Tony Blair will quit Downing St on the morning of 27 June. We all recall those stage-managed images of him entering through rapt crowds waving union jacks. Well, it is time for the reverse image as we boo the old warmonger out. I do hope you will join me there. Blair’s leaving will be covered worldwide and it is a great opportunity to get our point across. It was Blair’s support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, against the whole background of the war in Iraq, that led the Labour MPs to boot Blair out. We should remind the World why he has to go.

It needs enough people that the media cannot ignore it – and a determination not to be shunted somewhere invisible.

(I have, incidentally, no idea why the Stop the War Movement is dissipating energy on yet another long traipse in the rain around the deserted parts of Manchester three days previously, which will get no coverage at all.)

I have been determinedly trying to give Gordon Brown the benefit of the doubt. Sadly his strong support for anti-civil liberties legislation seems to leave little room for doubt. The need to maintain the right to demonstrate is another good reason to be there. Military Families Against the War have a permit for the demo.

We have already had a preview of the kind of hagiographic, cult-of-personality type reviews the BBC will be pumping out. When Blair announced his departure a month ago, the BBC produced a montage of his premiership that ignored the anti-war movement, cash for honours, the Mandelson/Blunkett resignations, the Lebanon, the Bernie Ecclestone scandal, David Mills or anything else that might be viewed as negative – or balanced.

Doubtless the Labour Party will have laid on some pro-Brown demonstrators. Let us make sure that those who hate what Blair has done to this country are represented in waving him off.

Be there. Downing Street. 27 June. 10am.

John Humphrys Does the end justify the means? Governments face that question all the time, and the answer is often yes, certainly if national security is threatened in any way. We do deals, we have relationships, with countries and leaders whose behaviour we deplore, especially if there seems to be no alternative. What about engaging in shady activities in the interests of creating jobs in this country? Well, that is the specific question that has been raised again this week with the revelation of the Saudia Arabian arms deal and the allegations that BAe paid massive kickbacks to a Saudi prince to get the contract. Well, Sir Andrew Green knows Saudi Arabia well, he was our Ambassador there for some years, and he’s on the line. Craig Murray is with me, he was our Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan. What’s your view of the deals that have been disclosed this week, they’ll have come as no surprise to you I imagine Sir Andrew?

Sir Andrew Green No, they don’t come as a huge surprise. I wasn’t aware of the detail of course, as these things are regarded as commercially confidential.

Humphrys Does it surprise you, before we move on from that, does it surprise you that Prince Bandar got so much, I mean more than a million [error – billion] pounds apparently in what are being called kickbacks.

Green I think that the allegation is more than that, but no, it doesn’t surprise me, any arms deal in the Middle East has payments for commission, or whatever you like to call it, associated with it. I don’t think there’s any news in that. I think the scale of it is surprising, yes. But, as you say, it’s a case of balancing our national interest against other factors and that’s very much one for the Prime Minister to take.

Humphrys But you, now that you’re no longer a diplomat you’re allowed to say this, what’s your view of it?

Green Well, it’s a matter of judgement, isn’t it. As you know, I’ve dealt with the Middle East for about forty years, and frankly I agree with the Prime Minister on this particular point. He said that our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important to our country, and if you just look at the outlook for the country, if you look at Iraq collapsing into chaos, a confrontation with Iran developing at American behest, anarchy in Palestine, genocide in Sudan, instability in Lebanon, I mean it just seems to me plain commonsense not to have a bust-up with a very influential ally in the heart of the region.

Humphrys Do you agree with that, Craig Murray?

Craig Murray No, I don’t. I certainly regard our relationship with Saudi Arabia as very important, but the idea that you can’t maintain good relationships with a country without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in bribes is a very poor one.

Green That’s not quite the issue though, is it? I mean the issue is whether we should do something that would be extremely embarassing for the ruling family in Saudi Arabia. I mean, the contract having been in place for some twenty years or so, so that the decision before us now is whether to allow that investigation to go forward, or to stop it, which is what the Prime Minister has done.

Murray Well, I spent most of my career in Africa and working on Africa. In Africa very poor people have their lives ruined by the fact that their governments are extremely corrupt, and that hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of aid money, donor money and commercial money are kicked back to the rulers by Western companies. How can we deplore corruption in Africa when we are actively participating in it in Saudi Arabia? And how can we say the rule of law applies to everybody in the land, if the Attorney General can say, as he did, that in this case the national interest outbalances the rule of law. The national interest can’t outbalance the rule of law in this country, nothing can outbalance the rule of law, not even the Crown.

Humphrys Isn’t this the point Sir Andrew, aren’t we saying “Don’t do as we do, do as we tell you to do.”

Green Well, first of all I don’t think you can draw a comparison between the countries of Africa and those of the Middle East.

Humphrys Really, why?

Green Well, first of all, there are very many countries in Africa and the situations are different in each. I think the key to taking a view on a particular country is actually to know about it, and the Middle East is quite different. There are very few people in Saudi Arabia who are actually in poverty. It’s not a question of the people suffering, they’re all quite reasonably well off.

Humphrys It’s the principle that we’re talking about here.

Green Well, the other principle is that you have to take the World as you find it, and you can only operate within the situation that you find within a particular country and a particular region.

Humphrys Is that the case when you have a Prime Minister who says that he’s a liberal interventionist and he wants to change the World?

Green Well, you would have to put that one to the Prime Minister. What I am saying is that on this issue, where he decided the balance of interest was not to proceed, I think he’s right in terms of our national interest, I think he’s right in terms of the counter-terrorism point that they have made quite a lot of, and they are not wrong to do so, and people often forget that Saudi Arabia itself is the first target of Al Qaida, the same organisation which threatens us so seriously. And we need hard information on those people involved, on their networks, on their movements, and the Saudis are interested to help. And that…

Humphrys That’s an important point surely, Craig Murray. If we are threatened in any way then we have to take help where we can get it, however distasteful it may be.

Murray I think there have to be limits, at the end of the day, to what you do.

Humphrys What, even if national security is at stake?

Murray Yes, because our security in the long term isn’t helped by promoting injustice, and the regime in Saudi Arabia is not a democratic one and is a tyrannical one which uses torture very freely and has even tortured British subjects in the past: that can’t be in our long term interest to assist.

Humphrys I am afraind, sorry Sir Andrew, we have to stop it there. Craig Murray and Sir Andrew Green thank you both very much.

Thanks to Chuck intervening with the BBC more succesfully than me, the link below now works! The BAe discussion is at the end of the final segment.

Many thanks to Clive and the server team for getting us up and running again after a persistent attack, probably not politically motivated, that had us off for some thirty six hours until yesterday afternoon.

On Saturday morning I had a sharp exchange of views on the Radio 4 Today programme with Sir Andrew Green, former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, over the BAe corruption scandal. John Humphrys was moderating.

I thought it brought out the arguments very well, and also for me illustrated precisely the ways that my thinking diverges from standard FCO thinking, thus explaining much of what occurred to me in Uzbekistan.

Sadly I haven’t been able to post a link or transcribe the interview because this segment of the programme is missing from the BBC web record of the Today programme. Here is the link to that: our interview was 8.55am. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/saturday.shtml (I presume that link will only work this week).

I have phoned the Today programme, and filled in the BBC website online forms to report a fault. Neither elicited a reply. If anyone else has time to try to nudge the BBC on this one, it might do some good.

I wondered how the Guardian would react to my criticism of their editorial staff on comment is free. What they appear to have done is leave the article up, but remove links to it from the front page and the Comment is Free page. So there is no way 99.9% 0f readers will know it is there.

It was only posted at 6pm last night, and articles posted long before it are still listed in cif as “Latest”, but this one has been removed. The only way anybody visiting the site could find it would be to go to Comment Is Free then Index, then M, then Murray, then choose it. The Guardian can therefore claim they didn’t delete it – just made it impossible to find if you didn’t know about it.

So this link still works –

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/craig_murray/2007/06/reids_new_best_friends.html

The remarks in question come in a comment I added at the end of the thread.

The Guardian has removed any reference to the article from the home page and cif listings, so there is no way anybody visiting the Guardian today knows it is there.

So I am asking everybody with access to a blog or site to post the above link over the course of the next week, to defeat the Guardian’s attempt to cut off dissent at its abandonment of its liberal tradition.

We have now mirrored the Guardian page just in case they do now scrub the original

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/CiF/reids_new_best_friends.html

Please post a comment after it – it would not take many more posts for it to reappear in the list of featured articles in the “Most commented” section. I presume that is driven by an automatic software.

I have just been sickened by John Reid putting his new anti-liberty proposals to parliament. “Terrible things are threatening” he gravely warned us “which had not been anticipated or imagined” when our liberties were adopted.

Just what are these “terrible things” that we can’t imagine? Reid’s flight of rhetoric is reminiscent of King Lear:

I will do such things, What they are yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth

The point is, of course, that Shakespeare’s Lear was supposed to be illustrating his descent into madness by this crazed rambling: whereas Reid’s daft statement comes from a supposedly rational man, intent on destroying the civil liberties of our country.

What terrorism we have seen to date in this country has been, in execution, not unimaginable or even particularly surprising. This is a tough and resilient country. We saw off Hitler, we saw off the IRA, and we can see this smaller threat off too. But we can do it better without Reid gnawing at our social sinews.

Terrible things have indeed happened in this country which I had neither anticipated nor imagined. In November 2005 the British government fought a case all the way to the House of Lords, to try to reintroduce, after three hundred years, the use in court of evidence obtained under torture. I never imagined or anticipated that would happen in my lifetime.

Nor did I imagine or anticipate that, as a matter of policy, our intelligence services would regularly use intelligence obtained under torture, nor that people would be held for years in British jails without charge or trial, nor that we would introduce house arrest. I never imagined or anticipated it would become illegal to read names of the dead at the cenotaph, nor wave a copy of Vanity Fair outside the gates of Downing St. I never imagined or anticipated that a Brazilian electrician could be executed on the London Underground.

One of the more nauseating scenes in the Commons was the brown-nosing of Reid by the so-called Liberal Democrats. Reid is no fool, and he knows that under Ming Campbell the Lib Dems are New Labour’s patsy party. Ming has dreams of ministerial office in a Lib-Lab coalition after the general election. That is why, for example, New Labour and the Lib-Dems are trying to wreck any chance of Alex Salmond providing stable administration in Scotland.

So Reid buttered up Clegg by cosy ministerial chats beforehand, leading to fulsome Lib Dem support today and the suggestion that he should go further. Why not introdue plea-bargaining, the Lib-Dems suggested, so those on the fringes of terrorist plots can turn others in for a reduced sentence?

The answer to that is simple. Terrorist investigations are already a minefield of intelligence obtained from foreign intelligence agencies, often under torture, and statements by informers many of whom appear to be acting as agents provovateurs. To persuade acknowledged criminals to improve their own lot by concocting statements against others, is something to which the British legal system has always offered resistance. If in the future any of you ends up behind bars because of lies told about you by a crook trying to reduce his sentence, you will have Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg and the so-called Lib Dems to thank for it.

Bin Laden and most of the 9/11 team came from Saudi Arabia. In response we keep invading other countries by mistake.

The so-called Attorney-General ordered the Serious Fraud Office to stop the investigation into BAE’s maasive bribery payments to Saudi Arabia because of “national security”. By this, he meant that the Saudis might stop giving us “intelligence” from their torture chambers if we persisted.

The Saudis are even allowed to torture British people if they feel like it:

Three Britons and a Canadian have been denied the right to sue Saudi Arabian officials they say tortured them. A Law Lords ruling allowed an appeal by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against a 2004 Court of Appeal decision for the men to be able to sue for damages.

The four had been jailed after being accused of taking part in a bombing campaign in Saudi Arabia six years ago. Saudi Arabia, supported by the British government, argues that its officials are protected by state immunity.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5078118.stm

It was fitting that the first stop on Blair’s World Rour was Libya, where he did deals with Gadaffi for BP and British Aerospace. No Prime Minister ever did more for the oil and defence industries.

But somewhere in the BBC, somebody is redisclvering their nerve. Take advantage of it before they get sacked to watch what looks like an interesting Panorama programme on June 11.

BBC investigation

A Saudi prince who negotiated a ’40bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia received secret payments for over a decade, a BBC probe has found. The UK’s biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.

Prince Bandar would not comment on the investigation and BAE Systems said it acted lawfully at all times. The MoD said information about the Al Yamamah deal was confidential.

Private plane

The investigation found that up to ‘120m a year was sent by BAE Systems from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington. The BBC’s Panorama programme has established that these accounts were actually a conduit to Prince Bandar for his role in the 1985 deal to sell more than 100 warplanes to Saudi Arabia. The purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the expenses of the prince’s private Airbus.

David Caruso, an investigator who worked for the American bank where the accounts were held, said Prince Bandar had been taking money for his own personal use out of accounts that seemed to belong to his government. He said: “There wasn’t a distinction between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts as we would call them, and the accounts of the royal family.”

Mr Caruso said he understood this had been going on for “years and years”. “Hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars were involved,” he added.

Investigation stopped

According to Panorama’s sources, the payments were written into the arms deal contract in secret annexes, described as “support services”. They were authorised on a quarterly basis by the MoD.

Prince Bandar was Saudi ambassador to the US for 20 years. It remains unclear whether the payments were actually illegal – a point which depends in part on whether they continued after 2001, when the UK made bribery of foreign officials an offence. The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation. The SFO inquiry into the Al Yamamah deal was stopped in December 2006 by attorney general Lord Goldsmith.

Prime Minister Tony Blair declined to comment on the Panorama allegations. But he said that if the SFO investigation into BAE had not been dropped, it would have led to “the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship and the loss of thousands of British jobs”.

Prince Bandar, who is the son of the Saudi defence minister, served for 20 years as US ambassador and is now head of the country’s national security council. Panorama reporter Jane Corbin explained that the payments were Saudi public money, channelled through BAE and the MoD, back to the Prince.

The SFO had been trying to establish whether they were illegal when the investigation was stopped, she added. She believed the payments would thrust the issue back into the public domain and raise a number of questions.

‘Bad for business’

Labour MP Roger Berry, head of the House of Commons committee which investigates strategic export controls, told the BBC that the allegations must be properly investigated.

If there was evidence of bribery or corruption in arms deals since 2001 – when the UK signed the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention – then that would be a criminal offence, he said. He added: “It’s bad for British business, apart from anything else, if allegations of bribery popping around aren’t investigated.”

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said that if ministers in either the present or previous governments were involved there should be a “major parliamentary inquiry”. “It seems to me very clear that this issue has got to be re-opened,” Mr Cable told BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight. “It is one thing for a company to have engaged in alleged corruption overseas. It is another thing if British government ministers have approved it.”

Panorama will be broadcast on Monday 11 June 2007 2030 BST

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6728773.stm

Update 08.06.07: The Guardian reveals that Attorney General Goldsmith hid secret money transfers from international anti-corruption organisation

The fascist initiative of the day today is that we should have a national day, to celebrate “Britishness”. We will all be dragooned into displays of spontaneous happiness, and celebrate our great national achievements, like detention without trial, use of intelligence obtained through torture, and illegal invasion of other countries. What fun!!

Personally I don’t feel the need, having Burns Night and St Andrew’s Day already, This idea sounds to me like the millenium dome in its force-fed awfulness. I can imagine Cherie and Tony in the middle of it all with their rictus grins, and Gordon wrapped yet again in a Union Jack, trying to sound cockney and pretend he’s a fun person.

Anyway two Labour ministers are promoting it today, backed up by an especially egregious creep called Nick Johnson of the Commission of Racial Equality. Johnson was so obviously a New Labour hack that I decided to google him. Lo and behold, I find that there is a view prevalent on the Web that neither Johnson, nor his partner Kate Davies, Chief Executive of the Notting Hill Housing Association, had a great deal to qualify them for their extremely highly paid Quango jobs other than their impeccable NuLab credentials.

Davies had a sociology degree and a postgraduate housing diploma, but not much practical housing administration experience when she was put in charge of one of Britain’s biggest Housing Associations. But she was a New Labour Special Adviser. What qualified the greasy Johnson I have no clue. But they now live in a very expensive address, in Sussex Gardens, at the end without the prostitutes.

Anyone smart enough to find what these NuLab parasites are paid?

Brown is attempting to establish his hard man credentials by trailing the next bunch of anti-terror laws. The most publicity has been given to the proposal that wiretaps should be available as evidence in court.

I have always favoured this, provided the wiretap is legal; and not just in terrorism cases. I blogged recently that I had never understood the government’s objection, but suspected it was because they did not want juries to be exposed to the extremely tenuous interpretations which the security services often put on communications ‘ which I have personally seen on the inside.

After I posted this, I met with a friend, still in the senior civil service, who filled me in on a fuller picture. I now realise, which I did not at the time, that he or she was telling me this because a move was imminent.

The concern is that intercept evidence might be more helpful to the defence than the prosecution. Where communication intercepts are used, as in the USA, the laws of evidence are that the prosecution must make complete disclosure of all the wiretaps made. The defence can then search this for evidence that points to innocence.

Compare this to the situation that operates with control orders, or indefinite house arrest without trial. Here the prosecution just feeds to the judge (no jury) an isolated snippet of information from ‘intelligence’, reflecting not a whole picture but just the security services’ interpretation. Judges tend to be impressed by this ‘Top Secret’ stuff.

To let the defence at raw intercepts threatens the intelligence services’ greatest lever of power ‘ their monopoly of interpretation of raw data. Even Ministers, or Ambassadors as I was, don’t get the raw data, but a ‘Report’ summarising, interpreting and selectively quoting.

So the proposal being considered by the Home Office is this ‘ that the defence should not be allowed access to all the material from wiretaps of the accused. The prosecution would have to disclose in full only the conversation, or conversations, being directly quoted from. The security services are prepared to go along with that, and the Home Office believe that the public demand for wiretap evidence to be admissible will drown out any protests from lawyers. We will be told the Security Services are not staffed to cope with fuller disclosure.

You read it here first. As my friend put it: “You see, in the minds of the Home Office, justice equals more convictions.”

The other point my friend flagged up was that some in the Home Office are arguing that the classification of many intercepts is such that they could not be available to juries. The demand to bring in intercept evidence might therefore be used to push the case for Diplock Courts in terrorist cases. I should be surprised if we see that kite flown at this stage; the government’s technique so far is to push back liberty by a series of hefty shoves. That is probably next year’s argument. But then I hadn’t realised my friend was warning me about something imminent on Wiretaps, so I could be wrong.

The other proposed Brown measure getting most attention is another call for ninety day internment without charge. But in many ways the most insidious proposal of all is the idea that you should still be subject to questioning after you have been charged.

This is a fundamental rebalancing of our legal system. It means that the police can charge you on spec, and then harass you for a confession when you are banged up in jail on remand and subject to extreme pressure, and all kinds of possibilities of physical abuse from fellow convicts -‘trusties’ working with the police. It removes a fundamental safeguard, that once charged the questioning takes place in open court before a jury. It is a huge change.

This proposal also completely obviates the whole ninety day detention question. At the moment, the police do not charge without a firm case, because then they can no longer question. If this new proposal goes through, then the police can just charge willy-nilly and hold the suspect for the usual remand of two or three years in terror cases.

Needless to say, the BBC and Sky have been able to find Lord Windbag Carlile, various ‘security experts’ and Gordon Brown himself to explain while all this is necessary. Even Simon Hughes turned up to pledge Lib Dem support for the right to question after charging. Obviously the whole country supports all this, as they have been unable to find anyone to argue against.