Just when you thought that nothing could be more sickening than the revelation that the mad Mahdi Blair was godfather to the baptism of Murdoch’s daughter in the River Jordan…
Kudos to the Daily Mail for outing BP’s Mark Allen as the MI6 man who wrote the sickeningly jaunty message to Gadaffi henchman Moussa Koussa on the rendition to terrible torture of a Libyan dissident and his wife and family. Lest we forget, this is the message:
I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq. This is the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years
Allen then moved seamlessly from MI6 to a £200,000 pa job at BP working on their relationships with Gadaffi and other Arab dictators. We can only hope that one day Egypt emerges from military government to democracy and its security files too are opened. But I am willing to bet that MI6 and CIA shredders have been put in to Cairo government offices and will be working ceaselessly for the next few days. Expect the odd fire too.
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kingofwelshnoir
That was campbell – blair is god.
Mary, Dorries was indeed shocking. I actually had some sympathy for what her amendment was trying to do. But she just talked about herself, incessantly.
It seems to me that saying “Such-and-such was done by MI5/MI6” is not necessarily the same as saying “Such-and-such was done by the British state”. The cover of secrecy permits agents and groups to pursue independent agenda.
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A systemic solution to this is required. Realistically, states require secret services, but relying upon vetting and personal integrity is hopelessly inadequate. The system should work to the good of the people without being reliant upon individual integrity.
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My tentative idea is that some sort of declaration and verification system needs to be implemented. Objectives of missions should be declared in advance, and held in some secure way so that results can be checked against objectives in some well-defined timescale.
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I feel sure that there is a good solution to this, related to and probably using the principles of public-key cryptography etc, but it would take someone clever at maths and logic to work out how to implement it.
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Maybe an “adversarial” system could work. A monitoring organisation would be given clearance to follow all details of missions, but wouldn’t normally publish anything. They would constantly press the secret services to disclose as much as possible. If the secret services couldn’t satisfy the monitors of integrity, the monitors would publish.
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At a very minimum, there should be time limits on how long the agencies can keep things secret, and the basic objective of all secret work should be towards eventual disclosure.
Clark
It doesn’t work in real life the way people think it does. MI6 is a very tame bureaucracy. The idea ministers don’t know what they are doing is absolute nonsense.
Clark,
Craig has made it clear, I think in one of his books, that Thatcher would never countenance the use of information gained from torture. This was clear at the time to the FO and presumably to secret aervices. Intelligence agencies are always going to be able to duck the radar to some degree, the issue is that government will always make them worry if they’re off message.
Nadine Dorries had over an hour of Commons time. Her voice became louder and louder as she proceeded.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtoday/cmdebate/c_03.htm
MI5/MI6, it would seem they have a lot of history
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rasputin-Britain-Secret-Service-Torture/dp/1906447071/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285178570&sr=1-3
And this
http://www.amazon.co.uk/SIX-BRITAINS-INTELLIGENCE-Complete-Intelligence/dp/1906447004/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285177860&sr=1-1
Craig, OK, maybe in the UK most of the blame lies with the government. It is certainly true that the people need better systems for checking on their ministers and MPs. Though in contradiction of your assertion, there was that plot to bring down Wilson’s government.
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Whatever, I think a systematic approach should be developed. Just as we have the principles of, for instance, independence of the judiciary or the police, there should be a generally accepted system of regulating secret services that gives some degree of confidence, such that countries could be judged by how well they had implemented it.
“there was that plot to bring down Wilson’s government.”
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2006/03/16/who-was-plotting-an-army-coup-to-get-rid-of-harold-wilson-115875-16819862/
writeon
I absolutely disagree with you over your view that Gaddafi wouldn’t have carried out a massacre. The basis of your argument seems to come from a speech Gaddafi made. It’d be much better to look at his actions in Benghazi in the past and other cities recently rather than words. Gaddafi has a particular hatred of Benghazi, which I think comes from fear. The city has never been compliant. I was there when his agents gunned down protesting students. I saw the gallows erected in the city centre. Most of the 1200 political prisoners massacred in Abu Salim came from Benghazi. More recently in the uprising Gaddafi troops used artillery fire on protestors including on a funeral procession. The streets were filled with shells and body parts. If the French hadn’t intervened, there would have been a massacre. The people in Benghazi including my son were in no doubt what Gaddafi had in store for them.
What interests me about this particular speech in Febuary is that it was used as the basis, as “proof” that Gaddafi was publically boasting, brazenly, insanely, crowing about his intention to slaughter the population of Benghazi. This was the spin our politicians and media put on his speech. That he actually, and my arabic is not that wonderful, but even I can see that this is not what he said.
Our propaganda used this speech to justify intervening in Libya and removing a tyrant from power, based once again on lies, distortion, and falsifications. In a war one cannot just accept the propaganda produced by the belligerents involved in the conflict.
Given that Gaddafi knew that Nato was looking for any excuse to attack Libya and remove him from power and destroy his regime, the idea that Gaddafi would have massacred the population of Benghazi out of spite, and at the cost of losing the entire country, is fanciful. He may have been mad, but he wasn’t stupid. Attacking Benghazi would have been like cutting off his nose to spite his face. Dictators don’t last long that way, especially one’s who have lots of oil.
And the NTC itself has recently stated that over 50,000 people have been killed in the civil war/revolution/coup, isn’t that equal to a massacre, if the figures are accurate? And what about the massive destruction caused by the bombing? What’s so special about the people in Benghazi, don’t the deaths of thousands of non-Benghazi Libyans count?
And what’s going to happen now that Gaddafi is gone? The West wants Libya’s oil on the West’s terms. How will the Libyans react to the West’s demands? Did they really believe life was going to be better with Gaddafi gone, replaced by the new leaders reliant on the West? I think the future is going to be bloody, like Afghanistan and Iraq, part of the West’s strategy of Balkanisation of the Muslim world.
The Dorries theatrical was allowed so as to be a media distraction I think.
The vote for NHS privatisation
NHS Privatisation Third Reading
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Ayes:316
Noes:251
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The people won’t know the NHS as they know it has disappeared until the point when they need its services.
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See the quote from Lord Howe. Most illuminating.
‘But the government’s cause was not helped by the choice of words of Health Minister Lord Howe or his boss, the prime minister.
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By saying the overhaul presented private groups with “huge opportunities” and it did not matter “one jot” who provided NHS care, Lord Howe invited the wrath of the medical profession.
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David Cameron’s claim that the reforms were now supported by a host of professional bodies did not help either – they still have a number of serious concerns.’
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14829485
The first step for Libyans was to remove Gaddafi. Without Western help that would’ve been impossible because he was armed to the hilt. If the new government doesn’t deliver they’ll be out. Libyans have suffered too much and have a duty to ensure that what so many died for is realised. They’re not afraid, they’re experienced now in fighting and of course armed. I don’t think the West will have the patience or time to wait for further disruption to their oil supplies and investments.
Yes, Writeon, the propaganda and spin should stop. Let people make up their own minds.
http://libya360.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/accurate-translation-of-gaddafis-speech-made-in-the-early-days-of-the-crisis/
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I don’t know if that’s the speech you’re referring to, but he does stress a couple of times that he hadn’t (yet) authorised force. However, I’m not sure the people in Benghazi would feel very reassured.
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“I haven’t yet given the order to use bullets. When the order is given to use force, we will be ready. Then everything will be burned.”
‘Given that Gaddafi knew that Nato was looking for any excuse to attack Libya and remove him from power and destroy his regime’
I think Gaddafi felt reasonably secure at the beginning of the uprising because he had the support of the UK.
I’ve just found this tool which looks useful. When you use it to cite a web page, it makes a snapshot copy. This would have been useful, for instance, when the Atlas Shrugs blog was edited after incriminating evidence was found there. Home page:
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http://www.webcitation.org/index
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Submissions:
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http://www.webcitation.org/archive.php
[Ruth]:
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[Other mod: diminutive nickname corrected, offensive insinuations deleted.]
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You say: “The first step for Libyans was to remove Gaddafi. Without Western help that would’ve been impossible because he was armed to the hilt.”
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i.e., rebellion was futile without Western intervention. So the sequence was this. A western instigated and armed insurrection in Benghazi leading inevitably to Libyan government reaction leading to NATO intervention to prevent Gaddafi from “killing his own people,” i.e., the people Britain and other NATO countries had incited to armed rebellion.
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(It will be interesting to know, when the history of this war is written, how many Libyans NATO has killed in its R2P mission. Based on the bomb load delivered, I would say at least as many as were killed by the Nazi blitz of Britain during WW2.)
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As for your premise “The first step for Libyans was to remove Gaddafi”, you offer no justification, presumably because it is difficult to explain why people of the most developed nation in Africa would want to remove a government that was working to enrich the nation. Sure there were tribal rivalries and the Brits have a relative of the late King Idris, of the Senussi tribe as a puppet ready and waiting to go. But in what way will a puppet under Western control serve the Libyans better than Gaddafi? You didn’t bother to explain, because we can infer, you can’t.
A government has a responsibility to keep control over its territory, and if it loses control over an area it has a responsibility to regain it. Any government would do it, and most, perhaps all, would use force.
In preparing for that, it may make sense to issue threats on the lines of, if you give up we’ll be lenient, but if you don’t and we have to use force we’ll hit hard and crush you. The purpose is to demoralise the rebels and reduce their support. If done wrong it may backfire. I suppose.
I haven’t yet read the speech cited by writeon, but I recall that Gadaffi also promised Benghazi $20bn of infrastructure improvements once the rebellion was over – about $30k per capita (Benghazi pop approx 600k). Any threats made are likely to have been in the category of ‘overblown rhetoric’. I’ve seen people with straight faces saying he would certainly have killed 1/4 of a million. It’s nonsense.
Of course the real nonsense is NATO’s notion that they were protecting ‘civilians’ from reprisals, by prolonging the conflict for five months and more and thus providing five more months for reprisals to be carried out by both sides as territory changed hands.
Canaspeccy,
I think you’re wrong in ‘the people Britain and other NATO countries had incited to armed rebellion.’ I don’t believe the UK was involved in instigating the rebellion. I think it was France with US backing and it may have been the SAS who blew up the arms depot near Benghazi to stop the people of the city becoming stronger and help Gaddafi regain control.
You say ‘… it is difficult to explain why people of the most developed nation in Africa would want to remove a government that was working to enrich the nation.’
Take a few minutes and go through interviews of Libyan people saying what they want.
The Libyan government worked to enrich itself and its lackeys not the majority of Libyan people, many who are exceedingly poor.
Craig,
The Medialens Editors have quoted you, your blog, in the latest of their brilliant Alerts.
http://www.medialens.org
I find them to be a beacon of intelligence and conscience, and ‘Craig Murray’ – a superb fascinating character…
Thankyou for all your Posts.
Ruth,
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At least we agree the rebellion was instigated by outside powers. That the same powers then claimed a responsibility to protect the people they had incited to rebel is a piece of monstrous humbug.
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Some Libyans may be poor, but Libya nevertheless had the highest human development index in Africa. By the time the war is over Libya will be a heap of wreckage, smashed by more than 8000 bombing raids to date, with plenty more still to come.
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I see the rebels have given Gaddafi’s forces at Sirte another week to surrender. Then what? Napalm and white phosphorus as in Fallujah?
In Iraq, private companies harvest the remains of missiles from previous conflicts. Not surprisingly, those who come in contact with the depleted uranium contract cancer and die. Not to mention innocent women and children.
We in the West have been scarified by our governments for years by threats of dirty bombs in our inner cities, but this is in effect what we have subjected the populations of all the conflict zones.
The psychological war on Muslim populations is equally appalling. Repressive regimes, including especially our own in the UK have made open discussion of politics an extremely dangerous occupation because our government has spent billions planting spies in the Muslim communities. I myself have not made any new friends from the mosque for nearly a decade, and the isolation has been killing me.
The West bombards Muslim countries day and night with music, pornography and besuited political discussion. So if the temptation to speak out has failed to land you in trouble with the intelligence agencies, you are just as likely to be caught out by government-funded Islamists spying on who is watching pornography because their head is mashed up by not being able to express themselves to anyone.
You may well laugh, but in the hands of a CIA agent like Belhaj, a list of naughty Muslims is more likely to be tortured than a list of Gaddafi activists. Laugh as much as you like, carry on, I don’t mind. The reality is that in traditional societies, small misdemeanors like this, not to mention being forced into sexual activity, are major crimes. One AlShabab girl who blew herself and her politician father up in Somalia, a totally unthinkable act in Islam, was highly likely in my mind to have been sexually compromised in order to be manipulated into committing this heinous crime.
What you lot constantly ignore, because it does not affect you, because you have a choice under liberal democracy not to get involved, is that the religious mind of the Zionists has made itself particularly useful to the secular mind of Western governments by devising religious psychogical torture designed to persecute religious minds. A Muslim should be the first to speak out about injustice, but they are forced to live under stasi mind-control. A Muslim should be the last to look at what is haram, but they are kept idle and isolated until they turn to haram.
The CIA has discovered the most effective tool for punishing Muslims the whole world over is to employ the services of Muslim so called Salafi zealots who enforce compliance with hard-core jihadi Islam while they themselves lie, cheat, extort, spy, and sell all and sundry to their dictator masters and their CIA M16 paymasters.
I have contributed long enough to this blog to know that no-one ever comments on the vicissitudes of trying to practice Islam. Like my father, your opinion is just that if you choose to go the opposite direction to the rest of the world, you have only yourself to blame.
But spare a minute for the victims of unseen radiation freely distributed by us in every conflict zone, and for the unseen psychological suffering the Zionists have devised for Muslims. These crimes and thought crimes, although not felt by you, are perpetrated by your governments in your name. God forbid that you should become the victims of unseen radiaion from a dirty bomb or victims like Roderick Russell or Craig of dirty, psychological mind crime.
Let’s get this part straight at least. I am not a supporter of Gaddafi or his regime. I don’t live in Libya, and to be honest I don’t know enough about Libya’s internal politics to make a judgement about which side I’d be on, if I did live there. I would though be highly sceptical about the issue of a “genuine, people’s revolution” that could only succeed with the backing of Nato, and the consequences for Libya, especially after Aghanistan and Iraq, and especially because Libya has so much oil. Libya’s national interest is to exploit the oil as carefully and slowly as possible, with as much national control as possible, in a phrase, “resource nationalism.” This is in direct contrast to the wester, neo-conservative, economic and strategic agenda, that wants unfettered acess to Libya, a “free” market, and to rapidly ramp up production.
The point is, from my perspective, that Gaddafi’s speeches were full of shit, and wild, emotional, rhetorical, flights; great ranting things in front of huge crowds in Tripoli. But in February 2011 when his troops were outside Benghazi, he didn’t threaten to slaughter the civilian population, or unleash a “genocide” like our politicians, media, and experts, said, over and over again, and used this as a moral justification for going to war on the rebel side to topple a regime we had become “dissatisfied” with.
There’s an enormous difference between a brutal regime threatening to hunt down armed rebels and a regime that openly calls for “genocide” and massacres. But in a war one needs propaganda in order to sell the war to the people and get their suppport, or at least undermine the potential opposition to the UK intervening in Libya. So one chose to deliberately “re-edit” Gaddafi’s speech, and subsequent speeches, and offers to negotiate a peaceful transition, and instead opted for war and the total destruction of his regime, even though, ironically the NTC contains a swathe of former regime members.
Was Gaddafi really as Bad as our leaders and their media painted him? I don’t know, though I suspect he wasn’t. In many ways the social security system in Libya is better than our own, with free healthcare and free education, massively subsidized basic foodstuffs, almost free energy and petrol. And in Africa Libya’s generous investments and loans made Gaddafi close to a hero, which our media chooses to ignore. Why do we think that we know more about what’s good for Africa than the Africans? Why did we reject out of hand the various peace proposals presented by South Africa and the African Union?
If, in reality, our only real interest and concern in relation to Libya, is gaining free access to and controling their oil reserves for our benefit, and everything else is basically hypocracy and propaganda, then there is no “moral” basis for our attack on Libya, no legal basis at all, and it’s once again a western war of aggression aimed at another oil-rich, but weak, and vulnerable country.
Nextus,
All I’m saying is that there is a world of difference between what Gaddafi actually said, and what our politicians and media, said he said. In fact, we almost reveresed what he said 100%, and re-edited his February speech to present it in the worst possible version imaginable, that he was openly, insanely, brazenly, threatening the civilian population with “genocide”, andy that’s what Obama said, and in public. So there can be no doubt about how Gaddafi’s speech was spun in the propaganda war for our hearts and minds.
Add this, which I find shocking; to the level of cynicism involved, the selective editing, the spin, the contempt for basic democratic principles, namely that our politicians should not lie to us, that our media should act as a watchdog and scrutinize our political system; to the wild stories about viagra handed out to soldiers so they could rape more successfully, thousands of invisible, African mercenaries, indiscriminate aerial attacks on civilian targets, mass rapes, massacres, exections on massive scale, and a clear pattern of war-propaganda emerges.
These are the methods of a totalitarian state when it chooses to start a war of aggression, not a democracy that’s healthy and still functioning, and that’s why these dire methods don’t just have significance for Libya, but for the kind of country we live too.
Ruth, well done, remaining rational despite Canspeccy’s insults.
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Further to my comment above about British secret services being so secret that they may not be representative of the British state, consider the matter of the SAS and the arms dump, and Cameron’s simultaneous support for military action to support the rebels. These look contradictory. Consider the ridicule in the House of Commons when Hague made excuses for the actions of that SAS team. It looks to me as though “Britain” was playing for both sides, Gaddafi and the rebels.
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That Hague was so quick with his speech of excuses suggests that this is a normal situation within the British establishment. Maybe what we’re seeing is not really politics at all, but the playing out of old Public School or Oxford college rivalries through the machinery of the British state.
Nextus,
Thank you for the link to the translation of Gaddafi’s speech. I’m not sure that it is the February speech I was talking about, or not. Because the “accurate translation” doesn’t give a date, and it’s been cropped and edited. It isn’t a translation of the whole speech, bits have been left out, and it’s been “cleaned up”, whereas other translations I read, and though my Arabic is far, far, from perfect, give a more confused and incoherent version of the speech, and much longer.
Though this is all just blood under the brigde I suppose, who really cares anymore? On to Syria and Iran.
p.s. The Qur’an categorically forbids casting aspersions on chaste, Mulsim women. But one of my friends who belongs to this class of political, lying, benefit cheating, people cheating, phone and computer hacking, so called Muslim leaders, who study Shari’ah to burden others, but who exempt themselves from its obedience, like the Rabbis of Jesus’ peace be upon him, time… recently called my wife a ‘bitch on heat’ while declaring him and his family as superior in religion to my wife and her clan.
This is the ‘divide and rule’ strategy the West has unleashed on Islam. Devised by Zionists specifically to attack the unity of Islam. Even Birmingham boasts a handful of mosques where the majority of Muslims, maybe one million, are regarded as non-brothers and non-sisters, outsiders to Islam.
Maybe Islam stands in need of rectification, but Western governments have changed this to sticking up your rectum, the hatred of the ‘whited sepulchres’ the rabbis who ‘strain a gnat out of the water’ but who ‘eat the money of widows and orphans’.
I know you lot don’t give a damn. Laugh yourselves senseless for all I care. The West has devised a universally hated strand of hypocrisy, in the Muslim leaders of Deoband, of Saudi, and of Mossad’s Muslim Brotherhood, to cause division in Islam.
God knows the people of the West saw enough hypocrisy in their time, without another batch arriving. When you look at the stupefying greed, betrayal, fraud, befriending of the enemies of Islam the very leaders of Blair and Cameron’s governments who constantly bombard the Muslims with their bombs, the English people rationally and sensibly believe that if this is Islam, they are better off without it. Don’t worry, indeed everything small and large is encompassed in the knowledge and power of God and He is watching them.
I know for a fact that my comments on the sufferings of ordinary Muslims will be ignored on this site, but I am grateful to Craig for supplying an open forum for people to express their views.
If the CIA MI6 sponsors of the self-appointed leaders of Islam were given power, like Belhaj has in Libya, they would never establish justice, or a benefit system, or free speech, or relinquish control over other people’s personal lives, their marriages or their personal freedoms.
These self-appointed leaders of Islam usurp the seats of the pious and just believers and they make sajdah ( putting your forehead to the ground) to Allah for giving them the means and power to commit their crimes. I will never forget Chemical Ali’s response to the accusations of genocide in the Baghdad courts. ‘Alhamdulillah’ ‘Praise be to God for letting me commit these despicable crimes.’
Go on, Have a good laugh at our expense. I hope the New World Order doesn’t test you with these sufferings, but maybe some of you realise what’s round the corner for non-conformers to Big Society clonism.
Anno, thanks for your earlier comment. I do not attempt to practice Islam, but I hope that I do attempt to live a reasonably moral life, and I recognise the strain that you describe, though I would not ascribe it to the same source. For my part, I have banished TV from my life, and other media that impose their choices upon me. I may appreciate one program or article, but something offensive will be transmitted at me unless I maintain 100% vigilance, or a juicy but offensive article on the same page will keep distracting my eyes. So I come here.
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I’m also sorry about the islamophobia. Sorry Anno, I don’t know what to write.
@Crab the Medialens alert is excellent as you say.
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http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=645:to-avert-a-bloodbath-libya-and-the-press-part-2-&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=9
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It is a thoroughgoing analysis and summation of the propaganda and lies that we have been fed by the corporate media.
Eliza Manningham-Buller says: torture is never justified, the phrase “war on terror”‘ is unhelpful, the war on Iraq has increased the UK’s risk from terrorism, and the UK should negotiate with al-Qaeda:
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14750998
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14763864