For the last ten years we have suffered media hysteria at the very mention of a bomb plot. The live news networks have been devoted for whole days and weeks, and the front pages monopolised, by a whole series of alleged bomb plots, even though in the large majority of cases there turned out not [...]

Any last pretence that Obama is substantively different from Bush was abandoned yesterday when Obama signed an executive order providing for indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, which will not close. He has also abandoned the idea of giving detainees a reasonable process in civilian courts, and instead is resuming the kangaroo “Military tribunals”. About [...]

There is a really very high quality dialogue going on in the comments section on yesterday’s post Diplomacy, Dictatorship and the Uses of Torture.

Contrary to the false reports disseminated by government agencies, there were no detonators in the toner bombs. They would therefore almost certainly have failed to go off, just like the self gonad immolating bomber. As for the weird insistence by the government that the bombs were designed to go off on the plane, I just [...]

There is a major profile of me in the latest Der Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,724471,00.html It is slightly overdrawn in its desire to paint a contrast between Ambassador Neuen and I, but is not unfair. Where it is wrong is its easy acceptance of the false dichotomy: is it better to suck up to a dictator and [...]

Somebody posted two parcel bombs. Grave threat to western civilisation. Our basic principles are at stake. They hate our freedoms. Biggest threat since World War 2. Islam incompatible with democracy. Yemen is the new Afghanistan. Eternal vigilance needed. More tanks required at airports. Fighter plane escort for passenger planes is a rational answer to parcel [...]

Hmmm. Not only did the Saudi secret service have the precise details of the bomb packages, the female alleged terrorist in Sanaa gave her phone number to the courier company. As all ultra dangerous highly trained al-Qaidah operatives are obviously taught to do. Meanwhile David Cameron ups the 9/11 hype by saying the bombs might [...]

Let us assume for a moment that the parcel bombs sent to Jewish targets in Chicago were viable devices and this was a real attack by anti-Jewish, and probably Islamic, terrorists. There are other possible explanations, but it is not improbable this was a real attempted attack. We are looking at low level, workaday terrorism. [...]

Nothing has changed. Under the Lib/Con coalition, MI6 continue to receive intelligence obtained through torture abroad, and Lib Dem ministers will be seeing intelligence obtained from hellish torture chambers in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and numerous other capitals. That was plain from yesterday’s speech by MI6 head John Sawers – despite the near unanimous [...]

This is a really weird cut from AFP of snippets of an interview I did with them today on the torture inquiry.

Finally David Cameron has announced that there will be an inquiry into British government complicity in torture. It will not start until a number of civil and criminal proceedings by individuals who claim they have been tortured have been resolved – which David Cameron appears to believe will be later this year, but we can’t [...]

This is Linda Duffield’s take on the vexed moral question on whether or not it can be justifiable to boil somebody alive to obtain information from them: There were difficult ethical and moral issues involved and at times difficult judgements had to be made weighing one clutch of “moral issues” against another. It was not [...]

This is the letter I wrote to William Hague, via my local MP Angela Bray, on 24 May. I was not going to publish it until I received Hague’s reply, but as he has not replied after six weeks… I did receive almost immediately from Angela Bray a copy of the very fair letter with [...]

This is perhaps the best of eleven analyses I have found so far on major US blogs of the new material I recently posted proving a UK ministerial policy of torture. http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/07/01/torture-and-truth/ I have done numerous foreign press interviews in the last two days, including Liberation, Boston Globe and Der Spiegel. But I got the [...]

An FCO source warns me this morning that a vicious rearguard action is being fought within the FCO, to ensure that any government inquiry excludes my evidence and does not consider whether there was a policy of complicity with torture. Rather the security services wish it only to look at individual cases like Binyam Mohammed [...]

Another breathless day without a moment to blog, but I am delighted at the prospect of an inquiry into British government complicity with torture. I had already written to William Hague offering to give evidence to any such inquiry, and suggesting to him that it is essential that all evidence is taken under oath and [...]

Robert Fisk’s impeccable Arab sources strongly suspect, with good evidence, that Britain colluded in the murder in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. I have been working my own British sources since seeing Fisk’s article in February. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-britains-explanation-is-riddled-with-inconsistencies-its-time-to-come-clean-1902994.html This morning I can say that information has reached me that confirms that Fisk is right and these were [...]

I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act a heavily censored copy of one of my telegrams from Tashkent protesting at the use by the UK government of intelligence obtained under torture. Every British person should read this telegram and hang their head in the deepest of shame. This is the pitch blackness [...]

With support for the ludicrous occupation of Afghanistan flagging, government efforts to ramp up Islamophobia become ncreasingly febrile. Now we have the deeply unlovely taxpayer funded Quilliam Foundation http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/11/quilliam_founda.html being paid by Newsnight to produce a piece exposing the Islam Channel as a biased and unbalanced source of Islamic propaganda. It will be hitting our [...]

There is a good article in the Guardian by Vikram Dodd on Eliza Manningham Buller’s professed ignorance. Some kind people in the comments thread have pointed out that my testimony and documentary evidence directly contradicts Manningham Buller. Some commenters then bemoaned the fact that the Guardian no longer invites me to write on these issues, [...]