We have made the New Statesman’s Blog roundup again.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200706080001
I am just giving the link as, ironically, the only two copyright action threats to this website for posting stuff have come from the FCO and the New Statesman!
Craig
From COE
Dick Marty presents his second report on secret detentions in Europe
Strasbourg, 04.06.2007 ‘ Following several months of additional investigation, Dick Marty (Switzerland, ALDE), rapporteur of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), is due to present his second report on ‘Alleged secret detentions and illegal inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states’ to the Assembly’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights in Paris on Friday 8 June 2007.
The meeting is closed to the press, but if the report is approved by the committee, it will be made public on this occasion. Mr Marty will also give a press conference at 2 p.m.
Commenting on the draft, Mr Marty said: ‘My first report focused mainly on illegal inter-state transfers and extraordinary renditions. This second report will focus mainly on the other part of my mandate ‘ secret detentions.’
The report, if approved, is scheduled for debate by the 318-member Assembly, bringing together parliamentarians from all 47 Council of Europe member states, on Wednesday 27 June 2007, during its June plenary session in Strasbourg.
From BBC Online
The first criminal trial over the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects has opened in Italy. Twenty-six Americans and six Italians are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect and sending him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.
The Americans – most believed to be CIA agents – will be tried in absentia. Italy has not announced if it will seek their extradition to the Milan trial. US President George W Bush will arrive in Italy hours after the trial opens.
Meanwhile, the head of a European investigation into the rendition process is due to present more findings on Friday.
Surprise witness
Italy’s government has asked the country’s highest court to set aside the rendition trial, saying prosecution documents will break state secrecy laws and damage relations with the CIA. The Constitutional Court is due to rule on that appeal by September, and defence lawyers are expected to ask that the trial be adjourned until the high court makes its ruling.
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr – also known as Abu Omar – was snatched from a Milan street in February 2003. Italian prosecutors say Nasr was taken to US bases in Italy and Germany before being taken to the Egyptian capital of Cairo. Nasr says he was tortured during his four-year imprisonment in Cairo.
At the time of his arrest he was suspected of recruiting fighters for Islamic groups but had not been charged. He was released by Egypt earlier this year, his lawyer said.
A senior US official has said that the 26 Americans accused of Nasr’s kidnapping would not be sent to Italy even if Rome made an extradition request.
One of the surprise witnesses in the case will be Philip Morse – one of the minority owners of the US baseball team the Boston Red Sox, says the BBC’s Christian Fraser in Rome. It is alleged that his Gulfstream jet was used by the CIA to fly Abu Omar out of Italy, says our correspondent.
‘Web of abuse’
Also on Friday, Swiss senator Dick Marty, leading an inquiry on behalf of the Council of Europe, is due to release more of his findings. Last year, he accused 14 European nations of colluding with US intelligence in a “spider’s web” of human rights abuses, and specified Romania and Poland as suspected locations for CIA “black sites”, where terror suspects are secretly held.
President Bush acknowledged the existence of such centres last year, but did not say where they were. Mr Bush will arrive on Friday for talks with Pope Benedict XVI and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
Mr Prodi has already said that the extraordinary rendition case will not be on the agenda.
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 United Nations has held that “disappearance” of persons is in itself a form of torture, because of the mental anguish heaped both on the “disappeared”, and on their family. Yet the US continues to do it.
As Reuters reports, human rights groups have named 39 people “disappeared” while in US custody. Stephen Grey, author of the brilliant Ghost Plane, believes that the numbers disappeared by the USA might reach the hundreds. As Uzbekistan is one of the torture destinations for extraordinary rendition, experience would indicate that many of these will have been murdered and the bodies dumped or cremated.
Groups list 39 ‘disappeared’ in U.S. war on terror
Thu Jun 7, 2007
By Claudia Parsons
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people they said were believed to have been held in U.S. custody and “disappeared.”
The groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they filed a U.S. federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the 39 people it terms “ghost prisoners” in the U.S. “war on terror.”
“Since the end of Latin America’s dirty wars, the world has rejected the use of ‘disappearances’ as a fundamental violation of international law,” professor Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law said in a statement.
The report said suspects’ relatives, including children as young as seven, had been held in secret detention on occasion.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano dismissed the report, saying the CIA acts in “strict accord with American law” and its counter-terrorist initiatives are “subject to careful review and oversight.” “The United States does not conduct or condone torture,” he said.
In September, U.S. President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIA had interrogated dozens of suspects at secret overseas locations and said 14 of those held had been sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Bush strongly defended the secret detention and questioning of terrorism suspects and said the CIA treated them humanely. The program has drawn international outcry and questions about the cooperation of European governments.
Tens of thousands of people “disappeared” during Latin America’s so-called dirty wars in Chile, Argentina and several other countries where right-wing dictators used extra-judicial detentions to crush armed Marxist opposition.
The list of 39 people said to have been held in U.S. custody at some point was compiled using information from six rights groups, including London-based groups Cageprisoners and Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. The detentions began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and include people said to be captured in locations including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia.
EVIDENCE OF DETENTIONS
The United States has acknowledged detaining three of the 39. The groups said, however, there was strong evidence, including witness testimony, of secret detention in 18 more cases and some evidence of secret detention in the remaining 18 cases.
Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch said it was unknown if the suspects were now in U.S. or foreign custody, or even alive or dead. “We have families who have not seen their loved ones for years. They’ve literally disappeared,” Mariner told Reuters.
Among the cases detailed in the report is the detention in September 2002 of two children, then aged seven and nine, of confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was later detained and is now held at Guantanamo. “According to eyewitnesses, the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while U.S. agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts,” the report said. The groups said the lack of information about the prisoners “prevents scrutiny by the public or the courts, and leaves detainees vulnerable to abuses that include torture.”
Bush said in September there were no prisoners remaining in custody in U.S. secret facilities at that time. But the report said the transfer of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi from CIA custody to Guantanamo in April showed the system was still operating.
“Interviews with prisoners who have been released from secret CIA prisons indicate that low-level detainees have frequently been arrested far from any battlefield, and held in isolation for years without legal recourse or contact with their families or outside agencies,” the report said.
The groups urged the U.S. government to cease use of secret detention, provide information on those in custody, give access by the International Committee of the Red Cross to all detainees and either bring charges or release all prisoners.
(Additional reporting by Carol Giacomo)
The danger is we get so used to the idea of Guantanamo that we stop being shocked. This is another excellent article by the indefatigable Marjorie Cohn, which reminds us of the continuing horrors, both of brutality and of Kafkaesque procedure:
No Unlawful Enemy Combatants at Guant’namo
By Marjorie Cohn
June 6, 2007
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2007/06/no-unlawful-enemy-combatants-at.php
In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld famously called the detainees at Guant’namo “the worst of the worst.” General Richard B. Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were “very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.” These claims were designed to justify locking up hundreds of men and boys for years in small cages like animals.
George W. Bush lost no time establishing military commissions to try the very “worst of the worst” for war crimes. But four and a half years later, the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that those commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. So Bush dusted them off, made a few changes, and rammed his new improved military commissions through the Republican Congress last fall.
Only three detainees have been brought before the new commissions. One would expect the people Bush & Co. singled out for war crimes prosecutions would be high-level al-Qaeda leaders. But they weren’t. The first was David Hicks, who was evidently not so dangerous. The U.S. military made a deal that garnered Hicks a misdemeanor sentence and sent him back to Australia.
Salem Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who used to be Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur, was the second. Hamdan, whose case had been overturned by the Supreme Court, was finally brought before a military commission Monday for arraignment on charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.
The third defendant was Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who appeared for arraignment the same day as Hamdan. Khadr was 15 years old when he arrived at Guant’namo. He faced charges of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, spying, and supporting terrorism.
On Monday, much to Bush’s dismay, two different military judges dismissed both Hamdan’s and Khadr’s cases on procedural grounds.
The Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last year says the military commissions have jurisdiction to try offenses committed by alien unlawful enemy combatants. Unlawful enemy combatants are defined as (1) people who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its allies; or (2) people who have been determined to be unlawful enemy combatants by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) or another competent tribunal. The Act says that a determination of unlawful enemy combatant status by a CSRT or another competent tribunal is dispositive.
But there are no “unlawful” enemy combatants at Guant’namo. There are only men who have been determined to be “enemy combatants” by the CSRTs. The Act declares that military commissions “shall not have jurisdiction over lawful enemy combatants.” In its haste to launch post-Hamdan military commissions, Bush’s legal eagles didn’t notice this discrepancy. That is why the charges were dismissed.
The Bush administration may try to fix the procedural problem and retry Khadr and Hamdan. But regardless of whether Guant’namo detainees are lawful or unlawful enemy combatants, the Bush administration’s treatment of them violates the Geneva Conventions. Lawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. Unlawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by Common Article Three.
Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan and brought to Guant’namo when he was 15 years old. In both places, he has been repeatedly tortured and subjected to inhumane treatment. At Bagram Air Base, Khadr was denied pain medication for his serious head and eye shrapnel wounds. At Guant’namo, his hands and feet were shackled together, he was bolted to the floor and left there for hours at a time. After he urinated on himself and on the floor, U.S. military guards mopped the floor with his skinny little body. Khadr was beaten in the head, dogs lunged at him, and he was threatened with rape and the removal of his body parts.
Khadr cried frequently. He has nightmares, sweats and hyperventilates, and is hypervigilant, hearing sounds that he can’t identify. When Khadr’s lawyer saw him for the first time in 2004, he thought, “He’s just a little kid.”
Why was Khadr treated this way? He comes from a family allegedly active in al-Qaeda. His charges stem from an incident where the U.S. sent Afghans into a compound where Khadr and others were located. The people inside the compound killed the Afghans and began firing at the U.S. soldiers. The Americans dropped two 500-pound bombs on the compound, killing everyone inside except Khadr. After Khadr threw a hand grenade which killed an American, the soldiers shot Khadr, blinding and seriously wounding him. Khadr begged them in English to finish him off. He was then taken to Baghram and later to Guant’namo.
According to Donald Rehkopf, Jr., co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Military Law Committee, “The government has steadfastly refused to allow hearings on this alleged [unlawful enemy combatant] status because there are so many prisoners at GTMO that were not even combatants, much less ‘unlawful’ ones. Khadr is in an unusual situation because he has a viable ‘self-defense’ claim – we attacked the compound that he and his family were living in, and the fact that he was only 15 at the time.”
If Khadr were a U.S. citizen, he would not even be subject to trial by court-martial because of his age. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that children under 18 at the time of their crimes could not be executed, it said that youths display a “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” that “often results in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.” A juvenile, the Court found, is more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and his character is not as well-formed as that of an adult. “From a moral standpoint,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.” The Bush administration’s treatment of Omar Khadr flies in the face of the Court’s reasoning.
The United States may be able to retry Khadr and Hamdan. They have a few days to file an appeal. But the Court of Military Commissions Review hasn’t even been established yet, so it’s unclear where the appeals would be brought.
The Military Commissions Act, which denies basic due process protections, including the right to habeas corpus, is a disgrace. But an even bigger disgrace is the concentration camp the United States maintains at Guant’namo Bay, Cuba. The Act should be repealed and the Guant’namo prison should be shut down immediately.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Associaiton of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in July. See http://www.marjoriecohn.com.
I have received a pleasant email from Kate Davies, which points out that she is married to a different Nick Johnson than the oily creep from the CRE (not her description). Kate deserves marks for sense of humour, and for the possibility that her taste in men could be better than I thought (I haven’t seen her Mr Johnson yet). She also points out that her bit of Sussex Gardens does have prostitutes.
So unreserved apologies for incorrect marital attribution. However, whether her quango job really deserves a salary on the same scale as Ambassador to Washington or Permanent Under Secretary at the Treasury, is something on which I am afraid I remain sceptical. So apologies Kate swam into our sights by mistake, but fair game nonetheless.
STOP THE WAR LOBBY
WEDNESDAY 6 JUNE, 4.45pm
CONGRESS HOUSE
GREAT RUSSELL STREET WC1B 3LS
Nearest tube Tottenham Court Road
Gordon Brown and the six candidates for the Labour deputy leadership are speaking at a hustings meeting in London on Wednesday 6 June. This is the first London hustings meeting and it is essential that there is a large anti-war lobby calling for troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, opposition to any attack on Iran and a break with US foreign policy.
Ha ha ha ha ha! Ho ho ho!! Hee hee hee hee hee!!
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?
…for starting an illegal war of aggression. But bringing justice to Bush, Blair and their criminal crew will be an uphill struggle. In the meantime we had Jack Straw bang to rights on a lesser – but still serious – crime.
On 24 April 2005, in an election rally in Jack Straw’s Blackburn Constituency, over one hundred Blackburn electors were given a full free meal by the Labour party, with Jack Straw present, having just made an election speech to the lucky partakers of this generosity.
Every reader involved in electoral politics will know that this is a criminal offence under the Representation of the People Act, formally known as “Treating” – the provision of free food and drink to electors in an attempt to influence their vote. Conviction leads to forfeiture of the election, banning from public office and a prison sentence of up to two years.
It is also an offence of strict liability – a candidate is liable even if it was organised by someone else on his behalf. A candidate is viewed in law as responsible for his campaign. But in this instance, Jack Straw was actually present.
There was no shortage of witnesses – protestors were ringing the hall. The police were actually providing protection for this criminal event, and showed no interest in the fact that the proceeding was illegal. Jack Straw runs Blackburn as a personal fiefdom.
I therefore went to a police station and made a formal complaint. This obliged the police to investigate, and to do them justice, the detectives of Lancashire Police did a very good job, establishing the facts of the incident. They then sent a file to the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Crown Prosecution Service returned the file to Lancashire Police, saying that the offence was “Trivial” and there would be no prosecution. As this was one of the worst examples of large scale electoral treating since it was made a criminal offence in 1832, presumably this means the CPS has decided that the law on treating has fallen into desuetude, and candidates may now provide food and drink to electors.
Or only New Labour ministers?
I am not expecting any brave decisions by the CPS in the Cash for Honours scandal.
The copy of the invite above is from a rather tatty photocopy I was given. But I have seen an original, and the copy is genuine.
See also: Straw accused of currying favour
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.
A posting on issues which arouse passion and disagreement.
I have been listening this morning to the views of the Scottish cardinal on abortion. You might be surprised I agree with him to a large extent. I think abortion is appalling, an abomination.
Next month the ban on smoking in public places comes into force. I have never smoked and hate smoke; I love pubs, but the stink on my clothes and hair the next morning is horrible.
I dislike fox hunting intensely. To me, it arouses a nasty bloodlust and is just wrong.
What unites these issues in my mind, is that I am very strongly against all of them – abortion, fox-hunting, and smoking in pubs. But I don’t believe that, just because I am against them, they should be illegal. I don’t even think if a majority were against them, they should be illegal. This is an attitude that seems to have gone out of fashion – the idea that you don’t have to impose your views on everybody else by force.
Legislating on taste and personal morality is assumed. Authoritarianism is the default setting. The anti-foxhunters and anti-smokers have got the strength to impose their will, the anti-abortionists not, at least in the UK. But why do we have to seek to impose our will by force, not reason?
Tiscali have now admitted to their email service not working. Not only that, but other email addresses have not been working through Tiscali as an ISP (if used through Outlook.) That is why I have not been able to communicate with anyone on either of my email addresses.
I am furious with Tiscali, who failed to warn their customers of the problem. I had been sending emails into oblivion for a week before I twigged. I missed appointments and lost work in consequence. What is more, the emails will not have been stored by Tiscali and resent once the system was up, and I had not saved all, as I regularly clean out my sent items.
The system is now allegedly working. Anyone awaiting a response from me on anything, please email me again.
We have all been saved again. Another deadly terror plot has been uncovered in its early stages, with plotters planning to blow up airliners/JFK/The NY Subway/Sears Tower (delete as appropriate). Doubtless Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to it already.
Tell you what, you all run around being terrified, I need an afternoon nap. Maybe I’ll wake up to find we’ve invaded another country, or at the very least introduced the State of Emergency in the UK which Blair and Reid have been asking for.
I have been meaning to blog about this article for some time.
In it, Melanie Phillips claims to have learned from a Dave Gaubatz of the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations that “Saddam’s WMD did exist”. They were buried, then removed to Syria after the occupation.
This places Phillips in a minority of neo-cons who are still spinning the line about Iraqi WMD. Most, including Blair, have moved on to the “Hell, we got rid of Saddam, so what does it matter?” line. Plainly, others like Phillips feel their intellectual credibility is at stake. These are people whose fanatical world view does not permit of the possibility of having been wrong. Those weapons must exist.
So, Phillips buys the story of Mr Gaubatz, who tells us that the weapons were buried in four vast, thick, concrete bunkers in Southern Iraq.
He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.
This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.
After we had invaded and occupied Iraq, in the massive search for Iraqi WMD, with Bush and Blair’s credibility vanishing by the hour, inexplicably nobody would listen to Mr Gaubatz saying he had found the WMD. From this account, apparently Mr Gaubatz did not feel that the discovery of Iraq’s WMD was important enough to put in his requests to the Iraq Survey Group in writing. I presume that is what Phillips means when she says he “verbally” told them, although of course writing also uses words and she intended to say “orally”.
And then what happened?
the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria.
Now let us consider what Phillips is selling us here. Sometime after July 2003, with some quarter of a million coalition troops and other personnel occupying Iraq, four vast bunkers of WMD, presumably weighing hundreds of tonnes, were secretly excavated, some from thirty feet under the Euphrates, and then smuggled many hundreds of miles in trucks across the desert and across the Iraqi border, without anyone noticing or a single weapon being caught?
Don’t forget that these are not facilities hidden in deep desert near the Syrian border. They are under the Euphrates – the great river along which most Iraqi towns lie, and alongside which all the roads and other infrastructure run, in constant use by allied forces, who were also patrolling the river in boats.
Think about the building of these facilities in the first place. Iraq was under intense scrutiny from both satellite and aerial photgraphy. UK and US airforces were in constant sortie over the area described, which lies within the Southern no-fly zone. On the ground UN inspectors were roaming widely, poking into anything suspicious.
The Euphrates is not a stream. it is one of the great rivers of the World. Phillips tells us these great projects involved diverting the Euphrates around dams. And no-one noticed?
This story goes beyond the unlikely into the ludicrous. Phillips has obviously allowed political and atavistic hatred to override her powers of reason. Put starkly, the woman has gone barking mad.
All of which would be funny, except that she is given the widest access to all forms of media to broadcast her racial hatred against Arabs and Muslims, and her vile, hate-filled books sell well. Yet the rational can easily dissect her output as rubbish beyond the pale of reason.
Glad to see that she has made up with the Spectator though. On 21 January 2005 she wrote in her published diary
The Spectator. What kind of hatred of the Jews resides at that magazine…
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001013.html
Checking my stats, I discovered a major falloff in the last week or so in the percentage of people reaching this site through google. So I tried some google searches, and we seem to have almost vanished. This site used to appear, for example, on the front page for searches on “Uzbekistan” and the second for “Jack Straw”. It is now not on the first twenty or so pages. We only hit the front page on a very specific search, like “Craig Murray” or “Murder in Samarkand”. Broadly the same thing is true on Yahoo.
Yet a random check shows links to this site from other sites still working, and Technorati’s “Authority” ranking continues to mount, now to 499. This search engine drop does seem to have been caused by a sudden event, not a gradual decline. Can anybody offer an explanation?
Interview from The London Project http://londonproject.co.uk/article/murray
Colonialism Returns To Africa Says Ex-Diplomat
By Mattia Bagnoli
June 1st, 2007
in Issue 1 Today
As Tony Blair was feted as an ‘honorary chief’ in Sierra Leone this week, not everyone in London was as congratulatory towards the prime minister’s chequered foreign policy. “To me it sounds like colonialism has returned to Africa”, says Craig Murray, former British ambassador referring to the British intervention that brought the civil war in Sierra Leone to an end.
In 2000 Blair ordered the British Army into Sierra Leone to support government soldiers in the bloody civil war that had wrecked the diamond rich West African nation. “We managed to bring the war to halt, it’s true. But the price is that colonialism has returned to Africa. Is this the pattern we want? We now have troops in Sierra Leone; the head of the police is a British citizen, not to say that the government enjoy the help of British officers. Is the solution for Africa to have the Europeans come back?” says Murray.
Craig Murray was relieved of his post at the height of the Iraqi invasion in 2004 following public disagreements with then Home Office Secretary Jack Straw. Uzbekistan backed the US led invasion in the Gulf, conceding its strategic air-force base to the Americans, in return for much needed economic support. Tashkent’s poor record involving human rights was not considered an obstacle in the ‘pay off’. The former Ambassador was moved to voice his concerns bringing him into direct conflict with his own government.
Murray an experienced career diplomat served as British Deputy High Commissioner in Accra, Ghana and subsequently led the peace-talk delegation which brought a solution to the civil war in Sierra Leone.
“Sierra Leone is seen by supporters of intervention as a big achievement yet it can be seen as an example of the rather childish division of the world into bad guys and good guys often made by Mr Blair”, says Mr Murray.
Britain sent a battalion of 800 paratroopers to Sierra Leone in May 2000 – not as peacekeepers but, in effect, as combatants. They backed the democratically elected government, whose army had fallen into disarray, fighting a rebel army with a record of recruiting child soldiers, terrorising civilians, inflicting terrible deaths on innocent victims.
“Rebels have done truly horrific things but it cannot be forgotten that the elected government was also terrible, in terms of corruption, even by African standards. For instance, 90 per cent of the diamond trade revenues were shared between Sierra Leone’s elite and foreign companies which were operating there,” Murray said.
Murray claimed the money remained untouched in bank accounts, nonetheless the government was restored.
Sierra Leone remains one of the poorest nations in Africa and the world, despite its abundant mineral wealth. In the interior the diamond mines are working again and people wonder where that wealth is going. According to Alan Little, BBC’s correspondent in Sierra Leone, “the government has presided over a system of entrenched corruption in which the political elite grows rich while the mass of the people remain poor”.
“Mr Blair did not want to see this aspect”, recalls Mr Murray. “He wanted to find the good guys and then support them with a military solution. He adopted the same mindset to Iraq, where this simplistic view exploded – a rather ‘cow-boy’ approach I think”.
In his main speech on his farewell tour of Africa, Mr Blair, who has sent UK troops into action in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq while prime minister, said it was in countries’ self interest to intervene in failing states. He said: “I believe in the power of political action to make the world better and the moral obligation to use it.”
Mr Blair will fly back to London later after his four-day final trip to Africa before leaving Downing Street on 27 June.
After leaving the Diplomatic Service, Craig Murray turned to writing. His latest book, ‘Murder in Samarkand’ tells the story of his mission to Tashkent in the years between 2002 to 2004 where he became a firm opponent of Uzbek’s reckless regime and helped to expose its horrific tortures against political dissidents as well as helpless citizens – including boiling them to death. He also contributes to various newspapers and broadcasters.
I believe I may have found the way to post the original text of my Recent Mail Russian articles, without taking over the whole weblog:
Two months ago, 51 year old Ivan Safronov, defence correspondent of the authoritative Kommersant newspaper in Moscow, came home from work. He had bought a few groceries on the way, apparently for the evening meal. On the street where he lived, as he passed the chemist’s shop in front of the cluster of grim Soviet era apartment blocks, he met his neighbour, Olga Petrovna. She tells me that he smiled from under his hat and nodded to her. After a mild winter, Moscow had turned cold in March and Safronov held his carrier bag of groceries in one hand while the other clutched the lapels of his coat closed against the snow. Fifty yards further on he arrived at the entrance to his block, and punched in the code – 6 and 7 together, then 2 which opened the mechanical lock of the rough, grey metal door at the entrance to the concrete hallway. He passed on into the gloomy dank corridor.
The identification this week of a ‘former’ KGB officer, Andre Luguvoi, as the chief suspect in the murder in London of dissident Alexander Litvinenko, and Russia’s curt refusal to extradite him, reflects once again just how ruthless and audacious Putin’s Russian has become and how little we can do about it. But in fact there is a less obvious, but more sinister, danger from the Kremlin that threatens the future security of every British citizen.