I have just realised that the press release below, issued today, is being put out on the one day when you can be guaranteed that not a single political journalist in the country will look at it, when they are all swamped beneath thousands of pieces of material on the G20 summit.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/evidence.html
I have just received the following from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights:
2 April 2009
Session 2008-09 No. 31
PRESS NOTICE
Notice of Forthcoming Public Evidence Session
UN Convention Against Torture
The following oral evidence session has been arranged:
Tuesday 28 April 2009
1.45pm
Craig Murray (former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan)
The Committee will be following up its 2006 Report on the UK’s compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture by taking evidence from Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, on allegations that UK ministers and officials knowingly received information obtained by torture. The Committee previously heard evidence from Ian Cobain of The Guardian and Brad Adams of Human Rights watch about allegations of abuse and mistreatment involving British agents in Pakistan. A transcript of this session and the Committee’s correspondence with ministers on this issue is available at:
http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/joint_committee_on_human_rights/tortureiniraq.cfm
The above meeting is open to members of the public. It is advisable to allow about 20 minutes to pass through security checks. There is no system for the prior reservation of seats in Committee Rooms. Members of the public enter via the Visitors Entrance, next to St Stephens Entrance, the Palace of Westminster.
The members of the Committee Are:
Mr Andrew Dismore MP (Labour, Hendon) (Chairman)
Lord Bowness (Conservative)
John Austin MP (Labour, Erith & Thamesmead)
Lord Dubs (Labour)
Dr Evan Harris MP (Liberal Democrat, Oxford West & Abingdon)
Lord Lester of Herne Hill (Liberal Democrat)
Mr Virendra Sharma MP (Labour, Ealing, Southall)
Lord Morris of Handsworth (Labour)
Mr Richard Shepherd MP (Conservative, Aldridge-Brownhills)
The Earl of Onslow (Conservative)
Mr Edward Timpson MP (Conservative, Crewe and Nantwich)
Baroness Prashar (Cross-Bencher)
Clerks of the Committee:
Dr Mark Egan (House of Commons) 020 7219 2797
and Rebecca Neal (House of Lords) 020 7219 6772
Enquiries: 020 7219 2797/2467 Fax: 020 7219 8393
E-mail: [email protected]
Homepage: http://www.parliament.uk/jchr
Media Inquiries: Ms Jessica Bridges-Palmer: 020 7219 0724
There was a 5% chance that it would fall to the UK to host this particular G20 meeting, but the timing of it plays to Brown’s obsession with being cast as the man who saved the World. As we plunge into depression, I can guarantee you that come next year people will see that it made no difference. It also will not fulfil its primary purpose of getting Brown re-elected.
As I explained yesterday, the final communique will have been agreed some time ago between senior officials (believe me, it used to be my job), so the media’s playing along with the “suspense” of whether agreement will be reached is rubbish. Brown said as much in Downing Street yesterday: “When the communique is released to you tomorrow, you will see that…”
Which doesn’t rule out some grandstanding by politicians looking to win votes at home, and there is a 0.1% chance that will lead someone to refuse to sign it, but don’t hold your breath. It will contain something for every leader to hold up as “their” negotiating victory. The negotiating officials understand that need very well; it will be a beautiful and pointless construct.
Brown’s vanity is enormous. I still have many friends in the FCO,and staff in the UK Mission to the European Union (UKREP Brussels) were horrified to receive an instruction from the FCO to ensure that the situation when Gordon Brown was obliged to hear a speech against him in the European Parliament from MEP Daniel Hannan, could not happen again. No. 10 reasoned, quite unrealistically, that other EU leaders would not want to suffer potential embarassment the same way, so there should be wide support for such a measure.
This was unrealistic because, while there may be some sympathy in the unelected Council of Ministers, it would be the elected European Parliament which would have to make any procedural changes. There is institutional tension between the two bodies, and to convince MEPs that they cannot criticise members of the Council of Europe in their presence, is an impossible task.
So our poor men and women in Brussels duly put out some feelers and found that, not only was there no sympathy, but nobody else thought that anything bad had happened. Wasn’t this democracy? Isn’t parliament for debate?
Of course, the Westminster one isn’t, with Brown only swanning in for half an hour a week for Prime Minister’s questions, half of which are planted and rehearsed, and the whole chaired by an outrageously biased pro-New Labour Speaker.
Anyway, my friends in our mission in Brussels consoled themselves that Prime Ministerial pique would die down, and with the G20 summit keeping Brown frenetically busy in London, the whole thing would be forgotten. But no! As they opened their offices at 8am Brussels time this morning, there was a missive from No 10, demanding to know what progress has been made. An affront to the great Gordon is an affront to the great Gordon. It cannot go unpunished. Even if the Dear Leader is busy saving the world, there is always time for such vital detail.
There has been an astonishing hype in the British media for the last fortnight around the “Riots” which have been predicted for the G20 summit for the last two weeks. It is a fortnight since the first “Riots” newspaper billboards appeared in London. The news bulletins yesterday were dominated by the boarding up of shops and by earnest “security consultants” advising that people in suits are likely to be attacked.
The BBC reported fears that demonstrators would “Create unrest” in the capital.
Actually they won’t create unrest. What they may do is manifest the unrest that already exists in the capital.
The entire torrent of demonisation of protest is part of a process of limiting the area of legitimate debate to the tiny gap that exists between the Labour and Conservative parties, with all other ideas portrayed not just as illegitimate but as disorderly and threatening. That governs the opinions which journalists are allowed to express and the selection of voices heard on the media. It is the intellectual equivalent of playing a game of cricket confined to the square, with the outfield behind the ropes.
This will be mirrored in the physical constraints placed on demonstrators today. The Metropolitan Police now have a well rehearsed system for dealing with such events. 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.
As for the G20 summit itself, diplomats designated as “Sherpas” will already have worked out and agreed between all participants the draft of a bland communique. It will be all things to all men and enable everyone to claim victory. Brown will tell us he saved the World again.
I am in favour of fiscal stimulus of the Keynsian kind, with public spending and jobs helping boost demand in recession. The problem is that Obama and Brown have conflated that idea with massive bail-outs to the bankers, which is a completely different thing.
No amount of banking regulation will compensate for the fact that we have created a position where the financial services industry is featherbedded above all others. It has no downside. Success brings individual rewards on levels you and I can only dream of, while failure means you and I will pick up the tab with – on average – 14% of our total personal wealth donated to the bankers so far.
The bank bailouts have been the biggest transfer of funds from the poor to the rich in human history. That is a fundamental and an irrecoverable disaster. We are going to get a depression whatever this summit does.
The real interest of this summit will take place in the behind the scenes meetings. It won’t be mentioned in the official communique, but China, Brazil and Russia, quietly egged on by France, will be chattering about replacing the dollar as the currency of note. It is China, which has a lot of eggs in the dollar basket, which is pivotal here.
Britain is nowhere near its climate change targets on renewable energy. In fact it is so far out as to be laughable. Climate change ought to be high on the agenda. But here there will be a divergence between public support for existing agreements, and behind the scenes talks which will focus on how to use the recession to excuse relaxing the targets.
Of all the issues the public are demonstrating about today, climate change is the one where the G20 will be most shameful and most hypocritical.
The appalling lackey “Sir” Stuart Bell MP was popping up all over the media yesterday attempting to divert attention from Jacqui Smith’s ripping off of the taxpayer. His first tactic was to claim there was a hunt for the mole who had leaked the information about Jacqui Smith’s expenses. Not one reporter in our grovelling media had the sense to ask hm whether this spending of our money should not be public anyway. To diminish any public feeling of gratitude to whoever leaked the information about Smith (in fact without payment) Bell was making “Off the record” the ridiculous claim that the informant was demanding £300,000.
But Bell’s really breathtaking claim was his fallback on the cover-all excuse of anti-terrorism. Bell argued that if information about MPs expenses were released, that could help terrorists. For example if they knew which MPs habitually took taxis.
Obviously a grave danger – we wouldn’t want Osama Bin Laden inserting subliminal messages into Jacqui Smith’s porn videos now, would we?
I have no idea what he’s talking about. I was only just warming up. Good job he never worked with Oliver Reed…
Winterbottom seems chipper, given that two projects have recently collapsed. One was A Beautiful Game, about gangs in Manchester. The other was Murder in Samarkand, based on the memoirs of the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who accused Tony Blair’s Government of connivance in torture. The director rattles through a long explanation involving difficult locations, some creative differences with the screenwriter, David Hare, the pitfalls of making a black comedy about torture and, not least, the phenomenal amount of vodka he and Eaton had to absorb on their reconnaissance trips. “We were drunk the whole time. We thought, ‘Our bodies can’t take this any more. Three months of it and we’ll be dead’.”
So now the name on the Director’s chair has been changed to Julien Temple. If he could work with Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious…
One of the most venial administrations in the UK’s many rotten boroughs was finally kicked out yesterday as New Labour lost power in Dundee City Council for the first time in my political lifetime.
It was Gordon Brown what done it. The day after Gordon’s speech to the Scottish New Labour Conference in Dundee earlier this month, New Labour lost a key by-election there to the SNP. Even then they had to be prised out kicking and screaming. For the last three years the SNP has been the largest party but kept out of power by a New Labour/Lib Dem alliance, with Tory voting support. Which illustrates perfectly the fact that the only actual choice in Scottish politics is between nationalists and unionists.
Manouverings to keep New Labour in power now included the offer of an OBE to John Letford, Lord Provost. I know John Letford, who is a good man from a trade union background. A Labour Party man his entire adult life, he has been so disgusted by the sordid dealings of Scottish New Labour in attempting to cling on to power that he has resigned from the party and offered his voting support to the SNP.
I won’t now go into the detail of the massively corrupt demolition and construction contracts, or the jerry built huge shopping centre and hotel that lasted fifteen years. Let us just be grateful we got them out at last, and make sure they don’t get back.
I keep being asked this, so I thought I would set the record straight. Arsenal’s main shareholder Alisher Usmanov was jailed in Soviet times for blackmail. He and a colleague in the KGB attempted to blackmail another KGB officer. The KGB officer they tried to blackmail was Jewish and they seem to have felt that would make it easier to isolate him and his “roof”, or network of protective interests, would be weak. They miscalculated badly. Many believe that Usmanov was involved generally in extortion and overreached himself in this one case.
Contrary to assertions made by Usmanov’s lawyers Schillings, liars for the wealthy, Usmanov was not any kind of political prisoner. He was convicted as a straightforward criminal. He was later pardoned by Uzbek dictator President Karimov of Uzbekistan – not by Gorbachev, another Schillings lie.
As I prepare for my evidence session before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights on 28 April, I was looking back for the evidence I gave to the European Parliament on extraordinary rendition. Unfortunately it seems that no transcript was made of the committee questioning me (unless anyone who knows the system there better than I can come up with one) but rather a kind of precis made of my evidence as a “working document”.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/comparl/tempcom/tdip/working_docs/pe374341_en.pdf
It also helpfully published the supporting documentation I gave.
What still surprises me is that, after I gave my evidence, I was mobbed by media, gave numerous television interviews, and was headline news all over Europe. Except in the UK where there was no mention of it at all. I was pondering this over the weekend as I read a very large number of commentary pieces, in every serious newspaper, on the apparent complicity in torture and what enquiries into it may find.
I have been answering the question of the moment – was there a policy of torture – for the last five years, with eye-witness testimony backed up with documentary proof. Yet I appear not to exist to the media. Will my testimony to the JCHR also be simply ignored?
At least this time I am going to get to give evidence. This was the response when I tried to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in 2006:
Dear Mr Murray, The Committee considered your e-mail at its meeting yesterday, 15 March. As you requested, it was made available to all members. The Committee decided not to receive the communication as evidence. Steve Priestley Clerk of FAC
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/07/duck_here_comes.html
It is, I think, worth thinking about this again
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/11/blacklisted.html
If I were married to Jacqui Smith, I would probably watch a lot of porn too. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
Meantime I see the police have arrested some teenage “Terrorists” in an “anti-terror raid” in Plymouth to foil “an attack on the G20”. They have discovered “explosives, weapons, imitation firearms and extremist literature”. Why do I suspect these to be knives in the kitchen, fireworks, a toy gun and something by Kropotkin?
By and large, it is better to protest without making anything go bang. It scares cats.
With thanks to Andrew.
This is the most important blog post I have ever made. I would be grateful if you could do everything in your power to disseminate a link to anyone you know who has the remotest interest in human rights – or should have. This blog will be silent for a few days now.
Tucked away at Page 15 of its annual Human Rights report, the FCO has finally made a public admission of its use of intelligence from torture. Despite the Orwellian doublespeak about “unreserved condemnation of torture”, this is the clearest statement the government has ever made that it, as a policy, employs intelligence from torture.
“One example is the question of the use of intelligence
provided to the UK by other countries. The provenance of
such intelligence is often unclear ?” partners rarely share
details of their sources. All intelligence received, whatever
its source, is carefully evaluated, particularly where it is clear
that it has been obtained from individuals in detention.
The use of intelligence possibly derived through torture
presents a very real dilemma, given our unreserved
condemnation of torture and our efforts to eradicate it.
Where there is intelligence that bears on threats to life, we
cannot reject it out of hand. What is quite clear, however, is
that information obtained as a result of torture would not
be admissible as evidence in any criminal or civil
proceedings in the UK. It does not matter whether the
evidence was obtained here or abroad.”
http://www.fco.gov.uk/resources/en/pdf/pdf15/human-rights-2008
Let us take this apart.
Let me start by noting that it confirms precisely the response I was given by the FCO when I tried to stop this back in 2003. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Wood.pdf
It is worth noting two things. First it follows not just the precise legal distinctions made by Sir Michael Wood between intelligence and evidence, but it also very carefully mirrors the heading of his letter by referring to “Intelligence possibly obtained under torture” – even where there really was no actual doubt.
Secondly, it deploys the argument that you cannot be sure if the intelligence was obtained by torture or not, because the intelligence report does not give you the source. As I explain in my evidence statement to the Joint Commission on Human Rights, that is a deliberate double blind. The name of the source is always omitted from the intelligence report, on purpose so you cannot prove they were tortured to give that intelligence.
Trying Again to Stop Torture: My Formal Statement for the Joint Committee on Human Rights
I might pause here to say that this stunning new admission by the FCO proves I was telling the truth all along. Given that Jack Straw in particular and the FCO in general have been calling me mad and a liar for the last five years, I hope you might forgive me for asking you to dwell on that for a moment.
Now let me return to analyse what the FCO statement means. It is a piece of mind-blowing hypocrisy. You cannot, in the same paragraph, argue our unreserved condemnation of torture, and that it save lives so we use intelligence from it. I would add that it is also an outright lie. Not a single one of the many pieces of torture intelligence I saw in Uzbekistan had the slightest bearing on saving lives in the UK. In fact the “intelligence” was, on the whole and in detail, highly misleading. Yet the FCO made a very definite policy decision to continue to receive it – because it came from the CIA.
The FCO has in fact under New Labour never rejected any intelligence on the grounds that it came from torture.
The fact that the government accepts that it cannot use such intelligence as evidence in court, is not of great comfort when instead it is used to have people kidnapped and sent on extraordinary rendition, or severely beaten and detained without charge, or deported to home countries where they will be murdered.
The ticking bomb scenario is a Hollywood myth. 99 per cent of the tens of thousands of cases of torture in the War on Terror have been “Fishing expedition”. Torture does not work. The tortured individual will not tell you the truth, but will tell whatever he or she thinks will satisfy the torturer and stop the pain. We know this from history. People confessed under torture that their cat was the Devil and they flew on broomsticks. In my time in Uzbekistan children were tortured in front of their parents and dissidents were boiled alive.
Yet by accepting torture material for “Careful evaluation” we create a market for it. We increase the amount of torture in the World by putting a value on its result. And we are breaking international law by complicity in torture, which is plainly against Article 4 of the UN Convention Against Torture.
The government has set up its usual planned exoneration by allowing their cronies at Scotland Yard to conduct a highly circumscribed investigation into the MI5 agents involved in the torture of Binyan Mohammed.
In fact the guilt lies plainly with those who set this policy of compliance with evil. The most guilty is Jack Straw.
Like so many harumphing political commentators, I am feeling really sorry now for Sir Fred Goodwin. So here is a nice song to cheer him up.
Barack Obama does not lie awake at night worrying what Craig Murray thinks of him. One day he will go to his grave without ever knowing what Craig Murray thought of him. But as an infinitesimal fraction of the spreading of views and information in the digital age, I thought I might tell you anyway.
I am not a socialist. I have to say that from time to time, because people imagine that I am, from my dislike of the abuse of power and wealth. But my view remains that organised socialism has generally turned out to be one of the nastier ways of concentrating power and wealth. I am a liberal. My political inspiration has come from Mill, Bright, Hobson, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Keynes and Grimond, from Paine, Cobbett and Carlyle, from Milton, Byron, Burns and William Morris. I am a radical. I am not a socialist.
The point of which disquisition is to explain to you why I was prepared to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. Many of my fellow campaigners against war and for human rights, were writing him off after a couple of weeks.
“Give the man time”, I said.
I corresponded with Democrat friends in the US, who explained that, in trying to turn round the neoconservative juggernaut, Obama needed a critical mass of support. His aim was to capture people to his side. Many of those retained, who had served Bush, were careerists not ideologues. Their loyalty was to the Commander-in-Chief. With his authority allied to his charisma, Obama would align them to the new agenda. Give it time – the result would be the most powerful change in modern US history.
The problem is, to believe that someone is changing course, you do have to observe them putting some pressure on the tiller. I see none. On human rights, Obama’s government lawyers have continued seamlessly the positions adopted by the Bush administration in seeking to deny any rights before US courts for detainees in Guantanamo Bay, arguing that they are not legal persons in the US.
The US detention centre at Baghram airbase in Afghanistan, where prisoners have been subject to terrible deprivation and torture, and many have died, is being expanded to take another 244 prisoners. That appears to be the plan for closing Guantanamo Bay, and is one of the few things that could actually make life worse for the prisoners there.
Extraordinary rendition has not been stopped. And to quote just one of myriad cases, Obama continued the Bush administration’s efforts to have the details of the torture suffered by Binyam Mohammed kept secret by the puppet UK government, which complied, and the British courts – the latter thankfully having resisted.
There are to be no prosecutions of Bush administration officals or security service personnel for instituting or implementing the policy of torture worldwide. Which policy, as far as records of the law are concerned, was entirely dreamt up by Ms Lyndie England.
Obama ought to have encouraged prosecutions to deter from it happening again – except it appears not to have stopped. But there are not just to be no prosecutions – the truth is to be buried forever. It was under Obama that Binyan Mohammed was still held, with the complicity of Miliband, while he was pressured to sign a condition of release that he would not tell anyone about his torture. We still don’t know which basements Khalil Sheikh Mohammed was held in over three years and precisely what tortures he was subjected too. At the very least, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Torture and Extraordinary Rendition.
Those rendered to the unspeakable torture of Uzbekistan came on CIA flights from Baghram and from the secret prison at Szymano-Szczytny in Poland. Most if not all now lie in graves in the Kizyl Kum desert. The Americans must have lists of who they transported. We – and their relatives all over the World – don’t know their names.
In January, one of Obama’s first foreign policy initiatives was to send General Petraeus to Tashkent for talks with President Karimov, with a view to reopening the US airbase in Uzbekistan. Diplomatic talks continue. Interestingly, I hear from my Uzbek government moles that they have stalled over Karimov’s demand for a photoshoot with President Obama. That sounds crazy if you don’t know Karimov’s megalomania, and his desire to revive a faltering personality cult.
Hillary Clinton is resisting this strongly. She has nothing against an alliance with Karimov, opening the airbase, paying him a large subsidy and resuming the Bush policy of denying Karimov’s massive human rights abuses at the UN, OSCE and elsewhere. But she has made plain that she will not under any circumstances be pictured with Karimov, who boils opponents alive (literally). She doesn’t think Obama should do it either. But there is now a split over this issue in Washington between White House and State Department, with White House senior staff seeing no harm in a photocall with a man that 99.9% of Americans have never heard of, and who (this is a telling factor) is strongly allied with Israel.
The Uzbek policy particularly interests me, and is a subset of Obama’s disastrous Central Asian policy. In Afghanistan we have presided over massive increases in opium production, to exceed all previous levels by over 50%. The Karzai family and the majority of the Ministers and Governors of the government we installed, are deeply implicated in the industrial scale refining of opium into heroin and its export – much of it through neighbouring Uzbekistan and in collaboration with the Karimov family and their bagman Gafur Rakhimov.
What Obama expects to gain by a massive surge of Western troops into this mess is beyond me. Meantime he has actually increased the rate of air strikes into Pakistan, killing many scores of innocent civilians and contributing to the destabilisaton and growth of radical insurgency in that country.
Then we have economic policy.
I praised Obama’s initial economic stimulus bill for old-fashioned Keynesianism, creating jobs in a recession through public works. But it has now been followed up by Geithner’s Public-Private Investment Program. No wonder Wall Street cheered. It represents a huge transfer of money from the man in the street, not just to the wealthy, but specifically to the speculators.
The plan will bankroll private investment firms and guarantee them huge profits in return for buying failed home loans and securities from the banks at vastly inflated prices. Its name conceals the fact that it involves no private investment of any value, and certainly no private risk. It aims to get the whole speculative hedge fund casino back up and running.
But this is not any casino. This is an exclusive casino with a very tough door policy, where the high rollers can keep their winnings, but know that if they lose, their losses will be taken by force from all the little people who were not allowed into the casino. What fun!
Barack Obama will always have the benefit of not being George Bush. I like him for that. But then I like my cat for not being George Bush. Does he really represent the positive change for which Americans yearned? Will he fulfil the aspirations of his ethereal oratory?
No.
So now the government are training a Stasi of 60,000 selected nutters to spy on potential terrorists. The government is still trailing in the opinion polls, so we have Home Secretary Jacqui Smith taking a break from filling in expense claims on her sister’s home, to warn us a terror attack is “Very likely”.
Listen up everybody. You have more chance of winning first prize in the National Lottery than you have of being killed by a terrorist. On average, each year in the past decade approximately 150 people drown in their own bath in the UK. On average, each year in the past decade approximately eight people are killed in the UK by terrorists. One death is too many, but it is one of the very least likely ways you might die. Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith are trying to panic you for political reasons. Your kettle, your stepladder, a kitchen cupboard falling on your head, all much more likely to kill you than a terrorist. Terrorists do exist, but they are much, much less dangerous than your staircase.
Two excellent comments, one from Gerard Mulholland posted on the BBC website:
For 30 years we -under both Labour and Tory governments- combated serious, organised US-financed Irish terrorism.
We lost 3000 civilians and 2000 soldiers.
We had car bombs.
We had truck bombs.
We had pub bombs.
We had shopping-centre bombs.
We had letter-box bombs.
We had shoot-outs.
We had sieges.
We were mortared.
We didn’t panic.
Nu-Labour are panic-stricken wimps, stampeded into unbelievable panic.
They stir up fear and dread.
Stupid Al Qa’ida nutters aren’t the enemy.
Nu-Labour is.
One from Anticant on this website
I’m old enough to remember the Blitz in WW2, when 40,000 people were killed in a single year. They [my parents’ generation] just got on with their lives and said “sod it” when a bomb fell. They didn’t scare themselves witless with phantom plots and plotters like this daft lot, who resemble kids at hallowe’en giving themselves cheap thrills with pumpkin bogies.
Yes, there IS a threat – but this government doesn’t seem to have the least clue as to what it actually is. They can’t see that they are a large part of the problem, not the answer. That is what really scares me.
I have been asked to provide more proof that the Sufi Muslim Council is funded by the Karimov government and the CIA. Well, to some extent you have to take my word that as British Ambassador in Uzbekistan I had my informers and sources. But let me give you some strong supporting evidence.
The Head of the Sufi Muslim Council is Sheikh Kabbani. That is not entirely acknowledged, but is pretty clear from the SMC website.
http://www.sufimuslimcouncil.org/cs.php
Kabbani is also the head of the self-styled and CIA backed Islamic Supreme Council of America, a body which devotes much of its energy to propagandising for Karimov.
http://www.islamicsupremecouncil.org/bin/site/wrappers/uzbekistan.html
Fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, like praying five times a day, possessing a Koran at home or fasting at Ramadan, will bring you to the attention of the Uzbek security services as an “extremist”. Ironically religous worship is banned in the Mosque pictured in the website! There are some eleven thousand people in prison for Islamic religous observance outside the strictly controlled and limited state Mosques. They are subject to the most vile torture and frequently killed. Yet Kabbani has made numerous evidence submissions to bodies including the UN and OSCE, denying that there is any religious persecution in Uzbekistan.
The Karimov regime is strongly pro-Israel. The Israelis run Karimov’s personal security. Interestingly, Sheikh Kabbani belongs to a tiny Lebanese Muslim faction aligned to Israel and the Christian Falangists, and has been the envoy for Karimov’s dealings with Israel. This article in the Jewish Daily Forward is interesting.
http://www.forward.com/articles/3544/
Now this Karimov organisation is pro-actively promoted by New Labour, and pimped by Sky News, as the way forward for British Muslims.
Quite interesting filming in Sky News on the situation in Pakistan, including an interview with President Asif Ali Zirdari, in which his slow-witted performance indicates why he so rarely gives them. The Pakistanis, Italians and Israelis are quite happy to elect crooks to lead the nation. The rest of us tend only to find out we have elected crooks after the event.
But Sky of course go on to hype the “Terrorist threat in the UK”, and mar their report by faking a discussion among “Community and business leaders in Rochdale” into which they introduce a spokesman for the Sufi Muslim Council, attempting to pass him off as a representative of the Rochdale community. This is quite simply fake journalism. Rafiq is now Rochdale based – which I strongly suspect is why Sky News chose Rochdale – but his accent and above all his jargon and use of language are totally different from the others, and the body language of the others when he talks shows he is not one of them.
The Sufi Muslim Council is a propaganda initiative of the Uzbek government of President Karimov and US Neocon foundations, embraced in this country by the Blairites and Blearsites. It had its genesis in cooperation between the CIA, German and Uzbek security services. It is the counterpart of a “Black” organisation the same security services set up, the Islamic Jihad Union. The Islamic Jihad Union was blamed for faked “Bombings” in Tashkent and remains a cover for agent provocateur operations, particularly in Germany.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/10/hazel_blears_ma.html
Despite government promotion, and almost unlimited access to funds enabling it to start up its own TV channel,
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/156/156432_soap_stars_help_launch_tv_treat.html
the Sufi Muslim Council has had no success in attaining a mass membership in the UK, where its adulation of the Karimov regime is well understood. It represents nobody in Rochdale and Sky’s use of it to direct a conversation of the Rochdale community is highly reprehensible fake journalism.
99% of Britain’s Sufi Muslims have no connection to the Sufi Muslim Council.
I cannot ignore the fact that the whole nation is in mourning. I view the current mawkishness with even more bemused detachment than I did the dead Diana phenomenon. If only we saw such outpourings of grief for the British soldiers – let alone their opponents and hundreds of thousands of civilians – who have died in recent evil motivated wars. I am sorry when anyone dies prematurely, even Saddam Hussein. I tried hard not to rejoice when Suni Abacha died.
Death is a sad thing, especially for family. But someone has to stand against the excess. I am not afraid to say that there is something really gone wrong with the national psyche when a person deficient in intelligence, talent and even looks can rise to such national prominence for no apparent reason, except for an apparent desire to celebrate something aspiring to mediocrity. I am talking of course of Employment Secretary Tony McNulty and the shock this morning of the death of his political career.
The scarcely articulate McNulty was cashing in on his parents’ house as his parliamentary “Second home”, even though his constituency home was already in London and he spent only 20 nights a year in the parental home. He has claimed some £60,000. He is now insulting our intelligence by appearing all over the TV channels as a campaigner against the system he himself abused. Not one journalist has so far dared ask him the obvious questions about his hypocrisy.
What a sleazy shower of little crooks. I don’t care how sad Gordon Brown is, I shan’t shed a tear for McNulty’s political demise. He will linger a bit, of course, perhaps to the next election, because being a crook is a pre-qualification for membership of Brown’s cabinet.
I am stunned by Canada’s decision to ban George Galloway from entering the country. I have known George for too many decades to share in the hero-worship he attracts from some; but he is a truly talented speaker and debater. George was right on Iraq when so many Western politicians hid behind the coward’s shield of patriotism. He is right on the disaster of Afghanistan too, the full horror of which is still unfoldng. I see that three more Canadian soldiers were killed there yeasterday, and nine maimed. The kind of debate George brings is urgently needed in Canada.
I was also surprised by the Canadian government spokesman’s description of him as an “Infandous street corner Cromwell”. Cromwell was a truly great man, a towering figure, with a driving concern for the common good. His statue stands guard outside Parliament. A peculiar comparison indeed.
Canadians should be ashamed today. George has fallen foul of the trick by the Israeli lobby of tarring everybody sympathetic to the Palestinians as a terrorist.
There is a spirit of protectionism abroad in these troubled times – of intellectual protectionism. As the frailties of an economic system built upon unrestrained greed and speculation become clear, as it becomes more and more obvious that recent Western invasions of Muslim lands are a drive to corner key areas for access to increasingly scarce hydrocarbons, and as the spectre of climate change looms over everything that was viewed as “Progress”, governments are desperate to control the narrative thier population hears.
The British government banned Geerst Wilders and several Muslim theologians. Canada is banning George Galloway, of all people. When the British banned the Dutch MEP Wilders, the Dutch government commendably supported the right to free speech in Europe and the Dutch Ambassador offered to meet him at Heathrow. The British government should make Canada know of our displeasure at the banning of somone for voicing opinions which are held by a large proportion of the British nation.
Fat chance.
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has agreed to hear my evidence on torture on Tuesday 28 April at 1.45pm. Many thanks to everyone who helped lobby for this.
I am delighted, as I have been trying for over four years to lay the truth about British torture policy before Parliament. I will testify that as British Ambassador I was told there is a very definite policy to accept intelligence from torture abroad, and that the policy was instituted and approved by Jack Straw when Foreign Secretary. I will tell them that as Ambassador I protested formally three times in writing to Jack Straw, and that the Foreign Office told me in reply to my protests that this was perfectly legal.
I will prove my evidence with documentation.
Here is the written evidence I will speak to
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/trying_again_my.html
There is now a wealth of evidence from individual cases to support my testimony that such an underlying secret policy exists.
It is likely that I will face hostile questioning from government supporters and from “War on Terror” hawks. In the past the government has accused me of corruption, sexual blackmail, and alcoholism (all completely untrue) and hinted that I am insane, in an effort to deflect attention from the cold facts of my testimony. The hearing will be open to the public, so if anyone can make it along, some friendly faces in the gallery would be extremely welcome.
I will also see if I can discover if anything usefully can be done by way of lobbying to ensure that the Parliament channel films it for broadcast.
SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT
MOTION
Date of Lodging: 18 March 2009
Short Title: University Rector’s Torture Evidence
S3M-03730 Bill Wilson (West of Scotland) (SNP): That the Parliament
supports the request by the rector of the University of Dundee, Craig Murray, to give evidence to the Westminster Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights on the subject of the UK Government’s policy on receiving intelligence obtained by torture abroad and considers that Mr Murray is offering first-hand eye-witness testimony with documentary proof of a secret and reprehensible policy of attempting to benefit from torture, endorsed and directed by UK ministers.
Bill Wilson MSP has also put out this press release:
University Rector Must Present Torture Evidence, says MSP
Dr Bill Wilson, SNP MSP for the West of Scotland, announced today that he had just lodged a motion calling for the Rector of the University of Dundee, Craig Murray, to be allowed to present evidence of the UK Government’s involvement in torture to Westminster’s Joint Committee on Human Rights.
Dr Wilson commented, “I have long admired Mr Murray’s principled stand against UK complicity in human rights abuses, a stand that lost him his job as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. He has clear evidence of the fact that the UK Government is prepared on a regular basis to receive intelligence from torture.
“I agree with the suggestion by commentators on Mr Murray’s website that the fact that he is not being allowed to present his evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights strongly suggests that the purpose of this committee is not to uncover the truth but to bury it, to ‘prove’ that the government isn’t involved.”
Mr Murray commented on Dr Wilson’s Motion: “It is essential that people are told the truth about some of the terrible things that have been done in their name, if we are to avoid such outrages in future. There is a degree of integrity on this issue being shown in Holyrood that appears so far lacking in Westminster.”
I can make contact details for Bill Wilson available to anyone who wants them. I am very grateful for this support, which makes it still more difficult for the government to pretend that my evidence does not exist.
UPDATE
MSPs Robin Harper, Dr Christopher Harvie, Christina McKelvie, Stuart McMillan, Joe FitzPatrick, and Bill Kidd have now added their names to Dr Bill Wilson’s motion calling for my evidence to be heard.
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/Apps2/business/motions/Default.aspx?motionid=16106