Monthly archives: May 2009

British Government Buries Its Torture Guilt

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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

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Spanish Fascists Barca Through to Final

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Barcelona are through to the Champions League final tonight after beating Chelsea. They were pretty fortunate, with Chelse having four very good penalty shouts, at least two of which looked 100% certain (and I am neither a Chelsea fan, nor English). That outweighed Barca being hard done by in the sending off.

But what is really disgusting is Barcelona’s relationship with the Karimov regime of Uzbekistan, one of the world’s most vicious dictatorships.

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

For selling itself as a propaganda tool for a fascist regime founded on child slavery, Barca has disgraced itself and football.

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Hazel Blears Lies Again

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Hazel Blears is the epitome of New Labour populism. She is the friendly face of outflanking the BNP to the Right. Portrayed as a bouncy little “no-nonsense” politician, “no-nonsense” and “common-sense” are code for “very very right wing indeed”.

In this video interview with George Monbiot, she reminds me irresistibly of Gracie Fields, if Grace Fields were campaigning for Oswald Mosley:

“‘Ee, Ducks, don’t you worry about that Mr Hitler, e’ll do alright. Just you think about the ordinary working folk here in’t mill. That’s what I call decent politics, like.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/video/2009/apr/25/monbiot-meets-hazel-blears

Except that the Blears act is very thin indeed. Seven minutes in to the Monbiot video, he challenges her over New Labour support for the evil “President” Karimov of Uzbekistan. Blears pretends hardly to have heard of Karimov, and as Monbiot presses, she makes out that she knows nothing about Uzbekistan and is only interested in “Jobs and education for the people here in Salford”.

But Blears has played a key role in New Labour’s support for Karimov. In October 2005 Hazel Blears told the House of Commons that the Islamic Jihad Union had been responsible for bomb attacks in Tashkent in March 2004. In fact, there were no bombs in Tashkent in 2004. I was able personally to inspect each of the alleged bomb sites within hours – and in one case minutes – of the alleged explosions, and there were no bombs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/oct/19/foreignpolicy.uksecurity

A very full description is given on pages 325 to 340 of Murder in Samarkand.

The purpose of the false bombing campaign was to provide cover for the shooting dead of several dozen dissidents, and more importantly to establish a new black ops “terror” group, the “Islamic Jihad Union”. This group, never heard of before, was immediately blamed by the Uzbek government for the “bombs”.

In fact the Islamic Jihad Union was a creation of the Uzbek and German security services, with CIA involvement. The “bombs” were timed for the day a senior level delegation of German MPs and MEPs were in Tashkent. The motive behind creating the “Islamic Jihad Union” was to firm up political support for the controversial German deployment of troops in Afghanistan, supported by the German airbase at Termez in Uzbekistan, which is still operating.

German security services have since arranged a series of terror scares in Germany over pretended planned bombing campaigns by the “Uzbek Islamic Jihad Union” inside Germany, to continue to whip up German public support for their alliance with the odious Karimov.

Blears specifically told the House of Commons that the Islamic Jihad Union was reponsible for the “bombs” in Uzbekistan, and then defended this in subsequent debate against sceptical MPs.

For her to pretend to Monbiot that she has no idea what he is talking about on Uzbekistan, is sickening. The woman has “Fake” stamped all the way through her.

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Don’t Shoot Samantha Orabator – But You Can Keep Her

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In 2003, over 10% of female prisoners in the UK’s jails were foreign women with drugs convictions.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4261934.stm

I can’t find a more recent number, but there has been no substantial change in the scale of the problem. A lot of them are from Nigeria, where Samantha Orabator was born.

In the case of another London Nigerian, Yatunde Diya, who was convicted two years ago in Ghana, I wrote:

“I am sick of the easy presumption by large sections of the media, whenever a British person is arrested abroad on drugs charges, that they are being unfairly dealt with by a tinpot state, and have been set up by evil foreigners.”

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/07/i_am_aware_that.html

But there are important differences. Diya was in Ghana, which has a basically fair legal system. Orabator is indeed in a “Tinpot state” – Laos, which has a nutty communist regime. And she faces the death penalty, even more horrible as she is is pregnant. It is that possibility which gives the story sufficient frisson to headline the news.

I don’t know enough about Laos to know if they execute pregnant women, but killing pregnant women appears to be a universal cultural taboo. I do know enough about Laos to know that it is not a place to ordinarily expect a fair trial. All communist societies, including Uzbekistan, have almost a 100% conviction rate. The State is perfect, so the Prosecutor cannot make mistakes.

This poses an interesting conundrum. It would not be sensible to adopt the position that a Briton should be allowed to commit any crime at all in Laos – say murder – without any expectation of punishment, because it does not have a system of fair trial.

I hope that the lawyer Reprieve are finding her does a good job at trial, and perhaps through diplomatic pressure the death sentence could be commuted if she is convicted. But for us to try to insist the Laotian authorities release her immediately from imprisonment would be quite wrong. There is no particular reason to believe that they have invented the story that she is a drug smuggler.

If you are going to comment, please first read my earlier post linked to above for all the caveats on what leads to drug smuggling etc.

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Oprah Winfrey’s Heart Broke

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Just heard on Sky News:

“Oprah Winfrey has revealed how her heart broke when she interviewed Kate and Gerry McCann.”

Great News! Oprah Winfrey’s dead! How did she reveal it though? In a seance? At the post mortem when her diaphragm was opened?

This disgusting McCann couple at the very most charitable interpretation, left tiny children all alone in a foreign hotel room while they were off having fun. More than once. I can think of much worse possibilities. When will the media stop promoting them?

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A Gentleman’s Diary of the Pig Plague Year

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Mrs Murray and I continue very Well, with no need of Physick. Yesterday we took our Promenade down to Gunnersbury Park. We made a picque-nique with some Roast Fowl and a quart of claret, and watched the Gentlemen of Acton in a match at Cricket against some visiting Gentlemen.

Mrs Murray commented what a goodly Providence it was, that had assured that, even in these terrible times of Plague, each team had yet been able to find eleven players, and some of them very fine looking and Portly!

The talk was all of Baroness Udders who has been caught stealing from the public purse. Nobody could recall a single reason why a woman of such small Distinction might have been elevated to the Peerage. It is believed, however, that she commands prodigious many of the new postal ballots in a Rotten Borough very nigh upon the Tower, where the poor disgraced Mr Blair had been much beset by Liberals. Mrs Murray observed to me that Baroness Udders was a mere Harlot who should be Whipped around the Town. I cannot find it in my heart to disagree with her.

Returning home up Gunnersbury Road, we passed by an emporium for funerary services. We were very much surprised to see that all appeared quiet. Perchance the proprietor had collapsed from overwork, and become himself, in that sense, a Victim of the Great Pig Plague? That we should live to see such Melancholy times!

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Iain Dale and Racism

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This blog has a notoriously liberal attitude to free speech. It is also, notoriously, not politically correct. Comments are virtually never censored. Only two commenters have ever been banned, in both cases for persistently publishing sentiments that were not anti-Zionist (OK), but anti-Jewish (not OK).

Iain Dale currently has comment moderation on. He is pre-screening comments. He has an excellent post about the corrupt New Labour Baroness Uddin.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&postID=3181377803578187025

But I am really surprised that Iain has approved these comments for publication:

“It is inevitable that these cretins will take advantage. The whole system is wrong and this “Lady” could not control her temptation which was with intent. She’s no different to a sponging immigrant.”

(My emphasis).

and

I wonder why there is a higher proportion of ethnics amongst the most corrupt and deceitful in our society? It makes you think that the so-called colonialists were only acting according to how they found them.

I think most third world ‘people’ are inherently dishonest. Once you accept that, perhaps it is possible to interact on a civilised basis. Otherwise, they’ll run rings around you.

Am I alone on finding the inverted commas in that last one particularly sinister?

Now I quite accept that Iain Dale is no racist. And I accept that a comment on a blog in no way implies that the blog author agrees with the comment. But I would have removed those two, and can’t understand why Iain approved them – or at least did not add a comment of his own to challenge these racist attitudes, as I do in publishing them here.

I tend to the view that this proves that, if you move in Tory circles, you get inured to comments that make ordinary people’s toes curl.

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NuLab Freeloaders Steal From The Starving

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The CDC scandal is the worst of all the NuLab snouts in the trough scandals, because they are stealing from the poorest on Earth. They are diverting taxpayers’ money that was meant for poverty alleviation in the Third World, into the pockets of NuLab figures and the fattest of City fatcats. Like these.

http://www.cdcgroup.com/the_board.asp

I worked with the old Commonweatlh Development Corporation on agricultural projects in Nigeria in the 1980s. The conversion by NuLab of this £2 billion body, wholly owned by DFID, into a private equity fund which pays its chief executive £1 million a year, is a terrible disgrace even for this most despicable of governments.

I could not agree more with John Hilary, Chief Executive of War on Want: “CDC has long abandoned any interest in poverty reduction. (It] is focused instead on wealth creation for the affluent, including its own chief executive Richard Laing, who is paid close to £1 million a year. This is a travesty of the organisation’s original mandate.”

http://news.scotsman.com/politics/Anger-as-boss-of-antipoverty.5220242.jp

But it is much worse than even John Hilary knows. A CDC employee has contacted me after reading The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, to tell me that there are at least seventeen instances of remunerated directorships of CDC funded companies held by senior New Labour figures. I expect to receive materials in a few days time.

I broke this directorship scandal in The Catholic Orangemen when I stumbled on just one shocking instance regarding Baroness Amos. Here are the relevant extracts:

The concierge opened the door and the Nigerian detached himself from the rich leather upholstery of the sleek, silver, range-topping Mercedes. He stalked into the lounge of the Sheraton, as glossy as the sheen on his Italian silk suit and as smooth as the mirrored lenses of his designer spectacles. My heart sank as he headed towards our little group. I had taken on the chairmanship of a Ghanaian energy company to help out some Ghanaian friends. Our little venture had prospered and we were looking to expand across West Africa. In doing so I was determined to steer well clear of capital tainted with corruption or drugs. My surest guide to doing that was to avoid people who looked and dressed like this man whom my colleagues had arranged to talk with us.

West Africa is now the third largest centre in the World for money laundering and narcotics capital formation. But in terms of the percentage of total capital formation which drugs money forms, it is far ahead. Money laundering is the raison d’etre of many West African financial institutions. In Accra in March 2008 a World Bank sponsored conference held in Accra on money laundering heard an estimate that over 60% of the capital of the mushrooming private banking sector in Nigeria could be drugs money. Recently Nigerian banks have started taking out huge poster adverts all over the UK’s major airports. That is drugs money.

One consequence of this is that I have found it too easy to attract the wrong kind of capital to a legitimate business proposal in West Africa. These investors from West African banks and private equity firms are not even expecting the kind of high returns that a high risk market normally demands. With anti money-laundering regulations now so tight in the US and EU, their investors are looking to launder the money in the region before sending it to Europe. The proceeds of a legitimate energy company are accountable and clean; so we attract those wishing to put dirty money in to get clean money out. The actual bank executives and fund managers are of course not themselves necessarily involved in narcotics; they just fail to query adequately the source of their investor’s cash.

So when the new arrival introduced himself as a manager of a Nigerian private equity firm, I mentally switched off. I giggled inwardly as he named his company as “Travant”, because I thought he said “Trabant”, which given the car out of which he had just stepped, would have been wildly inappropriate. But I came to with a start when he said that his Nigerian private equity firm had access to DFID funds because Baroness Amos was a Director. To be clear, I asked whether Travant was an NGO or a governmental investment agency. He replied that it was not; it was a private, for-profit fund management company.

Baroness Amos was of course the Secretary of State for DFID until 2003 and until 2007 was Leader of the House of Lords. I though that it was impossible that DFID money would be given to a company of which she was Director. On the face of it, nobody could look further removed from the development aid ethos than the man in the designer suit. I went back to writing him off, deciding he was simply making it up about Baroness Amos and his access to DFID money. In West Africa among people who wear silk suits and are driven in Mercedes, the standards of truthfulness sadly leave in general a great deal to be desired.

I would have forgotten the incident, but in December 2008 I found myself sitting next to Baroness Amos on an airport bus heading for the plane to Accra. Once on board she moved to Business class while due to overbooking I was downgraded to Economy Plus. Baroness Amos was going out to Accra to head the Commonwealth monitoring team for the first round of the 2008 Ghanaian elections, as John Kufuor retired. Sending Baroness Amos to monitor an election seemed to me another tremendous example of British arrogance. Valerie Amos is the very antithesis of a democratic politician. One of the Blair inner circle, she rose to Cabinet rank despite never having faced the electorate. Never, ever, at any level of politics. Her entire career was based upon New Labour internal patronage after making a very good living out of complaining about discrimination against minorities in the UK. She opened up a substantial income gap between herself and those on whose behalf she was claiming to work, from a very early stage, and that gap has widened ever since.

All this came back to me as I looked at Baroness Amos quaffing champagne on that plane. So I did a bit of digging. Valerie Amos is indeed listed on their website as a non-executive director of Travant Private Equity, one of only five directors. There is nothing about developmental goals,

ethics, or the environment on the website. There is a lot about real estate opportunities in West Africa (by which they do not mean housing for the urban poor), and a boast that they have “the largest fundraising from domestic investors in sub-Saharan Africa”. Remember what I said about the sources of local capital formation? Now Travant may have the most rigorous procedures for scrutinising the origin of the domestic money deposited with them. But if they do, they do not mention it on their website. Rather they emphasise that “we are deeply immersed in the business communities in which we invest”. Mmmm.

But have Travant received DFID money? On the face of it, Travant shouldn’t even want public money ?” they are aggressive proponents of the capitalist ethos: “We believe that the private sector, with appropriate oversight and governance, is the best shepherd of Africa’s resources. We seek to empower entrepreneurs to pursue opportunities that they have identified, creating returns for investors, jobs and economic growth.” Yet in 2007 the British Government financed Travant with £15 million of funds, provided through CDC, the investment arm of DFID. CDC is owned 100% by DFID. At launch over one third of Travant’s first equity fund came from DFID. A few months afterwards Baroness Amos, ex minister in charge of DFID, joined the board of this profit-making firm.

It says everything about New Labour that CDC, which as the Commonwealth Development Corporation used to run agricultural projects to benefit the rural poor, was rebranded as CDC with a new remit to provide most of its funds to the financial services industry. It says even more about New Labour’s lack of the understanding of fundamental personal ethics, of their embrace of greed, that they see no reason why one of their former senior ministers should not move to benefit personally from the DFID money – even if through a 100% owned satellite – thus invested.

To turn this story full circle, let us turn back to Sierra Leone. 65% of the measured exports of this country come from its rutile mines. These were under guard by Sandline at the start of this memoir. Following the British invasion of Sierra Leone, it returned to its normal state of extreme corruption. Life is hard for most of its inhabitants, and UN donated food and pharmaceuticals, clearly marked “not for sale”, are only available to the local population for cash they do not have, as the result of collusion between corrupt UN officials, government officials, and mostly Lebanese traders. But the rutile mines are working full out, and extremely profitable, with armed white men again in charge of security. A major rutile miner, Titanium Resources Group of Sierra Leone says in its 2008 interim report: “the long term future of our markets is sound and the quality and scale of our mineral reserves underline our future prospects.” The Chairman of Titanium Resources Group is Walter Kansteiner III, George Bush’s former Assistant Secretary of Sate for Africa and a founding partner of the Scowcroft Group, led by Brent Scowcroft, George Bush’s National Security Adviser and architect of the CIA’s re-introduction of torture. The Scowcroft Group advisory consultancy did huge harm in Africa in the 1990s with their advocacy of privatisation and deregulation, particularly in the forestry sector, and with some influence advocated policies worldwide which contributed to the credit bubble and collapse of recent years.

But none of that prevented Kansteiner and Scowcroft from making money out of it, and Blair’s invasion secured Sierra Leone’s mineral resources to the neo-cons. Not everyone benefits. Titanium Resources’ Interim Report 2008 mentions the disruption in production as a result of the collapse of a dredger, without feeling the need even to mention the two Sierra Leoneans who

died in the incident.

But New Labour believes in profit, especially for themselves, so it was no surprise to me when Titanium Resources announced in March 2008 the appointment of Baroness Amos as a non-executive director. For me that appointment [though she later resigned] sums up the cosiness of the alliance between Bush, Blair and their acolytes. It was an alliance based on the acquisition of mineral resources by any means possible. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most infamous example. I saw it close up operating by war in Sierra Leone, and by the diplomacy of repression in Uzbekistan.

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Good Lord!

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The Independent on Sunday has named me as one of its Top Ten Alternative National Treasures. There I am, after Charlotte Church, Vivienne Westwood and Jo Brand.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/rough-diamonds-ithe-iosi-selects-its-alternative-national-treasures-1678242.html

I differ from the others in having no discernible talent, but also in not having appeared on broadcast media for two years now. I continue to receive invitations to appear, and then have them withdrawn almost immediately thereafter. The last was from Channel 4 News a couple of weeks ago. It is 18 months ago since I catalogued how it works here.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/11/blacklisted.html

It must have happened over twenty times since. It appears again and again that an editor has the idea to invite me, but then it gets knocked on the head by some process.

I cannot help but put this together with the almost total news boycott of my evidence this week to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. That was really weird. Carried nowhere at all but the Today programme. Not a single mention in one newspaper.

On the other hand, to become an Alternative National Treasure armed with nothing but a keyboard…!

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War Criminals Seek Safe Haven With Lib Dems

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Apparently some of the Blairite right of New Labour are in talks with Paddy Pantsdown over the possibility of defecting to the Lib Dems. As the Blairite right is well to the right of Thatcher, drove the most determined attack on civil liberties since 1818, launched a devastating illegal war on the basis of lies, and reintroduced torture as public policy, one would hope the Lib Dems would tell them where to get off.

The point of immediate dispute – the introduction of a 50p income tax rate on marginal income above £150,000 – is probably the only sensible thing Brown has done.

We have been here before. Remember Dr Death. Dr David Owen is now comfortably ensconsed in the huge Mayfair office of Uzbek billionaire gangster and convicted blackmailer Alisher Usmanov, whose extremely highly paid PR catamite Owen now is.

What has the UK has come to, when its former Foreign Secretary is the paid lapdog of the most criminal of all the Russian oligarchs!

If you were very shortsighted and in a bad light, it was possible not to realise what kind of creature Owen was before he abandoned Labour for the Liberal/Social Democrat alliance. (Although it is often forgotten now that support for Trident missiles was the shameful cause of that realignment). There can be no excuse now for the Lib Dems to ally with the Blairites.

If there are any real Liberals left in the Left Dems, as opposed to nastly little careerists, they should be in revolt over even the mention of the admission of just one Blairite. John Stuart Mill must be spinning in his grave.

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Iain Dale Rides To Rescue Charles Crawford

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Iain Dale has offered much needed assistance to Charles Crawford, as Charles struggles to promote the New Labour doctrine that “Torture is Good”.

Condoleeza Rice – The Mask Slips

I think Iain ought perhaps to have checked with William Hague for the line on this one, but we’ll let that go. Anyway, Iain has given Charles a link on “The Daley Dozen” with the plug “Charles Crawford is not an FCO lickspittle, whatever Craig Murray might say.”

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&postID=7467638102883273883

So to what does Iain Dale link to prove that Charles Crawford is not an FCO lickspittle? To a bold criticism by Charles of British foreign policy? An attack by Charles on Milliband’s lack of effort on human rights, or on supine British policy over the Israeli attack on Gaza?

No, those don’t exist. Iain links, to “prove” that Charles is no lickspittle, to Charles’ attack on me to further the FCO position of supporting torture. Iain thus shoots both himself and Charles in the foot with one bullet.

I have increased respect for Iain Dale since he recently joined the long list of Tories coming out against Trident 2. I don’t choose friends by their political views. Charles Crawford is a perfectly nice bloke as well. That is the problem when governments do things like institute torture policy. The public servants who go along with it are not monsters but ordinary people.

Charles had attacked me about a dozen times on his blog, if you include his feeble series of “reviews” of Murder in Samarkand, and is acting in a thin-skinned way when I mentioned him for the first time, in the context of his support for the government’s torture policy.

But Charles Crawford’s huffing and puffing cannot disguise his failure to answer the question I put to him. When he was British Ambassador to Poland, did he know about the CIA secret prison near Sczytno Szymany, about torture in it and about the extraordinary rendition flights through that airport? Until he answers those questions, there is nothing else to discuss with him.

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Incredible Coincidences

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On Thursday 30 April, this blog had 2,849 unique visitors. That brought the total number of unique visitors for all of April to precisely 74,000. The chances of that being an exact thousand are, of course, just one in a thousand.

Which set my mind thinking on the following incredible coincidence of numbers in recent news headlines. I wonder if we might make a film about it, like that really boring one “The Number 23” with Jim Carrey. We could call it “The Number Nil”.

Number of People Dead in the UK in the Great Pig Plague – Nil

Number of people charged in Gordon Brown’s Manchester “Very big terror plot” – Nil

Number of responsible caring parents of Madeleine McCann – Nil

Number of the 117,000 people stopped and searched by police in 2007/8 under section 44 of the Terrorism Act, who were then convicted of a terrorism offence – Nil

The trebling in a year of the number of people stopped and searched under anti-terror laws, is another example of the massive growth and abuse of police power under New Labour. Nobody was convicted of a terrorist offence after being stopped and searched. 0.06% were charged with a terrorist offence. Just under 1% were charged with a non-terror related offence.

In London the police have been using these stop and search powers to set up cordons, particularly on tube stations in high immigrant areas. The idea is that if they search enough immigrants they are bound to find a few carrying drugs or knives, and it helps them meet their New Labour arrest, charging and conviction (clearup) targets.

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Condoleeza Rice – The Mask Slips

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Since being outed as the person who approved waterboarding, Condoleeza Rice has been unable to maintain that veneer of manicured niceness. She has a hunted, vicious look in this video from the brilliant Marjorie Cohn.

http://marjoriecohn.com/

This line of steaming bullshit from Rice shows just how very rattled she is:

“By definition, if it was authorized by the President, it didn’t violate our obligations under the Convention against Torture.”

Now I have had time to consider my appearance to give evidence to parliament last Tuesday, my overwhelming impression remains the lack of compassion displayed by the MPs. They seemed to have no particular concern about men, women and children screaming in agony under torture. They were solely concerned with whether the government’s collusion with it could be justified by legal sophistry. It may be that they are genuinely motivated by humanitarian concern, but the Earl of Onslow was the only one who really gave me that feeling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI

I do understand that, in their very British way, they were sticking like limpets to their remit. But that opens another very interesting question. This committee is tasked by parliament to monitor British compliance with its international human rights obligations. But Foreign Office ministers are refusing to cooperate with, or appear before, this enquiry into our complicity with torture. What does that say about the weakness of our parliament?

I have decided that my next move will be to send copies of my evidence to the UN Committee on Torture, together with the information that the UK government has refused to appear before the parliamentary committee to answer these allegations.

On the positive side, my evidence and that of Phillippe Sands strips away any pretence by the government that they do not obtain a great deal of intelligence by torture. There was no serious attempt by the committee to query that.

The Foreign Office has started to shift its ground towards the Cheney argument that “Torture works”.

FCO Finally Admits To Receiving Intelligence From Torture

The leading FCO sock-puppet on the internet is Charles Crawford. Charles on his “Blogoir” (Pretentious? Moi?) had managed to write a nine part review rubbishing Murder in Samarkand without once even mentioning the word torture, thus forwarding the FCO myth that torture was not the subject of my dispute with them.

More recently he ridiculed me on his blogoir for my contention from that it is not normal to enter No 10 to give secret briefings by the front door, and assured us (falsely) that there was good intelligence behind the recent fake Manchester Bomb Plot scare, whipped up by the government.

This week he has moved on to aggressive promotion of the “Torture works” neo-con school.

www.charlescrawford.biz – Torture – See It All?

Coincidental timing by the FCO sock-puppet? I think not.

There is an interesting link between Charles and I on torture. The Dick Marty official European report into extraordinary rendition revealed ten CIA rendition flights to Uzbekistan from Europe (and many more from Baghram).

All the CIA rendition flights to Uzbekistan came from Szczytno-Szymany in Poland. We now know that the CIA had both use of that airbase and a secret torture prison nearby.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,621450,00.html

I was Ambassador in Uzbekistan, and Charles Crawford was Ambassador in Poland, at the time this torture traffic was happening. In Tashkent I uncovered it meticulously, reported it and protested against it. In Poland Charles made no protest. Either he did not know it was happening – in which case he was a lousy Ambassador – or he did not care – in which case he is complicit in the torture.

Charles may wish to let us know which it was – haplessly ignorant, or complicit?

Given his recent post on torture, plainly complicity would not have given him moral qualms.

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