Monthly archives: October 2008


The Balding Butt Plug

I have been offline for almost three weeks, and the reason is that I have been deeply depressed. I guess that it is time I came out as a lifelong sufferer from severe bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was known when I was first diagnosed at Ninewells Hospital Dundee in 1978.

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,

https://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.

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The Catholic Orangemen of Togo

Yet more depressing correspondence with my publisher today – it really is getting me down. The publisher has an understandable fear of facing malicious and extremely expensive litigation under British libel laws, which exist to protect the reputations of the wealthy and the powerful. As my entire purpose is to expose unsavoury truths about the wealthy and the powerful, I really do not see how we are going to solve this.

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 [email protected].

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Mandelson Returns

Peter Mandelson as Trade Secretary oversaw the “light touch” policy of regulation which has just nearly bankrupted us. His is now coming back to essentially the same job, and I just listened in disbelief as a reporter from BBC News just told us, after a lobby briefing, that Mandelson was going to help tackle the financial crisis by “Pushing forward on Brown’s deregulation agenda”.

Words fail me.

I must be going to wake up soon.

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Ian Blair Goes At Last

An astonishing outburst of New Labour pique after the ousting of their acolyte Ian Blair from the Metropolitan Police. If it was a “Tory Plot” as the Guardian screams, the Tories are to be roundly congratulated.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/03/blair.conservatives

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.

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Spiv and Speculator News

paulmyners.jpg

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&sectioncode=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?

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Censorship and Freedom of Speech

This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is unwilling to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel lawyers, acting on behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:

” 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.

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