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Evidence To Parliament – Live Webcast

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If I pretended I wasn’t nervous about my appearance before the parliamentary committee today I would be lying. Little patches of moisture appear briefly on the keys as I hit them, then evaporate.

I am nervous not for myself, but in case I fluff this real opportunity to redeem something of the honour of our country, and to end this barbarous collusion with torture. If I had the chance to speak uninterrupted for ten minutes, I am sure I could make an impact. But I am limited to short answers to questions from the committee.

You will be able to see this on live webcast here at 1.45 BST today.

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/VideoPlayer.aspx?meetingId=3978

If anyone knows how to capture this for podcast or youtube or anything…

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Viral Press Officers Needed

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I am very busy now preparing for my appearance before the Parliamentary Joint Human Rights Committee. This will be at 1.45pm this Tuesday 28 April, in the Thatcher Room (!), Portcullis House. It is a public hearing and moral support would be welcome.

I have prepared the following press release:

ORIGINAL DOWNING ST SMEARS VICTIM

RETURNS TO HAUNT NEW LABOUR

Thatcher Room

Portcullis House

Tuesday 28 April 1.45pm

Formal Evidence Session on UK Complicity in Torture

Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights

Witness: Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan

(currently Rector of the University of Dundee).

In 2004, Craig Murray told us that:

– The British Government was complicit in the most vicious forms of torture

– He had been the victim of a lurid smear campaign initiated by New Labour

– The government was lying about all this

In 2004, much of the public and media was not willing to accept that the government would cooperate with torture or with false allegations against an innocent man. Many still had trust in the basic honesty and decency of government.

The evidence that Craig Murray was telling the truth about torture has now become overwhelming, including from the case of Binyam Mohammed. The UK “benefited” continually from intelligence passed on from the CIA waterboarding programme and from torture in countries including Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Egypt.

Craig Murray suffered the most high profile sacking of any British Ambassador for a century. But in 2005 the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee refused to hear him in evidence, despite allowing Jack Straw to appear and attack him.

Astonishingly, this is the first time Craig Murray will ever have been allowed to give formal evidence in the UK on his grave allegations, and be questioned on the truth of his testimony.

As the Scotland Yard investigation proceeds into MI5 and MI6 collusion in 16 cases of torture, Craig Murray will argue that it is not the security service operatives, but the Ministers who set the policy ?” and specifically Jack Straw ?” who should be facing criminal charges.

Contact: Craig Murray on 07979 691085 or [email protected]

Transcript of Craig Murray’s formal evidence statement is at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/trying_again_my.html

I need help to get this out to the mainstream media. Can you spare half an hour on Sunday or Monday to do that? Things you might do are:

– Find email addresses or fax numbers for newsrooms at newspapers, press and broadcast media and news agencies

– Send them a copy of the press release, and then telephone to make sure that somebody reads it

– Research on the internet reporters who have covered torture and extraordinary rendition, and send copies to them

– Speak with any journalist you have any contact with, alert them to the story and get them to pass it on to a suitable colleague

– Do not forget the Scottish media, political magazines and journals, specialist broadcasters, regional media and international correspondents in London

– Send copies to relevant NGOs – again following up with a phone call

– Rope in anyone with media experience and contacts you know to help

– Spread the news on the internet

Do not worry too much about duplication – it may be helpful, and there is much greater danger of too little being done than too much. I am sorry I am always asking you for help, but there is only one of me!

The parliamentary TV service is filming the hearing, so there will be footage and pictures available. It will also be webcast by parliament, though whether live or not I do not know.

You can cut and paste the press release, or it should be available in word and pdf here.

Download file

Download file

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Those Killed By US Torture: Alyssa Peterson

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Not everybody went along with the US torture programme. Read the tale of Alyssa Peterson.

Did she kill herself in horror at what she had witnessed her own country do, or was she murdered in case she made her experience public?

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1102-05.htm

Thanks to George.

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New Labour Corruption and Quilliam

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My own view is that those who have adopted religous fanaticism – for whatever religion – display an absence of good judgement.

Ed Husain is by his own account a former religous extremist. He is one of the leaders among those who realised that, having tried to make a mark in the world through religious fanaticism, they can make more money and career progress by turning traitor on their former beliefs and colleagues, and jumping on the anti-Islamist gravy train.

Both the original fanaticism and the high profile and lucrative betrayal are evidence of a sociopathic character.

Husain is now a wealthy man. The government set him up in the Quilliam foundation and has thrown more than £1 million of taxpayers’ money at it. He is in great and lucrative demand on the mainstream media.

The Quilliam Foundation is the branch of New Labour tasked with securing the Muslim vote and reducing British Muslim dissatisfaction with New Labour over the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. If they wanted to do that whith New Labour money, that would be their own business. But I object fundamentally to their doing it with my and your money.

The party political nature of the Quilliam Foundation is shown in their astonishing and completely unbalanced attack on Osama Saeed, a prominent SNP candidate and a friend of mine. They try to portray him as an Islamic extremist.

If Osama is an Islamic extremist, then I am a Blairite.

For New Labour to have even the faintest hope of a respectable performance at the general election, they must protect their Scottish base against the SNP. This pathetic attempt to smear the SNP as connected to Islamic extremism is a blatant abuse of taxpayers’ money.

It is also desperate. Here is one of the “extremist” comments of Osama which they highlight:

“The aim of Islamic law, contrary to popular belief, is not punishment by death or amputation of body parts. It is to create a peaceful and just society, with Islamic scholars over centuries citing its core aims: the freedom to practise religion; protection of life; safeguarding intellect; maintaining lineage and individual rights. This could be the basis for an Islamic Bill of Rights.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6157961.ece?print=yes&ran

They also criticisng Osama for saying the “Danish cartoons” should be banned. I disagree with Osama on that one, but I also disagree with Nadira and every other Muslim I know on that one. Freedom of speech, sadly in my view, is not absolute in this country – witness the government’s banning of Geerst Wilders. Osama’s view on this is not extreme, it is mainstream.

The real scandal here is not Osama Saeed, who is a good man dedicated to freedom and to bringing Scotland’s Muslim community into its mainstream politics. The real story is the blatant misuse of taxpayer funds by New Labour.

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Sunday Morning Thoughts

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It’s a beautiful morning, and I thought I might have a gentle mental ramble around the news.

It is very strange to find myself in agreement with the horrible Stephen Byers on anything, but he is reported as saying that the government may have to scrap ID cards and Trident II nuclear missiles as it slashes spending. It took a collapse of the worldwide Ponzi economy to drum at least some sense into New Labour. Byers is very close to Blair, but Blair would close down the NHS before closing down ID cards and nuclear missiles. So what is happening there?

It is almost tempting to propose that we should all vote New Labour to get the bastards back in again and make them clean up their own mess.

If Darling’s budget tells us anything, it is that Darling and Brown know that they are going to lose the election and are desperately trying to borrow enough to get them through and leave the hard decisions for the next lot. I see an argument for putting New Labour back in to take the pain and get so unpopular that even their under-educated Sun-reading Jane Goody-mourning core support will desert them, and the party will be wiped out forever.

Ok, let’s not do that. Not worth the risk they’d survive it.

There are going to need to be cutbacks in public spending. Trident should only be the start in the defence budget. The Typhoon Eurofighter is so highly specified that we only need that level of sophistication for a war against another major European power or the United States. What is the point of that? And what are we going to do with those aircraft carriers? Do we really still want to be able to fight major wars thousands of miles from home? The truth is, we cannot afford to.

As an Ambassador I was always amused to see on the recruitment ads that I earnt less than the average manager of a local government leisure centre. Those who remember the comedy show “The Brittas Empire” may be amazed to realise that Mr Brittas would likely be on £90,000 a year plus car, relocation expenses etc.

Almost the only aspect of local government which is media interesting enough to come under harsh scrutiny is child protection services. The awful faults there – top-heavy management, bureaucracy stifling efficient function, lots of people with no identifiable purpose, too few people at the sharp end, of too low standard and not allowed to use initiative – are actually repeated in every local government function.

I would start by making redundant everybody in local government who has either of the words “Director” or “Officer” in their title. That would save hundreds of billions of public money, while in three weeks everything would be working perfectly well again. I would then reorganise local government so that it received no money at all from central government, and had power to raise its own revenue from local income tax.

I am pleased at the overwhelming public support for the imposition of the higher rate of income tax. There is plainly a belief in social justice among the population which politicians, whose parties are funded by the rich and who are chasing company directorships before or after retirement, have been ignoring. The Sunday Times rich list is published today. This is a good time to confiscate unearned wealth. Let’s start by taking away the completely unearned £6.5 billion from the Duke of Westminster.

I am worried about the revelation by the Independent that David Cameron went on a freebie to South Africa paid for by a pro-apartheid regime lobby group. I know people can change, but only the most hardline of Thatcherites would ever have considered doing that in the 1980s, and anyone who could not clearly perceive the evil of apartheid has a deficient moral sense.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-camerons-freebie-to-apartheid-south-africa-1674367.html

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Waterboarding Approved Specifically To Justify Iraq War

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I have just learnt something which has convinced me that Bush, Cheney and Rice are indeed evil in the sense that Hitler was evil. I did not actually believe that until today.

The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.

Everybody in the intelligence and security worlds knew there were no such links – Bin Laden and Hussein were enemies. Only torture could yield “intelligence” of such links to provide a justification of the invasion of Iraq. There could be no clearer indication that these evil people wished to launch an illegal war of aggression for their other reasons.

If it is not evil to use torture to try to create a pretext for launching aggressive war, then what is evil?

Here is the full text of Marjorie’s article.

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.

The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding on July 17, 2002 “subject to a determination of legality by the OLC.” She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Team Bush claimed – and still claims – that it had to use harsh techniques to protect us from the terrorists. They really sought to create evidence to rationalize an illegal, unnecessary, and tragic war.

That is absolutely stunning in its implications. How much of this did Blair and Straw also know?

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Hillary and Pakistan

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I will go back out to Pakistan again later this year. In the meantime I have been talking to Pakistani friends and to journalists and others based in Pakistan, before trying to give a few considered thoughts on Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary and calculated remarks on Wednesday about the “mortal threat” to the USA posed by Pakistan.

The first and most obvious point is that, since Obama and Hillary have been in office, the United States has killed over 200 Pakistani civilians in Pakistan. Pakistanis have killed no United States civilians in the United States. For Hillary to call Pakistan a mortal threat is therefore somewhat rich.

The evidence is incontrovertible that missile strikes from aerial drones are a particularly indiscriminate way of killing. Very often the justification of the attacks is a desire to assassinate a particular indivdual; but the average number killed in each strike in Pakistan is 19. The majority of those killed have been women and children.

It should be self-evident that these brutal attacks will stoke resentment of the US in Pakistan. They are helping to create the fundamentalism which Hillary claims horrifies her. Which leads me to wonder, as I have wondered so often in the “War on Terror”, whether apparently brutish action by the United States is in fact intended to provoke a reaction.

The attacks not only stoke outrage, but are a blow to the self-esteeem of the average Pakistani and fuel contempt for the Pakistani government which permits the United States to attack its territory and kill its women and children. The truth is that the spread of the Pakistani “Taliban”, which Clinton so deplores, is not achieved through military strength but through popular sympathy.

One of the most potent things the Pakistani government could do to prevent the leeching of support towards Islamic extremists, would be to forbid the United States absolutely to carry out any more bombing operations in Pakistan, with the threat of physical resistance. That would damage the cause of the Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan much more effectively than bombing ever will.

I share the Clinton viewpoint that theocratic government is, in itself, a bad thing. But it is also important to consider the motivation behind the increasing support for Islamism – manifested in the issue of sharia law – among ordinary Pakistanis. We very seldom hear their voices. The very pleasant and highly educated Pakistani commentators from all sides we hear on the mainstream media, are a tiny fraction of the population.

I strongly supported the reinstatement of the judges sacked by General Musharraff, but these middle class concerns mean nothing to the 90% of the Pakistani population who live on under $350 a year. They have no access to justice at all and are subject to oppression by an arbitrary and extremely corrupt police, backed by corrupt courts. The appeal of sharia law is that the westernised system has corrupted and failed the poor. Add to that an economy going backwards while neighbouring India has surged forward. It is impossible to tackle corruption under the President who is its walking embodiment, but without radical reform the theocratic movement is going to continue to make ground – literally. Clinton’s harsh words and bombs will do the opposite of help.

On 12 April the US signed a new military agreement with Islam Karimov, the Butcher of Tashkent, for supply of US forces in Afghanistan through Uzbekistan – thus conclusively killing any hope that the Obama/Clinton administration would prioritise human rights in foreign policy. The increase of US forces in Afghanistan is in progress. The ultimate goal remains the revival of the Unocal plan for a pipeline over Afghanistan and through Pakistan to bring out Central Asia’s massive hydrocarbon resources to the sea. But the actual result of US action throughout Central Asia and of their support of deeply corrupt regimes in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, continues to be the growth of fundamentalist Islam. A radical change of US policy is needed. Instead, like a desperate gambler, Hillary is upping the ante.

Either the United States is preparing the ground for ultimate invasion of Pakistan, or it is behaving very stupidly indeed.

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Carbon Capture – A Physical Impossibilty

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The government is giving a coat of greenwash to its decision to smash its emissions commitments by giving the go-ahead to a new generation of huge coal-fired power stations. The propaganda focuses on the idea that 25% (in fact the measure says 20 to 25% and we can guess which it will be) of harmful emissions must be captured and stored.

Or to put it another way, the most atmosphere polluting of all electricity generation methods will be pumping out a massive increase to British carbon dioxide emissions, with a 20% mitigation of that vast increase. The even more pathetic aspect of the greenwash figleaf is the claim that 100% of the carbon must be captured by 2025.

If we continue to increase carbon emissions until 2025, the value of any reduction thereafter will be minimal; the situation is urgent and needs to be addressed now, not in sixteen years time. It also relies on a non-existent – and many would say physically impossible – technology. It would have been less of a punt to claim that in 2025 they will be replaced by nuclear fusion.

The problem is that when you combust coal or oil, the carbon dioxide produced, even when expensively compressed to its maximum. has a volume several times greater than that of the original coal or oil. Ideas that you put it back in the hole it came from do not work. Keeping a gas compressed also involves high pressure containment. The idea that this will happen on a massive scale, and that any significant proportion of fossil fuel emissions can be stored, does not even make credible science fiction.

The UK has both abundant renewable energy resources and is a world leader in the technology to exploit them. The failure of the government to look to a major boost to the nascent renewable energy industry for this next wave of electricity generation, may in fact be one of the biggest disasters of New Labour.

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Darling’s Fantasy Bubble Burst – Already

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The government has just announced a first quarter fall of 1.9% in GDP.

It is important to understand this. That is not an annual rate of decline. It means that on 1 April 2009 the total economy meausred as GDP was 1.9% smaller than it was on 1 January 2009.

So for Darling’s budget projection of 3.5% decline this year to be true, the average decline over the next three quarters would have to be about 0.5%. Given that we are still on an accelerating decline (the -1.9% quarter follows a -1.6% quarter) that is plainly very very unlikely indeed.

My own Treasury source tells me that they had expected a – 1.5% decline in the first quarter as part of their -3.5% projection for the full year. The Treasury did not have the 1.9% figure from the National Statistical Office in advance of the budget.

So plainly Darling’s – 3.5% figure is wrong. It is worth noting that the IMF came out two days later with the same prediction as me, – 4.1%.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/the_economy_wor.html#comments

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Condoleeza Rice Appproved Waterboarding Torture

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It emerges that Condoleeza Rice gave the go-ahead for waterboarding as National Security Adviser.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090423/ts_alt_afp/usattacksmilitaryjusticecongresszubaydah

This blog brought you information on the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed over two years ago.

CIA Torture and Khalid Sheik Mohammed

The man was waterboarded – which causes excruciating pain and suffocation – over 180 times. That is about once every three days over the period in question. There are few examples in history of anybody ever being tortured so severely over such an extended period. Can you imagine the permanent mental anguish, of waiting for the next physical anguish to begin?

Plainly the “Ticking bomb” argument used by Cheney and the pro-torture lobby is a myth, when torture extends over years.

As a result of this extreme and prolonged torture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to pretty well every terrorist atrocity you can name or planned terrorist atrocity you can imagine. In the UK alone, under torture he “confessed” to plans to blow up Heathrow, Canary Wharf, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. There are similar lists for pretty well every other Western country.

When I wrote the following back in 2007 this blog got 500 visitors a day: now it gets 5,000 let me repeat it:

Secret Confessions and Torture

Mohammed Sheikh Khalid has now, voluntarily and of his own free will, admitted he masterminded every significant event from the Norman Invasion through the bubonic plague, fall of Constantinople, and Great Fire of London, to the Battle of Little Big Horn, assassination of JFK and the Oklahoma bombing.

Or he might as well have. The extraordinarily comprehensive list of terrorist outrages for which he claims responsibility would be beyond the capacity of any but the most brilliant and inspired mortal; Khalid, I fear, is a more run of the mill thug.

But in truth, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, he has confessed at all. The BBC brazenly reported all of yesterday that while Khalid did allege he had been tortured during his four years of secret detention by the CIA in various locations around the globe, he is now freely confessing under no duress and does not retract any of his confession.

Who says? The proceedings being held in Guantanamo Bay, and which the BBC report so uncritically, are held behind barbed wire, machine guns, gun emplacements, reinforced steel and concrete and combination locks, before an exclusively military panel. Khalid does not even have a lawyer present. For all we know, his confession could be an entire fabrication. The blandness of the BBC reporting in these circumstances is one of the worst examples of the appalling desertion of the principles of that once worthwhile institution.

The readiness of the rest of the media to push the “instil fear” button on behalf of the Orwellian government is predictable. They report as fact that Khalid also planned to blow up Heathrow, Canary Wharf, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and any other British building the Pentagon had heard of.

If Khalid really is freely and openly confessing all of this stuff, then what possible reason can there be to deny him a lawyer, and not allow public and media access to his trial? The atrocities he allegedly confesses – the Twin Towers, Madrid, Bali – left thousands of bereaved families. They have a right to see justice done, rather than this elaborate propaganda set-up, with its total lack of proper legal process or intellectual credibility.

Did Khalid really do all of this? Two facts must be considered. He has been through years of vicious torture and of solitary confinement. If the experience of others who survived extraordinary rendition is typical, he has been kept in total isolation, in darkness, beaten, cut, suffocated and drowned, suffered white noise and sensory deprivation. He will have been moved around, often not even knowing which country he is in. One good contact has told me that the CIA gave the Uzbek torturers their turn with him. I do not know that for certain, but who can contradict me?

After years of this, a person can be so psychologically damaged that they believe the narrative of their torturers to be the truth. It is perfectly possible that he now in fact believes he did all that stuff on the list, when he did not.

Alternatively, he may have decided to exaggerate his own role and achievements for the personal glory it brings. We can get the appalling situation where both the sides which benefit from and wish to promote the War on Terror – Al Qaida and the CIA – indulge in what becomes a grim mutual cooperation in exaggeration as each seeks to glorify their role. Thus do those on both sides who actually desire a “Clash of Civilisations”, promote one.

What is happening now in Guanatanamo Bay is a disgrace. We cannot in present circumstances accept anything that comes out of it as other than a completely unsubstantiated claim by the Pentagon. Some of it is quite possibly true. But this is no way to make the case.

Secret Confessions and Torture

The UK is complicit in this torture. Every bit of “intelligence” from the CIA torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the thousands of other victims of torture by the CIA or their foreign liason intelligence agencies, has been shared with MI6 by the CIA. Jack Straw took the positive decision that the UK should accept intelligence from torture. That is the main point of the evidence I shall give to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights on Tuesday 28 April.

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Sky Doesn’t Get the Blogosphere

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At 7pm Sky give us a news broadcast intended to link in with the news media, promoting their own website and referring to news in the blogosphere. It really is quite painful to watch; it is like your grandmother trying to be very trendy.

They are having a discussion between “bloggers” on the budget, the standad of which is childish at best. As usual, they have invited so-called bloggers to represent the parties – one Tory, one New Labour and one Lib Dem.

The problem is that minor party hacks don’t get any more interesting just because you call them “bloggers.” And it misses the entire point of he blogosphere. Political blogs are increasingly popular because they are not controlled by the political relationships and demands of media proprietors, or by control of other power structures. They offer unconstrained thought, information and debate, and one of the main constraints they escape is the cold dead hand of British party politics.

Sky’s gesture towards the blogosphere is undermined by complete lack of imagination.

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Lord Jones and Kalashnikovs

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Lord Jones of Cheltenham has sent me his telling of the story recounted in The Catholic Orangemen of Togo about our seeing off the security service raid on the independent radio station in Accra. It differs from mine in some details, the most important of which is that we were actually with Graham Elson on this occasion as Roger Gale was working up country.

I confess that I am always pleased to have other eye-witness accounts of the many incidents in my books where dangerous people point guns at me. David Hare told me he had spent some of his time in Uzbekistan verifying the truth of some of the more physical enounters in Murder in Samarkand, like my attempt to shield Kristina in the car crash, and had clearly been somewhat surprised to find I really did that stuff.

The truth is I was petrified much of the time – including in the following incident, as told by Lord Jones:

Craig Murray arrived at our hotel on eve of poll with news of a melee up north in Ho, or maybe Hohoe. We readily agreed to accompany him to the local radio station Joy FM to find out what had happened. You tend to be very gung-ho on these missions and the thought that the evening might turn violent was not one which entered my head. Joy FM’s sister station Love FM confirmed the disturbance and told us that fourteen people had been arrested, one of them an opposition candidate. Craig asked what Joy FM intended to do with the news. ‘Well,’ said the young, bright broadcaster,'”Rawlings is giving his final Presidential broadcast on TV. We will make the trouble the main item on our news bulletin at 8 pm which is to be followed by a phone-in programme on the election.’ We watched the presidential broadcast. It was obviously pre-recorded with cuts when Jerry Rawlings started to get agitated. The whole thing was pretty disjointed but I gained the impression that he did not relish the concept of his party losing power.

The 8 o’clock radio bulletin followed and then all hell broke loose. There was a disturbance at the door and a group of uniformed and heavily armed large men appeared, each carrying what I am assured were Kalashnikov weapons. They were from the Bureau of National Intelligence. The leader instructed the young man in charge to stop broadcasting. Then Craig stepped in.

Craig Murray is not the tallest man in the world although the leader of this group of invaders was certainly a candidate for that title. Bravely Craig looked this man in the eyes and calmly said ‘You know I am Craig Murray the Deputy British High Commissioner.’ ‘Yes, Mr Murray, we know who you are.’ ‘Yes well what you may not know is that these three gentlemen have been invited by your government’ he paused jabbing his finger at (but not touching) the chest of the large man and repeating ‘YOUR government’ with emphasis, continuing ‘to observe these elections to make sure they are free and fair, and this person’ pointing at me ‘is a Member of Parliament from the House of Commons in London.’ At this every single member of the group pointed their Kalashnikovs at me. I kept as calm as you can in these circumstances. As Craig continued I was aware of a bead of sweat forming on my brow and slowly making its way down my forehead and left cheek. ‘Now,’ Craig continued, “Are you telling me and are you telling them and in particular are you telling him’ pointing at me again (I wished he wouldn’t keep doing that), guns still at the ready, lots of trigger fingering going on, ‘that you are going to close down this radio station? Because if you do, these gentlemen, including this important Member of the British Parliament’ pointing again ‘may decide to report that these elections have NOT been free and fair.’. He paused. ‘And it will be all YOUR fault’ jabbing finger again ‘YOUR fault’. Silence reigned for some moments. The guns were still pointing at me. They were very large. I gave outward signs of being calm. What was going on inside is a different matter. Another bead of sweat formed and made its way down the other side of my face.

Graham Elson tried to be helpful. I suggested they might like to go back and get further instructions as there had obviously been a mistake. After what seemed like an age, accompanied by more trigger fingering, they turned on their heels and left. After perhaps a minute we went outside to make sure they had really gone. They had left, but had stopped at the end of the road. We thought they might be about to take a pot shot at us from there, but when they saw us they got back into their vehicles and drove off. Joy FM stayed on air. ‘Thanks Craig,’ I commented. He chuckled. ‘You look like you need a drink,’ he replied perceptively.

Now if we had not been there, that radio station would have been closed down and the 2000 Ghana elections might have joined a long list of African elections which went wrong. Diplomats, MPs and others often get a bad press. All I can say is that Craig Murray is one of the most effective diplomats I have ever met and that like others I have known, the mission to observe this election was certainly no ‘jolly’.

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David Hare on the Flinching Milliband

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David Hare made an a thought provoking speech at the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression awards. Worth reading, and not just because I get a mention:

But hypocrisy and double standards on the left now seem over-shadowed, dwarfed, obliterated by endemic, instituional hypocrisy on the right or, to put it another way, in government. Better, I think, to be a champagne socialist than a suppository-wielding, water-boarding capitalist.

In Howard Brenton’s play Weapons of Happiness, one character looks puzzeled at another and declares: ‘You really are something of a perpetual absence, old man.’ I’m afraid this line of dialogue always pops into my mind when I catch a glimpse of our present Foreign Secretary David Milliband, a kind of flinching, nocturnal badger of human rights. Again, it’s difficult to recall that the Brown government arrived covertly flagging discontinuity. It was, we were told, full of people who in an epic act of loyalty had been willing to hide their misgivings about the supine antics of the Blair period. While nobody was going as far as to offer what Robin Cook was moved from office for suggesting ?”?” an ethical foreign policy ?”?” nevertheless there was, again, the feeling that a renewed defence of democracy might involve some public restating of absolutes. Do I need to observe no such restatement has followed? More accurately, nothing has followed, except reversion to tribal diplomatic loyalties, the old half-truths and half-lies rolled out on behalf of dodgy allies. In the last two editions of the New York Review of Books you may read Mark Danner’s authoritative accounts of systematic use of torture by the CIA. Humiliation, beatings by use of a collar, sleep deprivation, suffocation by water, kickings, confinement in a box, shackles, prolonged nudity. Strange: we await the appropriate moral outrage from Whitehall.

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2009/04/22/we-expect-a-bias-for-freedom/

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Scottish Parliament Motion on UK Complicity in Torture

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Bill Wilson MSP has put down the following motion in the Scottish Parliament:

Short Title: UK Government’s Admission of Complicity in Torture

S3M-03949 Bill Wilson (West of Scotland) (SNP): That the Parliament

considers the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s recent report on human rights in which the UK Government tacitly admits to using “intelligence possibly derived through torture”; further notes Craig Murray’s statement that the names of sources are omitted from intelligence reports so that it cannot be proven that torture was used in producing that intelligence; believes that the report therefore negates the UK Government’s supposed condemnation of torture and that when it uses evidence obtain from practices such as immersing victims in boiling water, as used in Uzbekistan, or taking them to the point of drowning , as extensively practised by the United States of America under the euphemism of waterboarding, then it is as guilty as the government or agency that carries out the torture, and is of the opinion that torture does not protect lives but simply ensures that the victim provides whatever “evidence” is required by the torturer and that the use of torture can only increase hatred and violence, not reduce it

His office have put out the following press release:

UK Government’s admission of complicity in torture highlighted in Scottish Parliament

Dr Bill Wilson, an SNP MSP for the West of Scotland, today lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament highlighting a recent human rights report by the Foreign and Commonwealth office that contains a tacit admission the UK Government uses evidence obtained through torture.

Dr Wilson commented: “The UK has a long and appalling record when it comes to human rights. The latest revelation is of a piece with its support for Indonesia’s genocidal Suharto regime, its treatment of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia, its earlier support for sanctions against Iraq and its later invasion of that country, and its support for Israel, despite the latter’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory and its brazen flouting of the human rights of Palestinians and various opponents of its brutal policies (not least the brave Jewish Israeli youngsters thrown into prison for refusing to serve in the Israeli Defence Force!).

“The UK Government’s weasel words cannot disguise its effective support for torture. As my motion makes clear, this undermines any pretence the UK might have to higher ethical ground. How can the UK effectively combat terrorism when it condones atrocities committed by its so-called friends and allies? The bitterness and hatred stoked by this hypocrisy is surely considerable.

“Furthermore, it’s nonsense to suggest that tortured people will say anything other than what they think their interrogators want to hear. If you are taken to the point of drowning and believe that the only way you can save yourself is to say that X, Y and Z are members of Al Qaeda, then you would likely do so, regardless of the truth.

“Perhaps the worst aspect of torture, however, is that those who have taken part in it are driven to justify what they have done. Of course they want to believe that the cruelty they have been guilty of produced useful information, and so they are likely to go to great lengths to deceive both themselves and others in this regard. Having justified it, then, they will persist in practising it.

“Torture is always wrong in my opinion, and the ‘ticking bomb’ argument a dangerous myth. The criminals complicit in torture, who can be found at the highest levels of the UK Government, must be held accountable. ”

My analysis of the FCO’s stunning admission to receiving intelligence from torture is found here:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/fco_finally_adm.html

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Treasury Civil Servants Must Be Sacked

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The budget not only shows the massive cost to ordinary people of saving fatcat bankers from the consequences of their multiple Ponzi schemes.

It also shows the total politicisation of the Civil Service under New Labour.

The Budget figures on borrowing, tax and spending going forward have been massaged to give the Chancellor political cover, by being based on impossible economic growth projections.

Nobody but nobody believes the Treasury forecast of 1.25% economic growth in 2010 and 3.5% in 2011. The IMF does not believe it and not one respected independent forecaster is so optimistic.

Vince Cable just described it as “Utter fantasy”. Vince Cable is quite correct.

But, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson just told us “Senior Treasury officials say that they stand by these projections.” That the senior civil servants in the Treasury have signed up to impossible projections, to give political support to the Chancellor, is a betrayal of all the values that are supposed to be represented by our Civil Service. What they have signed up to is not in the range of intellectually respectable opinion.

This is not difference of opinion. This is deliberate lying about the country’s economic prospects, by those entrusted with the stewardship of the economy.

Remember these are the same Treasury officials who just six months ago, also with political motivation, projected the fall in GDP this year as, at the top of the range, -1.25%. Just six months later they have radically revised that to -3.5% (which is still an underestimate of the collapse).

The situation is a disgrace, but not an accident. It is a reflection of the relentless politicisation of the senior ranks of the Civil Service under New Labour. Nowhere has that process been more thorough and ruthless than at the Treasury under Gordon Brown. There are now no senior civil servants, in key positions of influence for the budget, who are not New Labour apparatchiks.

Hence this politically motivated forecasting and its execrable quality.

After the next election and once these forecasts are shown for the specious ill-motivated propaganda that they are, every civil servant who signed up to these forecasts must be charged with gross misconduct, sacked, and stripped of their massive index-linked pension.

Not enough has been done to ensure that the bankers who fed fat on their Ponzi schemes cough back their ill-gotten gains after bringing disaster on us all. But the same must apply to the Civil Service too. The Augean stable Brown created must be swept clean of his bullshit so-called public servants.

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Budget Advice

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The debt and borrowing forecasts in the economy are appalling. The announced borrowing of approxiimately $750 billion over five years is already astonishing, but it is predicated on ludicrously inflated economic growth rates.

Nobody outside New Labour believes in the economic growth projections of 1.25% in 2010 and 3.5% in 2011. So in fact the real borrowing figure is likely to be over 1 trillion dollars.

I am poor and I don’t worry too much about money. But if you have any savings, in sterling or invested in something sterling denominated, get out now and get it into euros. The pound is going to fall spectacularly over the next eighteen months.

Just two other points then I’ll forget the budget. For Darling to pretend that 2.5% is a real terms increase for pensioners is a plain lie. Few pensioners pay mortgages, so the large majority do not benefit from the fall in the RPI due to mortgage payment reductions. Food and energy costs feature disproportionately in their budgets, and real inflation for pensioners is well over 2.5%.

The small increase in income tax for the rich is long overdue, but the bastards nearly all have accountants who will help them avoid it.

Nick Clegg is making a very good speech indeed, but nobody is listening. I will post it tomorrow.

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Sickening BBC News Propaganda

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At 07.00 this morning, BBC News gave a mention of less than ten seconds to the release from anti-terror questioning of the nine men they still called “terror suspects”. This was followed immediately by a non-news piece on the testing of barriers to protect us from car bombs, which gave the BBC the excuse to show two bomb explosions at 07.03, right at the front of the news. That will take people’s minds off the fact the terror plot was a fabrication, and get them good and scared again!

The BBC gave massive coverage to these innocent mens’ arrest and Gordon Brown’s and Jacqui Smith’s lying statements about them. The real story is the concoction of huge terror scares by politicians for propaganda purposes. But you won’t see it on the BBC.

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Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith Terror Lies Revealed

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Only two of the twelve people arrested in dramatic “terror raids” in the North West of England are still in police custody. Nine more were released from anti-terror detention on Tuesday. Their arrest was first headline on all news bulletins and announced by no less than the Prime Minister himself. Sky News is saying that despite the total lack of evidence against them, they are still regarded as a security threat and thus are being deported – thus getting rid of the embarassment of these innocent men being able to talk to the press..

This was the only major UK political blog which had the courage to stand against the manufactured terror panic and false patriotism, and point out that the whole Easter Bomb Plot story stunk to high heaven from the very first minute:

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.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/politically_tim.html

There was in fact never any intelligence that there was going to be an Easter bomb plot. And vast expenditure of police and military resources failed to find anything more sinister than sugar, and some photos of Manchester taken by students in Manchester.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/bomb_squad_in_d.html

The mainstream media and the so called parliamentary opposition are determined to keep the vast over-hype of the terror threat going.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/jacqui_plays_th.html

But it is obvious from evey internet outlet that has a comment page, that they have lost a large proportion of the men and woman in the street. The government’s desperate fallback position of branding them a security risk and deporting them absolutely without evidence, is a sickening abuse of power and evidence of a continued desire to ride a wave of xenophobia aimed at overseas students.

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The Deepest Split in the Tory Party

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Being in opposition disguises the fact that the Conservatives are still a deeply split party. The huge divide on Europe actually has a close relationship to their still deeper split over the most important fault line in British politics – that authoritarian/libertarian divide.

New Labour, of course, have pinned their colours unreservedly to the authoritarian mast. We have seen the greatest erosion of civil liberties and parliamentary government since Britain became a democracy. There remain some Tories who are instinctively libertarian, like Rifkind, Clarke and Davis. But as examplified by Chris Grayling’s dreadful parliamentary performance against Jacqui Smith yesterday, many have an atavistic urge to be even more authoritarian than New Labour.

Right at the top of the Conservative Home website today is a video from Fox News supporting torture – arguing in effect that torture works.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2009/04/new-ipsos-mori-poll-puts-tory-lead-at-13.html

The Tory party in the country, and even more so in parliament, would be deeply split by those who are horrified at this trampling on ancient liberties, and those who have bought in to the neo-con agenda.

You can hide that kind of fundamental divide in opposition. You can’t in Government.

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