages.
You deleted my last direct accusation against Larry , and thats fine , but of course the nature of his work is to disrupt, cause arguments and accuse the blog of being full of crazy conspiracy theorists whilst pretending to be just a normal blogger. I won't mention it again and will just ignore him from now on. But he really does set off warning signs to me and with the background of your work I think its a fairly natural assumption based on his words.

Titus,

Didn't you see what Craig's belief is? I'm an agent of New Labour!

Re Camberly Mosque -

I watched the webcast of the planning meeting. The original permissions for the demolition of the school and the building of a mosque were rescinded.

Much mealy mouthed 'reasoning' - lack of car park spaces, we love our Victorian school (disused for 15 years incidentally), the mosque dome 5 metres higher than the tower, the excessive height of the minarets, conservation area, blah blah. Any councillor supporting the mosque was jeered at and any one opposing was given applause by the audience in the Camberley Theatre.

The very weedy and awful Gove is the local MP.

http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/s/2065639_mp_voices_opposition_to_camberley_mosque

Re the first post by John.

The U.S. has Pacific Radio and, in particular, Democracy Now! (www.democracynow.org). John's right. We need a Democracy UK!.

Craig

Disgraceful, immoral, coward and Nazi toady! A self-aggrandizing pompous careerist!

Careerist?

I have responded at some length to you and some of your vociferous readers at my own site:

http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/more-on-complicity-in-torture

Regards,

Charles

Like Charles Crawford, I have some sympathy for Eliza Manningham-Buller, which I expressed recently in a comment in The Independent titled -- “WHY SHOULD MI5 BE MORE HONEST THAN OUR HUMAN RIGHTS INDUSTRY?” Its URL is:

http://russell46.livejournal.com/1112.html

The comment sympathizes with Eliza Manningham-Buller’s difficult position, pointing out that Torture is usually divided into two categories – fashionable torture, which our human rights industry slavers over with righteous indignation, and unfashionable torture which it ignores completely.

Indeed it is unusual to find our human rights industry targeting our own intelligence services – MI5/6 – at all. It must be very galling for MI5 to find that a torture (water boarding) that was once fashionable, has now become unfashionable so that items where the press and human rights industry once freely adopted "reservatio mentalis" (closing ones mind to), and didn't report on, have now become open for discussion.

There seem to be a lot of people in the UK who are desperate to believe rubbish about how anything that was done wrong was done only by the Americans, not the British. In the US many Americans try to pretend it was the British that were to blame. Karl Rove recently claimed Bush would never have invaded Iraq if he'd known there were no WMDs, but that Blair would have.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-would-not-have-invaded-had-he-known-about-wmd-1916485.html

On both sides of the Atlantic the ridiculous claims about torture having been down to "a lack of training" or a "few bad apples" keep being repeated, when it's been established that torture was standard procedure in Iraq and Afghanistan - and may well still be for all we know, because the formal rules provided to the press and public are not the same ones soldiers are supplied with.

nice post. thanks.

On both sides of the Atlantic the ridiculous claims about torture having been down to "a lack of training" or a "few bad apples" keep being repeated, when it's been established that torture was standard procedure in Iraq and Afghanistan - and may well still be for all we know, because the formal rules provided to the press and public are not the same ones soldiers are supplied with.

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