Ian Cobain’s history of British state involvement in torture, “Cruel Britannia” – appears to have been radically censored between the review copies and publication.
This from Peter Oborne’s review of Cruel Britannia :
Some heroes do emerge from this sordid story. There is Lt Col Nicholas Mercer, the British army lawyer, who warned against the Iraqi atrocities. He was frozen out of the army and is now an Anglican priest. And Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, was horrified by what he found out and lost his job.
While Nicholas Mercer’s own review has this:
At the same time, the few good men who do speak out know what fate will befall them. Craig Murray was drummed out of the Foreign Office for revealing Foreign Office connivance with torture evidence and Ben Griffin, the former SAS Trooper who spoke out against the UK treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, is now living under a Government injunction which prevents him from speaking any further. If he breaks the terms of the injunction he will go to jail. In Cruel Britannia you can lose your job or go to jail for revealing UK complicity in torture and rendition. Those who are complicit meanwhile remain untouched and untroubled. The only tap on the shoulder is the sword used to knight them.
Yet the book as put on sale contains not one single mention of me or my evidence, and the book’s chapters on British complicity with torture in the war on terror are extremely short and scanty, given Cobain’s genuine wide knowledge and expertise in the subject.
For a book to be radically changed between the review copies and general release is very unusual. What exactly has happened here?
UPDATE Comment from Ian Cobain below states that I was never in the book. I should be interested in any further comment he has as to why it is so thin on recent torture; there is a great deal of fascinating and directly relevant stuff that I know he knows that is not there.
Thatcrab calls me (or my comments) “disruptive”. Would he care to define that word in the context of a public blog? What and/or who is being “disrupted” and how in practice are my comments “disruptive” for the functioning of this blog?
Further to Mark Golding’s “The USUKIS backed Saudi terrorists in Syria made a grave error torturing Kurdish militia”, this now happens;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20968375
but don’t expect any more light to be shed on this than the al hilli murders, also in France.
I’m shocked Macky – deeply shocked and carrying the load.
The ‘bakery massacre’ was fiction.
http://syria360.wordpress.com/2012/12/25/the-halfaya-bakery-massacre/
This seems to describe the type of posting that we often see here;
http://consciouslifenews.com/paid-internet-shill-shadowy-groups-manipulate-internet-opinion-debate/1147073/
“carrying the load” !??
I hope you are not blaming yourself Mark, at least not without good course !!?
A coincidence there @ macky
11 Jan, 2013 – 10:44 am
I thought the same and posted it earlier on the latest thread! Certain names come to mind don’t they!
@Mary,
They sure do ! On read the guidelining tactics & strategies, they obvisously think that these are sufficent to fool people, but for most of these shills/trolls, they are so inept that as soon as they try engaging in them, they give themselves away; they can’t win eitherway, because even if they do actually engage in real debating, they soon realise why they have to resort to trolling again.
Ah, the soul sisters Macky and Mary.
It speaks volumes about these two that they cannot conceive that anyone could possibly disagree with them or point out the illogicalites, errors and the sheer ill will so often present in their comments, and so they call these anyones shills or trolls.
A mindset which is both slightly sinister and buffoonish (although not at all surprising) and enough to make one view any of the postitions taken by these two maestri with extreme caution.
I should have added that it’s not really important that this is Macky’s and Mary’s mindset because they themselves are unimportant; they are just fairly marginal – and powerless – characters spending a lot of time gassing away on a blog. And what’s a blog at the end of the day? What IS worrying is that there are a fair number of people in positions of real power (including future Labour cabinet ministers) who have the same mindset.
Appropiate advice from Rhisiart Gwilym c/f ML;
“As soon as regular posters have begun to say that they suspect that we have visiting shill, call him or her, and then begin shouting ‘DR.DADE people!’:
Don’t Read. Don’t Answer. Don’t Engage.
At all! And keep saying that that’s what you’re doing on each thread where they post. Cuts their balls off quicker than anything, and makes them scarper. As has happened with our recent visitors, hasn’t it?
OK, it’s fair to say that you have to give them enough rope; and fair too to tell them that that’s what you’re doing, to see whether they switch to honest discussion and argument, or not. But once sussed: DR.DADE! And keep up the constant shouts of warning to other readers. Works!”
Won’t work, Macky, because you (still) haven’t understood what this is about. When I point out the idiocies – or bad faith – in someone’s post, I’m not doing it to get the poster to respond (or even to reform – because they are probably too stupid to realise that they’ve just been stupid), not am I doing it to engage others in the discussion.
I’m doing it so that the general readership will – I hope – get the point, recognise the idiocy or bad faith in the post I’m commenting on, and draw his or her own conclusions. And they will read my post, you know, because there’s no way for you to stop them (much as you great democrats would like to).
Mission accomplished!
Hubbubcook your compositions amount to idiocy and bad faith, from frequent nonsensical attacks one of the blogs most well appreciated commenters, flooding of threads at intresting times, the preposterous pedantry of spelling and grammar which you arrived with and often resort to, and the bitchy jibes you let off several or dozens of times a week here. Imo, this is only tolerated (an exception to Jons normal moderation advice) because you are so obviously doing it with no concern for anything, except the need for work. You may as well be sending your work in here for the record than somewhere else. But recently the amount of dross you have been posting is so great, it is probably threatening to trip even the old spam filter.
I suspect my posts are tolerated by the moderator because the moderator is more intelligent than you and your ilk and can recognise the value of holding posters to acclount both for what they say and how they say it.