There is an extremely important article by Gareth Peirce in the London Review of Books. Gareth is our greatest human rights lawyer. She exposed some of the most famous human rights abuses in recent British history. In the film “In the Name of the Father”, Gareth was played by Emma Thompson. It was Gareth to whom I turned when the government was attempting to destroy me with false allegations. She advised me, as she very often does, pro bono. She manages at the same time to be one of our most famous lawyers, and one of our poorest.
At one stage, when the goon squad were entering and turning over my flat to try and put the frighteners on me, Gareth and her husband invited me to live with them for a while. I declined and toughed it out, but I tell the story as an example of her kindness and devotion to the cause of human rights.
I have been fighting New Labour’s use of torture more or less full time for five years now. This is the best and most important analysis I have read in that time. Anybody with the tiniest interest in British politics should read it.
Frankly, that will not happen. It will fall victim to the very stifling of debate and information which it analyses so brilliantly.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n09/peir01_.html
Here are some key extracts:
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been unprecedented worldwide monitoring of man’s propensity to torture, and yet its use has not abated but appears to be thriving. How has this come about? Monitoring of torture depends on two strategies: exposing it to public censure through careful documentation, and holding state agents responsible for torture conducted on their watch. The first has encouraged torturers to adopt techniques that are less visible and hence harder to document. The second has encouraged politicians to seek acceptance of their methods from a public that condemns those who are soft on terrorism. In this country, in fact, the government hardly needs such acceptance, because of the additional and crucial factor that the public is unlikely to be given sufficient information to trigger its revulsion. (My emphasis).
Whether we will in this country ever properly know the extent of British participation in criminal acts of the utmost seriousness should be a burning issue. We should not take for granted that court cases or a judicial inquiry will tell us what we need to know about the complicity of our government in crimes against humanity. The Baha Mousa inquiry into the activities of the British military in Iraq will not touch on the interaction of the British state with the US or the intelligence services, or with any torturing foreign state. Instead, the government will claim, as it does with ever greater frequency, that any issue relating to the intelligence services, or to the conduct of diplomatic relationships, should be confined entirely to special courts, or the evidence heard in large part in secret. The use of these procedures expands daily.
…Once we have arrived at a position where acquiescence in crimes against humanity by our government may well have occurred, the state can no longer demand that we acknowledge it as our protector and assert that in consequence the nation’s security is at stake if secrets are revealed. This after all is the thesis on which the claim for secrecy is built. For years the government has sidestepped report after report on these issues by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Justice and Liberty, and has considered the interventions of those organisations as interventions of which they need take no note whatsoever. And for the past seven years the United Kingdom has also shown disturbing indifference to the criticism of international organisations. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture conducted repeated checks on those interned indefinitely without trial between December 2001 and March 2005. Their observation that those being detained on secret evidence were being driven to madness were ignored; so too was the stinging critique of the European Commissioner for Human Rights. The government carried on with the detentions to the bitter end, months after the House of Lords had declared the legislation to be in violation of the fundamental provisions of the Human Rights Act. Similarly, the concerns the special rapporteur expressed in his report this year appear to have remained unread. Is arrogance the reason that criticisms can never correctly apply to the UK? Are they only for others?
…Staggeringly, not only do we therefore know nothing of what the intelligence services have actually witnessed in Afghanistan, but in each of the committee’s inquiries into their involvement or otherwise in torture, the government’s witnesses and the committee in turn appeared to miss entirely the wider legal and moral point. Instead, they focused on individual errors of judgment, even though members of the intelligence services were present during unlawful transfer and confinement: that is, in situations comprehensively meeting the definition of internationally prohibited crimes against humanity.
Equally disturbingly is that later in 2002, some months after MI6 sent its advice, the recently arrived British ambassador to Uzbekistan inquired urgently of the Foreign Office what its legal justification was for receiving information from Islamic dissidents who had been boiled alive to produce it. Craig Murray records his astonishment on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the ‘War on Terror’ we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by foreign intelligence services. A follow-up memo from a Foreign Office legal adviser in March 2003 explained that it was not an offence to do so. How sound was this advice legally? Morally, there is no question. But what of the encouragement to torture resulting from our enthusiastic receipt of information?
There have been no resignations over any of this. The government on whose watch it has occurred may be vulnerable for other reasons, but at present it seems not for possible complicity in grave crimes. From where does it derive its confidence? Control of information is a powerful tool: the answer must undoubtedly lie in the extent to which the secret state believes it has consolidated and can control any mechanism that might allow discovery and challenge, so that it can rely on its citizens never knowing properly, or often at all.
It is horrible for me to read this against the background of my own despair at the virtual media blackout of my evidence last week to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. I thought that my evidence of ministerial collusion in torture was so shocking that the mainstream media would have to carry it. I realise reading Gareth that even now I am still naive. I also understand better now the Committee’s extraordinary dispassion.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/nobody_can_hear.html#comments
‘At one stage, when the goon squad were entering and turning over my flat to try and put the frighteners on me, Gareth and her husband invited me to live with them for a while. I declined and toughed it out, but I tell the story as an example of her kindness and devotion to the cause of human rights.’
Since I ‘woke up’ a few years ago and started trying to wake up other people on internet chat rooms, forums and blogs I have also been heckled. More recently, though some minor odd things did happen before, after I stumbled you on you blog and voicing my opinions things have got worse. I have had the exterior of my home ‘vandalised’, seen 2 mysterious men ‘hanging around’ outslde my property (to rough me up?) and on a recent night heard abusive shouting (wanker etc.) right outside my property. I have lived here for ***30 years***. My property has ‘never’ been vandalised before, I have ‘never’ seen mysterious men hanging around outside my property before and ‘never’ heard abusive shouting outside my property before. You would have to see my location to understand how incredibly unusual this is. And all within the last ***2 weeks***? After I exposed and abused some of the people on here I deemed to be spook idiots? I have also aired the links between paedophilia and economic/political power. Believe me people, it’s all true. I was aware of ‘gangstalking’ before this, but had never experienced it. It is where higher up people have some channels they can go through to use some ‘gutless morons’ to heckle ‘problematic’ members of the public. So, nothing ‘really heavy’ has happened, but I live with 2 elderly parents and i’m not impressed. I think this is disgusting. Do you have any advice for me Craig?
Jaded
Well, unless you have some information which has not been made public, there’s not much point in anybody trying to frighten you.
What they did with me was not subtle at all. I came home to find the door wide open and evey single electrical appliance – including hoover, iron, oven, TV, Hi-Fi etc etc – plugged in and switched on. From a couple of indications (eg oven not up to temperature yet)it had been done just a couple of minutes before I got back.
I don’t want to dismiss your concerns, but what you are experiencing seems a bit indirect and I don’t know what you know that anyone might want to frighten you over.
Your best defence is to post on the net any information at all you might have, holding nothing back. And always have a camera handy.
Have you contacted your MP?
I think Jaded that Craig is politely telling you you’re paranoid.
Great article here. The torture issue is just not on the UK media agenda – the only thing lacking from Peirce is an analysis of why the UK media are government lackeys.
Thanks for that. Read the whole thing, brilliant but depressing article. The question remains, what is to be done? People should be held to account though I am not optimistic that this will occur.
The people in the British government who believe information thru torture should be accepted, really should start thinking about the fact that what if some people with the same attitude as they used torture on them to get information out of them to the public? Is this the sort of world they want us to be working for?
I also ask what is it that make them believe they can get away with it? In a dictatorship you get away with it. Because you threaten people, kill people or they do their best to destroy your life. It seems this is what’s happening in the UK and other countries who we have called democratic. So can we still call it a democracy? No. The rapping may say it is but the inside tell of a different truth.
Craig, in a couple of weeks I’ll be in Dundee with my husband, feels good to be in the same city as you. Easier to breath.
With lots of respect
Nadia
No, I don’t have any info that isn’t public. What I have done with determination over the last couple of years is ‘proactively’ attempt to wake other people up on the internet. Maybe they don’t like that. I have encountered so many ‘agents’ online it is laughable. I don’t think having 2 men just standing outside my property, having people shout abuse outside my property at night and having a whole drain pipe ripped off my wall and tossed into a field in the middle of the night, and all in the space of a fortnight or less, is subtle, indirect or makes me paranoid. It’s not ‘real’ until it happens to you. And it’s hard to imagine things like this happening when they haven’t happened to you. Anyhow, I wasn’t going to mention this here, but saw Craig refer to his experiences. Just wondered what he thought I could do. If no one believes my view that’s cool. Moving on then…
If anything similar happens again, you should contact the police. And install a CCTV camera.
A psychic friend of mine told me some time ago that there is a ‘satanic conspiracy’ going on in the world,which I sort of took with a pinch of salt then.But when I think about the torture issue and how KSM was waterboarded 180 times it starts to make sense.I presume that the people who are being picked to do the torturing are quite happy to torment other human beings.Add to that Craig’s description on MIS of the “malevolence” he encountered on one of the FCO meetings and Hollywood scripts are no longer a figment of the imagination.
Mark wrote:
“The torture issue is just not on the UK media agenda – the only thing lacking from Peirce is an analysis of why the UK media are government lackeys.”
Maybe the question is where does the media get any news from?
If you saw the programme “Six degrees of separation”, you should be aware that ‘networks’, like the news industry, have ‘hubs’ which vary in their importance. The greater the network (global even) the greater the importance of a few hubs become.
Take for example the internet: when it was relatively new, we had many search engines; now it is older and bigger, we have google.
If you want to know who, or how the media is being ‘controlled’, then you have to find the common hubs that they all share.
PS. If google wanted to, it could make the name ‘Craig Murray’ disappear from the internet, without needing to delete anything written by Craig, just by removing his name from the search data base. People have links could still use those links, but people ‘looking’ will not find it unless google makes it searchable.
The irony is that the more global and diverse information becomes, the easier it will be to control.
There’s nothing ‘satanic’ about what’s going on – we are living through a period in which what Jung called the ‘dark shadow’ of the human psyche is uppermost.
Hollywood scripts, after all, don’t appear from nowhere – they are the product of human minds (sick if you like) and are seized upon by imitative souls who have nothing more authentic in their own lives than copycat violence.
The amount of violence – actual and simulated – continually seen on television these days has a desensitising effect on viewers who make no connection between what they see on screen and their own or their neighbours’ lives.
The excerpt correctly sums things up.
Torture has probably always been used by our and American spooks.
The American government has, by choice removed the ‘plausible deniability’ from what our hired thugs and assassins get up to.
Those once delicious sausages now have a list of ingredients that leave a very bad taste in the mouth….
Check out the disgusting war criminal John Bolton squirming about potential prosecutions of Bu$hCo torturers by the Spanish at the Grauniads website…
Good to see him being lambasted by sane decent commentators.
Dont forget to add your tuppence.
@ Craig and all.
I’d like to bring to your attention ForaTV (http://fora.tv). Like TED.com, there are some great speeches/lecturers/talks and discussions there.
I strongly disagree with some of them (like the sociobiologocial ones if you were curious) but I think discussion helps raise the level of debate and WILL life us out of some of the crap we have today.
Registration/viewing and downloadein (:)) is free. I mention this as I’ve just downloaded a Geiffery Robertson talk he gave in Austraila just over a month ago.
All the best…
lw
Geoffrey Robertson on the History of Human Rights
Queen’s Counsel, broadcaster and author Geoffrey Robertson has achieved international fame by defending high-profile cases, often representing victims of alleged human rights abuses. H…
03.30.2009 | 01:03:16 min | 215 Views
Oh, and many many video’s that came up from a search of Zionism. Still, know thy enemy!
Gareth Peirce’s piece? Just oh.my.god. This corruption and evil goes so, so deep.
And, if I may, with the greatest of respect to you Craig whilst not wishing to fuel anxieties, I believe the ‘frightener’ tactics are employed on escalating levels. They appear to be utilised by those who are probably engaged on a need-to-know basis (ergo plausible deniability/ignorance of the bigger picture). I have too much knowledge now (from e.g. reputable journalist and lawyer acquaintances as well as my own ‘interesting’ experiences) to ever again dismiss anyone’s suspicions in this regard, as I would have done glibly a few years ago.
Taking an overview of similar occurences across the country involving those who do think and speak independently and honestly, it seems to me that the widespread incredulous denial by law-abiding, decent people of covert nefarious activity is actually what these ‘frightener’ folks depend on.
No, I’m not paranoid! I’m not even slightly touched – and can produce robust, BRD evidence to substantiate!
Sam…
Yes you’re absolutely right that these tactics are employed on escalating levels now.
Far far too many,now,have experienced these “practices” for it to be kept underground/secret or denied as the sole preserve of the tin-foil hat brigade.
It’s mainstream and huge now.
And,of course,unsustainable in the long run-not that the bastards engaged in this behaviour have the brains or long-term wisdom to see where this’ll lead us.
People talk.Word gets out.Truth gets out.
Peace.
JimmyGiro “Maybe the question is where does the media get any news from?”
Good point. Nick Davies in his book “Flat Earth News” makes some very interesting and pertinent observations about that.
Craig ?” you post:-
“…Once we have arrived at a position where acquiescence in crimes against humanity by our government may well have occurred, the state can no longer demand that we acknowledge it as our protector and assert that in consequence the nation’s security is at stake if secrets are revealed.”
HMG ?” instigated, fabricated, participated in the Iraq invasion ( recall the “Downing Street Memorandum”). There is no new discovery there. A fair amount of the shit was emitted from Downing Street. It was utilised by Colin Powell ( remember him?) in the United Nations Security Council. And guess what ?” it has been splattered all over Iraq and has suffocated, engulfed and claimed over one million Iraqi lives, in a process to this day being manipulated with on-going UK complicity for domination of Iraqi oil and control of the Iraqi state apparatus as far as is practical in the situation, for some measure of Western influence if not full spectrum dominance over the Middle East.
Having said that ?” do we see how high the shit is stacked?
From the 2003 illegal invasion “, the state can ( could) no longer demand that we acknowledge it as our protector and assert that in consequence the nation’s security is ( was) at stake if( since) state secrets are (were) revealed.” The secrets have been out in the open for quite some time ?” 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and, are we there already ?” 2009.
The operative “secret” is the fact of the manifest extreme corruption in having started the bloody Iraqi war with lies in the first instance! The crimes against Iraqi humanity continue and the British government is still playing a central part in the process.
From Magna Carta right down to the 2003 invasion, with all the laws placed on the books in the intervening years ?” not one “British war criminal” who unleashed this “oil war” on the Iraqi people will ever be brought to justice. One million strong marched against this bloody war; the duplicitous Blair lied the war into existence; there will be no honest and full inquiry resulting in war criminals being brought to justice and being prosecuted. Blair is now supposedly a peace maker seeking justice in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. What an irony if any ever existed. The chief British war monger and criminal is seeking peace in the very region where he unleashed the illegal war. The stink that we now smell is not just from the British government’s complicity, the pay off to Blair for his lying, but it is the cumulative smell of the dead Iraqi bodies, stacked high in consequence of the complicity and Blair’s illegal conduct!
How much longer does it have to take to arrive at ” … at a position where acquiescence in crimes against humanity by our government” is not gleaned as the order of the day which has already been accepted by a majority of the citizenry as a fait accompli. If the citizenry ?” if we think about it ?” is not to be categorised as complicit; if there is not to be any guilt by commission, since it was the citizenry that elected the politicians who sat in the Commons and voted fro the war, then at the very least there are sins by omission which come into play when the citizenry does nought by way of effective ( “effective” = operative word) opposition to the continuing war. The people elected those who sat/sit in the Commons ?” the Prime Minister lied ?” the Commons voted for an illegal war ?” and the guilt, corruption and shit is thus spread wide ?” so, watch out where you step.
Then you post:-
“There have been no resignations over any of this.” ?” and if the whole corrupt bunch resigned? ?” what then? – the Tories?
As you say Craig ?” “I realise reading Gareth that even now I am still naive.” I would say that you still believe in a system that at its core is manifestly and extremely corrupt, and murderous, if you consider the Iraq war and how it unfolded.
And you close on the question of torture ?” “I also understand better now the Committee’s extraordinary dispassion.” ?” so, now we can both accept that from the top where Tony Blair sat, to the seat that you sat in to give your testimony Craig, is ultimately a part of that very system ?” the murderous and corrupt one that makes your stomach churn. What should be in consequence of all the known facts, a great national shame for the defiling of the human spirit by way of torture, and collective guilt for the deaths in the war in Iraq, expires as a damp moral squib. No explosive national headlines in response to your testimony. How could it be otherwise ?” after all ?” it is the system that you are exposing ?” so ?” do you expect the same system to go further and expose itself even more after what you have done? Ultimately, be assured ?” there will still remain national pride and confidence in the great democracy, before which you gave your own great testimony. This democracy is further assisted by assumptions ( shared by you and others) that changing from Labour to New Labour or Tory brings any fundamental change. But we can all be sure of preservation of the world’s greatest democracy, in which you played your part in testifying as you did Craig. There is in the final analysis – no expression of shame to be anticipated from this government, and none will be forthcoming from any subsequently elected one either!
Aluta continua!
Geoff Robertson is an old mate of mine – I was one of those who steered him towards some of his early civil liberties and anti-censorship work when he was a young barrister in John Mortimer’s chambers. He is a first-class brain, and an honest democrat.
As for the points rightly made by Courtenay Barnett and others, we must face the fact that, sadly, we are living through a time of extreme moral turpitude within the Western democracies. As our dear prime minister might say, it all started in America when the Republicans stole the 2000 presidential election and a gang of unscrupulous operators were installed in office who surrounded themselves with the proponents of the Project for the New American Century – Zionists or pro-Zionists who had been openly calling for the invasion of Iraq since the mid-1990s.
Whether or not 9/11 was at least partly a false flag operation – I believe it was – it was brilliantly successful in swaying the ignorant credulous timid US electorate in favour of cowboy-style “kick ass” policies. Hence the increasingly burdensome and potentially disastrous wars we are lumbered with in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Whether or not Blair actually had any choice in following Uncle Sam like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail is a moot point. I myself think that the Americans have such a tight security and intelligence hold over this country that we had little choice but to go along with them. Dodgy dossiers and other spins (second nature to New Labour anyway) were just the necessary icing on the cake.
So the prime question for us who believe that Western policy has been morally rotten and militarily suicidal for the past decade is how to change that state of affairs? The first step is to recognise that our sentimental ‘special relationship’ with the USA does us as much harm as theirs with Israel does them.
At present, there is no-one in mainstream politics prepared to say so – not least because none of them appears to recognise the true facts.
Yes, all good points, but the arseholes that control it all aren’t, in essence, part of any country. They are an overclass. They see us all, wrongly, as dumb cattle and all they understand is power and money. They are our masters. The world, right now, is really a pluto-paedo-mofo-sociopathiocracy. They are enemies of all countries in the world. The worst part is they probably think that what they are doing is somehow good for the world. They are up to their necks in filth and will never surrender because of fear they will be held to account. That’s how the U.S. has got in such a mess and the world is paying for it now. If Obama was for real he would have scrapped the Federal Reserve and Patriot Act for starters!
Anticant – ” pluto-paedo-mofo-sociopathiocracy.” ? – that’s a new on me. Actually the phraseology that sums it up for me is a “kleptocracy” ( i.e. which summarises those who steal the money, those who administratively and politically who assist the process, and those who fail to expose it in the mainstream media).
If there was not a core of decency in the UK, our long history of violence overseas would have finished us a long time ago. The powers that be in this country discovered a thousand years ago that violence against others engenders humility and patience in the victims and gratitude for crumbs of mercy from the oppressors.
When Zion was defeated by Rome, Paul ensured that Rome and its sibling empire would inherit an utterly false religion of prophet worship, masquerading as truth, and an utterly treacherous political class, masquerading as defenders of truth. That has not changed for two thousand years and nobody should complain about it now.
The bastards have had an exceptionally long innings. Their time is over now. Complacency led to the sinking of the Titanic and the West is also doomed. Simple steps to avoid destruction are:
Belief in One God, certainty of the day of Judgement, indifference to fate. After all being eaten by lions and harrassed by thugs was always the fate of those who spoke the truth. However much the lying bastards want to ratchet up the war against Islam, let them die from their rage that two millenia of continuous violence is about to be replaced with prosperity and peace.
You could jump now into the icy waters or carry on playing, the result is the same, the West is finished.
Capitalism of course is not the prerogative of the West, it’s just that that they always do it with their swords, rockets and nukes concealed behind their backs.
That’s a big grave they’ve got to dig…
It wasn’t I who used that multi-hyphenated term.
Yes – all those people are power-hungry and greedy for money, but how many of them are consciously crooked, and how many are just dumb moral defectives?
We all do whatever we freely choose to do “for the best” (even Hitler – perhaps most of all Hitler). we’d be idiots if we didn’t.
It’s too simplistic to blame all the world’s ills on a tightly-knit group – the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, the Jesuits, or whoever. What we are dealing with is the flaws in human nature arising primarily from lack of moral education, religious or otherwise.
Anon, anything that tells people what to believe is precisely the problem. Get a few of these power discourses in play and you’ve immediately got divisions in humanity that can be manipulated by arseholes. People need to be taught to figure it out for themselves! All organised Religion is poppycock. It’s funny how God’s word always gets written on paper by someone. Quite handy that. I’m not saying something greater than us – I don’t like using the word God – doesn’t exist, but no one knows what it is. It’s pathetic the stuff we dream up. At some stage in your life you didn’t know what to think and bought into something. Now it rules your life. Nothing wrong with randomly looking at the odd Religion and picking out a few ideas you like though. Think about it and show some courage. Probably banging my head on a brick wall.
Moral education as indoctrination, do what I say, is horrible. Our society has definitely forgotten the concept of the moral leader, who engages everybody in a moral enthusiasm, religious or non-religious. Content is important, though. I hear lots of virtual-moral comment from sports broadcasters, who seem to live in a second reality of their own, and Euro politicians who have confused their real economic power with popular approval.
To all second-lifers, no doubt the pain of torture is ‘virtual’. I take solace from the belief that the punishment of Hell will be real for them. Probably banging my head on a brick wall though same as you.
Craig, this is a long march. It will not be resolved quickly – certainly not in our lifetimes – because of man’s infinite capacity for perfidy. So we must understand that our job is to inflict attritions where possible and, when the time comes, to hand over the torch to another generation. However, we can gain some satisfaction and some heart from those small victories which we can take along the way.
This is not a battle, it is a war. Part of our job is to educate and inspire those who will follow.
Excellent Craig. Thanks for posting the link.
You wonder why the media have not covered the recent ‘airing’ of your testimony?
Could it be that the current economic crises coupled with the disclosures concerning the dubious dealings of the financial class have led to the public disillusionment in our our social system.
Further disclosures concerning MP’s expenses, which they voted to keep secret, add to peoples suspicions that the rulers rule in their own favour.
They fear that once the lid is lifted, and it has been, the toxic (for them) truth will come spewing out and hit them.
John Pilger has some interesting things to say.
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=528
Here’s a snippet.
The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January last, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W. Bush with that of Pinochet. “Outside [the United States] there is not the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime,” he said. “So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as ‘former President George Bush’ [but] as a current war criminal.” For this reason, Bush’s former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said, “We have clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture.”
All the best