Here at last is a good working version of my Straight Talk Interview with Occupy News Network. It shows what I might have said on Newsnight had Gavin Esler and Joan Smith been concerned to hear what I had to say, rather than stop me from saying it.
With many thanks to Occupy News Network, and to Michael for overcoming the video problems.
Macky,
Thanks for the Scott Ritter post.
Fascinating and important.
See how low the evil bastards go.
Vronsky,
“More seriously, you say that Hague was pressured by the US. Can you guess what form this pressure would have taken?”
I’m no expert but id imagine they’d start with national economic threats,then geo-political then threatening access and influence.
Failing that they’d become personal.Sexual if necessary.
I sense that for many a year there isn’t a single person in UK politics who’s got to the top without CIA vettting/approval.Long before they get there they are either vetted/approved or have enough blackmailable info on them for future use if the CIA deem it necessary.
Just a thought mind.
@Macky — Thanks for posting the info on Scott Ritter. I didn’t know. I saw him speak years ago in Escondido when he was promoting his book Target: Iran. It was a packed audience grateful to hear someone with authority speaking out against Bush’s and Cheney’s trumped up warmongering, trying to stop another war before it happened. He took the Constitution and citizenship seriously and challenged us to as well. I thought he was a hero and was sorry later to hear of the sex charges and conviction but didn’t know the particulars — didn’t want to go looking either. Heavy heart.
Your description of his trial fits what I’ve come to expect as common for courts here, which is shameful. To me it all comes down to juries, what they’re allowed to hear of the truth, and what they’re allowed to know of their duty and power, which is, not much anymore. We’re dumbed down. A retired professor got prosecuted recently for handing out Fully Informed Jury Association leaflets in front of a New York courthouse. He was acquitted, but only because they couldn’t prove he had directly influenced any specific juror in a specific trial, not because the information he was sharing was in fact true. Things are so ludicrous now that the attorney general Eric Holder actually says due process need not be in a court, just some process, someplace, sometime. He sucks. They all suck. As Craig said, “a complete bloody disgrace.” I bet Scott Ritter could run rings around them in a citizenship test.
The part of Craig’s interview that struck me the most was his telling of the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest and Clive Ponting’s trial, where the juries returned verdicts contrary to the judge’s instructions. I’ll bet the LAST thing the UK or US governments want for Assange or for anybody they prosecute is a fair trial with an informed jury. And that says it all.
How is it that Sweden has secret trials without juries? That was news to me.
Thanks again.
Interesting stuff about Scott Ritter. I knew almost nothing about it. I’m not proud of my ignorance, so will read up. However, the usual media outlets seem not to have covered the story at all. I genuinely can’t recall even one article on the subject. Macky’s post is interesting for sure., but surely a journalist can find out the same information without too much effort? Ah, but media outlets are, first and foremost, heirarchies. Disapproval from The Boss – no, actually, it’s probably more like sly mockery and subtle put-downs – is a powerful tool. It strikes me that the world of journalism is actually the same hyper-competitive, ruthless, money-orientated world as Wall Street, or Microsoft. The Good people are sacked or sidelined, and the rest prosper.
Still, we have the internet now. For it’s many flaws, the critical reader can still glean from the web much of interest, and learn to dismiss that which is not.
Not a lot of people know this! Could you make it up? Similar with ‘Dr’ Patel in the Ian Tomlinson case.
Shorrock was the pathologist ‘selected’ for the post mortem of Jean Charles de Menezes.
EXPERTS
Surgical precision?
Private Eye March 2007
THE Home Office pathologist called in to investigate the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot by police at Stockwell tube station, has been found guilty of serious professional misconduct.
When Dr Kenneth Shorrock (pictured) was approached to carry out the de Menezes autopsy, he was about to face a General Medical Council disciplinary hearing: his alterations to a post mortem report in another case had led to a surgeon being accused of manslaughter after a patient bled to death.
The GMC heard that in his first report on Gladys Allen, 78, Dr Shorrock, then a consultant pathologist at the Royal Halifax Hospital, said she had been given “necessary surgery” by locum consultant urologist Hurais Ramis Syed. He said there was “no definite evidence of any avoidable deficiency in the medical or surgical treatment that she received”.
But Shorrock produced a second report after the coroner asked him “to reconsider his findings”, in which he deleted the sentence clearing the surgeon of blame and wrote: “Likely that death was contributed to by inadvertence, both before and during the operation.” He also changed his witness statement from “left renal artery had been transacted close to its origin”, to “a hole in the aorta where the stump of the aorta would normally be found”. Mr Syed was charged with manslaughter but cleared at Leeds Crown Court in 2003.
In its ruling, the GMC panel found the changes were “unprofessional, inconsistent, unreasonable, inappropriate and not based upon the medical and pathological information available to him; and that they were likely to bring the medical profession into disrepute”. Of course Dr Shorrock also put a statement that was not based upon “medical or pathological information” in his report on de Menezes: he said the Brazilian had leapt over the ticket barriers while being chased by police – something which turned out not to be true.
However, after hearing that Dr Shorrock had changed his working practices, had carried out 115 further autopsies without complaint, and had the support of his colleagues, the GMC panel decided he should not be struck off or suspended. Instead, Dr Shorrock was given a reprimand. So that’s all right then.
http://www.whale.to/a/shorrock.html
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-sweden-8-big-problems-with-the-case-against-assange-by-naomi-wolf/
I am concerned that there has been a travesty of justice for Assange but I am also concerned that messy re-telling of facts by some journalists/writers and posters just muddies matters and alienates would-be-supporters. Someone on this site posted a link to a video purporting to show 50% of reports of rape to the Police are false. I could understand the ‘maths’ to that (not that I am mathematical) but to go on to say ‘but I believe blah blah blah and then to say ‘therefore 90% of these claims are false is reprehensible. Opinion is not statistics. Here I am annoyed at all these ‘rape apologist’ articles which seem to be acting like a ‘smokescreen’ that muddies matters (though it is a despicable thing and not that I am blaming people who seem to be expressing themselves rather clumsily and not realising) and then I see something as horrendous as that video. Balance, balance, balance … Rational support and objectivity is of the essence.
You remember that Archbishop Tutu pulled out of a seminar in Johannesburg at which Blair was collecting yet more shekels.
He has now written this in the Observer today.
Why I had no choice but to spurn Tony Blair
I couldn’t sit with someone who justified the invasion of Iraq with a lie
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/02/desmond-tutu-tony-blair-iraq
‘On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague.’
Tutu names Bush and Blair. He gets the number of dead in Iraq wrong. He quotes the Iraq Body Count study. The Lancet study produced a much higher number.
http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-reveals-extent-of-lapdoggery-from-swedish-govt-on-copyright-monopoly/
‘Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests.’
/…
I had thought it was evident from the context, but when I said:
““Rape is the one crime where you are never allowed to challenge the evidence of the accusers”
I meant in public discourse rather than in the courtroom.
To campaign effectively against a miscarriage of justice in a rape case is near impossible because, unlike in a murder or robbery case, the media and the gatekeepers of political correctness will not permit you to publicise and investigate the evidence and the circumstances surrounding the accusers – even their identities.
@Mary Thanks for that link. Those cables shed some interesting light on how US embassies operate to assert control over other countries, on the orders of big business.
Nonetheless the ‘Pirate Party’ in Sweden is a strange animal. Their leader’s website.
Helm of the Observer finds Archbishop Tutu’s call for Bush and Blair to go The Hague ‘startling’.
‘But it is Tutu’s call for Blair and Bush to face justice in The Hague that is most startling. Claiming that different standards appear to be set for prosecuting African leaders and western ones, he says the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict is sufficient on its own for Blair and Bush to be tried at the ICC.’
Not at all startling to us, the 99%, Mr Helm.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/sep/02/tony-blair-iraq-war-desmond-tutu
800 comments there already. It was posted just after midnight.
Thanks, Me In Us, for the transcript – very helpful. Thanks Craig, for the chilling clarity.
and thanks Mark Golding, for that link – excellent!
The headline from Tutu in the Observer is one of the most cheering things I’ve seen for a long time. Let’s hope it encourages others, as Craig is doubtless doing (my godmother was a nurse in South Africa, and a friend of Tutu’s – I feel somehow proud)
I like Craig’s style of quiet insistence in this interview, it is appropriate to an interview in his garden and also connotes a mature sanity and sense of humanity. The speech in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy was a different situation and in my view, Craig rose to the occasion.
.
Agreed, Technicolour and Mary, Tutu is a wonderfully courageous and honest man. I’ve only had one direct interaction with him – while co-editing a book of writing by South African and Scottish writers – and it was overwhelmingly positive.
@Craig – I’ve just read the interview transcript. Much better than watching the video! Another case of jurors standing up against the judge was the Michael Randle and Pat Pottle case in 1991. They were the blokes who helped spring George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs in the 1960s.
(Blake was an MI6 officer who turned against his employers because of the western war crimes he witnessed in the Korean war. He became a Soviet triple agent, but MI6 thought he was their double. The fact that MI6 knew he was in touch with the KGB, and were encouraging him, was kept quiet at his trial.)
Randle and Pottle were known to the authorities for many years, but got prosecuted more than 20 years later when it was considered opportune. The judge said they had no defence.
Hopefully some readers will find the following information useful…
There are various things that barristers aren’t allowed to tell juries, but people representing themselves are.
These include prosecution offers to plea bargain. If you’re a defendant and the prosecution offer you a deal, your barrister isn’t allowed to tell the jury – but you are.
Sometimes your barrister isn’t allowed to mention the fact that there was a relevant previous trial, but that doesn’t stop the defendant from mentioning it.
One very important thing that a defendant can tell a jury is the legal fact that an English jury can find someone not guilty even if they are certain they did the act they’re accused of, and even directly against the judge’s orders – indeed even if the person has admitted everything but said he did it to hinder the war effort, for example, or to expose some other injustice. In such circumstances, the judge can say they have absolutely no defence whatsoever, but the jury can tell the judge to shove it.
An English jury has an absolute right to acquit a defendant, against anything that anyone else has said about anything – including the judge.
Anyway, Randle and Pottle sacked their barristers, told the jury what their barristers wouldn’t have been allowed to, and the jury said not guilty. 21 years later, I remember my joy at hearing the verdict.
I noticed that in your interview you say “it’s basically a government decision not just which judges get appointed but allocating judges to particular cases.”
Yes indeed. Control the allocation of cases to judges and you control a country’s judiciary.
One of the themes in a few of the books by people who’ve written about MI6 critically from personal experience is the existence of judges and other lawyers in the UK who are on the MI6 payroll…
It seems to me that if more information were revealed about that, the cat would really be put among the corrupt pigeons…
Just tried the video again, but there was ‘an error occured whilst loading’ message. Has it been tampered with?
Nevermind, working here just now. In any case, the full transcript has gone up on a new post – so anyone with persisting video problems can just read it.
Thanks again to Me In Us who kindly supplied the text.
“There was an error encountered while loading this video.”
Hi Jon and Craig, I’m so glad you were able to use the transcript. But you should thank Michael Stephenson as well because without his Vimeo video I never could have seen anything to transcribe. ONN’s website is pretty useless, for me anyway. Best wishes.
P.S. Buenos Aires, oops.
It was totally obvious that Craig Murray meant ‘in public discourse’ when saying it was impossible to challenge the evidence in cases of rape etc. Anyone who missed this can’t have been listening or must have been trying to miss it.
BTW – David Allen Green has another rehash of ‘his myths and zombie facts’ piece in New Statesman. More repetitive obfuscation and no apology for the blatant errors in the earlier piece.
DAGs ability to miss the point and try to present it all as some technical legal niceties is mind boggling. He can’t be that stupid surely?
“It was totally obvious that Craig Murray meant ‘in public discourse’ when saying it was impossible to challenge the evidence in cases of rape etc.”
Agreed, which I was surprised that he take the bait & felt that he actually needed to clarify it the way he did; he would have done better correcting his mistake of stating that the Ritter entrapment officer was female, as if people can see that he is getting such basics wrong, it tends to lessen the credibility of point he was trying to make.
Joe Emersberger has posted on Z Blogs (& MediaLens) about DAG latest smoke-screening exercise:
http://www.zcommunications.org/is-david-allen-green-a-rape-apologist-by-joe-emersberger
Macky, the “retro” comments option is now installed. Check a long thread, and let me know if there’s any probs.
@Jon, just seen this, and yes it seems to work, so many thanks; just hope that others users will find it useful for ctr f searching.