Yearly archives: 2010
Another Stupid Rambling Nutcase
Rod Liddle. With an acknowledgement to Sunny for all his work, I like Will Straw’s post best for the simple isolation of Liddle’s acknowledged comments on Auschwitz. Just these crass statements alone are enough to put Liddle beyond the pale.
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/01/rod-liddles-anti-semitism-exposed/
Liddle would be at home at the Independent. We get so dazzled by Fisk we forget the dross of the rest. Liddle would sit well with saloon bar bore Bruce Anderson or MI6 tool Dominic Lawson, not to mention the inane Mary Dejevsky.
Stupid Rambling Old Nutcase
What do you make of the intellectual capabilities and mental state of the man who said this unedited passage in a speech to the diplomatic corps?
“To carry our reflection further, we must remember that the problem of the environment is complex; one might compare it to a multifaceted prism,”
“Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes,”
“I am thinking, for example, of certain countries in Europe or North and South America,”
.
It sounds like the obscure ramblings of a senile old fool, but actually it was worse than that. The Pope meant it as a calculated attack on legal equality for gay people.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100111/tts-uk-pope-ca02f96.html
Once a Nazi…
47 – Nil, 47 – Nil, 47 – nil, 47 – nil, 47 – nil, 47 – nil
Been doing some filing. Thought you might like these statistics relating to legal threats received by this blog since it started five years ago. These figures also include letters from the Treasury Solicitors threatening action under the Official Secrets Act and other legislation.
Dedicated to Jack Straw, Alisher Usmanov, Tim Spicer, the Quilliam Foundation and nine other bad people with something to hide, who have wasted money trying to frighten this blog out of telling the truth:
Number of letters received from lawyers threatening legal action 47
Number of lawyers involved 11
Number of lawyers told to go ahead and sue or prosecute 11
Number of suits/prosecutions brought Nil
Number of apologies and retractions issued Nil
Damages Paid Nil
Number of flasehoods published Nil
Who says it is not fun running a blog?
Of course, some of these rich criminals and mercenary killers have succeeded in hindering me by legal bullying of other people. Alisher Usmanov had us closed down for three days when he got my webhost to close down the site by threatening legal action. (The Quilliam Foundation tried to pull the same trick but found I now have a much more robust webhost).
Ultra wealthy mercenary killer and war profiteer Tim Spicer threatened my publisher into preventing commercial publication of the Catholic Orangemen of Togo. But he backed down when I published it in full online.
Britian’s notorious libel laws are designed to inculcate fear in those who would publish the truth. But, as with most situations in life, a lack of fear makes things much less fraught.
Iraq Inquiry – The Smoking Gun Moment
This is the moment when Jonathan Powell admitted that Downing St was set on war irrespective of whether Saddam had WMD or not. This admission contradicted all the carefully constructed lies of key war criminals David Manning, Alistair Campbell and Jonathan Powell himself.
The implications of this passage could not be more stark. The aim was war. Whether or not Iraq had WMD was irrelevant. There was no interest in knowing the truth about WMD. Indeed to know the truth would be negative.
A ten year old could understand the crucial importance of what Powell said here. But the hand picked committee of pro-war cronies failed completely to pick up on it.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: I mean, Sir David Manning and
8 Sir Jeremy Greenstock both said, but differently, that
9 they would have liked to have had more time, but you
10 don’t agree with that?
11 MR JONATHAN POWELL: No, we asked for more time repeatedly
12 from January onwards of the President, and we got more
13 time in each case. Eventually, by the time we got to
14 midMarch, he wasn’t going to give us more time and the
15 French veto knocked any chance
16 SIR RODERIC LYNE: He wasn’t going to give us more time. If
17 we had had more time, if the inspectors had had longer,
18 there had been longer to build up the picture and you
19 had continued these extraordinary diplomatic efforts
20 that you described, would there not have been a chance,
21 at that stage, of actually gathering the international
22 support that we had not managed to gather by then?
23 MR JONATHAN POWELL: No. I mean, if you think about it,
24 Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. We were
25 wrong. The intelligence was wrong. So, no matter how
82
1 long you had carried the inspections on, they weren’t
2 going to find anything, and, from what we know of
3 Saddam, it is extremely unlikely that he would have
4 cooperated. So we would have been in exactly the same
5 situation for months and months and months. There would
6 have been no discovery of weapons of mass destruction,
7 but 8
SIR RODERIC LYNE: But one way or the other they might have
9 built up a more convincing picture, if they had had more
10 time.
11 MR JONATHAN POWELL: A convincing picture of what?
12 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Well, a picture to convince the people
13 who weren’t not convinced by our arguments in March.
14 MR JONATHAN POWELL: But if there weren’t weapons of mass
15 destruction, we wouldn’t have been able you are
16 asking me in retrospect, “Would we have had more time?”
17 The answer is more time would have achieved nothing.
18 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Thank you very much.
Options for Tony Blair 29 January – Tips From an Ex Senior Civil Servant
I very much doubt that Blair will enter the Iraq Inquiry via the front door. He can get in to the QE2 Conference Centre from the back by passing through the Institute of Mechanical Engineers building. That seems pretty likely. A strong detachment armed with buckets of blood should watch that route.
Or he can arrive by an underground route using the spur to the QE2 conference centre from the old tunnel that connected Bomber Command (now known as The Citadel bunker) in Marsham St to the Cabinet Office and the MOD. As this tunnel network is an official secret I doubt they will want to risk him appearing mysteriously from nowhere, though.
Cadbury’s Demise a Disaster for Ghana
Cadbury’s were using Fair Trade Cocoa for generations before the phrase was invented.
Cocoa in Ghana is a smallholding crop, with individual farmers having a hectare or two of mixed crops, including cocoa. It is not a plantation crop as it is in Brazil or Ivory Coast. That is why Ghanaian cocoa is of higher quality, and commands a premium on commodity markets. Cadbury’s chocolate in the UK uses 95% Ghanaian cocoa.
The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, p184
A major reason that Ghana is the most stable and successful of Sub-Saharan African countries, is that traditional landholding patterns were not broken up by colonial usurpation. (White men ?” and their cattle ?” died like flies in the climate here. Wheat wilted).
Cocoa farming has for well over a century provided the backbone of a thriving agrarian society in Ghana. That widespread economic base has in turn enabled the continuation of traditional chieftaincy institutions and other indigenous forms of government.
Colonial population displacement is the root cause of many of Africa’s conflicts. In Kenya and Zimbabwe, conflicts we dismiss as tribal or as the result of African bad governance, in fact come down to the long term consequences of tribes displaced from their land by the British, and being forced to settle in other tribes’ territory.
If you don’t understand that, you don’t know Africa. The idea that the land was desolate before whites came, or that African forms of agriculture are unproductive, is nonsense which I tackle in The Catholic Orangemen of Togo.
Displacement to form vast cocoa estates has been part of the cause of conflict in Ivory Coast. The estates are attended with other evils ?” erosion and devastation of soil nutrients caused by monoculture, widespread use of child labour, and the conversion of independent small farmers to landless day labourers. These are but some of the ill effects.
The estates also produce low quality cocoa. It seems a truth in agriculture that over-intensive monoculture produces tasteless food. Most British people realize that Cadbury’s chocolate tastes better, but don’t know why. The answer is in the cocoa.
What Cadbury’s use in the UK is from independent Ghanaian smallholders, and is the equivalent of wines from an ancient small chateau or boutique Californian estate. They pay extra for it, and their willingness to pay extra has been a key part of keeping the Ghanaian small farmer going.
Kraft on the other hand use the mass produced estate cocoa; the equivalent of soulless and tasteless wine from multiple fields and huge stainless steel tanks. They source mostly in Brazil ?” the World’s most tasteless cocoa ?” and Ivory Coast. The bad taste in the mouth from the cocoa is both real and metaphorical. The estates in both countries make massive use of child labour.
It is a fact that Cadbury’s practices in dealing fairly with small African farmers dated back directly to the ethical precepts of their Quaker founders. I had occasion to prepare a report for the British government on the Ghanaian cocoa industry, in response to concerns about the use of child labour on Ivory Coast estates. I visited numerous Ghanaian farmers and Cadbury’s headquarters in the process, and have met Cadbury’s buyers in the field in West Africa over twenty years.
I have no doubt that in order to rack up the return on their vast investment, Kraft will switch to the cheap and nasty cocoa they normally use. This could be the worst thing to hit the Ghanaian rural economy since blackpod disease.
I sympathise entirely with those concerned about the effects in the UK of this takeover ?” just the latest manifestation of the fact that our society knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
But try to spare a thought for the ill effects in Africa too.
War Criminal Makeovers
Radovan Karadzic
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein
Jonathan Powell
Jonathan Powell
Iraq Inquiry Elides Key Evidence
The most revealing moment of the Iraq Inquiry so far – probably the most revealing moment we will ever get – occurred yesterday in the evidence of Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff. A stark sun ray of truth burst through for just a few seconds before the Committee allowed it to be closed over by the fog of chummy complicity that has characterised these evidence sessions.
Asked whether he agreed with Sir Jeremy Greenstock that more time for diplomacy would have been helpful before the invasion started. Powell bluntly disagreed. As there were in fact no Iraqi WMD, more time would have weakened, not strengthened the case for war. That would have been unhelpful.
WHAT?
Powell had just sliced clean through the mound of lies constructed by himself, Alistair Campbell and Sir David Manning (you can tell when Manning lies – his lips move). After a huge pile of verbiage claimimg that the War was only about WMD, Powell had just admitted that they were absolutely bent on war whether there were WMD or not – indeed WMD were a problem, as the lack of them weakened the case for war.
This is where any person of average intelligence on the committee would have siezed on what Powell had just said. He had just admitted they wanted war irrespective of whether Saddam might have any WMDs. But the committee failed completely to pick up on the point. They moved swiftly on. They allowed the clouds of obfuscation to roll swiftly back in.
That is because the entire committee at abse agree with Powell. They accept the premiss that the war was a good thing. The composition of the committee, entirely from known pro-war advocates, is a national disgrace.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/11/iraq_inquiry_th.html
That nobody should even put to Powell the thought that perhaps, as Iraq had no WMD, the war was not neceassary, is as revealing of the Committee’s guilt as it is of Powell’s. Similarly, Powell was permitted several times to refer to 9/11 as leading to the war in Iraq, without anybody on the Committee ever putting to him the lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
No matter how stubborn the truth may be, it is not beyond the committee and the media to ignore it.
Which helps account for the quite astonishing fact that 32% of the electorate apparently think that Tony Blair genuinely believed in Iraqi WMD. It is a great pity that we don’t have any breakdown on the other social and political attitudes of these extraordinary people.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ibGYwlSSoYuPSO7_qBm54sKjWvYQ
I am going to spend the next few weeks sitting on the tube wondering which third of the passengers is dull enough to buy that.
Powell, meantime, appears to have taken lessons from that other war criminal, Radzvan Karadzic, on image makeover.
I Almost Feel Loathe to Post
…when everyone has been having so much fun in comments without me. On Friday the connection, which had been almost unusable for three days, failed completely, and the phone lines too. Vodafone blame Friday evening’s storm, but the problem had started long before that.
Fascinating comment from Sembe:
At 3kbps, you should be using a simplifying proxy server like loband.org. For urgent communications, it might be best to set up a telnet service (using pine for email, lynx for web surfing).
Internet telephony services in Ghana are routed through the SAT-3/WASC cable, which is jointly owned by Ghana Telecom and 35 other telecoms. Local ISPs are assigned 2Mbps bandwidth, and supply it to subscribers at an average speed of 1kbps.
The common alternative is to use a VSAT satellite system, but this is more expensive and is rather clogged in West Africa. Additionally, MTN & Zain are now offering GSM or 3G mobile access.
Things are set to improve, though. Glo has just laid the Glo1 fibre optic cable from UK to Nigeria, which should be operational soon, and the Main One cable from Portugal should be installed by May 2010.
My emphasis.
The sad truth is that every advance in new technology leaves Africa falling further and further behind.
supply it to subscribers at an average speed of 1kbps
. Think about that.
We had a microwave link to a satellite provider which theoretically gave us dedicated 512 kbps – for about $4,000 a month. My UK connection is 20 times faster and 200 times cheaper – so costs 4,000 times less per kbps. In fact our “dedicated” capacity had been sold many times over by the satellite ISP, Zipnet, and speedtests usually showed about 30kbps. Corrked ISPs are part of the whole complex problem
Last night the phone lines came back and I rushed down to post something when the electricity went off. This had happened so often in the last few days that the generator had run out of diesel, while a UPS only survives a few months coping with a dozen outages a day – and that is with a $10,000 voltage stabiliser on the house. [This was written yesterday and attempts throughout the day to post it failed. So I got up at 6am this morning to do it].
All this is in “normal” circumstances. Imagine the logistic nightmare facing the aid agencies in Haiti, with the same kind of level of base infrastructure, and then most of that destroyed by an earthquake.
Missing You
Difficult journey to Ghana Europe snow now here very intermittent connection speedtest 3kbps (sic) when working. Almost impossible post. Ghana Telecom privatised to Vodafone much worse. Try post tomorrow.
Greek Orthodox Church Sells Palestinian Lands to Israel
I found this report very interesting. It probably isn’t news to many of my readers, but it is to me.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49921
I have a very jaundiced view of the Greek Orthodox Church since my time working on the Cyprus dispute – in Cyprus the Church is a major player in money laundering and the international illegal arms trade. Is the Greek Orthodox Church the most corrupt major religious organisation in the world? Discuss.
New Labour Steal From the Starving Millions
With thanks to Old Holborn via Subrosa Blonde.
In the past, my anger with DFID has been focused main;y on its channeling through CDC of funds to private companies benefiting senior New Labour hacks. But this news makes me even more angry.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6982999.ece
Returning to CDC, I would like to think that the Tories will sort it out. My expectation, however, is that the companies it subsidises have already started recruiting senior Tories as directors.
The Case of Dr Al-Balawi
There is a very great deal that we can learn from the case of Dr Al-Balawi, the suicide bomber who took out seven CIA agents in Afghanistan.
The first relates to intelligence. Dr Al Balawi had become a trusted CIA informant, believed by the CIA to be helping them to target al-Qaida elements on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Except that we now know he was a dedicated al-Qaida all along.
Presumably much of the intelligence he had been providing was deliberately false and misleading. This yet again illustrates the point I have made repeatedly about the unreliability of “humint” – intelligence gained from informants.
As British Ambassador, I saw in Uzbekistan a continued stream of intelligence from the Uxbek torture chambers, accepted by the CIA and MI6 but which, in many cases, I knew to be false. The Uzbek government wished to retain Western support and subsidies by exaggerating their role in fighting al-Qaida; that was their purpose in providing the false intelligence. The Western security services and governments wished to exaggerate the threat of al-Qaida for domestic political purposes: that was their purpose in accepting it.
Torture is not the only source of unreliable “Humint”. Double agents like Dr Al-Balawi are another, A very high proportion of this intelligence is bought for cash, and that is the most unreliable of all. The dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD was full of tall stories for which you and I as taxpayers paid dodgy informants millions of dollars.
Yet we used unreliable humint as the basis for a war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands. We use it to take out wedding parties with bomb attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We use it to keep people detained without charge for years in Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, in Belmarsh, and we use it to deliver people up to torturers around the World.
We should know by now that the intelligence services and politicians no longer care if the intelligence is true: they want intelligence that justifies the actions they want to take anyway, and that keep on stream the mega profits that their friends are making from the War on Terror.
So Dr Al Balawi’s case gives us an invaluable insight into the world of intelligence.
But it does more than that. Why would a medical doctor, a happily married professional man with two children, become a “terrorist”. The answer is crystal clear.
Al-Balawi “started to change,” says his wife, after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/229792
The failed underpants bomber was said by eye-witnesses to be shouting about Afghanistan: Dr Al-Balawi was motivated by our illegal invasion of Iraq. Violence begets violence – it is a truth as old as man.
Our unconscionable attacks on weaker nations, and our increasing complicity in the slow genocide of the Palestinians, are bound to provoke reaction, however weak that reaction may be compared to our own ability to kill en masse. The notion peddled by politicians and mainstream media, that we invade countries abroad to keep us safe at home, should be met with the derision it deserves.
Joking Now Illegal
One of the tinier income flows of the “security industry” amongst the billions of cash they have made from the War on Terror, is the money they get from television punditry. This is a double whammy as they get paid to stoke up the climate of fear on which they thrive.
Sky News have had two different security “experts” on in the last ten minutes, both assuring us how deadly serious last night’s incident on Emirates was, and that the police response was “Proportionate” and necessary. The Sky presenters repeated the mantra of proportionate action too.
Complete bollocks. Common sense seems to have gone out of the window completely. I don’t know exactly what Al-Qaida teach their potential bombers in the Yemen. Apparently they don’t teach them that you can’t blow up commercial explosive without a detonator, in the case of the underpants bomber. The UK authorities apparently believe they also don’t tell them not to let the flight crew know about the bomb, before the plane takes off.
According to “security expert” Chris from Bolton, the men may have been making a joke among themselves which the cabin staff overheard. Something like “Did you remember the bomb Jim?” “Don’t worry it’s in the hold”.
The authorities are very keen to introduce suspect profiling, to make sure Muslims get worked over. Here is a clue for suspect profiling: terrorists don’t tell you about the bomb in advance.
Hoon and Hewitt
It is a sign of the terrible decline of Britain’s “democratic” system that figures as insignificant as Hoon and Hewitt should ever have held political office. The only reaction I have to this “crisis” is that it is a reminder how deeply unattractive are the entire New Labour cast being paraded before us.
Is this attack on Brown motivated by revulsion at endless war on weak countries, at the attack on civil liberties at home, at the incredible amount of debt loaded on ordinary people to bale out the bankers, at the widest ever gap between rich and poor in this country?
No! They talk only about the chances of Labour MPs and the thousands of other Labour hacks sponging off the taxpayers, to keep their jobs and their noses in the trough. It is not about policy at all, or anything that benefits you or me. It is about New Labour politicos’ personal access to money and power.
You are all a bunch of troughing, hypocritical, war criminals. Fuck off New Labour, all of you.
Grumpy Old Man
I take Emily to York, and at a freezing cold Kings Cross station decide to wait in the first class lounge as I have a first class ticket. I am told that as I have a First Advance rather than a First Open ticket, I have to pay £10 to use the lounge. What? I would have thought £90 for a single to York was quite enough to buy me a smidgeon of comfort.
I receive a letter from Ealing Council threatening to fine me £80 for rubbish left on the street outside my house. This is infuriating because it is mostly not my rubbish, and it consists of flattened cardboard boxes left out for recycling. I send this email to the Council:
Dear Yusuf,
As other residents of Whitehall Gardens, we received from you recently a copy of a letter dated 12 August 2009 from Roger Jones, concerning rubbish left in the street for collection on the wrong day.
In fact, the problem in Whitehall Gerdens appears to be with rubbish which was left in the street on the correct day, but which the council have failed to collect. In the street outside out house at the moment is a large collection of cardboard boxes, mostly properly flettened, A small rpoportion of these are our own rubbish, but the majority are from other houses and were colected into a pile by the refuse men two collections ago, but not taken away either then or with today’s collection.
Obviously at Christmas residents receive a large numbers of parcels, and the Council appears to be having some argument of principle over collecting the cartons, even where they have been carefully flattened. Why the Council feels it is an appropriate response just to leave large piles of cardboard in the street is something I would like you to explain to me.
Another strange thing is that, at the first post-Christmas collection, anout four of these centralised piles of cardboard were created by the refuse men but left in the street. They were all still there when I returned home last night. But at today’s collection, three of the four piles were collected but the pile outside our house left again.
Rather than sending threatening letters, it would be a good deal more helpful if you could sort out your collectors’ Scrooge like attitude to dealing with Christmas detritus.
I look forward to your reply, and would also be grateful if you could copy this to the counillor or councillors who represent this ward.
Craig Murray
30 Whitehall Gardens
W3 9RD
07979 691085
Both my problems with the railway and the refuse collection arise from public services being handed over to private companies whose only interest is profit. The Tories believe more of this is the answer to our edonomic problems. Ha!
(Yes, I know the East Coast railway has just gone back into public hands. But the First Class tickets not valid for the First Class Lounge policy was introduced by National Express just before it lost the franchise).
Gaza and Guantanamo – Surprising Documentaries
I watched Ross Kemp’s documentary on Paleastine yesterday and it was much better than I had expected. I have never watched any of his travel documentaries before – their advertising portrays them as “Our hard nut goes to see if other hard nuts are really as vicious as London East End gangsters”.
It is impossible, unless you are obscenely ill-motivated, to do a documentary in Gaza that does not leave you appalled at the plight of the Palestinian people there. But Kemp gave the Palestinians a much fairer and fuller hearing than I had expected, and while there was a great deal of editorial horror at the attitudes of Islamic terrorists and their supporters, it came over very strongly – and Kemp himself plainly “got”, that those attitudes were caused by the atrocities and indignities to which the Palestinians are subjected.
Which made Kemp’s documentary much more intelligent than Michael Portillo’s effort on Guantanamo. Portillo never for one moment questioned whether Islamic hatred of the West was in any sense caused or triggered. He seemed to accept that Guantanamo holds a core of “some 50” diehard terrorists who are intrinsically evil, and he agreed explicitly that they should be kept locked up forever even though there was no evidence against them that could stand up in court.
His glib “I am a politician and I know about tough decisions like abandoning legality” line was helped by two intellectual dishonesties. He never considered the causality of terrorism, and he did not mention the possibility that some of that “core” of fifty might be innocent. He described the moral dilemma as whether people you knew were guilty but could not prove it, should be locked up. Who says you know. they are guilty? I can tell you from first hand experience that a great deal of the War on Terror intelligence on individuals is woefully inaccurate and deliberatelly exagerrated.
Which Michael Portillo once seemed to understand:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article495277.ece
Portillo reserved his compassion for the Uighurs, because they were anti-communist, and for the British ex-detainees who had been tortured. There was one particularly unsavoury piece of editing when showing a UK conference, at which an ex-detainee was making a very emotional and harrowing point; the director then cut away to a shot of Moazzam Begg grinning merrily and apparently completely inappropriately at the point.
The impression was given that cut-away was contemporaneous, and it made Moazzam look very bad. I don’t believe the cut-away was contemporaneous and think this was a deliberate bit of BBC demonisation. I don’t think it was genuine because of sound discontinuity, because BBC documentary crews nowadays almost never have two cameras, and because I know Moazzam.
Shoddy work.