So nobody in the security services was guilty of complicity in torture. Those rendered to torture were in fact whisked off by flying pigs. Or maybe a big boy did it and ran away.
I should say I never had the tiniest bit of doubt that the institutionally corrupt Metropolitan Police would let off the security services. Nobody ever is guilty in these things. It was nobody’s fault that an unarmed and unresisting electrician was shot six times in the head as he sat on a tube train. It was nobody’s fault the police subsequently lied about him. It is nobody’s fault that MI5 and MI6 officers were interviewing detainees with freshly mutilated genitals. It was nobody’s fault that, when I blew the whistle on active UK complicity in torture, I was immediately suspended from duty and charged with eighteen allegations of gross misconduct, every one of which was subsequently adjudged to be false. It was nobody’s fault that David Kelly died a horrible, lonely and mysterious death after letting slip the truth – that there were no Iraqi WMD. It was nobody’s fault that hundreds of thousands died and trillions were squandered due to the lies officially published – by nobody’s fault – about WMD.
I have views on this lying exoneration today which are more complex than you might expect. The MI5 and MI6 officers were following policy set out by Tony Blair and Jack Straw, that we should obtain intelligence from torture. It would have been a hollow justice for some junior spooks to be scapegoated while Straw and Blair are walking around as respected international statesman, coining in the money.
Yhe Met investigation was so remarkably “thorough” it did not approach me at any stage, even though I had given obviously relevant evidence in person to the Council of Europe, European Parliament and UK Parliament.
Do watch my evidence to the UK parliament if you have not already done so. Then judge who you believe.
Meanwhile, there is no sign at all that the so-called Gibson Inquiry into UK Complicity in Torture is ever going even to take the lid off the whitewash bucket and get started.
Yes welcome to this world baby Arsalan. We have not given you a very good inheritance sadly.
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Let us not forget young Bradley Manning waking up today and facing a court martial. Nor young Richard O’Dwyer who is facing extradition to the evil M-Pyre as I call it. What can we do to assist these young men?
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On 30 September 2006 the US Senate unanimously ratified the treaty. British Home Secretary John Reid said he was “delighted” that Baroness Scotland’s visit to the US over the summer succeeded in getting Senate agreement. John Reid: “The treaty is an important measure in our fight against serious international crime”.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Act_2003
I thought that this was a spoof but apparently not. Frank Gardner relives the Adventures of Tintin.
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Tintin’s Colonial Adventures
Posted by margo on January 13, 2012, 7:23 am
I accept I’m being facetious, but during this era of heightened tension, extra-judicial assassinations and unfolding events in the Middle East – surely a busy time for any serious journalist – it’s curious that the BBC’s security correspondent found the time to star in Frank Gardner’s TinTin adventures.
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He gets to drive through the ancien empire and across the colonies in a snazzy vintage car – it must have been fun – I guess I’m being mean
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Tintin was his hero, says Gardner. Ah yes. Herge’s Tintin au Congo , in particular, is revealed as a racist, condescending document that shines a light into the colonial mindset. Herge’s employer, Wallez, decided the Belgian youth needed to know more about the values of colonialism. Hergé was instructed to show Belgium how the Congolese natives were introduced to the shining light of civilisation. From a review of that book: “Throughout [Tintin au Congo] we will witness further displays of Colonialism. Tintin shows a condescending – even despising attitude towards the natives. In 1954, as Hergé re-edits the story this attitude would soften, but not disappear.”
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http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1326439427.html includes some good graphics.
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Margo is South African so I assume the programme, which was broadcast here last October, has just been shown in S Africa.
How many days ago was Correra warning about terrrrrist attacks in Kenya?
Now it is Bangkok.
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BREAKING NEWS:US embassy in Thailand warns citizens foreign terrorists may be planning attacks on tourists in Bangkok
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Keep the wheels grinding ZBC!
EdgarBlamm
I think you mean smart alec Dr Evan Harris, once Liberal Democrat MP, not re-elected. Andrew Dismore the chairman was also not re-elected. Lord Onslow the only humane person there is now dead. The other members are listed on the report.
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http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/Final%2520Report%2520UNCAT_watermarked%5B1%5D.pdf
In ‘The defence of the realm, the authorized history of m15’, by Christopher Andrew isbn: 9780141023304 claims that future Torture will be prevented by having ethics officers.
I wonder if these new ethics staff have immunity from laws and inquiries ?.
Phil Shiner on torture and the Iraq war.
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http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/phil-shiner-uk-iraq-policy/
Re. Arsalan at 07:04pm on 12.1.12.
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First of all, lots of mubarak on the brith of your son, Arsalan. Brilliant and happy news! I’m sure that by the time he is three, inshallah, you will have initiated him into the joys of the culinary arts of fish disshes.
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I completely agree with your post; this is more-or-less precisely what I was arguing on the ‘Diane Abbott’ thread.
Congratulations on your son’s birth.May he live in happier times. As to this country’s record on torture who followed the trial of the Kenyans a few months ago? Castration ,bottles shoved up vaginas as well as commonplace near death beatings.All this just 50 or so years ago.I recommend Richard Gott’s Britain’s Empire published by Verso if people want an overview.Bliar & Straw are two sick f*****s.Stay sane Craig ,it is important to hear how it really is.By the way when attempting to listen to your testimony my computer kept on claiming there was a breakdown!! anyone else experience anything similiar?
Craig, I also had no doubt that the Metropolitan Police would let off the security services.
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All the cases of UK complicity in torture should be fully investigated. The case of the torture in Pakistan of Salahuddin Amin is key.
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Salahuddin Amin was despatched back to the UK by the Pakistan authorities (after a 10 month detention in Pakistan where he was tortured by the Pakistan SIS with the connivance of the UK spooks), arriving on on 8th February 2005, the very same day that Mohammed Sidique Khan & Shehzad Tanweer arrived back in the UK from Pakistan.
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The testimony that Salahuddin Amin relayed to the Metropolitan Police subsequent to his immediate arrest upon arrival on 8 Feb 2005 was used, alongside the evidence from US al-Qaida ‘supergrass’ Mohammed Junaid Babar to secure the ‘fertiliser plot’ convictions.
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The ‘fertiliser plot’ trial was one of the longest in UK criminal history (Jan 2006 to May 2007), however a major tenet of prosecution evidence was based on evidence received following (UK complicit) torture (albeit undertaken in Pakistan).
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As in all cases of evidence ‘obtained‘ from torture, it is utilised to enact a pre-written script.
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Thank you Craig, for your efforts in highlighting again the ‘UK complicity in torture’ subject.
get that child away from this thread and let him ner hark back!
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-hehehe. “lots of mubarak” is auspicious ?
ROMNEY’S ISRAELI HANDLER – Orit Gadiesh, former “War Room” assistant to Ezer Weizman and Moshe Dayan, is the daughter of Israeli Brigadier General Falk Gadiesh (born Falk Gruenfeld, Berlin, 1921) and his Ukrainian-born wife. Gadiesh is chairman of the management consulting firm Bain & Company, the parent company of Bain Capital, and was the company’s managing director under CEO Mitt Romney in 1992.
Interesting post, wish there were more like it.
People are so asleep that incredible events are washed off as easily as rain drops on your jacket.
I think this whole system could be upgraded, starting by eliminating such ideas as kings and queen, Lords etc. All pure rubbish. There is no such thing as “good old traditions” they should be updated all the time.
A better world is possible and we have to make it so together.
Ken Clarke is ready to betray 800 years of British justice
The security and justice green paper threatens to deprive us of one of the vital traditions of common law
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Henry Porter The Observer, Sunday 15 January 2012
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Four of the earliest surviving copies of the Magna Carta on display at the Bodleian library, Oxford. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
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First, the UK Bill of Rights Commission: has anyone seen it? Are we quite sure it exists in corporeal form? Do we know where its members meet? How come people are forming the impression that the UK Bill of Rights Commission is doing rather less for the public good than a home counties bridge party?
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These questions haunt me because Kenneth Clarke, the secretary of state for justice, the man who set up the commission last spring to investigate a new bill of rights – no doubt with half an eye on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015 – is also responsible for the justice and security green paper, which threatens to deprive us of one of the vital traditions of common law, guaranteed by Magna Carta. You could dignify this with the word irony, but it is just the usual story of politics and hypocrisy. While pacifying those who worry about liberty with a footling commission, composed largely of lawyers from left and right, who cancel each other out, Clarke proposes a vast extension of secrecy in the civil courts and inquests, which will suppress evidence of corruption and negligence in high places, as well as reduce access to justice and the public’s right to know.
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Sometimes, I wonder if Clarke, who is a QC, read the paper before it was published last autumn, because it is arguably more menacing to our legal traditions than anything dreamed up by his predecessor, Jack Straw. But he must have read it. Indeed, the high commands of the major parties have all read and apparently support the proposals that, in the case of the Liberal Democrats, amount to a historic betrayal of the principles of open justice.
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Apart from the Tory MP David Davis, there is barely a whisper of opposition to the shoddy, self-serving and manifestly illiberal measures, which Clarke claims will improve executive accountability and provide “a court system equipped to deal with sensitive material and intelligence services that are able to get on with their job”.
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There you have the lies summarised. Now let’s look at what the proposals will actually mean.
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The most important point is that Clarke will provide a magic cloak of protection for any minister or government agency that wishes to cover up a wrong, most significantly for members of the intelligence services. Under his law, evidence that British officials were involved in the rendition and torture of British resident Binyam Mohammed could have been suppressed. Evidence that emerged last autumn that British spies arranged the rendition of two Libyan opposition figures to Gaddafi’s people for torture may not, if Clarke gets his way, be heard in an open British court, because the minister will be able to declare the material “sensitive” or “against the public interest”.
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Those are vague concepts. Anything can be thus defined: the death of someone in police custody, the contamination resulting from a nuclear accident, the details of a government contract, or security lapses in a government laboratory, to say little of the matter of gentlemen with Muslim names being conveyed to some fetid, bloodstained cellar. Executive accountability will be reduced, not improved.
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Once Clarke’s apparatus is in place, it is likely to encourage a sense of immunity in officials, possibly the idea that they are above the law. The result will be a worse-run country, where the state grows incrementally more heedless and irresponsible – exactly the argument I made against, among other things, Jack Straw’s proposal for secret inquests.
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Over the last six years, I have stressed the dangers of the tendency of illiberal practices to spread through the system, after being introduced to deal with one discrete issue. Following controversy over the deportation of terror suspects, Labour established the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and introduced the “closed material procedure”, which allowed evidence to be withheld from the individual and his legal team. Instead, it was revealed to a special advocate who supposedly protected the individual’s interests, yet wasn’t allowed any contact with him or his lawyers.
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This shameful arrangement spread quickly. In numerous other contexts, the state used the “sensitive” label to make sure that evidence was not disclosed to the other party. Clarke’s innovations will mean that closed material procedures and special advocates will become much more common in civil courts and inquests, denying the public knowledge of the misbehaviour and mistakes of officials – the people we pay for with our taxes. Our servants! It is retrograde and condescending in the extreme, but, worse still, it breaks the promise in Magna Carta, which says: “To no man will we sell, delay or deny justice.”
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Dinah Rose QC summarised the obvious advantage to ministers in her Atkin Memorial lecture last year. The legislation would, she said, “permit courts to try common law claims for damages using a closed material procedure, whenever a government minister, who is, of course, likely to be party to the action, decides that disclosure of particular material would be damaging to national security”.
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We are following America, where the state secrets privilege results in the exclusion of evidence from the proceedings simply on the basis of affidavits delivered to a court by the government, and this is going to make life very difficult for serious journalism in Britain. A response to the green paper from Guardian News and Media, owners of this newspaper, says Clarke’s proposal would have a serious impact on the judicial process, court reporting and public interest journalism. Closed hearings, secret evidence and secret pleadings and judgments will result in the indefinite removal of information from the public domain.
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The green paper is designed almost shamelessly to prevent information concerning such things as British involvement in Binyam Mohammed’s torture reaching us. That motive tells you all you need to know about the rottenness of the proposal and why we should follow the example of the many special advocates who have voiced their opposition.
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Clarke’s fall-back position will probably be to guarantee the intelligence services immunity from scrutiny in open court, but given the absolute lack of opposition in Parliament he may get everything he wants, in which case we will all be worse off.
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Which brings me to the UK Bill of Rights Commission and my conviction that if we are to have a new bill of rights, it is the public who must wrest this process from the lawyers, academics and former civil servants, working away to boost the credentials of politicians at the next election. Just as capitalism needs reform, so do the mechanisms that guarantee freedom, scrutiny and accountability. The English gave Magna Carta to the world 800 years ago; now we need to update it properly.
Link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/15/henry-porter-ken-clarke-bill-of-rights
Many thanks for your efforts. It is only you and people like you who through your courage and fortitude have so far helped block those who seek control.
Please keep up the good work
Check this link to see if you get the same ‘Access Denied’ message. ‘You are not authorised to view this page’.
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http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/george-w-bush-canceled-2011-geneva-lecture-israeli-group-over-torture-arrest
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Hacked or some higher interference??
Mary, from reading the source code, it appears to be blocked efficiently by their own site software. Maybe a mistake or a retraction, or a hack.
‘Piracy’ student loses US extradition battle over copyright infringement
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TVShack’s Richard O’Dwyer faces 10 years in jail for operating website US authorities say hosts links to copyrighted material
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A judge ruled on Friday that a 23-year-old student can be extradited to the United States for running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films, despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws.
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The ruling threw Britain’s contentious extradition treaty with the US, which critics allege is greatly biased against UK nationals fighting their removal to America, under further scrutiny. It came just hours after a businessman from Kent lost an appeal against the decision that he should be sent for trial in Texas for allegedly plotting to send missile components to Iran.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jan/13/piracy-student-loses-us-extradition
Alistair Burt has been in Iraq discussing Saddam’s human rights record with one of the members of the USUKIs stooge government.
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This is what we have brought in human rights. This piece should be read and memorized by Burt.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/16/corruption-iraq-son-tortured-pay
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Corruption in Iraq: ‘Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don’t pay’
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports from Baghdad where families of innocent detainees face extortion from corrupt officials
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Monday 16 January 2012
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Iraqi demonstrators hold pictures of missing relatives during a weekly protest against corruption. Photograph: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images
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The walls of Um Hussein’s living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.
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Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.
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She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.
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Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.
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Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.
“We waited until they brought him,” she said. “His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn’t know him from the torture. He wasn’t my son, he was someone else. I cried: ‘Your mother dies for you, my dear son.’ I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn’t let me see him again.
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“I have lost four. I told them I wouldn’t lose this one.”
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What saddens me about the Iraq type of situation is that at base, it is Iraqi people killing Iraqi people. Of course, the USA/UK bears enormous responbility for what they did over a period of years and there are no doubt people setting off bombs just to stoke sectarian hatred and violence. I read recently that it is alleged that Israel is supplying the Sunni fundamentalist paramilitary in south-eatern Iran to attack the Iranian regime. So all this goes on, as one would expect. But ultimately, we have to face the fact that Arab people are torturing and killing Arab people (and we can guess what will happen to the Alawites in Syria when the regime there falls). The Christians, who’d been there since the Year Dot, nearly all ran away from Iraq after 2003 because they were being killed by other Iraqis. Saudi Arabia versus Iran is the fixture, with NATO as coach and ref. A bloody game with a trophy of skulls.
Utterly amazing Craig. I can’t add to that except that Evan Harris is a weasel. Thanks.