The Russians call it Kompromat – the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said “Kompromat“. They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.
Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.
Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:
“He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year.”
So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law – if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.
Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.
Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.
Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations – as happens in virtually every case – doesn’t help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.
Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated – but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these “serious allegations”.
Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example – Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today’s Western political system.
Tech said
“Perhaps you could enlighten me about English culture?”
Don’t just run away, Alfred?!
As for your childish effort above to tread on me, forget it.
I’m far too proud of my heritage and my clan. But I don’t have time to reply in detail.
Suhayl, your earlier description of my previous intervention made me hoot.
Tautology on my part.
“My sons consider me soft as melted butter, Alfred.”
Dreoilin, in the context of a debate it was clearly oxymoronic to use the word woman and docile in the same sentence.
Alfred wrote:
“An immigrant *either* comes as a settler, intent on establishing a community of their own faith and culture in a foreign land, *or* they are prepared to integrate”.
This description creates two arbitrary categories where none exist. People differ. They maintain their culture AND integrate, each to greater or lesser extents in diverse aspects of their lives, depending upon inclination, circumstance, opportunity, incentive, etc.
“Perhaps Alfred would like to explain it by talking about what he’s integrated with in Canada ?”
“Suffice it to say that until after WW2 Canadians were the British nation in North America”
And, did this British Nation notice that there was anyone there already ? Shouldn’t it have stayed in its ethnic homeland like you say people should ? What’s a “British nation” doing anywhere except Britain ?
Go on, call me “balloon boy” again, it really explains things.
It appears Angry and the teabagger troll (who’s name is not worth mentioning here) have gone on holiday again. Last time they went, we hoped for a postcard. I wonder if they’ll remember us this time. Is “Sandals” ok with same-sex couples now? Or would “they” be thwarted anyway by the no-singles policy. Sandals might discriminate both ways, saying a dual identity doesn’t count, and if it did, it would still be a same-sex couple. That is, unless I missed a reference to ‘Angry’ being a female component personality.
Wasn’t Alfred the one who burnt the cakes? Hope his raspberies didn’t stick to the bottom of the pan and that he didn’t forget to keep stirring them.
btw Canada under Harper and his pals is now a stronghold of Zionism.
There are thankfully some brave Canadians who stand up for the Palestinians as you can see from the list of the links on this page.
http://www.jewsforajustpeace.com/
Heh Glenn, how’s that 911 Truth Movement coming along? Have you convinced anyone other than Charlie Sheen?
Why is the 911 Truth Movement failing so miserably?
No Alfred, I asked you to define English culture.
etc etc, ad tedium.
Suhayl
However much I support the cause of the IRA I will never accept the concept of murdering innocent people for a political pujrpose. That is why I call the Shia filthy, because of their bigoted terrorism.
The occupants of the twin towers were not innocent victims because they chose to work in the mascot of US imperialism, and they chose to ignore the significance of supporting the corruption and destruction that flowed from that odious regime.
The occupants of the twin towers were not innocent victims
Like the allies trying to justify the destruction of Dresden, or the US government the bombing of Cambodia, or the IRA Birmingham. Not that it is right for hapless young men (‘soldiers’)to be killed and mutilated either, but people in the Twin Towers were civilians, anno. If you think that’s perfectly acceptable, why make a fuss about Iraq? or Afghanistan? Please stop joining in with what I can only read as inhuman rhetoric.
There are people who happen to be Shia. You know, Shia grandmothers, Shia babies, Shia toddlers. There is no such thing as ‘the Shia’. This also should be bloody obvious.
Alien faith.
This is my faith, as expressed by Jesus peace be upon him:
His followers asked him why certain people had been crushed by a building. Was it a punishment for something they or their parents had done. Jesus pbuh replied, ‘ Worship God, or a worse thing may happen to you’, meaning Hell.
He called people to worship God, same as Islam. But the Jews of the time were intoxicated with the dosh they were making trading between Roman polytheism and Indian polytheism and they declared Jesus to be God’s son in the same way that Zeus or a Hindu god can have a son.
They had been punished previously by Allah when they had adopted many false beliefs from their neighbours. When they were taken into captivity in Iraq, they took with them amongst other things belief in Avatars, child-saint re-incarnated holy men, belief in the earth-mother cult of Demeter, in which yound men were killed a sacrifices.
This is the origin of the Sufi Dervish dancing, the white-clad dancers representing the souls of the sacrificed. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. Robert Graves’ the White Goddess explains how pagan ritual was translated into religious belief, by idealising the pain of romantic love and elevating it through poetry to the status of worship, and replacing the worship of God, which was enjoined by the true prophets of Islam.
There were a few other revolting things that the Children of Israel had become addicted to, such as cabbalistic magic that could cause distrust between married partners, and the concept of a sexual free-for-all in pitch blackness at the time of some pagan festival.
Today’s Zionists, who are racist-nationalist nutters, regard the people of Northern Iraq ( like Shimon Perez ) as part of the community of the lost tribes of Israel, as also the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan. The US presence there owes far more to Zionist nuttery than to big oil schemes in my opinion.
You do not have to conquer a nation to run a pipeline through its territory. You pay rent and you help them.
There are gonks, who don’t believe anything except English or American values. There are Zionutters who rake through the annals of their race’s history to appease their sense of loss at having deviated comp-letely from their chosen-people religion of Islam.And there is Islam, as re=explained from scratch in Arabic in the Qur’an.
The gonks love picking over the actions of the Zionutters like chickens, trying to find an economic/political rationality to Zionist foaming at the mouth psychosis, when there is none. The Muslims understand that the Christians follow a cult created by a corrupted and exhausted chosen people, who refused to listen to Jesus pbuh, calling them back to Islam.
The Muslims understand that the followers of Judaism are close to Islam, but Zionists among them are nutters. The Shi’a as well are nutters, because they deviated openly from the clear and explicit message of Islam.
Yes I do think that the British people are grounded in justice and faith, and I do think that there is a potential for there to be a mass embracing of Islam in the UK and the US, if the matter was properly explained to them. But at the moment we have to deal with three difficult patients struggling to get out of their straight-jackets; the gonks like Sarkozy who want to restart Nazism, the US Ziobankers who want to re-unite the lost tribes of the Jewish race in the lands of Pharaoh, and the Shi’a who now control a massive part of the oil in the Middle East. The fact that these three mad creatures are prepared to help eachother to escape from their cells and destroy the world, is something we have to put up with and be concerned.
What Cardinal Walter Caspar meant when he said that the UK was like a third world country, was that there were lots of dark skins, i.e. Muslims. Considering that his mission was going to be to apologise for the sexual abuse created by Catholic dogma that priests should not have wives, it would have been more appropriate if he had expressed pleasure at seeing the presence of Islam in the UK.
Sexual abuse exists amongst those in positions of responsibility in Islam, and it is normal in Hindu culture. The Cardinal could have pointed this out and apologised, but he chose to use the occasion to attack Islam.
technicolour
Too obvious to mention. I wasn’t talking about the babies and grannies. I was talking about the mullas and their terrorist followers.
Civilians have consciences and most of them use them, but if you choose to take employment in the centre of oppression for the whole world, and you have switched your conscience off deliberately, you don’t get any sympathy from me.
then talk about ‘the mullahs and their terrorist followers’; although I can see it must be hard, ending up sounding like the Daily Express. I think you mean ‘some’ mullahs, with ‘terrorist’ (presumably you mean violent) followers, don’t you? And are they all Shia?
‘you don’t get any sympathy from me’
that’s a step beyond saying they deserved it, but, really? The people whose families collected to condemn the attacks on Iraq don’t get any sympathy from you? The passers-by and the firemen? The tourists? the cleaners? The kitchen staff?
Mind you, anno, you’re not alone: there are plenty of extreme left wing commentators who feel the same way – and extreme right wingers too. The latter also want to bomb bomb bomb Iran, I seem to remember (with tacit support from Blair). It is indeed up to us all to be concerned.
Sorry, not suggesting you are anywhere near as bad as McCain, of course. Just that there’s a certain switch off of conscience whenever we accept killing, even if we refuse to do it.
Technicolour, I once met a then-youngish silly shopkeeper to whom I’d given a story to be photocpied (this was before printers and PCs, etc.) and who told me that in his opinion, Shias were not only not Muslim, but were not human beings.
Around the same time, this same silly shopkeeper went on TV (BBC Scotland or STV, I can’t recall which) as a symbol of ‘tartan Asian integration’; he was wearing a kilt, etc. and grinning.
These ijeuts have been allowed to monopolise the discourse with the state (local and national) and with other religious groups. I’m sick of having to show deference to such people. Why? They don’t feel the need to reciprocate. In many ways, they are behaviourally identical to the right-wing Bible Belt Evangelicals in the USA.
And what’s on the other side? The f-in Quilliam Foundation et al, who arguably (it has been alleged) are tools of the hard state.
The silly shopkeeper and his ilk had been brainwashed by the propaganda of Maulana Maududi (the late ‘presiding genius’ of the Jamaat-i-Islami Party in Pakistan), various Deobandi-based ideologues and the non-stop, petro-dollar export of ‘Saudi’ ideology to believe this stuff. And the conflation of all of this into an aggressive, reactionary, totalitarian political ideology is what we are seeing today (well, since around 1975, when Saudi dosh began to mean something). Saudi Arabia fears Iran so it spreads anti-Shia propaganda. They can do what they want, I’ve nothing against them, but they try violently – yes, violently – to foist it all on everyone else in Pakistan and elsewhere, that’s where the problem resides.
I am not a Shia, btw, but I have Shia pals (and Sunni ones, and many other people too).
There are different groups of Shias, too, they are not a homogeneous group either. Nor are Christians. One of my neighbours is a High Anglican (so statuary, etc.) Pakistani Christian.
That’s the beauty of it all – it’s all so varied and we can learn from one another.
It’s all just divide-and-rule. It’s so silly. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Now I will be called intolernat because I criticise intolerance. It’s this kind of tautology they use to justify their totalitarian views and shut down discourse.
I never went into that shop again. I refused to give him a penny of my money.
You can’t be called intolerant because you criticise intolerance. You could be called intolerant if (cf Alfred the gatekeeper) you wanted a state policy of banning intolerant people to hide behind. Choosing to challenge or remove yourself is different, I think.
It’s strange these tiny factions. Like the Greenham Common women who, united, nevertheless split up into different camps at different gates – literally. Individuals and the group; what an interesting subject. And the power behind them, dividing, dividing, diving.
That’s weird, I didn’t know about the different Greenham Common groups. Tell us more, technicolour. Was it the Radical Feminists, the Socialist Feminists and the Capitalist Feminists (as in the ‘Idiot’s Guide to Feminism’, which one can tell I’ve read!)? And did they have mud-fights?
Sorry, I’m getting carried away.
Just to remind ourselves what the work of a great journalist looks like. The current homepage pic. says it all about corporatist dog-eat-dog ideology.
Ah, Bobby Moore et al – those guys were real.
http://www.johnpilger.com/
How about this for a bunch of strange connections:
http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/untangling-new-intrigue-behind-ground-zero-mosque
Indeed, it would be fair to call them _very_ strange connections! Basically, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Islamic community centre in New York has been backed for some time by a former Christian, former Judaist, and now current Muslim called Leslie Deak. He works for “Patriot Defense Group”, and PDG is rather publicity shy.
It included Special Ops 4-star general Byan Brown. (Special Ops = psy-ops, “wetworks”, death-squad setups, assassinations etc. just like recently removed Stanley McCrystal). A third guy on PDG is a major banker, Cappello, and has an anonymous CEO who specialised in counter-terrorism and spent 23 years in the Secret Service.
Deak’s father was a top intelligence commander in WW-II for the OSS (forerunner of the CIA), heavily involved as one of the world’s top currency and gold dealers. He was – get this – murdered by a deranged homeless woman in the company offices. Of course he was!
Imam Rauf himself worked for the FBI as a “consultant”, and was a mate of the notorious Karen Hughs, who had headed up Bush’s disastrous PR effort to the Muslim world.
Anyway, read the article – it’s all very intriguing.
Glenn – WOW!!! This is very, very interesting. So, what’s the game? Is it that the Cordoba Foundation – like The Quilliam Whatsit (allegedly, reportedly, purportedly and arguably) is a hard state front? Well, well, well.
” A deranged homeless woman” – sounds like me on a bad day… in drag.
There’s more about the mosque in the following article:
The Bizarre Background of the ‘9/11’ New York Mosque
by F. William Engdahl*
http://www.voltairenet.org/article166989.html
It’s exactly what I was writing over on the 9/11 thread a few weeks ago, namely, that the Lower Manhattan ‘mosque’ idea was bound to excite controversy from the Right, so why do it there at this time?
But this gives the background.
The article you posted is very illuminating, thanks, Glenn.
What’s the game? I think it’s really quite obvious. Antagonism is deliberately being stirred up between Muslims and other citizens. I suspect the Koran burning pastor was put up to it and the cleaners’ arrest here served the same agenda.
Ruth, that’s fascinating as well. Curiouser and curiouser…
It reminds me a little of the paradox that ‘Peace Studies’ is a euphemism for ‘war Studies’ and ‘Defence’ is a euphemism for ‘Attack’.
I’m surprised the polyvalent Deaks guy is not also a card-carrying Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Pagan – he may as well go the whole hog.
Actually, I suspect that a lot of these brand new, shiny ‘moderate Muslim’ organisations, as well as the ‘hardline Islamist’ ones, are intelligence agency fronts. It’s all a game to them: Monopoly, by George Smiley. Meanwhile, the price is paid in the blood of millions.
Intriguing material relating to US covert actions against Iran:
http://www.deepjournal.com/p/7/a/en/2613.html
Here’s the first part of the one posted above:
http://www.deepjournal.com/p/7/a/en/2609.html