Of This I Am Proud 321

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I am proud of the company I was in of fellow Sam Adams winners; but also because in the circumstances I think this was the best speech I have ever made. If you listen from 15 minutes, the enthusiastic and sustained interruption of applause I received from the Oxford Union for my attack on those demonstrating against Julian Assange is remarkable.

It particularly explodes the appalling lies of the Guardian’s shrill hate campaign against Julian Assange, which you will recall covered this event under the headline Julian Assange finds no allies and tough queries in Oxford University talk . It has taken the Oxford Union two months to post this video, and then unlike other newly posted videos it does not appear on the front page of their youtube site.

The students no longer have any autonomy in the the Oxford Union where speakers and videos have to be approved in advance by a solidly and uniformly right wing board of trustees which includes William Hague and Louise Mensch.

It is, however, even at this belated time, a great pleasure to be able again to state and to demonstrate what a vicious little liar Amelia Hill is.

After my point on the Assange demonstration, you could have heard a pin drop for the rest of my talk and I was unsure how the audience were reacting. Unfortunately the video cuts off the peroration, so you will have to take my word for it that the applause was very big and after resuming my seat I had to half stand and acknowledge again. But I had concluded by introducing Julian Assange, so that may have been for him not me – I would be just as pleased.

Let me post this one again so you have the pair of me on consecutive nights in very different moods.

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321 thoughts on “Of This I Am Proud”

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  • Mary

    Of YOU we are proud Craig and of your fellow speakers including Annie, Co Ann Wright and the other fine Americans including the US Ambassador to Greece who resigned at the outset of the Iraq war, John Brady Kiesling. His resignation letter to Colin Powell below.

    The wrong people are, and have been, in power. I compare the stature that you possess, and the others who were there that night, to the squirming of the lying creature that Alex Thomson interviewed on Channel 4 last night, Straw.

    PS Why do they label you Michael Craig on the video?

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WarOnFreedom/message/759

  • John Goss

    The CIA list of tortured confessions is probably the reason so many innocent people have been wasted in Guantanamo Bay – a blight on the planet.

  • Clark

    Craig’s quote of William Gladstone:

    Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own.

    Those hill tribes had committed no real offence against us. We, in the pursuit of our political objects, chose to establish military positions in their country. If they resisted, would not you have done the same? … The meaning of the burning of the village is, that the women and the children were driven forth to perish in the snows of winter … Is that not a fact ?” for such, I fear, it must be reckoned to be ?” which does appeal to your hearts as women … which does rouse in you a sentiment of horror and grief, to think that the name of England, under no political necessity, but for a war as frivolous as ever was waged in the history of man, should be associated with consequences such as these?

    http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/04/the_goebbels_te/

    Look at all the references to “militant compounds” in this list of drone strikes upon Pakistan:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Drone_Strikes_in_Pakistan

  • Clark

    A new structure is required to organise the secret intelligence agencies and the information of which they are custodians. I have two tentative ideas. One is to interleave an oppositional or adversarial structure into the secret intelligence agencies. The other is separation of data from structure.

    Each member of each secret intelligence agency could be “shadowed” by a member in a new structure, a civilian intelligence disclosure agency. To balance the Official Secrets Act regulating the secret agents, disclosure agents would be bound by a Public Interest Disclosure Act to reveal anything that might affect the interests of the population.

    Encryption technology could be used such that the secret agent and their shadow, disclosure agent would never discover who their opposite number was. The two would have access to the same set of files, but data, such as the names of sources, the nature of threats, would all be hidden behind code-numbers, but revealable through disclosure of an encryption key.

    Working together, members of the disclosure agency would reconstruct the dynamics of the structure of the cases that the secret agencies were building. Any discrepancy or sudden discontinuity, such as formerly trusted a source suddenly being ignored, or a source routinely treated as marginally reliable suddenly gaining undue significance within evaluations, would thus be visible to the disclosure agency. If the secret agencies began to “fix intelligence to match policy”, it would not be possible to conceal this from the disclosure agency.

    Sharing of files between each secret agent and his disclosure agent would ensure that records outside the secret agencies were updated in real-time. Thus, retroactive editing of records would not be protected by a cloak of secrecy.

    It would take a better mind than mine to develop such ideas into something that could actually work. But I am convinced that integrity in intelligence is too important to be left as a matter of personal morality. Some sort of structure is needed to enforce integrity.

  • Clark

    Mary linked to the Wikipedia entry for Sam Adams. My quick look through the article’s history revealed that the following link was removed in 2009:

    http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/ob.html

    Removal of sourced material from Wikipedia is classed as “vandalism”. Removal is particularly odd in this case because the link is to an educational source, as preferred by Wikipedia’s policies, and contains many further links that would be of interest with regard to the Vietnam war and Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers.

  • Mary

    Let’s hope that the $6bn loss reported by JP Morgan seriously affects the pocket of their stooge, Bliar.

    JP Morgan accused of hiding losses by Senate report
    JP Morgan logo JP Morgan lost $6.2bn as a result of the scandal

    Related Stories
    Fed approves most bank capital plans
    UBS banker gets $26m ‘golden hello’
    JP Morgan to cut up to 19,000 jobs

    US bank JPMorgan Chase has been accused of hiding its huge trading losses by a US Senate panel.
    /..
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21795662

    More on the crooks.
    http://m.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/14/jpmorgan-senate-investigation-london-whale

  • Mark Golding - Children of Conflict

    We are proud of Craig Murray.

    Hand on heart for Annie Wright.

    At age 66yrs this women has fire, passion and vigor. An intensity demonstrated in 2005 when Annie interrupted a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, shouting at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Stop the war! Stop the killing!” Wright was uneventfully escorted out of the hearing room.

    Likewise in 2007 Annie was arrested, and later convicted, for disrupting a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing at which general David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker were testifying.

    http://warisacrime.org/node/29163

  • Mark Golding - Children of Conflict

    Papal Torture – Catholic Big Brother?

    According to lawyer Myriam Bregman: “Bergoglio’s (Pope Francis) own statements proved church officials knew from early on that the junta was torturing and killing its citizens, and yet publicly endorsed the dictators. “The dictatorship could not have operated this way without this key support…”

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/washingtons-pope-who-is-francis-i-cardinal-jorge-mario-bergoglio-and-argentinas-dirty-war/5326675

    “Whoever becomes the new pope will find himself in a position of almost limitless power as the earthly head of the Roman Catholic church. He’ll get to see the whole world, albeit behind a sheet of bulletproof glass, and 1.2 billion believers will hang upon his every word until the day he dies. But then again, the winner of Big Brother will probably release a fitness DVD and have a ghostwritten column in New magazine. It’s hard to say which of these we should be more envious of.”

    Stuart Heritage

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stuart-heritage

  • Mary

    Quite telling. From that link Mark.

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bergogliovidela-300×168.jpg
    Holy Communion for the Dictators (image right: General Jorge Videla takes communion from priest Jorge Mario Bergoglio)

    I suppose the message is that all sinners are redeemed, just like Murphy O’Connor admitted Bliar to the church. Widdecombe too became a catholic. She voted STRONGLY for Bliar’s Iraq war.

    http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/ann_widdecombe/maidstone_and_the_weald#votingrecord

    ~~~

    Agent Cameron has been in Brussels speaking up for arming the rabble rebels, along with his mate François Hollande. They salivate and lust for war and never learn any lessons.

  • Mary

    Another proponent for the Iraq War was Eric Joyce, MP Falkirk.

    Voting record (from PublicWhip)
    http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/eric_joyce/falkirk#votingrecord

    How Eric Joyce voted on key issues since 2001:
    Voted moderately for replacing Trident. votes
    Voted a mixture of for and against a smoking ban. votes
    Voted strongly against increasing the rate of VAT. votes
    Voted strongly for introducing ID cards. votes
    Voted moderately for university tuition fees. votes
    Voted against raising England’s undergraduate tuition fee cap to £9,000 per year. votes
    Voted strongly for allowing ministers to intervene in inquests. votes
    Voted a mixture of for and against removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords. votes
    Voted moderately for a wholly elected House of Lords. votes
    Voted a mixture of for and against a transparent Parliament. votes
    Voted very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws. votes
    Voted very strongly for a stricter asylum system. votes
    Voted very strongly for the Iraq war. votes
    Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war. votes
    Voted strongly for more EU integration. votes
    Voted moderately for the hunting ban. votes
    Voted moderately for laws to stop climate change. votes
    Voted a mixture of for and against a more proportional system for electing MPs. votes
    Voted a mixture of for and against greater autonomy for schools. votes
    Voted very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals. votes
    Voted a mixture of for and against automatic enrolment in occupational pensions. votes
    Voted moderately against encouraging occupational pensions.

    A terrible record one way or another.

    Having given his custom to too many of the 29 subsidized drinking places in the Houses of Parliament, he was arrested after a brawl there last night and is now sleeping it off in a cell in Belgravia police station.

    It is high time that these subsidies were removed.

    I also heard this morning that waiting staff have been sacked so that the members the House of Lords can continue to eat subsidized meals.

    Joyce’s constituents have been badly served by him. He should resign now, not wait until 2015, and seek medical help for his problem(s).

  • The CE

    Who exactly are these ‘rabble rebels’ you refer to Mary? Perhaps the people of Syria who were subjected to a hail of bullets for attempting a peaceful protest almost two years ago?

    You should be careful with the language in your posts, someone might almost think that you are supporting an authoritarian regime hell bent on suppressing it’s own people.

  • A Node

    OT but I’d like to share this.
    Just been listening to BBC radio 5 drive. They did a story about Palestinian men having their sperm smuggled out of Israeli jails so their wives can conceive. They interviewed a Palestinian doctor who seemed to confirm this. The presenters’ main focus was on how the smuggling took place, with talk of plastic bottles and even cups. No sympathy was expressed for the families involved, and no mention of the fact that the majority of the men are held without charge or trial.
    At the end of the item, the woman presenter said “and now for a sad story …..” and went on to explain that some “well-loved” cat had died somewhere.
    Breathtaking insensitivity, or the continuing dehumanisation of Palestinians by the BBC?

  • Mary

    CE I expect you already know about this.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/23/us-syria-crisis-saudi-idUSBRE85M07820120623

    and

    Can Free Syrian Army Defeat Assad:

    By early 2013, various rebel groups scored significant gains against retreating government troops in northern and eastern Syria, overrunning military bases, taking over border crossings with Turkey, and capturing roughly half of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital.

    However, many of these successes have been the work of Islamist militias, including Al Qaeda-linked groups such as the infamous Al Nusra Front. The FSA itself has largely faltered as an organized insurgent force.

    In fact, a report commissioned by the US State Department in late 2012 painted a bleak picture of the chaotic situation in rebel-held areas of Syria’s north. “There are hundreds of small groups (10-20 fighters) spread all over the area of Aleppo,” says the report, noting that the “rebel violations are becoming a normal daily phenomenon, especially against civilians, including looting public and private factories, storage places, houses and cars.”

    The FSA formal command seems ill-equipped to prevent radical Islamists from stepping into the vacuum left behind by a collapsing regime and a divided Syrian opposition.

    http://middleeast.about.com/od/syria/p/Syrias-Armed-Opposition-Free-Syrian-Army.htm

    etc etc

  • The CE

    Yes thanks Mary, I am. However the emergence of Jihadists in the FSA does nothing to excuse the Assad regimes horrific treatment of its own people and that of peaceful protesters over the last two years.

    Again why do you taint all those who are opposed to a corrupt authoritarian dictator as ‘rabble rebels’? Or do you think that this is a price worth paying for an anti-western leader in the ME?

    Why do you support people under oppression all around the world but not in Syria? You do realise, it is possible to be critical of both our government and the Syrian Regime?

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    Is it really so that speakers and videos have to be approved in advance by the Board of Trustees of the Oxford Union? If it is then I’m astonished and wonder for how long that’s been the case. For some reason I’m thinking that a few decades ago the choice of speakers (no videos at that time) would have been up to the student officers of the Union.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Conflict

    Yes thanks Mary- agent Cameron and François Hollande are calling on the EU to partially lift the arms embargo on Syria to allow Britain, France and others to assist the country’s opposition forces.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9933069/Syria-arms-embargo-not-working-David-Cameron-tells-EU.html

    Two hours ago François Hollande assured us he had secured an agreement with FSA ‘terrorists’ to guarantee advanced killing munitions, especially anti-aircraft missiles such as SAM and blow-pipe do not fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, this despite being a breach of international law, a fact Russia has iterated at the Brussels conference.

    The situation is of course different on the ground as we all know. These terrorists against Assad are already armed by Israel and Saudi.

    An aim is to gather evidence of atrocities in Syria by armed militia and present such evidence to the United Nations. This evidence is being compiled by certain NGO’s discreetly and covertly as such work presents a huge risk, to those at grass-roots and their messengers. Some expertise for this data compilation has been based on experience in Iraq and some key Syrian doctors and medical personnel are providing eye witness reports and images.

  • The CE

    Mary,

    I’m sure if you’d been through two years of violent civil war against a brutal dictatorship we might find you a touch fragmented and unruly.

    To have the temerity to mock people going through a life or death struggle you can not even begin to understand is behaviour I struggle to comprehend.

    Yes some of your links are informative, but this is a hugely complex issue and the blithe, nasty, throw away quips reveal nothing but meanness and do not paint you in a good light.

  • A Node

    The CE
    For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that President Assad really is the brutal dictator you describe, and we just hadn’t noticed how bad he was until last year.
    So what? What has it got to do with us, the West, and in particular, the U.K.?
    The U.K. is corrupt and bankrupt – we’re in no position, morally or financially, to be telling the Syrians how they should run their country.

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