Tom Watson has contacted me directly to deny any involvement in the whole McBride/Draper black propaganda caper.
I rather feel that he ought to have noticed what was going on immediately around him. But the evidence implicating him was circumstantial, and my enquiries today of people who know him personally seem to indicate that he is not a vicious character.
So I accept his statement.
If the UK is really not becoming a police state, then the police must demonstrate their independence of the government today by immediately arresting Damian McBride, Charlie Whelan and Tom Watson for the crime of misconduct in public office.
Their offices should already have been raided and sealed, and their computers seized. These disgusting New Labour spin doctors are a cancer attached to the heart of the British government. They pose an infinitely more fundamental threat to British society and values than terrorism does. We can get through the odd bomb attack. We cannot get through the radical corruption of the democratic system.
The Crown Prosecution Service defines the principles of the criminal offence of misconduct in public office:
“The elements of misconduct in public office are:
a) A public officer acting as such.
b) Wilfully neglects to perform his duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself.
c) To such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder.
d) Without reasonable excuse or justification”
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/misconduct_in_public_office/
Plainly they are guilty as hell. The only possible defence I can see is to say that at the time they cooked up this plot to libel the Opposition they were not “Acting as public officers”. But I do not believe that will wash. They were inside government offices – indeed two of them in the heart of Downing St – in office hours, and communicting with each other on official computers and using official email addresses. I understand that there is no email addressed to Watson, but he is mentioned in the emails, is in charge of the government’s internet straegy and sits in the same office as McBride.
Labour must be hoist with their own petard. They have insisted that the plainly party political dirty work being done by the likes of Brown’s long term creature McBride, is public service. We as taxpayers have been bearing the huge salaries and expenses of hundreds of these vile New Labour hacks for over a decade. They cannot now turn round and claim that what you and I have been forced to pay them to do for the last decade, was not done as public officers. While a tautologous argument that misconduct is evidently not public service, is obviously excluded by reasonable construction of the meaning and purpose of the law.
There can seldom have been a more definite case of misconduct in public office. If the police do not act, it will be an utter disgrace. Even Nixon could not prevent the Watergate burglars from bein arrested.
The behaviour of these vile people is not just a sin, it is a crime. A crime which strikes at the credibility of British democracy. We must demand their arrest.
I criticised Paul Staines earlier this week, but it would be wrong not to acknowledge that he has done a great service here.
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I take a hard line on piracy. I am sorry if the lives of Somali fishermen have become more difficult, but that does not justify armed robbery. There is already sufficient danger at sea, that the code among mariners of always assisting someone else in distress is enshrined as a duty in international law. To actually practice piracy – armed robbery at sea – is behaviour that may rightfully be deterred by the use of all necessary armed force.
It is a disgrace that the Royal Navy no longer even pretends to have much interest in protecting British flag vessels, which should be its primary mission. It is configured instead to threaten nuclear annihilation and to support illegal invasions. We need not nuclear submarines but frigates and corvettes.
I favour a much more forceful approach against pirates off the Horn of Africa. I recently saw a television feature on the international convoy patrols there. It noted that the warships warded away pirates but did not attempt to capture them. The Italian Commodore in charge explained that, if they were captured and returned to Somalia or Kenya, the legal process would tie up the ship’s officers as witnesses for months or even years. The courts were corrupt and unreliable.
But territorial waters (as opposed to Exclusive Economic Zone) extend only twelve miles from the coast. The large majority of incidents are occurring further out than this – on the high seas, in technical terms.
If the pirates can be captured on the high seas, then the capturing state may try them itself. This is provided for in Part 7 of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea:
Article105
Seizure of a pirate ship or aircraft
On the high seas, or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any State, every State may seize a pirate ship or aircraft, or a ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates, and arrest the persons and seize the property on board. The courts of the State which carried out the seizure may decide upon the penalties to be imposed, and may also determine the action to be taken with regard to the ships, aircraft or property, subject to the rights of third parties acting in good faith.
I do not believe that to date the international community has used this provision in the Horn of Africa. Pirates should be captured, enjoy several months in the brig of the warship while it finishes its patrol, and then be subjected to criminal trial in the capturing state. Most states still have very severe punishments for piracy mouldering on their statute books.
But there is a much wider issue relating to African countries ability to control their seas. This relates to the exclusive economic zone, which extends two hundred miles from the coast. In particular fishing rights within the EEZ are a huge potential resource for African nations.
Africa has a massive traditional onshore fisheries industry, employing tens of millions and making a vital contribution to feeding hundreds of millions. But Africa has very little developed deep water fisheries capacity. As a result, over 95% of the fish taken from the extremely deep EEZ waters around Africa, are taken by non-African vessels, and generally the fish are not landed n Africa.
The worst of it is that well over half of this deep water fishing is illegal. Most African countries have declared their EEZ and issue fishing licences. But to enforce the license system and clamp down on illegal fishing requires both aircraft and fast fisheries protection vessels, of which which by and large African states don’t have sufficient..
The size of the resource is enormous. Illegal fishing of tuna and other stocks from African EEZs is costing Africa over $20 billion each year. The Japanese and South Koreans are by far the worst offenders, and the Japanese and South Korean governmens display no genuine intention to control their fishermen. Nor do the fishermen show much interest in conservation.
There have been individual country programmes by bilateral aid agencies to increase license revenue and provide enforcement resources, but this has been very patchy. There have also been attempts in individual coountries to privatise the license revenue and enforcement, with mixed results.
It is time a much more serious effort was made to tackle this removal of resources from the people of Africa. International donors should support the African Union in setting up an overarching Maritime authority to oversee licensing, conservation and regional enforcement programmes. For an investment of $3 billion, revenue of ten times that much every year could be secured to Africa.
The mainstream media is in a flurry of excitement over the “Terror” arrests of students in the North West of England. Linked to this is the media feeding frenzy over the resignation of Bob Quick, Scotland Yard’s anti-terror chief. It is important to note that the Quick incident only brought forward the arrests by a few hours. Yet in all the acres of coverage in the newspapers, and all the hype on TV, nobody seems to have noticed the real story.
It was an accident that Bob Quick had his secret document on display as he was photographed entering Downing St.
But it was no accident that he was photographed entering Downing Street.
No 10 is a Tardis-like building which is far more impressive inside than out, and which seems impossibly large. Its secret is that it links straight through to No 11 and, more importantly, through to the huge Cabinet Office building that runs along Whitehall. The Cabinet Office is the central secretariat of the British government and in effect the office of the Prime Minister. The separation of the No 10 staff and the Cabinet Office staff is a polite fiction. The government’s major interdepartmental committees meet in the Cabinet Office, including the sexy Joint Intelligence Committee and its sub-committees. One of the fascinating things about the vast Cabinet Office building is that it incorporates parts of the original fabric of the Tudor Whitehall Palace.
In the first Iraq War I used to hand carry intelligence reports to No 10, and sometimes had to explain them personally to Mrs Thatcher. I never once took one in the front door. In fact I have only ever walked in the front door of No 10 when accompanying a foreign dignitary or attending a party. The front door is for people the government wants to be seen ?” hence the permanent stand of photographers which captured Bob Quick. People arriving to brief on secret matters go in through the back door, or more likely through the Cabinet Office.
So why did the government want us to see that Bob Quick was entering No 10? The only possible answer is that, had things gone more smoothly in the arrest of the “Terror suspects”, the government would have paraded the footage of Quick entering no 10 as evidence that it was really Glorious Gordon and Genius Jacqui who had directed the operation and saved the world – again.
It is very, very wrong ?” it violates the whole spirit of the constitution ?” for politicians to be involved in arresting people. If the police had real evidence that these people are terrorists, then of course they should have been arrested when the Police felt the right moment had come. That moment is when they have sufficient evidence, and are not putting the public at risk by undue delay. That is a technical decision requiring skill, expertise and experience in operational policing.
It is a matter of the criminal law. It is absolutely not the business of Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown. But we know that under New Labour the politicians are deciding who should be arrested and when. We know that for sure because then Home Secretary John Reid said in terms that he decided when the arrests should be made in the farcical “Bigger than 9/11”, (though in the event non-existent), “Liquid airplane bomb plot” case.
If politicians are going to decide the timing of arrests, then they cannot be surprised or aggrieved if we suspect that the timing of arrests is political.
This was definitely the case in the “Liquid Bomb Plot”. I know for certain from my own sources that in that case the intelligence services believed they had been forced by politicians to act too soon. That was quite widely reported at the time.
The view that John Reid had acted too early appears proved by a complex series of verdicts brought in by the jury. Less than half of those arrested actually were brought to trial. The jury found that three of the accused did have an intention to commit terror, but had formed no definite plan and specifically cleared them of the charge of planning to down aeroplanes with explosives.
Why had Reid jumped the gun? Because the Americans asked him to. With Bob Quick’s predecessor, the disgraced Andy Hayman, giving an official Scotland Yard view that the “Liquid Bomb Plot” was “Bigger than 9/11″ and involved plans to fly up to a dozen passenger jets simultaneously into different US cities, the resulting worldwide front page headlines were a Godsend for Bush in mid-term elections. They also enable the government to permanently ramp up the fear factor by the ludicrous toothpaste and shampoo searches that make flying so miserable.
In the liquid bomb plot do you remember the massive banner headlines ?” the full front page of every single tabloid in the UK -about the evil Muslim mother who planned to blow up herself and her baby along with the plane? There was no media reporting at all when she was cleared and released. The “Suspicious chemical” which police announced they had found in baby bottles was, errr, baby bottle sterilising solution.
The reasons why these “Terror raids” might be the subject of political timing could not be more obvious. Both Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown were getting a well-deserved media pasting over the outrageous ripping off of the taxpayer for personal benefit through expense claims. The Metropolitan Police were under extreme criticism for their unprovoked killing of Ian Tomlinson.
So this morning, instead of the news headline being the disgraceful fact that the policeman who launched an unprovoked assault from behind on Ian Tomlinson has still not been arrested, the headline is that the police have saved us all from certain death.
Let me be plain. I am not saying that terrorism does not exist. I am not saying that those arrested are innocent. I do not know. I am saying that Brown and Smith’s involvement in operational police arrests, and the fact that less than 1% of those arrested under anti-terror legislation in the UK have ever been charged with anything connected to terrorism, gives me the right to be suspicious of what is undeniably, at the very least, politically very fortuitous timing.
It is also the arrest of alleged terrorists from Pakistan, at a time when the government is under both parliamentary and criminal investigation for participation in torture of terrorist suspects in Pakistan. The government has responded by arguing that intelligence from torture abroad is necessary to save lives in the UK. I have no doubt that we will find the government arguing that this “terror plot” justifies their case.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/fco_finally_adm.html
Because of this suspicion, I will be setting a high test for evidence that these arrests really were needed at this time. The accusation is that a bombing campaign was ready for this Easter ?” ie now. If that is true, there must be explosives and detonators ready, or in the very final stages of preparation. We will see.
According to Sky News this morning, police searches so far have discovered photographs of leading buildings in Manchester taken by the students.
I studied Russian in St Petersburg. I have photographs I took of the Hermitage, of the Church on the Holy Blood, of the St Peter and Paul Fortress, of the bridges over the Neva, of the ornate underground stations. I studied Polish in Lublin. I have photographs of Lublin castle, of the main shopping street, of the Catholic University of Lublin…
I have, in fact, photographs of prominent buildings everywhere I ever studied. And photographis in bars and nightclubs.
Why do the police feel the need to feed out to the media the complete non-news of the non-evidence that they have discovered photographs of Manchester in Manchester? Why was it necessary for the Prime Minister to make a statement announcing the arrests? What does that do to the chances of a fair trial? Why was it never necessary to make a prime ministerial statement every time a suspected Irish terrorist ?” and remember they really did blow up the Arndale Centre in Manchester ?” was arrested?
There are many genuine and diligent people carrying out counter-terrorism work in the police and intelligence services, working the old-fashioned way with painstaking accumulation of evidence. They do save lives and they should be applauded and supported. They should be free from political interference and distanced from politicians.
They may have foiled a genuine plot here. If so they must be congratulated. The Home Secretary ?”who has not foiled any plots – should have been briefed after arrests were made, and there should be no room for suspicion that politicians had interfered.
That would have stuck to the cardinal rule of only telling people who actually have to know about an operation – and the rule of not carting around secret documents for no purpose.
The photo leak ?” which could indeed have jeopardised a security operation which may or may not prove to have been vital – was caused directly by the excessive and completely unnecessary involvement of the politicians in policing detail.
A police state is not a state where the police rule. It is a state where there is no distance between the politicians and police.
A police state is a state where a policeman can be caught on camera launching an unprovoked fatal assault from behind, yet not be arrested. A police state is a state where the police raid the parliamentary offices of opposition MPs. A police state is a state where it is the politicians who are making the decisions on who gets arrested and when.
The American tourist who captured on video what may have been the second assault on Ian Tomlinson by the Police, has done us a great favour.
I have been on several demonstrations in Central London in the last few years, and like everyone else who has done that, I have got used to the experience of being constantly filmed. Central London – and particularly the area around Bishopsgate – is fully covered by CCTV. In addition you had at the G20 demonstration scores of police cameramen filming from every vantage point at a demonstration. I have no doubt that on the recent huge Gaza demo I was filmed every step for two miles.
Let me be quite plain. I do not believe that there was no official footage of the police assault on Ian Tomlinson. Just as the security cameras in Stockwell station and on the train were “Not working” in the Jean Charles De Menezes case, I accuse the Police of subverting the video evidence.
So thank God for that American tourist – and thank God he went to the Guardian rather than to the Police. If unanswerable video evidence had not now been produced, what lies do you think we would now be being told?
A lie can be delivered by innuendo. The so-called “Independent Police Complaints Commission” – whose investigations in this case are being conducted by the City of London Police – had put out a statement saying that “it appeared that Mr Tomlinson had contact with the Police.” If we had not seen the video, what image does that conjure up in your mind?
Mr Tomlinson did not have contact with the Police. He had contact from the Police – they came up behind him when he was just walking down the road, and without warning hit him with a baton. This was in fact Mr Tomlinson’s second contact from the Police – he had already been turned away from his route home by another police cordon, and it is possible he was mishandled there too.
New Labour trolls are active all over the web – including in comments on my earlier post here:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/brutal_murder_o.html#comments
We will see more of these attacks on Mr Tomlinson in the next few days, just as Jean Charles De Menezes’ character was slurred (illegal immigrant, drug addict – all untrue).
The claim that Tomlinson died of a heart attack brought on by alcohol is pathetic.
I hope that the family are now getting good advice, and I for one would be happy to donate to a fund for an independent autopsy. Under New Labour we cannot trust the official one.
We also need a radical reconstruction of a police force which thinks it can attack and kill members of the public with impunity, and of the legal framework in which they operate. The legal system has ruled in terms that police may kill people and then may lie about it in court.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/12/the_disgraceful.html
We have reached the stage in the UK where we need a revolutionary change. We have to sweep out the old order of corrupt politicians whose one guiding principle is to keep their own snouts in the trough: of City bankers who are multi-millionaires from their bubble scams and whose lifestyles and jobs the ordinary people are now supporting by a massive tax and debt burden, while nobody guarantees the jobs of those ordinary people who fund it all.
We have to realise that the end of the centuries old prohibition of torture by agents of the state is of a piece with the freedom of the police to maintain the system of power by fatal force, in both cases without consequence. You cannot separate this brutalisation of power from the illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and thousands of our own soldiers, on the basis of a lie but really to secure oil.
The whole system stinks from the head like a fish. And people are starting at last to understand where the smell comes from.
I have frequently compared Israel as a state to apartheid South Africa. Citizens of the country are defined and confined by race. it is not just that all ethnic Jews, wherever they were born, have a right to live in Israel whereas many ethnic Palestinians who were actually born in Israel do not. Jews in Israel have a right of immigration for their spouses; arabs in Israel do not. Arab Israelis are actually forbidden by law from marrying Palestinians outside Israel. Many Arab communities are physically cut off by barbed wire.
It is worth reading this interview with Dr Hatim Kanaaneh. The interviewer, as is frequently a problem with pro-Palestinian groups, does not couch his questions in neutral terms but in pejorative terms which may put off the neutral reader. Try to get over that, and just concentrate on the substance of what old Dr Kanaaneh, who uses language with care and neutrality, has to say.
Here are some key parts:
Discrimination is a built-in part of life and the laws of the country. Remember that what we are dealing with here (and the basic issue of contention in the conflict between Zionism and all of us native Palestinians) is a conflict over land.
As a Palestinian I am disqualified by law from equal access to land ownership or use. This is given a deeper expression in the form of the Law of Return granting any Jewish person anywhere in the world automatic citizenship with all the benefits that accrue with it of access to land, housing, financial and social assistance, and to the symbols of the state while no Palestinian who is not born here can dream of ever becoming a citizen.
Recently laws were passed specifically to prevent our children from marrying other Palestinians and from the right to bring their spouses under the standing laws of family unification applicable to Jewish citizens.
The absolute majority of land we, the Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel since its establishment in 1948, once owned has been confiscated for the benefit of our Jewish co-citizens through a maze of some three dozen laws specifically designed for the purpose. Were it not for the 1976 uprising that has come since to be commemorated as Land Day, we would have lost the remainder. We, nearly one-fifth of the total population of Israel, now own about 3 per cent of its land. After all, we are dealing with what has been defined by Zionism as “the land of Israel” in an ethnic sense, a definition that excludes us, Palestinians. The last stroke in the continuing saga of disenfranchisement is the requirement from us to pledge allegiance to Israel as the state of the Jews. And once we take such an oath, it would be up to the same racist crowd to define what constitutes a breach of it, a process inevitably leading to our expulsion one way or the other.
Our youth, unlike Jewish youth, are exempt from conscription. Positions from which they are disqualified on this basis when they seek employment run the gamut from civil aviation all the way down to the manufacturing of ice-cream.
The worst part of the daily discrimination that we meet with is the fact that much of the final decisions on so many little items are left to the discretion of low-level bureaucrats. These, by and large, have been brought up on a deeply self-centred world-view that sees the world as one of constant struggle between “us”-the-Jews and “them”-the-goyim and considers one’s duty as serving his own people. This, of course, leaves me out of “the favours” many officials consider it their duty to do their clients. Intentional obstructionism is more often what we face.
Another area in which this phenomenon is evident is the differential implementation of the law. Take, for example, the practice of house demolition within Israel. Mind you, we are not speaking here of the savage collective punishment practised by the Israeli occupying forces against Palestinians in the occupied territories. We are speaking of the practice of demolition of homes built without permit within Israel proper.
In absolute numbers there are more illegally constructed structures in Jewish communities, but the demolition is practised almost exclusively against Arab home owners. The basis for the construction of homes without permit is also rooted in discriminatory practices in the laws of zoning which in many cases have retroactively criminalized all residents of many villages whose existence predated the state itself. Such “unrecognized villages” are frequently the site of home demolitions.
The cumulative end result of all the openly discriminatory laws, the hidden disadvantages, and the differential application of the rules and regulations are clearly seen in comparative figures from officially published data of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics.
As a public health practitioner I can point to the single most telling indicator of the well-being of a community, that of infant mortality rate (IMR), or the number out of a thousand infants born in a certain year who die before their first birthday. This statistic regarding the most vulnerable segment of a population reflects such community attributes as the income level, the level of education, the sanitation, etc.
The relative ratio of the IMR between Arabs and Jews in Israel has run at the level of almost exactly 2 since statistics were ever collected on both groups. In the last decade it has been on the rise, a reflection of increasing discrimination. One could look at many other statistics such as the level of poverty, education, housing, etc. and the gap is obvious, but IMR sums it up best.
It is worth reading the whole interview carefully. Israel now has a Foreign Minister from a party whose major election platform was the need for further action against Israeli Arabs.
Rather horrifying news reaches me from old FCO buddies. Instructions are starting to go out for the first time to British embassies in EU states, telling them to begin discreet lobbying for Tony Blair to be appointed as the first permanent President of the European Union. The post is created by the Lisbon Treaty on which the Irish are being forced to vote repeatedly until they get the answer right.
Horrifyingly, it appears that Blair may well be able to get a majority of EU member governments prepared to support him. That is despite his record as Bush’s poodle in launching illegal war, as one of the chief architects of the banking bubble economic disaster, and as the Middle East Peace Envoy who held the ring for Israel’s murderous assaults on Lebanon and Gaza.
My whole political life I have supported the EU. I was born close enough to the Second World War to understand its most fundamental negotiation, and I have seen the economic and cultural benefits it has brought. But at the same time I have been horrified by its bureaucracy, corruption and the gaping democratic deficit in its structures.
For anyone to occupy the position of President without a popular election would be very, very wrong. But Tony Blair? It is simply an appalling thought.
There are two factors which EU states should take into consideration.
The Irish Factor. The Irish are even less likely to vote for the Lisbon Treaty if they realise that it means they get Tony Blair as President.
British membership. To appoint Tony Blair as EU President will be a massive boost to anti-EU feeling in the UK. I personally pledge to campaign actively to leave the EU if this arch war criminal becomes President – and I will not be alone.
The Conservative, Lib Dem, SNP and Plaid Cymru parties should make plain that the Blair candidacy does not have all-party support in the UK. New Labour are arguing that Blair will command support in the White House. If that’s the criteria, let’s have an Irishman.
Darling and Beckett’s expenses scams just add to the long sorry tale of New Labour sleaze.
These people are moral and political pygmies.
I try from day to day not to dwell upon the way they ended my career as Ambassador and subjected me to an onslaught of slur and smear in what one senior Foreign Office source told the Guardian was “A campaign of systematic undermining.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/oct/18/uk.foreignpolicy
They did this to me because I queried internally their support for a vicious dictatorship in the “War on Terror” and because I was arguing in internal secret correspondence that it was illegal to obtain intelligence from torture.
They brought eighteen allegations of gross misconduct against me, and I was cleared of all charges after an internal invesitgation in which they loaded everything against me. Now you could make one or two charges of gross misconduct against someone, which turned out to be untrue, as part of a genuine process. But eighteen? All unfounded? It was a political stitch-up, overseen by Jack Straw.
They hastily added at the end of the process a nineteenth charge of disobeying an instruction to keep the false charges secret, and that was the only one I was found guilty of.
Of course, if I had not made it public, I would have been quietly stitched up on all charges.
But there was a sequel. After I was cleared and they were forced to let me return to Tashkent, they subjected the Embassy to an unscheduled “Surprise audit”. A team of three accountants was flown to Tashkent to go through every single transaction in the Embassy accounts since I arrived there, looking at every voucher.
This cost the taxpayer over £100,000.
The FCO had figured that if you went through anybody’s accounts with that fine a toothcomb, you would be bound to get them on something. But as it happens, I am pathologically honest about money. At the end of this vast exercise, it was found I owed the FCO just over 26 US dollars for a claim for which I had lost the receipt.
I paid them back.
And this was initiated by the unspeakable people who at the same time were themselves raking in to their personal accounts hundreds of thousands of pounds from the taxpayer!
New Labour are scum.
Alistair Darling is quite rightly coming under attack today for having his snout firmly in the trough, claiming a second home allowance while renting out his “First” home and living in two government mansions.
You can read a very good expose by the Telegraph’s Deputy Political Editor, Robert Winnett, here.
Or you could go to Paul Staines’ Guido Fawkes blog and see his lead article today, which is completely plagiarised from Winnett. Not one fact is given by Guido which is not in Winnett’s article, not does he add value by a single new thought in comment.
If you want your reheated Tory propagande through the blogosphere, stick to Iain Dale. At least he isn’t ugly.
A happy day in the Murray household today – it’s Nadira’s birthday. Emily is with us and this evening we are all going to see Burnt By The Sun at the National. Jamie is in San Diego, but thinking of us. Janet is coming round to give Nadira a birthday massage, and I am going to watch again the highlights of Australia getting stuffed in the last one day international, then doze off for an afternoon nap. Five weeks now till the new baby arrives.
Thought I would give you that to show that being angry at the injustices perpetrated by the powerful on the weak, does not mean you can’t be happy in life.
The Guardian and the Observer have finally started to report some of the truth over the murder of Ian Tomlinson:
“A riot officer came up behind him and grabbed him. It wasn’t just pushing him – he’d rushed him. He went to the floor and he did actually roll. That was quite noticeable. It was the force of the impact. It was all from behind. The officer hit him twice with a baton [when he was] on the floor. So it wasn’t just that the officer had pushed him – it became an assault. And then the officer picked him up from the back, continued to walk or charge with him, and threw him. He was running and stumbling. He didn’t turn and confront the officer or anything like that.
Anna Branthwaite, 36, freelance photographer, south London”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/06/g20-protest-police-assault
There is added poignancy in the fact that Mr Tomlinson wasn’t a demonstrator at all, just a local trying to ask the police to let him past their cordon. I had not heard the term “kettling” before the G20, but having twice suffered myself from the Metropolitan Police’s tactic of splitting demonstrations into groups, and then aggressively crushing demonstrators – and ordinary people who happened to be there, like Mr Tomlinson – into confined spaces, I was able to describe exactly what was going to happen before it happened.
“Each demonstration will be split up into several separated groups. Each group will be tightly corraled, penned in with barriers in an uncomfortable crush that feels threatening to those inside. Occasionally groups will be shuffled between pens. Most demonstrators will not be allowed to the destination point to limit the appearance of numbers at the rallies. Once it is over, people will be kept corralled for several hours, with no refreshment or (this is critical and no joke) toilet facilities. The tactic appears designed to create confrontation as people try to get out of penned areas to hear the speeches they came to hear, to escape the crush or just to find a loo. At the same time the argie-bargie thus deliberately sparked is confined to small numbers the police can contain.”
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/the_field_of_pe.html#comments
So this was no accident; it was the highly predictable result of deliberate over-aggressive policing that deprived Mr Tomlinson first of his right to go home after work, then of his life. Of course the chances of their ever being justice for Mr Tomlinson are nil, as long as the system is controlled by evil (and I use the word with care) men like Sir Michael Wright.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/12/the_disgraceful.html
I maintain that there was something else very wrong with the policing on that day, in that peaceful demonstrators were – in scores of instances – subjected to the most vicious of attacks. Meanwhile tiny isolated groups of alleged “protestors” were allowed without hindrance to carry out acts of violence. The ever excellent Postman Patel has a picture that paints a thousand words.
http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/2009/04/smash-capitalism-cameras-ready-roll.html
As does Theresa
http://comediehumaine.blogspot.com/2009/04/fourth-estate.html
While is it not al little strange that the police were unable to deploy anyone outside the Royal Bank of Scotland to prevent this massive crowd of, err, five people and 28 press photograpers from breaking the windows, but were able to pre-position a police photographer inside to video it?
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3455/3404568155_1ec4776a64.jpg
It stinks.
A lot of visitors have been turning up on this blog from the New York Times today, and I am delighted that we have been added to their blogroll, or blogrunner. I fear the reference will move off in an hour or two, but while it is there it is good to see this headline of mine on the NYT website, giving their readership a rather different perspective!
Barack Obama’s speech in Prague today contains the headline catching idea that the US will work to lead the way to a World free of nuclear weapons.
We will see how he takes that forward. It is a good aspiration and his speech in detail was an acknowledgement of the obvious but often denied fact that the world is not the safer for the existence of nuclear weapons. He reiterated in terms the basic premise of international agreements on nuclear weapons – that new countries will not obtain them, while those states which already possess them will seek to reduce them.
But the glaring question this opens up, is where this leaves Gordon Brown’s determination massively to increase the power and capability of Britain’s nuclear arsenal by replacing the Trident missile system, at huge cost?
Trident2 is the elephant in the room which the “Experts” on Sky and the BBC are blithely ignoring even as I type. If Obama is serious, withdrawal of US support for Brown’s plans should be one of the obvious first steps. (The missiles systems in question are American and would not be able to be fired without US permission.) Unless we see some movement on Trident2, we will know that Obama is just spouting hot air.
There are hopeful signs he may not be. As I said before, his discussions on nuclear disarmament with Medvedev were the most significant event in London this week.
His Prague speech represented another olive branch to Iran, talking unreservedly of the right of all countries to pursue nuclear power for peaceful use. The plan for an international fuel bank is a good one. Iran should listen.
If we assume Obama’s good faith, there remain major problems.
Gordon Brown will be extremely pig-headed on Trident2. Putin is a man whose intstincts are highly militaristic and Russia may be less keen to cooperate than Reagan found Gorbachev. The Iranian leadership is likely, stupidly, to insist on its sovereign right to enrich its own uranium. North Korea is led by barking lunatics, as its new “satellite launch” shows. Obama also deserves praise for not changing his agenda or the timing of his speech to make a populist, jingoistic response to North Korea. Doubtless he is being attacked on Faux News for this right now.
Obama did not repudiate the US missile shield plan, maintaining the fiction that it is a defence against Iran. I hope he is merely keeping it as a bargaining counter in disarmament negotiations with Putin, so that part of his speech would only make my third cheer less rousing.
What lost him my third cheer was his endorsement of nuclear energy as part of the fight against climate change. I suppose he needs to offer prospects of making money to the military-industrial complex which would lose out from arms reduction.
Nuclear power cheers authoritarians everywhere, including Brown. But speaking in a City as close as he will ever get to Chernobyl, Obama got no cheer at that point in his speech. Nor does he from me.
One of the nastiest men in Europe, Anders Rasmussen, has been appointed as NATO Secretary General. To achieve this Angela Merkel, Rasmussen’s most vociferous supporter, blackmailed Turkey into agreement by saying that otherwise Turkey’s prospect of entry into the EU would be affected. (The subtext is actually that Merkel has in fact no intention of ever permitting Turkish entry into the EU, as the prospect of all Turks having the right of settlement in Germany is anathema to her party.)
Insofar as Rasmussen’s appointment has been mentioned at all in the UK media, the only background given has been his support for the publication of the “Danish Cartoons” of the Prophet Mohammed. That is a surefire way to cheap popularity, as most in Europe – myself included – will maintain the right to freedom of speech. You only have to look at the scary fundamentalist Christians in the US to understand that it is essential that we maintain the right to poke fun at religion and the religous.
But the truth is Rasmussen has a very limited concept of freedom of speech. An enthusiastic follower of George Bush, like his friend Tony Blair he told outright lies to the Danish people about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He also lied about the content of secret intelligence reports the Danes had on Iraqi WMD.
Unlike Tony Blair, Rasmussen faced a secret intelligence service of some integrity. A very brave and honourable man, Major Frank Grevil, stepped forward to tell the Danish people that Rasmussen had lied about the content of intelligence reports.
Rasmussen did not show his famed support for freedom of speech in the case of Major Frank Grevil, who was jailed for telling the Danish people the truth and has only just been released. Rasmussen survived the scandal by winning the support of his parliamentary majority for the argument that he did not have to resign as he had not lied in parliament, only in a broadcast to his people.
There was dismay throughout Scandinavia at the prospect of Rasmussen’s appointment. The leading and generally conservative, pro-NATO Norwegian daily, Aftenposten, on 26 March published an editorial calling Rasmussen a “liar” and a “simplistic militarist”, and asking why Obama would support the appointment of one of Bush’s closest allies in the attack on Iraq – which is rather a good question.
In fact Rasmussen’s appointment is the apothesosis of the new vision of NATO as an alliance to enforce Western control over energy sources and supply routes in the Islamic world. And I challenge you to find any of the information I have just given you in the UK or US mainstream media.
Major Frank Grevil was this year, on his release from prison, presented with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, voted by a jury of former senior US intelligence officials and former winners, of whom I am very proud to be one.
Contrary to what the media are telling you, Barack Obama is not in any real sense visiting Iraq. He is visiting a US base which, under the Status of Forces Agreement, is US territory under US legal jurisdiction. He is not visiting Iraq any more than a vist to Guananamo Bay (Good Lord! Is that still open? What happened?) would be a visit to Cuba.
Which is a point worth making as he delivers an almighty snub to the Iraqi President and Prime Minister. For a visiting Head of State to come officially to your country and not meet the host President or host Government is an almighty breach of protocol, a gesture of supreme contempt. We are told he is going to telephone them. Well that’s OK then.
We already knew they were pointless American puppets. Isn’t he supposed to be hiding that?
The visit has the look and feel of an exercise in Imperial hubris, an entirely militaristic display. The Iraqis lost hundreds of thousands killed and saw the deliberate destruction of their water, electricity, sewerage and other civilian infrastructure. They are being visited by a new leader of their occupiers who made a virtue of opposing their invasion and their suffering. They might have expected him to walk on foot and say sorry to the Iraqi people, not glory in the power of his military and hand out medals.
The US occupation is coming unstuck again, in a way that is a familiar pattern to all students of Imperialism. Militias of all stripes, and particularly the “Sons of Iraq”, were bought off by the payment of huge bribes, or what in the British Empire were termed “Subsidies”. There always comes a stage when these large payments are scaled back in the interests of financial prudence. Then the militia,now much richer and better equipped, kicks up trouble again. It was the immediate cause of the British disaster in Afghanistan in 1841.
The Americans just cut their payments to the Iraqi militias, and the result has been 250 civilian deaths in a fortnight.
Having saved the world economy by re-labelling various huge sums of money they are going to print, our glorious leaders have now moved on for another showpiece event in Strasbourg, a summit on the 60th anniversary of NATO.
In the shadow of the ludicrously over-egged G20, they are trying desperately to raise the hyperbole still further, with President Sarkozy declaring that the freedom of mankind is dependent on the outcome of the conflict in Afghanistan.
As NATO is fighting in Afghanistan to keep in power a puppet government whose ministers include the largest heroin barons in the World, whose President’s family are deeply involved in drug smuggling, and which has just passed legislation to roll back the rights of women, including enshrining the right of a husband to force sex upon his wife (or wives, as the legislation in fact specifies but has not been generally noted), it is a little bit difficult to understand how freedom depends upon all this. Especially when a key part of the strategy is an alliance with President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, undeniably one of the World’s worst dictators, who provides the NATO German airbase at Termez and with whom the US is in negotiation to resume its alliance.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/obama_making_yo.html
The occupation of Afghanistan is of course part of the so-called “War on Terror”. It is a good pointer to the flaws in the whole concept, because the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. For every civilian killed by aerial bombardment, for everyone tortured in Baghram, for everybody pushed around by alien coalition forces, there is a reaction of growing opposition to the invasion and increasing support for fundamentalism, especially among the Pashtun population of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The whole conflict is in a dizzying downward spiral which threatens to undermine Pakistan, with highly destabilising consequences for the sub-region.
It is a crazy concept, unless you are in the security or armaments industries, where the last eight years of war have been extremely profitable, just as conflict increased energy prices have been for the oil industry. It is a disaster for the ordinary taxpayer, but a huge and never-ending payday for some.
Angela Merkel has stated that Afghanistan points the way to the future of NATO. To which some may reply that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation plainly has a poor sense of direction. The idea that the way to defeat terrorism is to point the largest conventional forces in the World at it, is plainly nonsense. Asymmetric warfare thrives and recruits just on that mismatch.
I was Head of the Foreign Office Maritime Section when the Berlin Wall came down, and shortly afterwards was First Secretary Political at the British Embassy in Warsaw. I recall all the policy papers on the future of NATO, as the opposing Warsaw Pact evaporated. The question the papers all tried to answer was “How do we find a new role for NATO?”. The prior question “Is NATO needed any more?” was never asked. At that time the consensus was that the future focus of NATO would be on drug-smuggling, though how you stop drug-smuggling with tanks was something about which my scepticism was not entirely ill-received. (It is worth noting – and I am no Tory – that dissenting opinion was welcomed and discussed in the thirteen years I worked in the FCO under the Tories. Under New Labour dissent very quickly became viewed as disloyalty).
Throughout the 90s NATO then moved into a situation when Eastwards expansion became, in itself, the raison d’etre of the organisation. There was so much work to do in ensuring that all the Eastern European militaries could communicate in English, share radio frequencies and fire the same ammunition as their Western NATO colleagues, that there was no time for any thought as to why we were doing it. But even before Putin came to power, the signs that we were stoking nationalism in a now encircled Russia became clear.
Then 9/11 and the War on Terror solved the existentialist gap. NATO became the more respectable wing of the “coalition of the willing”. Ironically, as in the early 90s it had been positioning itself as an anti drug smuggling organisation, NATO presided over and protected the great ever opium harvests and heroin production levels in human history. It expanded into Central Asia. Under the NATO Partnership For Peace alrrangements, British troops trained Uzbek forces in marksmanship before they carried out the Andijan massacre.
Now here we are, with a real disaster unfolding in Afghanistan – a state which failed because the Cold War was fought there by proxy over twenty years, with the US fostering the very fundamentalist forces it now is losing to. And NATO, having drifted into this mess, declares sonorously that this is its future.
Ironically, President Obama made some more hopeful progress while in London by agreeing with President Medvedev to restart talks on nuclear disarmament. Compare that to Bush’s apparent eagerness to kickstart a new arms race, which suited Putin’s authoritarian agenda just fine.
But Obama’s new disarmament initiative points up still further the utter folly of New Labour’s plans to spend £120 billion on a replacement of the Trident nuclear weapon system, thus adding massively to mankind’s capacity for self-destruction at a time when the UK is broke, and when we need to be spending many. many times more than we are on renewable energy.
I am a harsh critic of Russia’s government, which has no respect for human rights or democracy. But Russia is not the Soviet Union and we d not need to face it in terms of massive blocs and mutually assured destruction. The time for the British nuclear deterrent is gone. And so is the time for NATO.
STOP PRESS
Added into comments by Alba, and making my point perfectly: “The US today has signed an agreement with the butcher of Uzbek people to transit goods through Uzbekistan”.
There can be no doubt that, at the G20 protests, at times the police were unnecessarily violent towards non-violent protestors. Yet at other times they were puzzlingly non-violent towards inexcusably violent protestors.
I postulated that one explanation might be that the small number of “protestors” who were theatrically and irrationally violent, were not actually protestors at all. I could think of other explanations, but no better ones, as to why police would not arrest a small, isolated and outnumbered group who were attacking them with sticks.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/death_of_a_demo.html#comments
There is a website called Harry’s Place which exists to promote New Labour and a particularly virulent and sometimes openly racist strain of Zionism. That website has this morning put up a post called “Craig Murray Latest Lunacy”, where they assert that even to imagine that our security services might employ agents provocateurs is a symptom of madness.
It is not that Harry’s Place have a naive faith in their political masters. It is rather that they are engaged in a cynical attempt to manipulate public opinion. What do they expect us to believe that 4,500 people at MI5 actually do for a living, and why is it Top Secret?
I have got my full fifth star back. This may mark me as a deeply sad person, but I feel just as happy as when the bell on the Christmas tree rang in Its A Wonderful Life to show that Clarence the angel had got his wings.
Murder in Samarkand now averages five stars again after 28 Amazon customer reviews.
It had been sitiing on four and a half stars for almost two years, when the 24th five star review, from a Mr Evan Hendrikse of Bombay, pushed the average up to five again. When you think about it, that really is quite a feat. Excluding children’s books, I cannot find any other book which has more than a couple of dozen reviews and which maintains an average of five stars.
OK, I admit I have been trawling, and you can think me a nerd, but it is remarkable. Of the 28 book buying reviewers, 27 are strangers to me, and the one I do know is an ex-FCO colleague who most certainly would not have given five stars if it were not his honest opinion.
I recall the agent who returned me the manuscript with the comment:
“I can understand why Mr Murray might want to write this book, but I cannot understand why he believes anyone might want to read it.”
I recall the very abrupt note from Penguin saying they would publish it only if I removed everything about my private life. I remember my horror when I discovered it was being given a publicity budget of nil, and most bookshops were not taking it. Despite all of which we have sold some 25,000 copies so far, entirely on word of mouth.
I realise, of course, this post might well prompt some trolls to put up some low rated reviews on Amazon. If they had actually read the book, I would not mind quite so much.
Which brings me to the horrors of self-publishing. My publisher backed down on publishing the prequel, The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known, because of libel threats from mercenary commander Lt. Col. Tim Spicer. So I had to publish it myself. You can buy a copy here – and I should be very grateful if you would!
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/buy_the_catholi.html
So I decided to publish myself. I realised this would be hard work, but I thought that, with one successful book to my name already and numerous newspaper articles, it would be viable. I looked at print on demand, but found that, contrary to the claims, the resulting books were prohibitively expensive for the purchaser if bought other than through the POD company’s own site. So I set up Atholl Publishing, did all the hard work myself, and got the books printed. I had obtained an ISBN number, had it barcoded and had the book registered on Neilsen Booknet, the industry standard stock ordering system.
Then I had to get them on sale. I sold some 300 immediately direct through this website. But how to reach a wider audience? I got them sold through Amazon by enlisting Atholl on Amazon Advantage. Amazon pay me 35% of the cover price for each book – that is £6.30. They cost £6.50 to print. Other production costs such as indexing, photograph and lyrics copyright charges work out at around a further 80p per book on the number printed so far – and I have to pay for delivery to Amazon. So in fact I work out that I have lost £1.30 on each copy sold through Amazon.
Now for the bookshops. Waterstones are the dominant chain in the UK. Their branches have autonomous purchasing power – but can only purchase books which are centrally approved by Waterstones. To get approved, you have to register with Waterstones distributor, Gardners. I went through this process, which takes some weeks, but I was succesful.
Waterstones then sent me a list of all their 350 odd branches so I could mail them with details of the book. I did this. I was warned by a branch manager that the branches get several mailshots a day from self-publishers and that they go straight into the bin, so I needed to make it striking. So I had the letter done in colour on glossy unfolded A4, strikingly referencing Murder in Samarkand which had sold well in Waterstones, and the big name review quotes for that book from Harold Pinter, Noam Chomsky etc. And as my eye-catching coup I enclosed a dust jacket for The Catholic Orangemen of Togo.
As just the dust jackets cost £1.22 each, and the postage was large letter, this Waterstones mailshot cost some £710. In response, Waterstones 350 branches have ordered 28 copies of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo between them, at a marketing cost of £25 per copy sold. Except it is probably worse than that, because I suspect most of those copies were sold to people who had walked into a branch and ordered it, so my mailshot had nothing to do with it.
Part of the reason is those mailshots going straight into the bin with the other rubbish. But a major part is the pointless arrangement with Gardners. If the manager of Waterstones in Bolton wants to order a copy, I do not post it to Waterstones in Bolton but to Gardners in Bournemouth. Gardners unpack it, repack it, add a large markup and send it on to Waterstones in Bolton. With the Gardners markup added, Waterstones in Bolton can’t make sufficient profit on it to justify its taking up shelf space. Waterstones relationship with Gardners is a way of extracting still further margin for a completely unneccessary stage in the process, and effectively freezing out small publishers.
But at least Waerstones are better than Borders/Books Etc. I telephoned their headquarters to ask how I could get them to stock my book, and the receptionist replied very curtly that they did not accept telephone calls from new publishers. She referred me to their website. After a very long search around their site (so difficult I can’t now find the page again) I came across a page which stated again that they did not take calls from new publishers, and added for good measure that they did not see personal callers either. But it did say new publishers should write and send in a sample book. So I did that, on 15 January. I sent a reminder letter on 15 February and 15 March. I still have heard nothing, and I imagine the sample books go to the same place Waterstones put the flyers to their branches.
I decided that independent bookstores must be the answer. Bookmarks took 27 books, Foyles 15, Daunts and Bertram Watts 5 each and WordPower 2. Then we came to a halt. I contacted the Booksellers Association and bought a mailing list of 630 bookshops. I did a new flyer, offering books at 10.79 with a RRP of 17.99 – a 40% markup. We deliver free, sale or return; if they don’t sell, we collect free too. Three months free credit. I didn’t enclose dust jackets, but the mailshot was booklet style with a beautifully printed A5 glossy reproduction of the front cover. I posted the first 400 then paused. The result – not one single order. I decided to save the money and not post the last 250 odd.
I asked a friend in the bookselling trade what the problem was. He said independent bookshops are not in fact deluged with marketing for books. But it was generally well known in the trade that the word libel had been associated with this book, and that would scare off independents who would be put out of business by the costs of a libel suit. But more than this, there was a general presumption that if a book was self-published, it was rubbish. Bookshops would only carry self-published books by a local man if they thought his relatives might be good for a few sales!
I think the “self-published books are rubbish” maxim has also prevented newspapers from reviewing The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. Every national newspaper which carries reviews, reviewed Murder in Samarkand. I sent out review copies of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, but it has been ignored. The only major review has been in Rzeczpospolita, Poland’s equivalent of The Times. They liked it!
http://www.rp.pl/artykul/73290,259781_Wylowione_w_sieci.html
Murder in Samarkand recalls more recent events, and is newsworthy again now that the mainstream media has finally caught on to New Labour’s complicity in torture. But The Catholic Orangemen of Togo to me is important because it demonstrates that Blair’s contempt for international law, hunger for military action, support of mercenaries and above all his neo-conservative policy of imperialist grab for mineral resources can all be traced right back to 1997; they did not spring from Iraq.
Several people who have read both books have told me that The Catholic Orangemen is better written and a more entertaining read. It lacks the dark intensity of Murder in Samarkand, but still deals with some pretty fundamental questions. For those who do not know Africa well, it explains a great deal on development issues which are normally grossly over-simplified. It is funnier and lighter.
I am really sad that I have not yet found how to sell it. I shall console myself for the moment by looking at my five stars on Amazon.
For both books.
Amid all the pomp and hyperbole of the G20 summit, Gordon Brown said something that was actually true.
“Today’s decisions, of course, will not immediately solve the crisis.”
Unfortunately that statement is just as true if you omit the word “immediately”.
The outcome of the summit was exactly as I predicted, with everyone claiming they had “won”. I can leave Brown his ten days of reflected glory. As the economy plunges again thereafter he will look pretty silly.
Brown has told the truth before, when he said his economic policies had “Brought an end to boom and bust.” He was telling the truth about the boom bit.
The media are going full volume now to churn out lies that policemen attempting to treat the dying man were pelted with bottles. The blogosphere is attempting to fight back with the truth – with the exception of the mainstream media’s favourite bloggers, Iain Dale, Derek Draper, Alex Hilton and Paul Staines. Which is of course precisely why they are the mainstream media’s favourite bloggers.
There is an important eyewitness account here:
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Death-in-the-City
Justin has also an interview with an eyewitness:
http://www.chickyog.net/2009/04/02/sky-news-not-learning-lessons/#comments
All of which leads me to resurrect this bit I wrote in a comments thread in reply to someone asking why I hadn’t mentioned the possibility of agents provocateurs:
There was a fascinating and drawn out scene outside the Bank of England yesterday when a distinct group of some thirty were attacking the police, one hitting the police with a long pole. Prominent was a group of young Asian lads.
I recognised them because I was crushed up hard for a good while against the same bunch of young Asians outside the Israeli Embassy a couple of months ago, where again they were being inexcusably violent.
The very strange thing was that, plainly from Sky’s overhead cam, the Police had the ability to isolate and snatch this group of obviously violent individuals, and the police would have had my support in doing so. But they didn’t.
So who are they?
My prediction of the police tactics – written before the protests started – seems to have been entirely accurate and almost certainly the direct or indirect cause of this death:
“Each demonstration will be split up into several separated groups. Each group will be tightly corraled, penned in with barriers in an uncomfortable crush that feels threatening to those inside. Occasionally groups will be shuffled between pens. Most demonstrators will not be allowed to the destination point to limit the appearance of numbers at the rallies. Once it is over, people will be kept corralled for several hours, with no refreshment or (this is critical and no joke) toilet facilities. The tactic appears designed to create confrontation as people try to get out of penned areas to hear the speeches they came to hear, to escape the crush or just to find a loo. At the same time the argie-bargie thus deliberately sparked is confined to small numbers the police can contain.”
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/the_field_of_pe.html#comments
Sadly there is no kind of inquiry under this government in which the public will have the slightest trust.
