The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat“. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.
Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.
Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:
“He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”
So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law – if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.
Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.
Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.
Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations – as happens in virtually every case – doesn’t help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.
Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated – but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these “serious allegations”.
Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example – Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today’s Western political system.
R.D Laing – did anyone know him? I think his son wrote a biography. Glasgow exported some weird and wonderful people in those days.
You know when you have returned to the benighted West when you realise there is no water provided in the airport toilet. Civilised Muslim countries provide squatting toilets that do not spread 1,000 previous peoples’ urine etc onto your own body and clothes. Yes the squatters speak, and most of what the Westerners do and think about in their spare time is worse than poo.
You get on the coach home and the sixty year old lady in front of you is reading a a lady’s mag about wanting to have sex with your father in law or your ex. Yes, she has matured from fantasising about these things to reading about other people fantasising about them, and maybe by the time she is 90 years old she will fantasise at third remove about the time when her mind was capable of creating a physical twinge.
At a time of life that her equivalent in a Muslim country occupies her whole mind and her whole soul with glorifying and praising Allah, whom she is waiting to see sometime after the grave. ShubhanAllah shubhanAllah travels from her tongue into her soul. Yes, you stupid man, Alan Campbell, the squatters speak, because we do not think that we own and we do not like to purchase through sin, the vanities of this earthly world.
Anno, if you wear the right spectacles, you see what you want to see. What if the woman were a 60 year-old doctor/lawyer/accountant in a Muslim country? And what if a ‘Western’ woman in the Clapham bus was a cleaner, who was more interested in making sure her grandson is okay than in having sex with her father? You cannot essentialise and romanticise in that way. There is much that is shallow, repulsive and hypocritical in all cultures. Why are women the bearers of honour and shame?
Can someone send Anno a one way ticket to one of his civilised Moslem countries? Please.
PS Go back to masturbating about your sister, you tosser.
“You get on the coach home and the sixty year old lady in front of you is reading a a lady’s mag about wanting to have sex with your father in law or your ex..”
Yeah, the slags. We should bomb them, shouldn’t we, Anno? Just like we were going to bomb those slags dancing in the Ministry of Sound.
PS have you ever seen a vagina?
“Why are women the bearers of honour and shame?”
In Anno’s warped world, the answer to that question is fairly obvious.
I have to say, Anno, that if you find the hospitality of this country so disagreeable, you are _most_ welcome to enjoy it somewhere else. What’s stopping you?
Oh, and a lot of us ‘Western’ (why the quotes?) people in the UK find it pretty damned astonishing that someone would actually wipe their bottom with their bare hand. Do you do that? Even if you don’t, a surprising number of people in your favoured societies do precisely that. Receiving an admonishment in toilet hygiene from such a practitioner is kind of hard to take seriously.
But you’ll find our toilet practices are reasonably sound, and you’re unlikely to catch anything too nasty from a public lavatory, unless you insist upon licking or rubbing your genitals all around the seat. But then, there’s no accounting for some folks’ practices!
Oh God, guys, come on, I’m thinking of getting a takeaway! Yuck! What’s all this ano-genital stuff? Elevated observations… think of the sky and the sea.
Anno is a racist, sexist, homophobic religious bigot. He makes Ian Paisley look like Polly Toynbee. No true liberal would attempt to defend his views.
Once again, once of your right-wing nutjob American fellow Truthers get into a shoot-out with the cops:
http://mediamatters.org/research/201010110002
Well certainly, Suhayl, I think one’s hygiene practices are pretty much down to what works well for the individual. After all, I’ve no particular insight into those of my good lady for the past 20 years, nor she into mine, it just seems to work out reasonably well and we do indeed spend a lot more time with each other contemplating the sea and sky! Just today, for example, we were fortunate enough to arrive at a bay in time to see a fine sunset. Green hills and cliffs to our left and right, scrubland led down to the sand directly in front, while the sea went out to the horizon, which from our perspective came halfway to the levels of the cliffs. This bay faced directly west, and it was moments after sundown.
What was particularly striking were marked gradations of colour from the deep blue overhead to cyan at the horizon. There were distinct levels of purple, red, orange and an incredible bottle-green that gave way to electric blue before finally reaching the thin black terminator of the water at the horizon. The sea reflected back the same pattern in reverse order, only with ripples reflecting the adjoining layers making it appear a delicate dance of colour. Not a cloud to be seen, nor anything to be heard but the sounds of nature, there being little in the way of through-traffic on this peninsular.
What I did mention to the misses was the happenstance of the sliver of a new moon appearing dead centre in this view that we we most fortunate to witness, seated as we were at about half a mile back and several hundred feet up from the midpoint of the bay. Perhaps if we had arrived moments earlier, we might have seen the legendary green flash. We must try again on the next clear day.
(That was my post, btw!)
“think of the sky and the sea”
A friend of mine went to visit Crosby beach a few days ago, and came back all enthusiastic. He said, he had no idea why, but http://www.nothingtoseehere.net/2006/06/gormley.html just made him happy to be there and see them. A better way to go, I think …
Night of the forgotten names ! 1:01 was me.
An old ‘sea-dog’ told me as a young Naval apprentice, “you can always judge the character of a man by the way he leaves the heads [toilet].”
“At a time of life that her equivalent in a Muslim country occupies her whole mind and her whole soul with glorifying and praising Allah, whom she is waiting to see sometime after the grave. ShubhanAllah shubhanAllah travels from her tongue into her soul.”
It’s known as Alzheimer’s in the “West”.
Alan Campbell B—————I—————-G—————O—————T—!!!
aNGRY sorry, most people deserve a capital letter, but you are not one of them.
I should be spending my time with people who have healthier ideas about how to get along. I daresay I’ll look in again at some point, but this is just not worth it. So long, pity about all the fish …
“Alan Campbell B—————I—————-G—————O—————T—!!!”
Ooh, I know this one.
There was a man who had a dog and Bingo was his name-oh B-I-N-G-O… B-I-N-G-O…
“aNGRY sorry, most people deserve a capital letter, but you are not one of them.”
Have you been on the sauce, anno?
Glenn, Richard, those were lovely images; cosmic; thank you also for rescuing my takeaway!
I’m fascinated by anno’s concept of the second-order fantasy: fantasising about someone else fantasising about something. Sounds agreeably kinky, can’t think why I’ve never tried it.
“What happened to the radical squats”
Dunno. But read Randall Amster’s ‘Lost in Space – the criminalisation, globalisation and urban ecology of homelesness’. A bit postmodernist in style occasionally (crosses eyes) but a good read.
yeay, well, I picked up a discarded pull out on the bus (I think, surprise, it was from the Mail) which offered readers two free Mills & Boone stories. Quite frankly, I was shocked. And once I noticed the 10 year old girl peering over my shoulder, seriously embarassed. It wasn’t just the gloopy sex, it was the antedeluvian totalitarian stereotypes: strong, chiselled men with interior primal beasts and their vulnerable stupid swooning women. In a country where kissing between teenagers is technically illegal, and affairs are screamed at as though they were murders, it is quite strange to see the rise in vicarious sexploits, or self-explanatory, I suppose.
anno may well have serious issues (they seem to vary, and he’s often quite open to discussion) but, alan campbell, if you think it’s gone unnoticed that you’re one of this board’s more unpleasant, often vicious, and divisive commentators, you’d be wrong.
You are a fowl mouthed cretin Mr Campbell, next time, turn the microphone off and keep your derisive remarks to yourself.
Technicolour – well said.
Anno – in case you missed it, I draw your attention to Angrysoba’s comment, October 1, 2010 12:14 PM. I believe he deserves credit for this.
Angrysoba – “Alzheimer’s” etc. – please stop trying to wind Anno up.
“fowl mouthed”
Duck-speak ?
“Duck-speak?”
Maybe. Certainly quack-brained.
“I believe he deserves credit for this”
On the other hand, if we’re handing out gold stars for the positive bits, shouldn’t we also hand out black marks for the negative bits ?
For me, it’s even more depressing, to see that people who can also act sensible are so eager to leap into this never-ending sewer of schoolboy insult just as soon as someone offers them the chance. Can they really not see any difference ? A quick scan of the proceedings above will show that he’s hardly the only one.
The constant stream of people calling each other worthless is creating an environment where people behave worthlessly. And see how I’m at risk of turning into another of them, howling idiotically about how people are idiots.
Clark: “Anno – in case you missed it, I draw your attention to Angrysoba’s comment, October 1, 2010 12:14 PM. I believe he deserves credit for this.”
Thanks for sticking up for me there, Clark, but you may have already read what Anno thinks of Shi’ites. As far as he’s concerned, Ahmadinejad and co are already as “filthy” as they come. Not my words, Anno’s.
“Angrysoba – “Alzheimer’s” etc. – please stop trying to wind Anno up.”
Clark, I find some of the things that Anno says to be utterly outrageous. I have a feeling that you would be similarly outraged if the things Anno came out with were signed “Bob from Barnsley” or worse, “Dick from Denver”. Is it possible that because Anno identifies as a Muslim you suffer a little cognitive dissonance when it comes to approaching his virulently intolerant drivel? Perhaps you find yourself believing that because his intolerant drivel happens to be something he believes is sanctioned in an exotic holy book he has read then you fear it would be intolerant of you to complain?
“You are a fowl mouthed cretin Mr Campbell, next time, turn the microphone off and keep your derisive remarks to yourself”
No. Shut the fuck up, you pretentious lefty wanker.