That is of course the obvious verdict from the evidence. Were it not so, the disgraceful Wright would not have needed to serve the police by so instructing.

Wright went on to give a completely one-sided summation of the evidence, restating police evidence and ignoring the evidence of many close eye-witnesses who contradicted it. In perhaps the most extraordinary passage in a summation in recent English legal history, he went on to justify the occasions where the police killers were caught obviously lying:

However, Wright added, even if the jury found the officers had lied, they would not be able to blame them for the death. "Many people tell lies for a variety of reasons … [including] to mitigate the impact of what might be a … tragic mistake," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/02/menezes-police-inquest

Read that again.

However, Wright added, even if the jury found the officers had lied, they would not be able to blame them for the death. "Many people tell lies for a variety of reasons … [including] to mitigate the impact of what might be a … tragic mistake," he said.

Incredible, isn't it? So it is fine to shoot a completely innocent man repeatedly in the head, and lie about it in Court, because you are only trying to "mitigate the impact".

What?

Read it again.

However, Wright added, even if the jury found the officers had lied, they would not be able to blame them for the death. "Many people tell lies for a variety of reasons … [including] to mitigate the impact of what might be a … tragic mistake," he said.

I still can't believe the disgraceful old bastard said it.

I still do believe that we will come to recover from the terrible poison of the New Labour years, and return to being a liberal society. We will look back at all this as Americans now look back at McCarthyism, with horror and shame. And when historians write the history of these times, there will be a special footnote devoted to the infamous, the disgraceful, the appalling Sir Michael Wright.

There is a place reserved for Sir Michael in the deepest, blackest, hottest corner of Hell. He has already had much more time on this Earth than was allowed to poor Jean Charles De Menezes, who Sir Michael wishes us to believe was quite lawfully blown away by the police.

Let Sir Michael take his own good time to reach Hell. I certainly do not wish anyone to shoot him in the head while he is sitting peacefully on the Tube. But if they did, I certainly hope they deploy the defence "He was asking for it: he stood up". And I certainly hope the judge agrees, and the words filter down to tease Sir Michael in his eternal torment.

I was reminded this morning of one of Mill's more mischievous quotes:
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative".
With a small c, of course, that description embraces most of New Labour. But Mill also meant it with a large C, and he dubbed the Conservatives "The stupid party".

What reminded me of this was David Davis being interviewed this morning. I have come to have a real respect for Mr Davis and believe his concern for liberty to be genuine. He made a number of good points on the Damian Green affair.

But just before Davis had been introduced, Sky News had announced that the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police, Mr Ian Johnston CBE had been appointed by the Metropolitan Police to carry out an "independent" inquiry into the handling of the Damien Green case, and that Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary, had put out a simultaneous statement welcoming the move.

The Sky commentators had said that this would "assuage Tory concerns".

I thought, "No, the Tories are not that stupid."

Then along came David Davis and fell straight into the huge, naked elephant trap, welcoming Mr Johnston's appointment and looking forward to the results of his inquiry.

For God's sake, how many times? Legg, Hutton, Butler?

That would be an independent inquiry into the Metropolitan Police by Mr Ian Johnston, immediate past Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, would it?

Stupid doesn't cover it. The problem with the Tories is that they still trust what we might broadly call "the Establishment". They cannot get into their thick-boned skulls how far New Labour has politicised it and turned it into an instrument against the people.

Even now, they can't.

Anyway, here is a preview of Mr Johnston's report. You saw it here first:

The Metropolitan Police were investigating an allegation of a serious crime
They acted in a proper manner
They needed to search premises for evidence. Proeper permission was sought from the parliamentary authorities
Mr Green was suspected and rightfully arrested and detained
No Ministers were consulted on Mr Green's arrest; there was no political interference
Some junior police officers were guilty of minor faults. Mr Green was held an hour or two longer than necessary. One or two more police officers than necessary were deployed on searches.

Mr Johnston's terms of reference will exclude, and you will not see in his report, a log of all contacts between the Police and Ministers and between officials and Ministers discussing the case of Mr Green or his alleged source.

For the next one week, and when the matter is debated in the Commons, the government will refuse to comment pending the result of the "independent" investigation.

For God's sake, Tories, wake up and smell the coffee!!!!!!!!

Over to you, Iain Dale. Are you that stupid?

The most egregious example of "Misconduct in public office" in recent years was the preparation of the "Dirty Dossier" on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This compilation of lies was used to launch a disastrous war of aggression that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Let us test the alleged automaticity of police investigation, which Jacqui Smith claims had no political direction. Go to
https://online.met.police.uk/report.php
and report the promulgation of the "Dirty Dossier" as a crime of misconduct in public office. Name Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Alistair Campbell, John Scarlett, John Kerr, Peter Ricketts, Richard Stagg and John Williams as the offenders (take my word for it as someone who was in the FCO's Senior Management Structure of the time, they are the main offenders).

I expect the Met's response will show the extent to which they are the jackbooted and armed wing of NuLabour, rather than a body interested in actual misconduct in public office.

You have to leave your name and address, but if you have been browsing this website from home or work you are pretty certainly on a list already.

I have sent my report in. Apparently I should hear from a police officer within 72 hours. Perhaps the Nulab anti-terror squad may move even faster!

I would like to think this was a slip of the tongue, but unfortunately it is rather an indication of the fundamental belief system of the Eurocrats. In my professional career I attended many conferences with diplomats and others from EU states, at which the role of "the elite" in forwarding "the European project" was a key theme. On scores of occasions I have heard it propounded that "the elites" initiated "the European project" and would always be its drivers. The contempt for the views of the Irish people shown in attempts to enforce Lisbon is a manifestation of a deep-seated anti-democratic tendency.

The irony is that I am a firm supporter of the EU. I believe European unity to be one of the noblest causes of my lifetime, I think free movement of people and trade is wonderful. I think we should join the Euro immediately. But I wish to see a democratic EU, with directly elected representatives (ie not fatguts Barroso) in the lead and subsidiarity genuinely applied.

The EU's self-appointed "elite" are not the drivers of the process; by engendering well-deserved public hostility on a continual basis, they are a brake on the process. Doubtless UKIP are today grateful for the existence of Mr Barroso.

Jack Straw denied directly to the BBC in the documentary "The Ambassador's Last Stand", and denied to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, that he had any part in the false accusations laid against me or in my removal as Ambassador for raising human rights concerns. Yet, as detailed in Murder in Samarkand, I have obtained documents in Jack Straw's own handwriting, directing the process, and he held at least three meetings with Sir John Kerr to organise it.

On being sacked, I very openly leaked a number of government documents concerning UK policy, the use of torture material by our intelligence services, and the government's attempts to frame me. Most of these documents were classified more highly than the documents leaked to Damian Green, like this one for example:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Declaration.pdf

Yet when I leaked a number of highly classified documents, openly on the internet with my name and address, did the police come knocking at my door? No, they did not. They consulted Home Secretary John Reid, who consulted Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. They concluded that they should seek to kill the story, and not generate publicity by arresting me.

Does anybody really believe that Ministers decided whether someone as obscure as I should be arrested, but were not consulted on whether Damian Green should be arrested?

Jack Straw is a serial liar. Do not believe him.

As her lawyer said in court "The measures used by Thames Valley Police against Sally Murrer are familiar in authoritarian states where the police are used to discourage the media from reporting on issues of public interest using confidential sources".

That is absolutely true. The fact that Sally has been cleared in Court after a defence based on the European Convention of Human Rights is a small fightback for liberty. But her unnecessarily brutal treatment by the police (what possible reason can there be for strip-searching a journalist?), and her ordeal have already done that totalitarian work. She has announced she no longer has the confidence to continue journalism.

The extraordinary thing is the way that the media have failed to give Damian Green, let alone Sally Murrer, the prominence they deserve. Media inattention to startling human rights abuses is of course another characterisic of a police state. Indeed we have been treated to an egregious BBC commentator telling us that, after the Bombay incident, the Indian people are demanding "More stringent anti-terror laws and more powerful anti-terror police, as we have in the UK".

Happily, the blogosphere reflects the concern of the educated public much better than the once free media. And the isolation of the Nu-Lab hacks and trolls on these issues is startling.

When Tony Blair halted the process of law in the BAE corruption case over arms exports to Saudi Arabia, I commented that we had abandoned the principle that no man, however high, is above the law - a principle which we had chopped off Charles I's head to entrench.

Charles I famously failed to arrest opposition MPs when he arrived at the House of Commons with his soldiers to be defied by the Speaker and find that, as he observed, "The birds have flown". That attempt was critical in precipitating the country into civil war.

The good citizenry of London and Cambridge will not be grabbing their pikes and muskets today; but they should. The arrest of Damian Green for doing his job of opposing the executive is a step too far in rolling back centuries of democratic achievement. The pretext is the excessive desire of this government to keep all public information secret, and prevent the taxpayer from finding out what has been done in their name and at their expense. This is the most secretive, as well as the most authoritarian, government of the modern era.

I can comment with more authority than most in saying that civil servants now have a duty to leak: the official narrative is now so often far from the truth across the whole field of government, that if civil servants do not leak there can be no informed democratic debate. To arrest an opposition MP for finding out what is really happening is a grim, grim move.

But this time Westerners are involved, so there is far more media attention than when it is "Only Indians".

This is yet another illustration that the "War on Terror" has been entirely counter-productive and has made the World a much more dangerous place for the very Westerners it was supposed to protect. The apparent al-Qaida copycat motivation of the attackers is a further sign that the "War on Terror" threatens to destabilise not just Pakistan but the whole sub-continent.

William Dalrymple's excellent "The Last Moghul" details the religous tolerance of old India, and its systematic destruction by the British. These events must be seen in their context, not just of the hideous and violent blundering of Bush and Blair, but of four hundred years of history.

None of which excuses the stupidity of the acts of religiously motivated violence unfolding before us. I am sorry to be obliged to concede that the evidence is strong that we live in a global age of renewed irrationality, where religious impulses can easily be channeled to violence and hate. Important groups of Muslims, Jews, Christians and Hindus seem all prone to the infection. The Christians have commanded the most firepower to date. I do not in the least despise religous faith - it can lead to self-knowledge and to concern for societal good. But Richard Dawkins is quite right about its capacity for evil.

To put it bluntly, if Rashid Rauf was indeed killed by US action in Pakistan. then he was murdered. He was killed on no legal authority. US attacks into Pakistan and Syria (which Obama supports) have no legal basis. Rauf was a UK citizen. We do not have the death penalty. Does New Labour accept as a matter of policy that the US can simply murder British citizens abroad at will? The government must be pressed hard on this question.

If Rauf has been killed, the question arises as to why. He was the primary source for information on the famous so-called liquid bomb plot to blow up airlines, which sparked the greatest over-reaction of government measures in the entire debacle of the War on Terror. Ultimately 80% of those arrested in connection with the "Liquid bomb plot" were released without charge, and the jury found that, while a small group did have terrorist intentions, there was no organised plan or airline bomb plot.

That is extraordinary, but even more extraordinary is that the prime informant, the alleged major al-Qaida terrorist, Rashid Rauf, "escaped" from the custody of the Pakistani intelligence services and MI6, apparently by simply walking out of his cell.

Let us add to this the further strangenesss that Rauf had originally left the UK after a warrant was issued for his arrest as a suspect in the murder of his uncle, a death with no apparent political or terrorist motive. Yet the UK authorities failed to request his extradition from Pakistan when he was in custody there, even though they were involved in his interrogation, and he was still wanted for murder in the UK.

So if Rauf was murdered (and his family are denying his death) was it because he was a terror suspect, or because the intelligence agencies were covering their tracks? Was the reason that the UK government did not want to extradite him to testify in the UK, the same reason he had to be silenced by his murder?

I have for almost all my adult life eschewed the chemical regulation the medical industry has so kindly proffered, and in general although very unpleasant to me, I have managed through self-will to control the swings as they affect others. The exception is when something depressing happens anyway and an adverse swing reinforces it.

I was very scared that the Government would use this condition to try to explain away the events in Murder in Samarkand as a result of my condition. In fact the government did indeed try to do that, by contacting a number of news editors across the media to inform them helpfully that I had a history of mental illness. In fact it is true that my illness affected the events in Murder in Samarkand, but only in the very limited sense that when they chose to attack me with numerous false accusations, the resulting depression hit me harder than it might have another. My employers, of course, were well aware that would happen.

As other bipolar sufferers, my principal symptom was in general the alternation of periods of unusual high energy with perods of lethargy. In consequence occasionally routine work would be a bit late. That was used as the basis of one of the accusations against me. It was of course more than balanced by longer periods of huge energy and creativity.

Anyway, enough of the past. I was depressed lately partly by the problems over getting the book published, but mostly by despair over the "Bailouts" in the US and UK. This incredible misuse of taxpayers' money represents the biggest net redistribution of funds from the poor to the rich in all of human history. The lack of real analysis in any of the media is what plunged me in to gloom so deep it was not even much relieved by the death of Jeorg Haider. Incidentally a friend who is a retired member of MI6 texted me that Mossad killed Haider. I replied it was about time they did something useful.

Talking of people the World would be better off without, I see that Nathaniel Rothschild, escort of Gulnara Karimova,
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/07/parasite_news.html
is in the news. The deeply sad thing about this is that Rothschild, Karimov, Osborne, Mandelson et al inhabit the same sleazy space. But I would certainly believe Osborne over Rothschild. God made Nathaniel Rothschild that size to be a convenient butt-plug for Russian and Uzbek oligarchs.

I have no fear of libel action myself as I am confident in the truth of what is after all the story of my own life. So we may need to cut out the publisher.

I would be grateful for any practical advice on other publishing options. For example, can you really make it into Waterstones and Amazon if you publish on Lulu? What options are there for electronic publishing that work? I am also likely to need help from someone with genuine expertise in formating for publication - I have looked at the instructions on PDF creation, page numbering, chapter headings etc on Lulu and its all way beyond my ability.

You can comment below or email me at craigjmurray@tiscali.co.uk.

Words fail me.

I must be going to wake up soon.

Blair presided over an unprecedented politicisation in which the police saw it as their job to wildly exaggerate the terrorist threat and actively support the attack on civil liberties. He presided over the disgraceful spreading of lies about Jean Charles de Menezes. And he is widely viewed within the Met as personally corrupt. There has been remarkably little coverage in the media for the allegations of his giving out contracts to his own connections. A formal investigation into this, currently in progress, is believed by many in the Met only to be chipping into the tip of an iceberg.

The sickening thing about the current turmoil is that there is a class of spiv which makes money on the movement whether the market goes up or down. So of the very many hundreds of billions of public money "made available to the markets" already around the world, several billion have already lodged in the pockets of these parasites, who feast on the labour of the poor.

Here is one. Paul Myners, Director of GLG Partners. GLG is a hedge fund (which is what ultra posh people call a bookies). GLG has made a massive killing from short-selling recently, including of Lloyds TSB and Bradford and Bingley.

Oh yes, one more thing. Myners is also a good friend of Gordon Brown, is a Labour Party donor and the chairman of the Guardian Media Group. The Guardian, you will have noticed, is very much cheerleading in favour of you and I funding from our shallow pockets massive bailouts that will hugely benefit companies like GLG and put yet more of our money into the pockets of creeps like Myners.

The Guardian is dependent on trust funds set up by the CP Scott Trust. This is why, for example, when the GMG papers lost £50 million in a year they could still give a £175,000 bonus to New Labour acolyte, best friend of the ultra-dodgy David Mills, and notorious nylon wig wearing Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=35177§ioncode=1

The interesting thing here is that the CP Scott Trust specifies that the Guardian must maintain the liberal values of its founder. Yet it has continued to support a government which the vast weight of liberal opinion in the UK believes to be the most authoritarian of modern times. This government has rolled back centuries of fundamental civil liberties and engaged in illegal war abroad while feeding lies to its own population. The Guardian still urges its readers to vote for Myners' and Rusbridger's pals. Rusbridger has of course been rewarded for this betrayal with a great many more than twenty pieces of silver.

I guess now I definitely still don't get invited to speak about my books at the Guardian Hay on Wye Book Festival.

I have tried this appeal before, but it seems to me there is a very strong case that the trustees for CP Scott have been acting ultra vires in supporting through their newspapers the most illiberal of governments. This really is worth testing in the courts. Are there no liberal lawyers out there willing to try it pro bono?

" Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed separately. Both Penfold and Spicer were interviewed under caution, as suspects for having broken the arms embargo.

Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without consulting the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold, Blair declared, was “a hero”. A dictatorship had been successfully overthrown and democracy restored. Penfold had “Done a superb job in trying to deal with the consequences of the military coup.” All this stuff about Security Council Resolutions and sanctions was “an overblown hoo-ha”.

I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the country was still starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of hindsight, this intervention points the way towards the disasters of his later years in office. It is extraordinarily wrong for a Prime Minister to declare that a man is a hero, when Customs had questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very matter the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair’s belief that his judgement stood above the law of the land, something that was to occur again on a much bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud Office investigation into British Aerospace’s foreign bribes. But of course Blair's contempt for UN security council resolutions on the arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy by invasion could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently ignoring the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in charge of little more than Freetown.

In the FCO we were astonished by Blair’s intervention, and deeply puzzled. Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin Cook’s views. Who was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect that the UN and the law were unimportant? For most of us, this was the very first indication we had of how deep a hold neo-con thinking and military interests had on the Blair circle. It was also my first encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy being dictated by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Inister’s Press Secretary, The military lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of their own.

A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their investigations. A thick dossier, including documentation from the FCO, from the raid on Sandline’s offices, and from elsewhere, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The Customs and Excise team who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation was that both Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo. The dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown Prosecution Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in effect, for no further action. There would be no prosecution. A customs officer told me bitterly that, given the time between the dossier leaving their offices and the time it was returned, allowing time for both deliveries, it could not have been in the CPS more than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not even have read it before turning it down.

I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer and Penfold. So were the customs officers investigating the case; at least two of them called me to commiserate. They had believed they had put together an extremely strong case, and they told me that their submission to the Crown Prosecution Service said so.

The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first major instance of the corruption of the legal process that was to be a hallmark of the Blair years. Customs and Excise were stunned by it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Spicer and Penfold had worked together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone in breach of UK law. Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British law by an Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told Spicer that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any side in the conflict. Penfold’s claim never to have seen an absolutely key Security Council Resolution about a country to which he was High Commissioner is truly extraordinary.

But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously no defence in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this sorry tale of greed, hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no doubt at all – and more importantly nor did the customs officers investigating the case – that there was enough there for a viable prosecution.

The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to prosecute was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected woman in New Labour circles. She is married to John Mills, a former Labour councillor in Camden. That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister with a penchant for taking out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying them off with cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the friend and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore companies for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and David Mills were also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close to Tony Blair. Blair is also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite the numerous criminal allegations against Berlusconi and his long history of political alliances with open fascists. Just to complete the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law of Barbara Mills and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to proceed with the case, and to take that decision in less time than it would have taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise sent them?

Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions later that year after being personally criticised in his judgement by a High Court judge who ruled against the Crown Prosecution Service for continually failing to prosecute over deaths in police custody. That has not stopped the extremely well connected Dame Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid public positions since then. "

It is infuriating that, Maxwell style, Spicer (who has made millions form the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of defending a libel case to intimidate my publisher. The result is that important information I received at first hand, and an account of events to which I am eye-witness, is being repressed, as is an important independent critique of early Blair foreign policy.

I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.