Obama is now asking Congress for a waiver on Uzbekitsan’s human rights record – arguably the worst in the world – in order to restart military supplies to President Karimov of Uzbekistan. Even Bush stopped these, after the 2005 Andijan massacre of at least 800 civilian demonstrators.

This blog has repeatedly pointed to the ever-increasing role of the “Northern Distribution Network” for getting supplies to the NATO troops in Afghanistan, with Uzbekistan as the point of entry. The Wikileaks cables from Tashkent outline a consistent US policy of sacrificing the human rights of Uzbeks in order to promote this military agenda.

Unfortunately, by promoting evil dictatorship in Central Asia, the United States and NATO are not advancing their own long term interests. Like Mubarak, Karimov is passing his sell-by date. But all rational thinking is thrown out of the window as NATO concentrates on the war it is losing in Afghanistan.

I am advised by the British Embassy that to visit the scenes of the November 1841 uprising in central Kabul as research for my book on Burnes is too dangerous. After ten full years of occupation, with 180,000 troops and billions of dollars in military hardware, they do not even control a few square miles in the centre of the capital, let alone the country. The recent attacks on the US Embassy and British Council have proved that. This war is lost.

America’s increasing fawning to Karimov is yet more evidence of that. The reason America is now so desperate for his favour is that, as they leave defeated, taking Karzai with them, they have to get out millions of tonnes of vehicles and military equipment, which has to pass overland. They have lost this war so absolutely that they no longer have possession of the ground they started with. They cannot get out the way they went in, through Pakistan, as they would be attacked in the Bolan and Khyber passes, and along the entire route. So they have to leave through Uzbekistan. The Americans will do anything for Karimov, just as long as they get permission to slink out through his country. I hope as they go they look into the faces of the people whose continued enslavement buys their permission.

Don’t look at Dale Farm! The police have arrested four “terrorists” in the West Midlands! Look there instead! Isn’t law enforcement wonderful!!!

The evictions at Dale Farm are wrong. Eviction – forcibly removing someone from their home – is always a serious evil in itself. It is resorted to far too easily in this country, and is in pretty well every circumstance a far greater evil than the problem it seeks to resolve. That seems to be the case here.

The media has been scarily propaganda laden. We are told that this is green belt land, which will always provoke a strong and justified countryside protection reflex in the middle class. But in truth this was not a site of green fields, but a scrapyard. I very much doubt it will be returned to green fields now. The government meantime has been telling us for months we have to give up green belt so that homes can be built on it. Homes, of course, for nice middle class people. Not these homes.

The media have gone out of their way to promote every old prejudice against travellers – I have seen interviews alleging illegal tipping, dirt, and squalor. I doubt there is a great deal of truth behind these cliches in this case, but if there is some truth, the remedy is not eviction. The media is shrill also that these travellers are members of an extended Irish family, members of which own some property in Ireland. Why that is taken as removing their claim to humane treatment in Essex is something I fail to follow.

The biggest mystery to me is why the travellers wish to live next to such very unpleasant people in Basildon.

A society should not be judged by how it treats those who conform neatly to its regulations and social norms. It should be judged by how it treats minorities who do not so conform. It is a test we are failing.

I remain a liberal. As I have explained often with regard to my views on specific political questions, my political thought sits in a tradition handed down from Hazlitt, Bright, John Stuart Mill and Gladstone. That will always be the case. I joined the Liberal Party in 1973.

There is much to be said for consistency and for loyalty. But I really cannot with conscience look at the reforms to introduce private profit into the NHS and the state education sector, and remain a card carrying member of a governing party. These are not small points. So I have left.

I shall not back any political party in England. I have always supported Scottish independence, and I have now taken out a formal SNP membership. There is no perfection in practical politics and should be no idols. But Alex Salmond and his people are doing a decent job in an imperfect world. For reasons I gave recently, breaking up the British state and its resurgent neo-imperialism and neo-conservatism is a political priority.

Cameron and Sarkozy in Benghazi

Aircraftman Cameron and Sarkozy are in Benghazi taking the applause of cheering tribal warriors. Sarkozy looks a bit nervous, as though scared he might meet the English rugby team at a dwarf hurling evening. Cameron looks a bit dazed, probably not sure what applause is. Aaah, that heady moment of triumph! Just like George Bush and Mission Accomplished!

Now those delightful oil contracts to sort out.

Elsewhere, Libyans who foolishly fail to agree with them are being bombed to pieces by NATO. Presumably, once anyone who might hold a different view is dead, it will be safe to hold a democratic election.

Unemployment fell in Scotland on yesterday’s new figures, while it rose everywhere else in the United Kingdom. There is no doubt that the difference was caused by the fact that the Scottish government has a (limited) ability to effectively spend forward and thus postpone the results of the Osborne public spending cuts. But the interesting result of that, is that the employment increase in Scotland was in the private sector, not the public sector, while private sector employment fell in England.

The Osborne theory – that public sector employment “crowds out” private sector employment, and cutting public sector jobs will somehow automatically increase the production of private sector jobs – appears, in this large scale example in the actual UK economy – the opposite of the truth. Cutting public sector jobs cuts private sector jobs too. That is intuitively correct – people who have just lost their job, their car and their home are going to be spending less buying things from other people.

As Miliband’s appearance before the TUC reminds us, the truth is that, were New Labour in power, the difference between what Osborne is doing and what New Labour would do is very marginal indeed. Only in Scotland do the voters have a real alternative, and they have flocked to it in droves.

While some old people will die this winter because they cannot afford to heat their homes, the Westminster government has had no trouble at all in finding over £100 billion to burn in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, in the interests of the wealthy elite in charge of a few mega-corporations. These wars have been solidly supported by all the unionist parties, with a brief wobble by the Lib Dems under the good Charlie Kennedy, quickly disposed of.

The SNP have provided the only electable alternative to extreme neo-conservative policy (including neo-liberal economic policy) available to electors in the UK. They have had stunning electoral success as a result. The Lib Dems were perceived briefly in England as opposing the neo-cons, with some justice, but were hijacked by the right wing Clegg, and their wider leadership was bought up by the present and future riches office brings in our corrupt system. But in the period the Lib Dems did seem an alternative to the neo-con Tory and New Labour parties, they rose to new heights of popularity and support.

The almost 100% correlation today between unionism and neo-conservatism among professional politicians and media pundits is why I am absolutely confident Scotland will achieve independence very soon. That neo-con recipe is well and truly rejected by the Scottish people.

But where does that leave a newly independent England? (presumably still attached to Wales, but I leave that and Irish union aside) Political progressives in England have traditionally been the most hostile to English independence because England would have a permanent Tory majority.

Well, I am not so sure it would. Only ten years ago Scotland seemed to have a permanent New Labour majority. Things change. But also, how thick do so-called progressives have to be, not to see that New Labour is absolutely another neo-con party?

Who launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Who introduced university tuition fees? Who brought in control orders and 28 days detention? Who sanctioned kettling? Who gave unimaginable sums of your money to the bankers? Who massively expanded the Private Finance Initiative? Who invented Academy schools? Who was complicit in torture and extraordinary rendition? Who presided over the greatest ever growth in the gap between rich and poor in this country? Answers: New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour and
New Labour.

The truth is that, within the union, there is no practical chance for England to have any government other than a government of neo-cons. It needs a seismic shift to break this up. What we have seen is that the party system is resilient even to moments when its corruption is revealed to all, as in the MPs’ expenses and Murdoch scandals. The United Kingdom as an entity is in the power of a corrupt political class controlled by corporations, for whom perpetual war, hydrocarbon dominance worldwide and access at will to taxpayers’ pockets are the necessary conditions of their existence. Only a truly seismic shock in the political landscape can save the English from this. That much-needed shock can be the break-up of the United Kingdom. Who knows how politics in England would fall out afterwards, but it cannot be worse. A shake of the kaleidoscope is a moment of great potential. England needs that.

The New Labour Torture and War Crimes Party is squealing at the boundary commission changes. I hate their rank hypocrisy. Anyone with the remotest interest in psephology knows that a combination of shire constituencies being historically larger, and recent drift from city centres, gives New Labour an advantage over the vicious Tories. I do not favour First Past the Post at all, but the electorate hates Nick Clegg so much that FPTP has become beloved of the people as the best defence against him. Fairly equal constituency sizes is a necessary feature for FPTP to have even a smidgeon of validity.

New Labour’s argument that they should have less electors per constituency because their geographical areas contain more illegal immigrants and persons too thick to register to vote, is hilarious. We are now to take into account in the democratic process those who do not bother to register, let alone vote? Actually most of those “ghost” people are a hypothetical posit by government statisticians, because they do not fill in the census either. You can surmise their existence in other ways. I posted about Stratford earlier. Did you know that in Stratford and in Tower Hamlets, either there are many people there who officially do not exist, or they produce over half as much more sewerage per person than anyone else? Anyway, I digress.

Anyone can register to vote. the “Transient population” argument does not wash because there is no longer a single annual registration – here in Thanet the register is updated once a month, for example. If you have chosen not to be a part of the political process – which should be a right not to be part – you do not count in it and you should not count in it. You cannot be psychically chalked up as a supporter of Harriet fucking Harman.

The advantage to New Labour over the Conservatives was about 5% at the 2010 election.

Here is how many votes it takes to elect one MP:

DUP Nasty Proddie Bigots 21,027
New Labour War Criminal and Torturer 33,858
Sinn Fein Ex-Murderers 34,388
Tory Vicious Sneering Bastards 34,979
SDLP Rather Nice People 36,990
Alliance Sickly Nice People 42,762
Plaid Cymru Ineffectual Quasi-Nationalists 55,131
SNP Hooray! 81,898
Lib Dem Lying Two Faced Traitor Clegg 119,934
Green Very Nice But Need To Eat More Meat 285,612

Not forgetting, with no MPs

UKIP Like BNP With O Levels infinity 919,471 votes
BNP Hitler Loving Scum infinity 564,321 votes
Ulster Conservatives Like DUP With O Levels infinity 102,361 votes
Respect Green Leotard Tendency infinity 33,251 votes

Can’t wait for details of the Scottish boundary proposals.

duffieldminute

mcDonald

Something is, obviously to anybody, missing from this document series and something else is also missing obviously to anybody who has been a Whitehall civil servant.

For earlier documents in the series see here. But the crucial missing documents relate to these two above, labeled duffieldminute and mcDonald.

What is, obviously to anybody, missing is a communication from the PUS (head of the Diplomatic Service Sir Michael Jay, now Lord Jay for services to torture) to Jack Straw. Jack Straw’s Private Secretary minutes “The Foreign Secretary agrees with the PUS that you handled this very well. Thank you.”

Where is the communication from the PUS to Straw saying that Duffield handled this meeting with me, about complicity in torture, very well? We do not have it. This despite repeated Freedom of Information Act and Data Protection Act requests from me for all the documents. I have been told that some documents were withheld on grounds of national security. What did Lord Torture-Jay say to Jack War-Criminal-Straw, that is still being withheld by Hague to protect Straw?

The next part is that which anyone who has worked in Whitehall will understand. The Duffield minute is a record of an internal meeting between FCO officials. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of internal meetings between FCO officials every single day. Some will be on major policy questions, like the future of the EU or global warming. Yet only one or two minutes of internal meetings a day will be deemed important enough to be put into the Secretary of State’s box. An internal FCO meeting solely about matters in Tashkent will probably never have been selected before.

What was so important about this little internal meeting that it commanded the full attention of Jack Straw and Lord Jay?
Anybody who has ever worked in Whitehall will know that it is next to impossible that this minute was simply put before Jack Straw unexpectedly like this.

One of two things must be true. Either Jack Straw was fully up to speed and had been extensively briefed before about intelligence from torture in Tashkent and my attitude to it, or the Duffield minute was put up behind a substantive submission explaining the background. Either way, vital documents are being hidden concerning Jack Straw’s involvement in the policy of receiving intelligence from torture.

It is worth remembering that the FCO did not give any of the documents above to the Gibson Inquiry until I did.

The world’s largest shoplifting centre has been opened next to the Olympic stadium in Stratford. This will be the most enjoyable epic fail by the Australians since the Ashes.

I walked a few months ago along a street in nearby Leyton, off Francis Rd. Something caught my attention, and I started looking at tax discs. Of sixty two cars parked on one side of the street, twenty one had no valid tax disc. I would bet that at least that many had no valid insurance. All of these cars were within two hundred yards of Francis Rd police station.

The Olympics have cost £20 billion we don’t have, and in three years time the site will be a mouldering white elephant. The flats of the Olympic village, hopefully destined for yuppie accommodation, are less attractive than the nastier flats of Moscow or, still worse, the ones they have just demolished in Dundee. Moving West Ham just up the road from Upton Park to the new Olympic Stadium will have no net economic effect I can see.

I would be willing to bet, from talking to locals, that the thousands of people it is being announced are to be employed in the new shopping centre include the highest percentage of security staff and store detectives in the world. It is still not going to work.

More shopping malls is not the answer to our economic problems. This is madness.

One good thing about the Aussies is that they are not deferential.

http://bit.ly/nEH6P2
Thanks jonangus for flagging this up to me in comments. I should say that I have no objection to Osborne taking cocaine, but I do object to his subsequent hypocrisy in defending its criminalisation. Nor do I care about his masochistic practices in subsequent sexual activity with a prostitute, though I do object to his hypocrisy in defending the continuing legal persecution of prostitutes.

But what is of overwhelming public interest is how this all links in to the insertion of the criminal Coulson into the heart of government.

It would be wonderful to hear this lady giving evidence in public before Judge Leveson’s phone hacking inquiry. I fear that is not going to happen.

William Sinclair eh? Perhaps we have finally solved the mystery of what goes on in the hidden vaults under Rosslyn Chapel!

I keep linking a lot to the Daily Mail lately. Their coverage of the revelations of security services complicity with the Gadaffi regime has been outstanding.

Yesterday they showed that Libyan dissidents in the UK were made victims of control orders at the request of Colonel Gadaffi – not because they posed any particular threat of terrorism in the UK, but to handicap their anti-Gadaffi activities.

It is hard to imagine something that points up current hypocrisy over Libya more starkly. It also increases the shame of Nick Clegg for caving in to the Tories over the continuance of rebranded control orders. We are told that these are essential to protect the public when the Home Secretary has evidence that cannot be put before the court. The government continually briefs that this is communications intercept intelligence. In fact, as I have revealed before on this blog, that is a smokescreen – virtually none is communications intercept intelligence.

Most people under control orders were victims of “intelligence” from torture chambers overseas. That is why the “evidence” could not be put to court. That is the simple, shameful truth. But we now know, that in some cases the people whose lives were ruined by the extreme restrictions of Control Orders, were simply accused to please a dictator.

I do hope this opens the eyes of some who believe liberties can be surrendered to government in security matters because government can be trusted.

It is interesting to see Simon McDonald’s name appearing on one decidedly embarrassing letter published by the Mail. Simon, now our Ambassador in Germany, seems to have been one civil servant with no scruples about the dirtiest of dirty work. It was he who minuted Jack Straw’s approval of the meeting at which I was told it was policy to obtain torture from intelligence abroad. If the Gibson Inquiry were a genuine public inquiry, he should be in for a major grilling.

It is also good to see the Mail not scrupling to publish documents found, they say, not in Libyan security service offices, but in the British Ambassador’s Residence. This is however somewhat strange – you are not supposed to keep this kind of document lying around your Residence. In truth, every Ambassador sometimes takes classified papers home to work on, but these predate the current Ambassador. I am surprised if they really came from the Residence.

Do remember the innocent victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers. I will. The horror of what happened to them that day was unspeakable.

But I shall be avoiding the wall to wall neo-cons and those making money from “security” who will infest the media today. And I will also remember the 500 times more people who died as a result of the attack on Iraq, which had no connection with the attack on the Twin Towers, and no WMD. And I will rmember those who will die in Afghanistan and Libya today.

It is not impossible the anniversary will spark a terrorist attack. But it is quite certain that possibility will be played upon by those whose interest it is in to keep us in a perpetual state of fear, to justify wars abroad which benefit the oil, armament, military supplies and security industries, and provide the excuse for enhanced power for politicians at home at the expense of all our liberties.

Remember New York’s vicitms. But remember all the other victims whose lives have been destroyed by wars launched using the attack on the Twin Towers as a propaganda excuse. I shall do my remembrance standing on the stormy seashore. Not in front of a television.

I am delighted that Gulnara Karimova has been kicked out of New York fashion week. The world of super wealth and glamour has no conscience, but it does have brands to protect. It seems that it is the stark truths about Gulnara in some of the leaked Wikileaks US diplomatic cables of Jon Purnell that have finally put a bump in her career of schmoozing with the A-list.

Strangely, my statcounter shows that for the last few days I have had a good number of different people arriving on this site from google searches for variations of “Gulnara Karimova’s height” or “How tall is Gulnara Karimova?”

I haven’t worked out what has prompted this. I should like to think it is some plan involving telegraph poles and piano wire.

The Guardian has an interview with Vanessa Redgrave. She is truly noble. Not necessarily always right – nobody is – but always kind, giving and helpful. You can’t ask more from anybody.

When I whistleblew on UK complicity in torture, I was smeared, falsely accused, sacked and my self worth and physical health were both destroyed. I was given by doctors a maximum of three years to live. I was penniless, living in a friend’s flat, and in danger of just giving up on life. Corin and Vanessa Redgrave actively sought me out. They invited me to dinner in a little Indian restaurant along King Street from the Lyric, Hammersmith, where I think Corin was appearing. I don’t think they realised it, but I hadn’t had money to eat for several days. I have never known such empathy. They seemed to understand what was happening to me, with very few words from me.

Vanessa was leaning heavily on a stick, and Corin seemed rheumy. But they still had a life force that spilled over enough to revitalise me. They thought I was doing something worthwhile – you must remember, that when I was trying to tell the world in early 2004 our government was complicit in torture abroad, the government told everyone I was lying, mad and a crook.

Corin and Vanessa made no attempt to twist my tale to an ideological construct. They just wanted to say thank you. They just wanted to buy me a meal. They just wanted to help. I am sure there must be thousands like me touched briefly by Vanessa’s kindness over the years.

This in no way detracts from the duplicity and illegality involved in NATO’s intervention in the Libyan Civil War, but I am cheered by the thought that NATO’s attempt to co-opt, absorb and neutralise the “Arab spring” is not going as swimmingly as they hoped. The release of the damning documents on MI6 and CIA involvement with Gadaffi is one hopeful sign: the major anti-Israeli demonstration in Cairo is another.

The arab world is not as under control as Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron would like. I shall sing a little this morning.

I presume that serial killers become addicted. The really big killers, like Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot appear figures divorced from humanity. I really do find it hard to know what to make of Tony Blair. Universally execrated for fabricating the evidence to attack Iraq, apostle of war everywhere, Israel’s most ardent supporter, I used to think the desire for personal wealth – which his murderous career has indeed brought – was his primary motivation. But with his latest cheerleading for yet more wars, it seems he is indeed one of those who, having thrown off conventional morality in favour of homicide, just wants to go on and on with it.

For Bliar, the desire for killing will never stop.

Blanket opposition to public spending cuts is not my thing. We have far too large a state. It interferes far too much with our freedoms. It wields far too much physical power through excessive armed forces, it controls a crazed ability to wipe out human life on the planet, it attacks – apparently permanently – other countries and kiils their people. It carries out far too much surveillance of us.

It also wastes the hard earned money of working people on idiots like Martin Samuda. According to his Guardian profile, he has this non-job: “He works within schools as a home liaison officer, and within youth support”. You can catch the tone of the sort of things he does in his job from this article on his good friend Mark Duggan. If Martin Samuda views it as a mere peccadillo, scarcely worth mentioning, to be travelling around London with a loaded firearm (a converted weapon of precisely the type used in the majority of fatal gang shootings in London’s recent past), then what kind of use is he in his home liaison visits?

I have feared ever since the looting that one outcome is going to be an increase in funding for the entire class of social worker/youth leader/paid community leader who pop up everywhere in the media as pundits at times like these. Their refrain is that there is nothing wrong with urban street culture, that its adherents are victims not instigators of violence, and that the way forward is more government money for them.

The horrible death of Baby P revealed the uselessness of the vast hordes of local authority community and social officers sucking money from working people. It was certainly true that Ed Balls treated Sharon Shoesmith scandalously; but not nearly as scandalous as the incredible amount of taxpayers money this woman was getting.

Real communities cannot be developed by the state, and in fact excessive state interference distorts the growth of community and stunts it. There are many things that need to be done to address the problems of our society. One of them is to sack Martin Samuda and anybody else being paid from other people’s taxes in any similar kind of work, all round the country.

Wilful blindness – or worse? The credibility of the Gibson Inquiry into UK government complicity in torture seems to me to fall by the minute. The following facts seem to me almost unbelievable.

Government departments, including the FCO and MI6, are supposed to have already given Gibson all relevant documents so the inquiry can read through them before starting witness hearings.

But the government did not hand over the key document, revealed by Ian Cobain in the Guardian last month, which set out the permissions to operatives on complicity in torture. In fact as an email to me from Sara Carnegie, solicitor to the inquiry, reveals, the government still had not given this document to the inquiry ten days after the Guardian published. It now has done so in response to a specific request from Sara Carnegie.

Just as astonishingly, the FCO papers including those shown above, handed over by me to the Inquiry, were not among those submitted to the Inquiry by the FCO. The Inquiry has now requested unredacted copies. As of five days ago, and two months after I submitted my copies (redacted by the FCO), the Inquiry had still not received these papers from the FCO.

Ian Cobain’s source for his document is a whistleblower. I am also a whistleblower. There is no doubt that the documents produced from these whistleblower sources to the Inquiry are key evidence that the UK government was complicit in torture. There is also no doubt that if it were not for these whistleblowers, the Inquiry would never have seen this material – AND THAT THE INQUIRY IS INCREDIBLY RELAXED ABOUT THAT. So how much other incriminating material is the government still keeping hidden, and the so-called Inquiry not inquiring about?

Which goes back to the specific question on which I challenged the Inquiry. Had Gibson, in his role as Commissioner for the Intelligence Services, seen the document authorising complicity in torture revealed by Ian Cobain? This is the Inquiry’s very carefully worded answer to me on that point.

Further to your email below, I have now had an opportunity to speak to Sir Peter and show him a copy of the relevant document that was referred to in the Guardian article. He has confirmed that he has no memory of ever having seen this and that it would not have been a document that he would automatically have been expected to see at that time.

The statutory function of the Intelligence Services Commissioner was extended with effect from 6 July 2010, to include the monitoring of compliance by intelligence officers and military personnel with the Consolidated Guidance on the standards to be following during the detention and interviewing of detainees. Sir Peter had no role in the drafting of the Guidance. You may be aware that this Guidance is the subject of Judicial Review proceedings and judgment is expected in the near future.

The second para is smoke in your eyes, answering a point I never raised. The first para is a very narrow denial – that Gibson cannot recall having seen a particular piece of paper. It is far short of a denial that he knew of the policy. I think that Clive Stafford Smith’s point is absolutely right. Gibson should not be a judge, he should be a witness.

Suspect might be a better word.

Many of the supporting documents giving evidence of the truth of Murder in Samarkand were removed from the book by my publisher after the government threatened to prosecute them. They were then posted to my original website, but many were taken down after the government threatened to prosecute me.

With retrospect that was an act of strange cowardice on my part, so I have decided to bring them back, one at a time. This first one is a fascinating treasure trove in which to dig. It is the document listing the changes the FCO demanded in Murder in Samarkand, (in addition to the removal of all government documents). The FCO consulted every individual named in the book who was, or ever had been, in government service, and checked all the files. The exercise took over a year. In almost every instance, my own opinion is that my original version was in fact correct. However almost all these changes were made in tbe book by the publisher.

You can see what I originally wrote in this document.

But the really interesting point is that the changes requested are actually very small, and very few indeed. This document is a testimony to the accuracy of my account, and to just what the government wanted kept secret, and why. In those very rare instances where my accuracy is disputed, I am afraid the explanation is that government officials are not telling the truth, for motives which are obvious.

The page numbers in this document refer to the manuscript and do not relate to the published book.

UPDATE

Some people are having difficulty finding the document. You have to click on the link below, then on the next page that will come up, click again on the link below the heading there. The document will then load, but takes (on my computer anyway) about 30 seconds to do so.

FCO_Comment-2

Just when you thought that nothing could be more sickening than the revelation that the mad Mahdi Blair was godfather to the baptism of Murdoch’s daughter in the River Jordan…

Kudos to the Daily Mail for outing BP’s Mark Allen as the MI6 man who wrote the sickeningly jaunty message to Gadaffi henchman Moussa Koussa on the rendition to terrible torture of a Libyan dissident and his wife and family. Lest we forget, this is the message:

I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq. This is the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years

Allen then moved seamlessly from MI6 to a £200,000 pa job at BP working on their relationships with Gadaffi and other Arab dictators. We can only hope that one day Egypt emerges from military government to democracy and its security files too are opened. But I am willing to bet that MI6 and CIA shredders have been put in to Cairo government offices and will be working ceaselessly for the next few days. Expect the odd fire too.

.