This will annoy those who occasionally accuse me of being a closet Tory, but I have long been a fan of Malcolm Rifkind. He was the first junior minister I worked to in the FCO when I was on the South Africa desk. Apartheid was in its last throes and we were trying to kill it off. Rifkind was genuinely horrified by apartheid. But South Africa was high on Thatcher’s personal agenda and to say she was uncommitted on apartheid would be kind to her. She insisted, for example, that the ANC was a terrorist organisation. Rifkind worked away beneath her in a way that can only be described as cheekily subversive, under the benign soggy shield of Geoffrey Howe.

Anyway, I have remained a fan of Malcolm Rifkind. He made some of the best speeches on the Iraq War. I debated notionally against him at the Cambridge Union a couple of years ago, but I don’t think either of us disagreed with a word the other said, and we had a very pleasant couple of glasses of champagne together on the train back to London.

He has now made a thoughtful speech on nuclear weapons reduction, bits of which are reproduced in the Telegraph.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5172912/Nuclear-weapons-can-no-longer-be-justified-even-by-Cold-War-warriors.html

If we are to succeed in stopping the ridiculous and massive waste of money and resources on Gordon Brown’s obscene determination to replace and upgrade the Trident missile system, we need to make common cause with the growing number of Tories and senior military men who see the stupidity of it.

With massive pressure on the government, and on Jacqui Smith in particular, I can tell you what will happen next. The government will play the terrorism card, just as it did last weekend.

The Great Manchester Easter Bomb Plot was a bit of a damp squib. It is only a week ago, but it seems an age, since Gordon Brown told us he had foiled “a very big terror plot” and we had dramatic police swoops and the arrests of twelve “Islamic Extremists” in the North West. Eleven of them are still held without charge.

But the Great Easter Bomb Plot lacked any bombs. Or firearms. Or detonators. They have found some photographs of Manchester and a small quantity of sugar, which we have been assured can be a component of an explosive.

The police will be under huge pressure now to come up with something else. Household bleach would be good. Or even better a confession from one of the teenagers held without charge and interrogated for over a week now, who may be persuaded to turn evidence against the others.

Expect an announcement this weekend, to move the news agenda on from Ian Tomlinson. And expect a statement from Jacqui Smith by Monday at the latest. It will go like this:

Grave terrorist threat foiled – could have been massive atrocity – imminent threat – constant vigilance – reliable intelligence indicates – communication intercepts – photographs of potential targets – possible explosive ingredients – bollocks – bullshit – bollocks.

Then expect all the “opposition” MPs to rally round and sing the national anthem, and Jacqui Smith to be saved until David Blunkett comes back in the summer reshuffle.

So the second post mortem shows that Ian Tomlinson did not die of a heart attack, but of an abdominal haemmorhage. A policeman has been interviewed under caution for manslaughter.

If that American tourist had not captured on video one stage of the unprovoked police assault on Mr Tomlinson, the original falsified post mortem report of heart attack would have stood. So would the Metropolitan police statement that they had “No contact” with Mr Tomlinson.

Let us catalogue the lies we have been told by the authorities in this case:

Lie 1 – There was no police contact with Mr Tomlinson

Lie 2 Mr Tomlinson died of a heart attack

Lie 3 Protestors rained missiles at police rescuing and treating Mr Tomlinson

Lie 4 There were no CCTV cameras covering the assault on Mr Tomlinson

Lie 5 There were CCTV cameras, but they were not working

There may be more.

This is an echo of the numerous appalling lies the police told in the Jean Charles De Menezes case, which led to the astonishing ruling that the police are allowed to lie, even on oath, by the worst judge ever to sit in England.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/12/the_disgraceful.html

It is the whole police philosophy of violence towards dissent, and dehumanising tactic of “kettling” people, that killed Mr Tomlinson. To charge a single individual will not be sufficient.

The government pathologist who carried out the original post mortem must be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. He must also be struck off by the General Medical Council.

The police spokesmen who told the lies that there was no police contact with Mr Tomlinson, and that protestors threw missiles at police treating Mr Tomlinson, must be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The senior police officers in charge of devising the “kettling” tactics and cordons at the G20 must be charged with manslaughter.

The responsible minister, Jacqui Smith, should resign.

In explaining why Damian Green was not going to be prosecuted, the Director of Public Prosecutions told us much about New Labour’s corruption of the Civil Service. Not only did the information he had received not endanger national security and not endanger life, but:

“Much of it was known to others outside the civil service, for example the security industry or the Labour party or Parliament”

WHAT? That lets some very large and furry cats out of the bag. Information which was officially classified within the Home Office, and which civil servants were attempting to keep secret from you and me, even by calling in the Police, was available to the Labour Party? I can think of no instance where that would be constitutional.

We need to know urgently, which information was classified and kept secret by the Home Office but known to the Labour Party, and why.

There could be no more graphic illustration of the failure of our politicised civil service to distinguish between the interests of the state and of New Labour.

The same goes in spades for the “Security industry” – the one exponential growth area of the economy under New Labour.

The disgraceful episode of the arrest and taping of Damian Green hs been brought to a close. It is another shameful episode in New Labour’s attack on civil liberties.

The most important point is that all of the information leaked by or to Damian Green should have been public in the first place. That it was classified is symptomatic of the politicisation of Home Office officials under New Labour.

I have already written much in support of Mr Green. But for now, I will again ask the question: why did we see this police action against Galley and Green, where there is still no investigation into Damian McBride for the offence of Misconduct in Public Office, of which he looks to me as guilty as can be?

The last week has seen an outbreak of mutual name-calling between bloggers and the meainstream media, with one of the silliest contributions coming from my colleague Iain Macwhirter, the normally sensible Rector of Edinburgh University.

http://iainmacwhirter2.blogspot.com/

But beyond argument, the Guardian’s ground-breaking work on police brutality in the last week has been a huge reinforcement to the cause of liberty. The democratisation of video capture is something the Police have not caught up with – it is hard for them to blindside the referee now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/14/ian-tomlinson-assault-film-ipcc

We are used to institutional cover-up and fake inquiries to whitewash the truth, but the blatant nature of much of the corruption is still astonishing. In particular, over eighty per cent of street area in the City of London is covered by CCTV, and at the G20 protest this was supplemented by 83 police video cameras, plus the security services.

If you remember the “Tiger Tiger” attempted car bomb, to give just one example, the video footage was immediately released by the police to the public.

Yet different rules apply when the footage captures police brutality. None of the footage that has proved the police violence, has come from official sources or cameras. Instead we have a series of contradictory lies about whether official camers were not there, not working or had just nipped off to the loo, at the moments police violence was captured by amateurs.

I have no doubt that there are many other instances of criminal police behaviour on the thousands of hours of official video. Those videos are being pored over by police and security services to capture images of individual demonstartors, identify them and add them to their secret security files. In so doing they are deliberately overlooking and most likely deleting evidence of police violence.

We must demand that every single second of the official video of the G20 demonstrations, filmed with public money, is released to the public. Online will be good.

What is secret about video of events at a public demonstration on public streets, witnessed by thousands of people?

The selective use of this public resource to gather “evidence” against demonstrators while ignoring and even destroying that against police, must be halted.

Adolf Hitler today went on record to state that he “Had no idea what kind of stuff Goebbels was publishing.”

Although they shared the same bunker and met several times daily, Hitler was deeply shocked when invading Red Army forces drew to his attention what had been happening.

“There is no place for this kind of thing in politics,” he said: “I came into politics to promote ideas, like lebensraum”.

Mr Hitler further pointed out that he had now taken vigorous action to tackle the situation. He has written to Oberfeldmarischal Gustav Odonellmann to instruct that the Gauleiter’s Guide be amended to specify that the murder of seven million Jews, Poles, gays, romanies and political opponents should be clearly a sacking offence.

Copyright David Irving

Gordon Brown’s attempt to spin out of the smeargate scandal by writing a letter to Gus O’Donnell to demand that writing smears is specifically excluded in the Special Advisers’ Code of Conduct, is ludicrous even by New Labour standards.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/13/email-smears-gordon-brown-letter

The implication is that McBride was doing this because writing stories alleging things about opposition MPs and dildoes is not covered in the code.

Here are some more things not specifically covered in the code, but which now will be specified. The new Gordon Code will say that Special Advisers may not:

– Murder Mrs Irene Tomkinson of Weybourne St, Cromer or any of her children

– Rob banks during office hours or while wearing civil service trousers

– Score goals in football internationals using the “Hand of God”

– eat human liver

– impersonate a Chelsea pensioner for the purpose of pecuniary advantage

– concoct false intelligence dossiers for the purpose of launchng illegal wars and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

I understand that Gus O’Donnell has advised that the last one goes too far and would interfere with the smooth working of government.

The real reform this country truly needs is that “special advisers”, or party hacks (Stalin would have called them political commisars) should be paid by the party, not the taxpayer.

I have today sent the following to Tom Watson MP:

Dear Mr Watson,

This is a formal communication to you in your ministerial capacity. I write as a former senior civil servant and a life member of the FDA.

It appears to me that there is the clearest of prima facie cases that Mr Damian McBride has committed the criminal offence of misconduct in public office. There appears a strong prima facie case also against Mr Charles Whelan.

I believe that you have a ministerial duty to draw this concern to the attention of the appropriate police authorities so that an investigation may be undertaken. No doubt you will wish to consult the Cabinet Secretary, but in the case of a credibly alleged breach of the criminal law, not only of the Civil Service Code, I believe you are also under an obligation to consult the police.

Yours Faithfully,

Craig J Murray

Ends

The criminal case against McBride and Whelan is explained here:

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

Tom Watson has contacted me directly to deny any involvement in the whole McBride/Draper black propaganda caper.

I rather feel that he ought to have noticed what was going on immediately around him. But the evidence implicating him was circumstantial, and my enquiries today of people who know him personally seem to indicate that he is not a vicious character.

So I accept his statement.

If the UK is really not becoming a police state, then the police must demonstrate their independence of the government today by immediately arresting Damian McBride, Charlie Whelan and Tom Watson for the crime of misconduct in public office.

Their offices should already have been raided and sealed, and their computers seized. These disgusting New Labour spin doctors are a cancer attached to the heart of the British government. They pose an infinitely more fundamental threat to British society and values than terrorism does. We can get through the odd bomb attack. We cannot get through the radical corruption of the democratic system.

The Crown Prosecution Service defines the principles of the criminal offence of misconduct in public office:

“The elements of misconduct in public office are:

d) Without reasonable excuse or justification”

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/misconduct_in_public_office/

Plainly they are guilty as hell. The only possible defence I can see is to say that at the time they cooked up this plot to libel the Opposition they were not “Acting as public officers”. But I do not believe that will wash. They were inside government offices – indeed two of them in the heart of Downing St – in office hours, and communicting with each other on official computers and using official email addresses. I understand that there is no email addressed to Watson, but he is mentioned in the emails, is in charge of the government’s internet straegy and sits in the same office as McBride.

Labour must be hoist with their own petard. They have insisted that the plainly party political dirty work being done by the likes of Brown’s long term creature McBride, is public service. We as taxpayers have been bearing the huge salaries and expenses of hundreds of these vile New Labour hacks for over a decade. They cannot now turn round and claim that what you and I have been forced to pay them to do for the last decade, was not done as public officers. While a tautologous argument that misconduct is evidently not public service, is obviously excluded by reasonable construction of the meaning and purpose of the law.

There can seldom have been a more definite case of misconduct in public office. If the police do not act, it will be an utter disgrace. Even Nixon could not prevent the Watergate burglars from bein arrested.

The behaviour of these vile people is not just a sin, it is a crime. A crime which strikes at the credibility of British democracy. We must demand their arrest.

I criticised Paul Staines earlier this week, but it would be wrong not to acknowledge that he has done a great service here.

.

The mainstream media is in a flurry of excitement over the “Terror” arrests of students in the North West of England. Linked to this is the media feeding frenzy over the resignation of Bob Quick, Scotland Yard’s anti-terror chief. It is important to note that the Quick incident only brought forward the arrests by a few hours. Yet in all the acres of coverage in the newspapers, and all the hype on TV, nobody seems to have noticed the real story.

It was an accident that Bob Quick had his secret document on display as he was photographed entering Downing St.

But it was no accident that he was photographed entering Downing Street.

No 10 is a Tardis-like building which is far more impressive inside than out, and which seems impossibly large. Its secret is that it links straight through to No 11 and, more importantly, through to the huge Cabinet Office building that runs along Whitehall. The Cabinet Office is the central secretariat of the British government and in effect the office of the Prime Minister. The separation of the No 10 staff and the Cabinet Office staff is a polite fiction. The government’s major interdepartmental committees meet in the Cabinet Office, including the sexy Joint Intelligence Committee and its sub-committees. One of the fascinating things about the vast Cabinet Office building is that it incorporates parts of the original fabric of the Tudor Whitehall Palace.

In the first Iraq War I used to hand carry intelligence reports to No 10, and sometimes had to explain them personally to Mrs Thatcher. I never once took one in the front door. In fact I have only ever walked in the front door of No 10 when accompanying a foreign dignitary or attending a party. The front door is for people the government wants to be seen ?” hence the permanent stand of photographers which captured Bob Quick. People arriving to brief on secret matters go in through the back door, or more likely through the Cabinet Office.

So why did the government want us to see that Bob Quick was entering No 10? The only possible answer is that, had things gone more smoothly in the arrest of the “Terror suspects”, the government would have paraded the footage of Quick entering no 10 as evidence that it was really Glorious Gordon and Genius Jacqui who had directed the operation and saved the world – again.

It is very, very wrong ?” it violates the whole spirit of the constitution ?” for politicians to be involved in arresting people. If the police had real evidence that these people are terrorists, then of course they should have been arrested when the Police felt the right moment had come. That moment is when they have sufficient evidence, and are not putting the public at risk by undue delay. That is a technical decision requiring skill, expertise and experience in operational policing.

It is a matter of the criminal law. It is absolutely not the business of Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown. But we know that under New Labour the politicians are deciding who should be arrested and when. We know that for sure because then Home Secretary John Reid said in terms that he decided when the arrests should be made in the farcical “Bigger than 9/11”, (though in the event non-existent), “Liquid airplane bomb plot” case.

If politicians are going to decide the timing of arrests, then they cannot be surprised or aggrieved if we suspect that the timing of arrests is political.

This was definitely the case in the “Liquid Bomb Plot”. I know for certain from my own sources that in that case the intelligence services believed they had been forced by politicians to act too soon. That was quite widely reported at the time.

The view that John Reid had acted too early appears proved by a complex series of verdicts brought in by the jury. Less than half of those arrested actually were brought to trial. The jury found that three of the accused did have an intention to commit terror, but had formed no definite plan and specifically cleared them of the charge of planning to down aeroplanes with explosives.

Why had Reid jumped the gun? Because the Americans asked him to. With Bob Quick’s predecessor, the disgraced Andy Hayman, giving an official Scotland Yard view that the “Liquid Bomb Plot” was “Bigger than 9/11″ and involved plans to fly up to a dozen passenger jets simultaneously into different US cities, the resulting worldwide front page headlines were a Godsend for Bush in mid-term elections. They also enable the government to permanently ramp up the fear factor by the ludicrous toothpaste and shampoo searches that make flying so miserable.

In the liquid bomb plot do you remember the massive banner headlines ?” the full front page of every single tabloid in the UK -about the evil Muslim mother who planned to blow up herself and her baby along with the plane? There was no media reporting at all when she was cleared and released. The “Suspicious chemical” which police announced they had found in baby bottles was, errr, baby bottle sterilising solution.

The reasons why these “Terror raids” might be the subject of political timing could not be more obvious. Both Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown were getting a well-deserved media pasting over the outrageous ripping off of the taxpayer for personal benefit through expense claims. The Metropolitan Police were under extreme criticism for their unprovoked killing of Ian Tomlinson.

So this morning, instead of the news headline being the disgraceful fact that the policeman who launched an unprovoked assault from behind on Ian Tomlinson has still not been arrested, the headline is that the police have saved us all from certain death.

Let me be plain. I am not saying that terrorism does not exist. I am not saying that those arrested are innocent. I do not know. I am saying that Brown and Smith’s involvement in operational police arrests, and the fact that less than 1% of those arrested under anti-terror legislation in the UK have ever been charged with anything connected to terrorism, gives me the right to be suspicious of what is undeniably, at the very least, politically very fortuitous timing.

It is also the arrest of alleged terrorists from Pakistan, at a time when the government is under both parliamentary and criminal investigation for participation in torture of terrorist suspects in Pakistan. The government has responded by arguing that intelligence from torture abroad is necessary to save lives in the UK. I have no doubt that we will find the government arguing that this “terror plot” justifies their case.

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

Because of this suspicion, I will be setting a high test for evidence that these arrests really were needed at this time. The accusation is that a bombing campaign was ready for this Easter ?” ie now. If that is true, there must be explosives and detonators ready, or in the very final stages of preparation. We will see.

According to Sky News this morning, police searches so far have discovered photographs of leading buildings in Manchester taken by the students.

I studied Russian in St Petersburg. I have photographs I took of the Hermitage, of the Church on the Holy Blood, of the St Peter and Paul Fortress, of the bridges over the Neva, of the ornate underground stations. I studied Polish in Lublin. I have photographs of Lublin castle, of the main shopping street, of the Catholic University of Lublin…

I have, in fact, photographs of prominent buildings everywhere I ever studied. And photographis in bars and nightclubs.

Why do the police feel the need to feed out to the media the complete non-news of the non-evidence that they have discovered photographs of Manchester in Manchester? Why was it necessary for the Prime Minister to make a statement announcing the arrests? What does that do to the chances of a fair trial? Why was it never necessary to make a prime ministerial statement every time a suspected Irish terrorist ?” and remember they really did blow up the Arndale Centre in Manchester ?” was arrested?

There are many genuine and diligent people carrying out counter-terrorism work in the police and intelligence services, working the old-fashioned way with painstaking accumulation of evidence. They do save lives and they should be applauded and supported. They should be free from political interference and distanced from politicians.

They may have foiled a genuine plot here. If so they must be congratulated. The Home Secretary ?”who has not foiled any plots – should have been briefed after arrests were made, and there should be no room for suspicion that politicians had interfered.

That would have stuck to the cardinal rule of only telling people who actually have to know about an operation – and the rule of not carting around secret documents for no purpose.

The photo leak ?” which could indeed have jeopardised a security operation which may or may not prove to have been vital – was caused directly by the excessive and completely unnecessary involvement of the politicians in policing detail.

A police state is not a state where the police rule. It is a state where there is no distance between the politicians and police.

A police state is a state where a policeman can be caught on camera launching an unprovoked fatal assault from behind, yet not be arrested. A police state is a state where the police raid the parliamentary offices of opposition MPs. A police state is a state where it is the politicians who are making the decisions on who gets arrested and when.

The American tourist who captured on video what may have been the second assault on Ian Tomlinson by the Police, has done us a great favour.

I have been on several demonstrations in Central London in the last few years, and like everyone else who has done that, I have got used to the experience of being constantly filmed. Central London – and particularly the area around Bishopsgate – is fully covered by CCTV. In addition you had at the G20 demonstration scores of police cameramen filming from every vantage point at a demonstration. I have no doubt that on the recent huge Gaza demo I was filmed every step for two miles.

Let me be quite plain. I do not believe that there was no official footage of the police assault on Ian Tomlinson. Just as the security cameras in Stockwell station and on the train were “Not working” in the Jean Charles De Menezes case, I accuse the Police of subverting the video evidence.

So thank God for that American tourist – and thank God he went to the Guardian rather than to the Police. If unanswerable video evidence had not now been produced, what lies do you think we would now be being told?

A lie can be delivered by innuendo. The so-called “Independent Police Complaints Commission” – whose investigations in this case are being conducted by the City of London Police – had put out a statement saying that “it appeared that Mr Tomlinson had contact with the Police.” If we had not seen the video, what image does that conjure up in your mind?

Mr Tomlinson did not have contact with the Police. He had contact from the Police – they came up behind him when he was just walking down the road, and without warning hit him with a baton. This was in fact Mr Tomlinson’s second contact from the Police – he had already been turned away from his route home by another police cordon, and it is possible he was mishandled there too.

New Labour trolls are active all over the web – including in comments on my earlier post here:

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

We will see more of these attacks on Mr Tomlinson in the next few days, just as Jean Charles De Menezes’ character was slurred (illegal immigrant, drug addict – all untrue).

The claim that Tomlinson died of a heart attack brought on by alcohol is pathetic.

I hope that the family are now getting good advice, and I for one would be happy to donate to a fund for an independent autopsy. Under New Labour we cannot trust the official one.

We also need a radical reconstruction of a police force which thinks it can attack and kill members of the public with impunity, and of the legal framework in which they operate. The legal system has ruled in terms that police may kill people and then may lie about it in court.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/12/the_disgraceful.html

We have reached the stage in the UK where we need a revolutionary change. We have to sweep out the old order of corrupt politicians whose one guiding principle is to keep their own snouts in the trough: of City bankers who are multi-millionaires from their bubble scams and whose lifestyles and jobs the ordinary people are now supporting by a massive tax and debt burden, while nobody guarantees the jobs of those ordinary people who fund it all.

We have to realise that the end of the centuries old prohibition of torture by agents of the state is of a piece with the freedom of the police to maintain the system of power by fatal force, in both cases without consequence. You cannot separate this brutalisation of power from the illegal war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and thousands of our own soldiers, on the basis of a lie but really to secure oil.

The whole system stinks from the head like a fish. And people are starting at last to understand where the smell comes from.