There is a huge government cover-up in progress over the Werritty connection to Mossad and the role of British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould, and their neo-con plan to start a war with Iran.
Yesterday at 22.15pm I submitted by email a Freedom of Information request for:
All communications in either direction ever made between Matthew Gould and Adam Werritty, specifically including communications made outside government systems.
At 23.31pm I was astonished to get a reply from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The request was refused as it was
“likely to exceed the cost limit”.
Now it is plainly nonsense that to gather correspondence between two named individuals would be too expensive. They could just ask Gould.
And a reply at nearly midnight? The Freedom of Information team in the FCO is not a 24 hour unit. Plainly not only are they hiding the Gould/Werritty correspondence, they are primed and on alert for this cover-up operation.
Even more blatant was the obstruction of MP Paul Flynn, when he attempted to question Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell on the Gould-Werritty connection at the House of Commons Public Administration Committee. These are the minutes: anybody who believes in democracy should feel their blood boil as you read them:
Publc Admininstration Committee 24/11/2011
Q<369> Paul Flynn: Okay. Matthew Gould has been the subject of a very serious complaint from two of my constituents, Pippa Bartolotti and Joyce Giblin. When they were briefly imprisoned in Israel, they met the ambassador, and they strongly believe—it is nothing to do with this case at all—that he was serving the interest of the Israeli Government, and not the interests of two British citizens. This has been the subject of correspondence.
In your report, you suggest that there were two meetings between the ambassador and Werritty and Liam Fox. Questions and letters have proved that, in fact, six such meetings took place. There are a number of issues around this. I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and he has previously served in Iran, in the service. Werritty is a self-proclaimed—
Robert Halfon: Point of order, Chairman. What is the point of this?
Paul Flynn:> Let me get to it. Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran.
Chair:> I have to take a point of order.
Robert Halfon:> Mr Flynn is implying that the British ambassador to Israel is working for a foreign power, which is out of order.
Paul Flynn:> I quote the Daily Mail: “Mr Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran and has made several visits. He has also met senior Israeli officials, leading to accusations”—not from me, from the Daily Mail—“that he was close to the country’s secret service, Mossad.” There may be nothing in that, but that appeared in a national newspaper.
Chair:> I am going to rule on a point of order. Mr Flynn has made it clear that there may be nothing in these allegations, but it is important to have put it on the record. Be careful how you phrase questions.
Paul Flynn:> Indeed. The two worst decisions taken by Parliament in my 25 years were the invasion of Iraq—joining Bush’s war in Iraq—and the invasion of Helmand province. We know now that there were things going on in the background while that built up to these mistakes. The charge in this case is that Werritty was the servant of neo-con people in America, who take an aggressive view on Iran. They want to foment a war in Iran in the same way as in the early years, there was another—
Chair:> Order. I must ask you to move to a question that is relevant to the inquiry.
Q<370> Paul Flynn:> Okay. The question is, are you satisfied that you missed out on the extra four meetings that took place, and does this not mean that those meetings should have been investigated because of the nature of Mr Werritty’s interests?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> I think if you look at some of those meetings, some people are referring to meetings that took place before the election.
Q<371> Paul Flynn:> Indeed, which is even more worrying.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> I am afraid they were not the subject—what members of the Opposition do is not something that the Cabinet Secretary should look into. It is not relevant.
But these meetings were held— Chair:> Mr Flynn, would you let him answer please?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> I really do not think that was within my context, because they were not Ministers of the Government and what they were up to was not something I should get into at all.
Chair:> Final question, Mr Flynn.
Q<372> Paul Flynn:> No, it is not a final question. I am not going to be silenced by you, Chairman; I have important things to raise. I have stayed silent throughout this meeting so far.
You state in the report—on the meeting held between Gould, Fox and Werritty, on 6 February, in Tel Aviv—that there was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK ambassador was present. Are you following the line taken by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government who says that he can eat with lobbyists or people applying to his Department because, on occasions, he eats privately, and on other occasions he eats ministerially? Are you accepting the idea? It is possibly a source of great national interest—the eating habits of their Secretary of State. It appears that he might well have a number of stomachs, it has been suggested, if he can divide his time this way. It does seem to be a way of getting round the ministerial code, if people can announce that what they are doing is private rather than ministerial.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> The important point here was that, when the Secretary of State had that meeting, he had an official with him—namely, in this case, the ambassador. That is very important, and I should stress that I would expect our ambassador in Israel to have contact with Mossad. That will be part of his job. It is totally natural, and I do not think that you should infer anything from that about the individual’s biases. That is what ambassadors do. Our ambassador in Pakistan will have exactly the same set of wide contacts.
Q<373> Paul Flynn:> I have good reason, as I said, from constituency matters, to be unhappy about the ambassador. Other criticisms have been made about the ambassador; he is unique in some ways in the role he is performing. There have been suggestions that he is too close to a foreign power.
Robert Halfon:> On a point of order, Chair, this is not about the ambassador to Israel. This is supposed to be about the Werritty affair.
Paul Flynn:> It is absolutely crucial to this report. If neo-cons such as yourself, Robert, are plotting a war in Iran, we should know about it.
Chair:> Order. I think the line of questioning is very involved. I have given you quite a lot of time, Mr Flynn. If you have further inquiries to make of this, they could be pursued in correspondence. May I ask you to ask one final question before we move on?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> One thing I would stress: we are talking about the ambassador and I think he has a right of reply. Mr Chairman, I know there is an interesting question of words regarding Head of the Civil Service versus Head of the Home Civil Service, but this is the Diplomatic Service, not the Civil Service.
Q<374> Chair:> So he is not in your jurisdiction at all.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> No.
Q<375> Paul Flynn:> But you are happy that your report is final; it does not need to go the manager it would have gone to originally, and that is the end of the affair. Is that your view?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> As I said, some issues arose where I wanted to be sure that what the Secretary of State was doing had been discussed with the Foreign Secretary. I felt reassured by what the Foreign Secretary told me.
Q<376> Chair:> I think what Mr Flynn is asking is that your report and the affair raise other issues, but you are saying that that does not fall within the remit of your report and that, indeed, the conduct of an ambassador does not fall within your remit at all.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> That is absolutely correct.
Paul Flynn:> The charge laid by Lord Turnbull in his evidence with regard to Dr Fox and the ministerial code was his failure to observe collective responsibility, in that case about Sri Lanka. Isn’t the same charge there about our policies to Iran and Israel?
Chair:> We have dealt with that, Mr Flynn.
Paul Flynn:> We haven’t dealt with it as far as it applies—
Chair:> Mr Flynn, we are moving on.
Paul Flynn:> You may well move on, but I remain very unhappy about the fact that you will not allow me to finish the questioning I wanted to give on a matter of great importance.
It is shocking but true that Robert Halfon MP, who disrupted Flynn with repeated points of order, receives funding from precisely the same Israeli sources as Werritty, and in particular from Mr Poju Zabludowicz. He also formerly had a full time paid job as Political Director of the Conservative Friends of Israel.
But despite the evasiveness of O’Donnell and the obstruction of paid zionist puppet Halfon, O’Donnell confirms vital parts of my investigation. In particular he agrees that the Fox-Werritty-Gould “private dinner” in Tel Aviv was with Mossad, and that Gould met Werritty many times more than the twice that O’Donnell listed in his “investigation” into this affair.
Of the six meetings of Fox-Gould-Werritty together which I discovered, five were while Fox was Secretary of State for Defence. Only one was while Fox was in opposition. But O’Donnell has now let the cat much further out of the bag, with the astonishing admission to Paul Flynn’s above questioning that Gould, Fox and Werritty held “meetings that took place before the election.” He also refers to “some of those meetings” as being before the election. Both are plainly in the plural.
It is now evident that not only did Fox, Gould and Werritty have at least five meetings while Fox was in power – with never another British official present – they had several meetings while Fox was shadow Foreign Secretary. O’Donnell is right that what Fox and Werritty were up to in opposition is not his concern. But what Gould was doing with them – a senior official – most definitely is.
A senior British diplomat cannot just hold a series of meetings with the opposition shadow Defence Secretary and a paid zionist lobbyist. What on earth was happening?
The absolutely astonishing cover-up and lack of honesty from the government about the Fox-Gould-Werritty relationship is being maintained with cast-iron resolve. Not only is Gould a self-declared fervent zionist, he was born in the same year as Chancellor George Osborne and attended the same private school – St Paul’s. At least some of the time he was meeting Fox and Werrity while they were in opposition, Gould was Private Secretary to New Labour Foreign Secretary David Milliband. That opens up the question of whether David Milliband, another fervent zionist, was part of the discussions with Mossad and US neo-cons on how to engineer war with Iran, for which Werritty was the conduit.
That would help explain the completeness of the cover-up. The government appears able with total impunity to refuse to answer MPs’ questions on Gould/Fox/Werritty, and they will not respond to Freedom of Information requests. It is now proven without doubt that O’Donnell lied blatantly about the number of Gould-Fox-Werritty meetings, and that Mossad was involved. And yet every single British mainstream media outlet still refuses to mention it.
I know from a mole that the plot involves a plan to attack Iran. For the cover-up to be so blatant and yet so comprehensively maintained, the secret at the heart of this conspiracy must be great, and those complicit must include a very large swathe of the British political and media establishment.
UPDATE: access to this blog is now blocked from FCO and Cabinet Office terminals. Very wise – truth can be contagious.
The “likely to exceed the cost limit” is the usual answer. The only solution is to keep asking, hoping they won’t destroy the correspondance. Maybe they already did.
Sophia,
Thanks but I have done plenty of requests before, and never had that answer. And indeed never had any answer in less than two weeks, let alone immediately and after 11pm.
Knowing what we know about the Iraq war now, this story should mobilise. However, there is inertia created in my opinion by its absence from the mainstream media.
As long as the mainstream don’t publish the story, it won’t mobilise.
It’s interesting in a way because it reveals the control these media have on the public.
Breach the costs limit indeed. It’s not as if pretty much every email client has ways and means of searching for emails is it?
But many props for getting a FoIA response in an hour and a quarter, albeit a refusal. Quickest I’ve ever heard of anywhere.
I presume you know that you’re mentioned in the latest Private Eye over this issue? Doesn’t quite count as ‘mainstream media’ but at least it’s a start.
Craig,
Good one. Keep digging on this and don’t let the issue die. If it weren’t for the total farce that was the lead up to Iraq, we might have discounted these meetings and connections as peripheral and part of the usual mess of lobbyists trying to get heard. Werrity could be discounted as quite mad, visiting Iran on private trips and supporting the opposition.
But no – Iraq showed us that these lunatics can and do have influence with the most terrible consequences. Diplomacy and defense can never be completely transparent. There are of course state secrets and meetings that can’t be public. But when those meetings fly in the face of stated foreign policy and national interest they are not protected. They are traitorous.
Good one. Keep digging on this and don’t let the issue die. If it weren’t for the total farce that was the lead up to Iraq, we might have discounted these meetings and connections as peripheral and part of the usual mess of lobbyists trying to get heard. Werrity could be discounted as quite mad, visiting Iran on private trips and supporting the opposition.
But no – Iraq showed us that these lunatics can and do have influence with the most terrible consequences. Diplomacy and defense can never be completely transparent. There are of course state secrets and meetings that can’t be public. But when those meetings fly in the face of stated foreign policy and national interest they are not protected. They are traitorous.
Is it worth re-submitting the request, but reducing its scope, to call their bluff on the ‘cost’? For example, you could ask for all communications within a limited time period, and if that’s refused try again for an even shorter time period, until you get down to a single day – then if they ever respond properly, you (or someone else) can try again for another day or month or whatever. Alternatively, you could start by asking for communications within government systems, and then ask for communications by email outside government systems, and then phone calls and so on.
.
I don’t know if there’s any right of appeal against these ‘cost’-based refusals, but if not, reducing the scope of the request to the point that such a refusal is plainly preposterous might be a useful approach.
It’s quite possible that Gus O’Donnell is not aware of more than one meeting before the election but spoke of ‘meetings’ to distract Mr Flynn from the point that five of the six known meetings took place after the election and yet he only recorded two in his report. It’s a pity Mr Flynn didn’t follow up on that. Why did you not mention the three extra meetings, Sir [Au]gus[tine]?
Talking about democracy – why were my comments deleted twice? Am I banned??
Very interesting. And scary. Escobar thinks the Syrian meddling is the first step, the beginning of the war that’s on already. It makes sense from their point of view – Hezbollah must be hampered, etc. Britain, like Canada (where I’m from) should be restraining all this stuff, not actively encouraging. Hell. Glad I’ve got you on RSS Craig.
Private Eye are running with it now so more publicity – the timing of your response seems highly bullshit and an awfully quick calculation.
Keep digging, Craig!
Yes keep on keeping on Craig. A cover up if ever there was one. Gould is a dangerous latent would-be killer of humans.
.
Latest update from PSC text version.
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/index7b.asp?m_id=1&l1_id=4&l2_id=106&Content_ID=2271&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PSC+update%3A+this+Saturday+-+BDS+Day+of+Action&utm_source=YMLP&utm_term=For+the+full+text+only…
.
I can’t help thinking we’re missing something in this story in that Werritty visited Iran a number of times. Surely, if he were linked to anti-Iran groups in the UK, as well as to Israel, he was putting himself in serious danger (he has no dip. immunity). The Iranians certainly have their own spies in Israel and the UK. Now, I wonder what he was doing there? Meeting anti-regime elements? Could he be such a fool? Not very likely.
You could try asking them to explain what is their “cost” basis, i.e. what are their criteria? This will tie them down.
Good one, Craig. And if Paul Flynn’s reading this, 10/10 for not taking any crap: “If neo-cons such as yourself, Robert, are plotting a war in Iran, we should know about it.”
No question.
Keep digging.
Guess Flynn’s constituent must be this Pippa Bartolotti;
http://pippabartolotti.blogspot.com/
.
She’s got a few questions, too.
Halfon receives donations from many sources including
Caledonia Group Services Ltd
Caledonia Investments PLC
Auckland Shipping Ltd
Sussex Research Ltd
Simon Waxley
Robert Shetler-Jones
.
???
Halfon seems to be extraordinarily well funded. Who are these people and companies and why does Halfon need so many £thousands? Some digging. Perhaps he is a conduit for the money. The Israeli support set up is more and more like the mafia and just as brutish.
Halfon’s latest register of interests
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/111116/111116.pdf Page 121
declares that the Conservative Friends of Israel paid for his accomomodation at the Manchester conference to the tune of £1,100.
.
This summary is dated November 2011. Scanning through what they are ALL picking up leaves one feeling sick.
Antelope Grazer, my big fear is that these missions (if they’re really spies or special forces, and otherwise why are they there?) are already going on. Regardless of the opinions of decent people who contribute to this blog, devoted MPs like Paul Flynn (where are the others?), persistent bloggers after truth, like Craig, there is nothing we can do to stop them. This war on Iran is on the agenda. Nothing can remove it. Gould, and the other two Zionist ambassadors to Israel from Canada and the US, are there for a purpose. NATO is at their beck and call. Cover-ups and whitewashes like O’Donnell’s will continue, and questions will not be answered until these evil people (Hague, Fox, Osborne, their colleagues across the Atlantic and Israel, et al) get their way.
As well as having been favourably compared by the Jewish Telegraph with Louise Ellman (ie fearless channel for Zionist propaganda), Halfon is a member of the Henry Jackson Society.
http://powerbase.info/index.php/Henry_Jackson_Society.
.
As is Michael Gove, btw.
Excellent news, what a faux passe by Gus’, could it be that he is retiring soon?
Right, this calls for another global linking charge from us all, there must be no doubt that this will get through to everyone.
The defense of the realm is seriously undermined and it looks like the establishment is letting it happen, trying desperately to keep it under the carpet. I shall start with my face book page and then shall work my way through my adress book.
Clearly Liam Fox should now be asked to resign as an MP until further notice, I’d have him arrested and Mathew Gould recalled with imediate effect, its just my Krauty nature.
When it comes to real issues the likes of Hitchens and Monbiot are nowhere to be found, where are Britain principled Journalists?
Do they all work for Private Eye?
Good on you for being persistent, your recall of last nights FCO encounter of the strange kind had me in pupatations, what a hoot, a midminght service eh?, spooks never sleep, by now you must have half of MI6 buzzing.
Now would be a time to engage with your neighbours regards to the time when you go walkies on the beach, etc. This is getting very close and they do not like it up them I fear. Think about a few tricks from your past, there are easy ways to see who has visited whilst you are away.
One of Halfon’s donors, Robert Shetler-Jones, funds the Tories more generally, pays through a shell company, and has interesting links.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/25/partyfunding-conservatives
And Dmitry Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch who has absolutely nothing to do with Robert Shetler-Jones (oh, no, nothing at all. Don’t you believe me?), who helps fund the Tories and, specifically Halfon, has an Israeli passport. Allegedly.
.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1303215/MI5-vetoed-Security-Minister-Baroness-Pauline-Neville-Jones-links-Ukrainian-oligarchs.html
.
Who’da thunk it?
“UPDATE: access to this blog is now blocked from FCO and Cabinet Office terminals. Very wise – truth can be contagious.”
If I doubted before, I am certain now…
Readers, please pass this article on to as many people as you can – thanks – w
Willyrobinson, if you mean Craig’s blog today, I’ve already posted it on Facebook (but don’t think most people read anything polical; they are too interested in other more mundane things).
@John Goss – yes of course, my own post is a bit too light to really travel. And I agree, it’s often hard to get people interested in complex stories, but I think we could make the same effort to get a message out again today as when Craig first broke the story. With MPs on record about various meetings it’s less risky for MSM to carry should they want to.
.
Now, do they want to?…
Apologies folks have been deleting everything not strictly on topic as want to keep this targeted at the moment.
Freedom of Information requests should have a two-part reply: “do we have the information?” and “How (or if) we will give you the information.” It isn’t clear here which is answer is too expensive (= about three person-days work).
I had a similar strange response to a request for information of communications between a (named) minister and a (named) council (not about Sharon Shoesmith, but similar). My reply (after a reasonable fifteen days) was that it was too expensive to determine if they held the information.
It makes it difficult to refine a request to get it into the resource limit (which they are supposed to help you with). My practice in such cases is immediately to make another FoI request about how my first request was handled: it shouldn’t take three days work to find this out.
I received a holding reply (invoking the extra twenty days reply period) as they were holding meetings to see if they could respond!
You might like to try a similar tack.
In passing, Brent Council refused to even reply to an American friend’s FoI until he provided proof of identity. As he already held the information (leaked to him) and was only covering the tracks of the leaker, he went ahead and published the story anyway!