Since the judgement in the Binyam Mohammed case, there has been a resurgence in the awareness of our government’s policy of collusion in torture. Kim Howells and David Miliband have been telling outright lies in denying it, while Bruce Anderson is leading the “Torture the Muslim bastards” wing.
With the government issuing blatantly lying denials, I decided to contact the Guardian to ask why they never published my indisputable documentary proof of a policy of using torture, sanctioned by Jack Straw.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/11/jack_straw_lied.html
Thankfully the excellent David Leigh is back from sabbatical, Idly browsing while waiting for him to phone me back, I came across this from MerkinonParis:
A simple Graun story with a simple standfirst ‘The advice of worldly, well-educated Foreign Office diplomats is simply being ignored’
The article said :
‘Yet
Yep saw that on the Guardian forum Craig.
With each omission ,each comment deletion their position is weakend,their lies revealed and the Truth becomes even more self-evident.
We are now in a most curious era where most people understand MSM or Govt redaction/deletion to be,quite simply a hiding of awful truths.
The thick bastards dont even realise that their pathetic methodology is,in fact,undermining themselves!
Good work Craig,keep it up.
@Jives – I dunno, the more I work with them the less I think they give a toss at all. None of them – not a single bloody one of them could give 2 shits who knows what about what. There are so many layers of protection that even though the Chilcott has been public – ffffff fer fuck all is gonna happen.
Whey hey to be an Englishman – now fuck the fuck off.
Cynicsm? Not a bit of it – giving two hoots just doesn’t even cross the mindset.
@ Dick the Prick
I hear you but there will be a time when this hubris will come back to haunt them.
e.g. The Romsn Empire.Sooner or later the decadence and arrogance reaches a tipping point…
I’d like to stick this list in front of ‘their’ (Chilcot) ghastly pudgy faces.
http://www.brusselstribunal.org/academicsList.htm
An Iraqi friend sent it to me saying –
The compiled list is the tip of iceberg. The number of academics that had to leave under threat of assassination is at least 10 times those that have been actually assassinated. More even left before they were threatened. Although, some of those displaced found jobs in the Gulf and few in Syria and Jordan, the overwhelming majority are refugees without a chance to do work in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.
This the foundation of Tareq’s book on depriving Iraq of its Intellectual Capital necessary to rebuild the devastated country.
The Merkin article wasn’t deleted for 15 hours or so.
Some of the replies are still there.
What exactly has Craig done that pisses of the Guardian newspaper so much?
Deleting comments is cowardly. Craig opened a slot for the 9/11 debate that was disrupting other threads. Craig attacking the unity of the United Kingdom because of British use of torture was truly below the belt.
If The Guardian followed Craig’s example, they would continue to put pressure on this government about the use of torture and open another forum for discussion of breaking up the United Kingdom.
What the UK government doesn’t seem to understand at all is that if you stray from what is acceptable, the whole fabric of our society is likely to unravel, one crossed boundary leading to another. Actions have consequences, which governments often claim could not have been foreseen. If you attack Muslims below the belt, as Blair and Bush did, you are likely to get kicked below the belt yourself. Then when you’ve caught your breath, you can spend the rest of your life like Alistair Campbell complaining that life’s not fair.
The Guarian’s Comment is Free once deleted a post of mine because it contained the line “The killer of Ian Tomlinson has still not been arrested”.
Thanks, Mary. This is the reality. In addition the Bechtel water contract in Iraq, for example, leaves even qualified technicians inside Iraq unable to participate in redevelopment.
The Jalabi exclusion of Ba’ath party members is actually a sectarian exclusion of Sunnis. It is greatly to Jordan and Syria’s credit that they have accepted the refugees. ‘They plan, and Allah plans, and Allah is the best of planners.’
Readers who follow Craig’s blog on the topic of complicity in torture might find this interesting:
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/02/15/andy-worthington-discusses-torture-on-bbc1s-the-big-questions/
Craig,
From my general observations of matters pertaining to what you state here, and more particularly:-
“Kim Howells and David Miliband have been telling outright lies in denying it,…”
This seems to be the process:-
A. An accusation is made against the state or state officials.
B. There is silence, to see if the complaint grows into something of a legal or political challenge.
C. If the complaint is either legally or politically significant, then the state starts off either with an outright denial ( read: lies) – or – sets about with a disinformation and/or public smear campaign to discredit the complainant and/or the credulity of the particular allegation(s).
You – more than most – might agree with me.
Sad – but that’s the system, and governmental systems around the world will:-
A. Kill the complainant;
B. Torture or otherwise set out to intimidate; or
c. Utilise tactics listed as A,B and C above.
These are not observations made that can resort to excluded countries or dichotomies between “democracies” and others. I am saying that all governmental systems act in this way. Be it Dr. Kelly in Britain, or the extreme actions of MI6 or the CIA.
That’s life.
CB
“Sooner or later the decadence and arrogance reaches a tipping point…”
Wish I could be so sanguine. When the Roman Empire disappeared it slipped silently beneath the waves of history. Twentieth century empires have the technology to take us all down with them.
I’m afraid I agree with DtP – they know that the majority of the populace swallow the MSM propaganda, and those who don’t are few and impotent.
“Sooner or later the decadence and arrogance reaches a tipping point…”
That tipping will be soon when the criminal murderess Livni travels to London under threat of arrest for war-crimes namely the aerial bombardment of Gazan population centres on 27th December 2008, in the hope of embarrassing the government.
The attacks involved hundreds of fighter jet sorties, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Gazan neighbourhoods. At least 1,300 people – men, women and children were killed and 5,300 were injured. Schools, hospitals and UN facilities were targeted, medical crews shot at and prevented from evacuating the wounded.
She-wolf Livni reacted after Straw cautioned parliamentarians behind closed doors against changing the law hastily and recommended first forming a committee to study the law. The move by Straw happened however only after some 119 Labour back-benchers signed a motion to delay a decision until after the General election.
According to The Times, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told the paper that if the law remains intact, Israeli officials would not be traveling to England.
“If Israeli dignitaries cannot travel unhindered to Britain, then they will not travel,” Palmor said.
“Automatically the political dialogue between the two countries will be reduced, which is not something that London or Jerusalem wants,” he said.
If the law is changed then British judges will be prevented from issuing international warrants for individuals suspected of war crimes.
Is this another ‘CB’ case of ‘That’s Life’
Not in my book – I’ll be at the airport to present the terrorist with a burnt and broken baby doll.
“Wish I could be so sanguine. When the Roman Empire disappeared it slipped silently beneath the waves of history.”
Yes. Perhaps it was isolated, in ways that aren’t the case, now ? I mean, in western Europe, anyway – Byzantium may have been more complicated, being nearer to the other big serious states of the day. But for Britain, for example, there was no other system that could have got near to the organisation required to run such a system, within a very long travelling time.
[ I Am Not A Historian ].
Unless you mean the whole system of the world, all the various different big states at once ?
Kim Howells is a curious individual, with an even curiouser career trajectory.
This man started out as a communist NUM leader in Wales in the 1970s during one of the most divisive strkes in our history. He wasn’t just some middle class idealist university commie. This guy was the real thing, working at the coal face!
He’s now a cynical left-baiting war mongering neocon who is boss of the spook “supervisory” outfit.
I wonder how and when he become so spook friendly?
Was he compromised and recruited back in those difficult days in the 1970s?
“The most serious incident of the whole national dispute occurred on Howells’ patch, when taxi driver David Wilkie was killed when two striking miners dropped a concrete block off a local bridge onto Wilkie’s taxi, which was taking a strike-breaking miner to work. On being told of the incident in a telephone call from a reporter of the South Wales Echo, Howells rode his bicycle to the NUM offices, and destroyed the maps and information associated with co-ordinating the strike for fear of a police raid. He later commented that same day that the incident was a result of pressure to get the miners to return to work.
After allegations that he hid evidence associated with the death of Wilkie, and an investigation by South Wales Police, Howells in 2004 commented in a BBC Wales documentary that when he heard that a taxi driver had been killed, he thought “hang on, we’ve got all those records we’ve kept over in the NUM offices, there’s all those maps on the wall, we’re gonna get implicated in this”. He then destroyed a large number of papers, because he feared a police raid on the union offices.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Howells
There’s a good film just released, based on the novel by Robert Harris, who knew and supported Blair before becoming disillusioned with his antics.
It provides an interesting take on things, and some pause for reflection on why Blair acted as he did.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Robert-Harris/dp/0091796261
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139328/
Yup. Even our most senior judges are now conspiracy loons according to these neocons.
It’s McCarthyism all over again with these evil lying neocons.
“I decided to contact the Guardian to ask why they never published my indisputable documentary proof of a policy of using torture, sanctioned by Jack Straw.”
Perhaps because your documents prove nothing. They might serve as proof to the kind of loons that inhabit the comments section of this site, but they otherwise don’t prove Jack Straw sanctioned a policy of using torture.
Your claim of proof is slightly better than that of Roderick Russell – I’ll give you that.
So what are you saying then Loopy Lar?
Were the Americans not using torture?
Were the British not complicit in its use?
What are you saying?
Are all the judges conspiraloons too, or is it just you?
It official. The US is now a terrorist state which refuses to obey international law!
Britain in colluding with this state terrorism practitioner can now be prosecuted itself.
Blair has a lot to answer for.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-03-07/news/the-torture-judge/
Don’t think about torture or the testimony of craig murray or the flaccid journalism of the mainstream media. The most important thing is that everybody dance around in TrollHenge with Larry from St. Louis. Yes – he has many important things to say and he is saying them.
Craig
Keep up the good work.
I am about to buy 2 copies of Murder in Samarkand.
One for me and one for my NuLab indoctrinated sister in law !!
YNWA (You’ll Never Walk Alone)
Some thread derailing comments removed, and their responses.
‘Some thread derailing comments removed, and their responses.’
How ironic.
Your “documentary proof” does not remotely substantiate the claim that the British had a policy of using torture.
It proves that the British were complicit in the American terrorist’s torture.
The judges have proved it too!!
Why do keep lying about it, Larry?
When you’re lying about something as obvious and accepted as this we’d have to question everything else you say.
You have to be right loon to be lying about this Larry.
Ron, I was addressing Craig’s claim of “documentary proof.”
Oh dear.
There’s a whole heap of other British people who’ve been tortured in the presence of MI5/6.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/15/mi5-committee-torture-men-asked
Someone’s gonna have to have criminal charges pressed against them. This is all unravelling very badly.
MI5 lied to the Intelligence Committee
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/15/how-mu5-kept-watchdog-in-the-dark
“Some thread derailing comments removed, and their responses.”
Thanks.
Bert,
Thanks for the link which makes it clear the ISC set up by Blair lacks any power of investigation and is therefore impotent. The whole business went downhill after the dodgy dossier and Operation Crevice revealing disturbing facts about 7/7.
In my opinion the OSA needs urgent review and the D-Notice archaic system should be scrapped. I could be prosecuted for revealing anything that might be in the public interest because of these two genies – is that right if National Security is not affected, and who decides this anyway?