A week ago Wikileaks released the transcript of a meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, together with a number of other liberal establishment figures from the USA. This transcript is an important read. Assange has been portrayed in the media as a crazed pantomime villain. The reflective and thoughtful person who emerges from these transcripts is not perhaps what people accept. I also find it encouraging that a major CEO like Schmidt himself comes over as a genuine thinker, with liberal instincts.
But I want to focus rather narrowly on one point. Assange talks at length of his disappointment at the presentation of the State Department cables by Wikileaks’ mainstream media partners. In relation to the Guardian, among other things he says this:
“The Guardian redacted two thirds of a cable about Bulgarian crime, removed all the names of the people who had infiltrated – the mafioso – who had infiltrated the Bulgarian government. Removed a description of the Kazakstan elite, which said that the Kazakstan elite in general were corrupt, not even a particular name, just in general! Removed a description that a an energy company out of Italy operating in Kazakhstan was corrupt, so they have redacted for naming of individual names of people who might be unfairly put at risk, just like we do–that is what we require of them. They have redacted the names of mafioso, individual mafioso because they are worried that they might get sued for libel in London by this mafioso. They have redacted the names… they have redacted the description of a class of Kazakhstan elite, a class has been corrupt, and they have redacted descriptions of individual companies being corrupt because they don’t want to expose themselves to any risk at all.”
This is true, but not the whole story. At that time, I was trying without success to persuade Wikileaks to let me in to the cables in my are of expertise pre-publication, to assist with editing those on Africa and Central Asia to remove any risk to individuals. I was not able to do this because of Wikileaks’ exclusive deal with the newspapers, whom I thought they trusted to a remarkable degree.
A very senior figure ar the Guardian once said to me that “It should not be underestimated how far Rusbridger saw himself as an intrinsic part of The Project ” – The Project being Tony Blair’s plan to move the old Labour Party to a neo-con position and continue the Thatcher revolution (not that they called it that, even to themselves. Modernisation, Third Way etc.) Rusbridger, Michael White, Polly Toynbee, Andrew Rawnsley remain to this day fully paid up Blairites, and the Guardian continually, to this day, give a platform to Blair and Alistair Campbell, and publish article after article about how great is his legacy and how much he still has to contribute. I can’t bring myself to the emetic task of looking any of the offending articles up – perhaps people can kindly link to some in comments!
For several years now, a major stream of the massive Blair income has come from advisory and PR work for the murderous dictatorship of Kazakhstan – a government which massacres striking miners, which might be of interest to Blair’s former constituents. When I met Alistair Campbell in November he had recently come back from Kazahstan.
Julian Assange was quite right to infer that protecting themselves from possible libel suits had caused The Guardian to redact accounts of corrupt individuals. But that can hardly have accounted for the Guardian redacting a US Embassy observation that the ruling elite of Kazakhstan are corrupt as a class. Now what concern for the image of Kazakhstan might have led Alan Rusbridger to do that?
Pelfrey
Politics is conspiracy. Enough said.
Jon Pelfrey,
The FBI call them “sting” rather than “agent provocateur” operations, and there is absolutely no doubt as to their existence. Look up La Guardia or Cleveland terrorist plots.
You seem to understand an implication in “agent provocateur” that the crime is meant actually to occur. No, in these instances it is meant to be thwarted and the people convicted. Nobody is meant to get killed. The moral dubiety is whether the gullible victims would ever have moved into crime had they not been encouraged to it by the authorities.
If you keep running these “stings”, to use the FBI’s own term, there is an obvious danger that someone who has been encouraged to violence will actually commit it, going a route other than the particular one the FBI were trying to steer him down.
Why you would imagine it is nuts to think that, is genuinely beyond my comprehension.
My Jihadi Muslim friend has threatened to kill me on several occasions for not responding in the way he is being paid to steer me down. It started with general threats that a hadith says that you should kill collaborators/spies before you kill the enemy. Well, Al-Qaida have been openly working with/for NATO since Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Why don’t they kill themselves?
Then we moved on to a situation where he had been trying to convince me for a very long time that he was poor and had nowhere to put his family, in order to draw me to his sting through sympathy, but when I put some money to the cause he boasted about his 200,000 pound house which he had had for ages.
Then I realised that he must have been an old player in the political game of selling fellow Muslims to the incumbent dictator and he sent me an email indicating that the engineer who spoke about the knot in the mechanism of the gallows was the one who got his head chopped off.
Then he arranged for me to get a job in a Muslim company which used its corporate good reputation to blacklist me in this country and abroad. Now he has threatened both my mother and mother-in-law in terms that I continue to refuse to co-operate with his efforts to recruit me to the Zionist/Islamist cause, he would let me go for now, much like leaving an animal to grow until it was ready for slaughter.
My conclusion is that those who play macro-politics are also playing micro-politics inside the families of the people they are trying to sting. Politics is always about the self and the ego, and people who engage in it find themselves unable to convince their fellow human beings by either food and compliments or logical argument and historical/textual evidence.
They therefore turn to others with similarly frustrated egos, whether they be of the same ideology or a completely different one, anything so long as those who are operating by truth and decency are de-railed. The political ego turns from its own rationale/ narrative to others with completely opposite ideas in order to execute its will. Hence con-spiracy, opposite narratives working together to dis-rupt and destroy truthfulness.
The concoction is always virtually impossible to de-cipher logically. And that is because it is a conglomeration of opposing ideas, welded together by a common desire for power.
Don’t forget that the other half of “the Project” was tying in Paddy Ashdown’s Lib Dems to the neocon agenda – and that Charles Kennedy’s leadership was moving the party in the other direction (note that he was the one that stuck his neck out over Iraq), right up until he was brought down.
Was Charles an alcoholic? Yes. Was it stopping him being an effective leader? A much harder question.
As for Paddy, he got undermined by his party from within in 1997-99 and jumped before he was pushed. People who led that movement, like Donnachadh McCarthy, are a major reason why there was one political party that was opposed to the Iraq War – Paddy would, unquestionably, have been in favour.
Richard Gadsden
Thank you for popping up and illustrating exactly what I said above with the example you gave about opposing minds agreeing to work together against truth. I once had the priveledge of having Paddy Ashdown in my ( chauffeur ) car. I was hoping/expecting to be able to have a conversation however brief, which I normally used to manage to get with most of my customers, if they weren’t busy or tired. He was about the only customer I ever had who held himself aloft above the level of the mere driver of a car. Extraordinary pride.
Guano; That kind of shit is, well, it pisses me off. Imagine some guy in a schwarma booth trying to feed his family and maintain the faith of his fathers being coerced by those whom he is supposed to respect with honor.
These people need to be shafted in the most dishonorable means available.
Ah, Mr Gadsden (I googled): a decent lib dem. Thanks for the contribution. Looking back, the removal of Charles Kennedy certainly paved the way for all this: interesting that he had ‘overwhelming’ support from grassroots party members but was shafted by MPs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4590688.stm
Was there any proof that his drinking had affected either his judgement or capability in general? I don’t remember any.
Oh, I see: although, reading the actual story, the headline should have been ‘How rumours and gossip destroyed Charles Kennedy’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-517736/How-drink-destroyed-Charles-Kennedy-Menzies-Campbell.html
Jon Pelfrey
28 Apr, 2013 – 6:59 pm
“Hey Murray, 90% of your commenters are conspiracy nuts, believing in conspiracies that you quite often do not believe in, but it doesn’t help matters that you assert that the Boston bombings could have been one of the many FBI agent provocateur plots. Do you know what a mad hatter you sound like when you write such things? It completely wipes out anything wise you might have said in the past.”
Jon are you saying that the FBI, or for that matter, the CIA or the police, do not engage in agent provocateur activities?
Sorry to be boring but I left out an important part of the game my Muslim Jihadi friend played with me inside my personal life. Let anyone who finds themselves on the doorstep of the true religion of Islam beware, that inside its doors your only friend will be Allah. If you turn for help to its occupants 99% of them will sell you out and only 1% will be your friends, not my words but the spontaneous words of a Syrian man I happened to meet recently while looking at a van. Nobody is talking about how much the Syrian people are feeling betrayed by NATO / AlQaida. They are replacing one form of dictatorship with another nasty psychological form, using spying and exposure.
My lovely friend used to get me relaxed with dirty jokes and long conversations about my sufferings at the hands of ex-wife who deprived me of the pleasure of my young children, and my house, workshop and sanity by starting an affair with my now deceased nextdoor neighbour. My friend would fill my mind with dirty jokes and salacious advice about sexual relations inside Islam. He would tease me for being naive and trusting my former partner, He would lure me into thinking about things which are inappropriate talk amongst Muslims.
But little known to me he was simultaneously spying on me, which we do not expect or appreciate in UK culture. In fact we think this spying is reserved for politicians and celebrities. In Islam it is used to blackmail you to following certain ideas. The information gathered is carefully divulged to different sections of the community who used to be your friends, and to your Muslim and non-Muslim family. The Arabic word for this is Qiyanat/ betrayal of your honour.
Islam is the true religion, taught by all the prophets from Adam to Muhammad peace and blessings be upon them all together. But warnings to those who knock on Allah’s door and ask for guidance, when you are given the truth of the true religion of Islam, every grudge-laden Muslim wherever you travel in the world , is dying to expose your faith to trials and test its endurance. That is a matter which is ordained and mentioned by Allah in His Holy Qur’an. Surah The Spider.
In this country, in this time, in this blog, in this moment, praise be to God, we have a thing which the British people fought for by war and civil war, freedom of speech. There but for fortune I could very easily been drawn down the road that the Chechyen brothers have done. If I had been in the US, or if Craig Murray had not stood up for the UK right of freedom of speech, to challenge the use of torture in the War on Terror, and if he had not passed on that freedom, which few blogs do, to the ordinary contibutors, which he did today to Tony Opmoc, I would definitely have been scammed into a Boston Marathon scenario by now.
Let everyone on this planet know, whether they be Muslim or non-Muslim, that Al Qaida / NATO, the self-opposing agents of the Zionist New World Order, detest the freedom of speech which Craig Murray has had the generosity of heart and depth of intellect to provide to his readers here. Mary has recently been spied on in the privacy of her home and derided publicly just for collating items of interest to Craig’s readers. This bullying has been concerted and determined and she has been forced to stop contributing here.
The very existence of Truth depends on truth being spoken. The plan of the New World Order including the Muslim Brotherhood’s new Islam under Mursi in Egypt is to deprive humanity of its human right of human expression. Anybody who thinks that the Syrian people are going to be bombed, starved, raped, bribed by bread or murdered into giving up their human right to human expression, had better get another idea.
Richard Gadsden
28 Apr, 2013 – 9:32 pm
“Was Charles [Kennedy] an alcoholic? Yes. Was it stopping him being an effective leader? A much harder question.”
Not really a hard question.
Winston Churchill was undoubtedly an alcoholic and there is much anecdotal evidence that Mrs Thatcher needed a “stiffener” to get her through the day.
The “establishment” wanted the anti-war Kennedy out of the picture and the MSM played their part.
Charles Kennedy was then knifed in the back by the LibDem “orange bookers” that now form part of the Tory government.
Guano,
I don’t doubt your sincerity, but this is quite amazing
“Mary has recently been spied on in the privacy of her home”
How come? Who said so?
“she has been forced to stop contributing here”
Oh I don’t think so, Guano. She’s using another name, that’s all. [IMHO]
Doug,
I liked Charles Kennedy. But I don’t think your post at 11.14pm actually answers the question
“Was it stopping him being an effective leader?”
Gone – ‘night
Dreoilin
A youngster at work described to me a few years ago how he and a mate logged into a young lady’s computer, as engineers will do if you request help from your broadband service provider, then took control of her camera , screen and search facility. Mary commented recently that it appeared to her that someone had been logging her movements which she felt was rather weird. This seems to me to be the likely reason.
You may have noticed that I recently gave salam to Habbabkuk. That is because it has become clear to me that the best disguise for one of these socially-isolated, Al Qaida-supporting, freedom of speech-haters to disrupt this blog is the kind of Hasbara fruit-cake gasbag fart that Halitosisbollocks has become.
You turned up and seemed to stick the knife in to Mary which wasn’t welcome but you did it in your own name which makes it bearable.
What is the point of addressing an audience incognito? I can see why Horlicksballs uses a false personality. He can be deeply insulting and personal, and somebody else gets the blame.
Jon Palfrey,
By my reckoning you only appear here every 6 days or so to riff a couple of random meaningless playground posts at,Craig,and this blog.
Are you on overtime in a hurry or just being that dumb on your own coin?
We’ve seen your type before on this blog Jon.You rarely last more than 6 weeks.
The proper followers of this blog have been here for many years.
The hired help-such as you-rarely have the stamina of continuum and integrity to survive here in a longevity of Truth.
Now go away,you silly transient sockpuppet.
Murray, yes, the FBI engages in “stings,” and I’m thankful that they did so with respect to the Cleveland plot. That involved degenerates who had already developed an ideology geared to terrorism. I’m glad that the FBI did not wait for them to kill. I’m not sure what kind of people could be talked into blowing up bridges with fake explosives, but no one I know would ever do that. Of course, you might have a different perspective, as the company you keep on this blog is full of hateful scoundrels and conspiracy nuts and gullible losers.
And once again, that you have bought into the agent provocateur conspiracy without any evidence is further support for the British Left having a lot in common with the American Right. Don’t worry – your opinion is being aired over here. The ghost of Timothy McVeigh has your back.
‘Right or left’ John:
We are conspiring to help everybody.
Liberal John.
O/T A new film by John Pilger is being released and will be shown on ITV.
http://johnpilger.com/articles/new-john-pilger-film-utopia-to-be-broadcast-on-itv-and-released-worldwide
Since last night 450 comments have been posted on the Guardian’s copy of the same article.
Australia’s boom is anything but for its Aboriginal people
The story of the first Australians is still poverty and humiliation, while their land yields the world’s biggest resources boom
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/28/australia-boom-aboriginal-story-despair
Is Rawnsley a Blairite? I liked his books on the Labour government, they certainly provide masses of ammunition for its opponents, especially in relation to the runup to the Iraq war.
Guano,
“A youngster at work described to me a few years ago how he and a mate logged into a young lady’s computer, as engineers will do if you request help from your broadband service provider, then took control of her camera , screen and search facility.
Mary commented recently that it appeared to her that someone had been logging her movements which she felt was rather weird. This seems to me to be the likely reason.”
I wouldn’t let my imagination run away with me, if I were you, Guano. There is no evidence at all that what you describe happened to Mary, and she neither said nor hinted that anyone had taken over her computer. Or been in her house ‘fixing’ her computer. Or anything at all along those lines.
Mary did say she thought her daily activities were being logged, which I thought at the time was ludicrous. She herself had made reference to several activities – being out walking the dog, being out swimming, and either being at a concert the night before, or that she was planning to go to one that night. All on different days, at different times.
One or more of these activities was mentioned by one or more posters, later, and it seemed to me that if Mary had forgotten that she had mentioned them, she might wonder how people knew about them. And it might explain her remark about people “logging her daily activities”. Anyone trying to ‘log’ her daily activities from her posts here would have a very hard job doing so. And why would they bother? In order to follow her to the concert and bop her on the head in the foyer? Why? Because she supports the Palestinians? Guano, there are thousands (if not millions) around the net supporting the Palestinians, and if anyone was trying to bop them all on the head, they’d have an impossible job ahead of them.
I’ve crossed swords with Ofir Gendelman (Netanyahu’s Arabic spokesman) on Twitter, regarding anti-semitism. And I’ve been attacked (verbally) by a mad American who said I should be “shot in the face” because I said I saw nothing ‘heroic’ in the killing of Osama bin Laden. But I don’t lie awake at night worrying about those things, Guano. If I did, I’d never open my mouth online.
“You turned up and seemed to stick the knife in to Mary which wasn’t welcome but you did it in your own name which makes it bearable.”
I didn’t “stick the knife” into anyone, although that’s how Mary described it, if I remember correctly. I said I agreed with someone who said that D Scorgie and Mary didn’t have a monopoly on sympathizing with victims of violence. How is that “sticking the knife in”? It’s not even criticism – of Scorgie or Mary. And anyway, if I had criticised either of them, isn’t that allowed? Don’t you criticise people here? Or at least, criticise what they say?
[Surely you have seen some of the terrible ding-dong battles that go on in blog comments, people throwing abuse at each other. Frothing at the mouth as they bang away on their keyboards, quite possibly in their underwear or pyjamas. Stuff they wouldn’t dream of saying to a person’s face. It doesn’t happen here, Guano. But if even mild criticism is going to attract descriptions like “sticking the knife in” then I don’t know what will become of this place.]
People used the word “stalking” in reference to people picking on Mary’s comments. I was going to object, as “stalking” has a particular meaning in real life. And if Mary was being stalked in real life then she should have gone to the police. But she wasn’t being stalked, not in my book. She was being picked on. Her comments were being watched and she was often asked to explain them, or expand on them. And mostly she ignored these requests. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant for her. Quite sure. But anyone who gets involved in blog comments has to be prepared for some rough and tumble. It took me a while to get used to it myself.
However, after making a big to-do about leaving, I believe Mary’s back again, posting as “April Showers”. So I’m not worried about her. And I don’t retract anything I’ve said here, ever. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. Always.
Thanks for that long piece dreolin, what is its purpose? if not to re-open healing wounds. Has it escaped you that Habby’s single minded focus was on her?
Do you think we have not noticed that Mary is back under a new name?
I have used the term cyber stalking in relation to ‘it’s single minded focus on Mary and I stand by it, make of it what you will.
As many here I’m looking forward to the first real contribution of our resident it.
Dreoilin
I merely stated that it is easy for anybody with the knowhow to do it to watch you from your computer’s camera. Why twist my words into another meaning? weird.
“Thanks for that long piece dreolin, what is its purpose?”
I think its purpose was clear. I was replying to Guano, as you know, Nevermind, Guano who said that, “Mary has recently been spied on in the privacy of her home” — which I thought was plain wrong. And might put others off commenting here.
“Has it escaped you that Habby’s single minded focus was on her?”
No.
“Do you think we have not noticed that Mary is back under a new name?”
Guano said, “she has been forced to stop contributing here”. So I don’t know who has noticed what, Nevermind.
“I have used the term cyber stalking in relation to ‘it’s single minded focus on Mary and I stand by it”
I was referring to people who said she had been “stalked”, not cyber-stalked. (And I suspect that cyber-stalking involves more than simply focussing on a person’s comments. But never mind.)
And if you don’t mean “thanks” for a piece, don’t say “thanks”, Nevermind. I don’t appreciate the insincerity.
Wikipedia:
‘Cyberstalking is the use of the Internet or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual, a group of individuals, or an organization. It may include the making of false accusations or statements of fact (as in defamation), monitoring, making threats, identity theft, damage to data or equipment, the solicitation of minors for sex, or gathering information that may be used to harass’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking
*************
“I merely stated that it is easy for anybody with the knowhow to do it to watch you from your computer’s camera.”
No, Guano, you said more than that. See above.
Dreoilin
In these troubled times, I think it is better to assume that the contributers are sane, and the system corrupt rather than the other way round. You assume that Mary has forgotten what she commented earlier. My assumption is that Mary is robust enough to know the difference between a feeling of being observed and what she herself mentioned here. When people hack into your phone or computer, they only gain an element of power over you if they leave traces of their activity. The powers that be hack into all our activity all the time. No problem, they do not try to disturb us or leave traces of their interference. They only want to observe.
My suspicion is that the feeling of malicious intent which Mary described came from 1/ Habbabkuk having a malicious intent 2/ Hisposing as a Hasbara Troll when he is in fact an anti-freedom of speech Muslim Troll and 3/ He also has a knowledge about computers that enabled him to observe and disturb.
I know several brothers in the Muslim community who are obsessed with controlling their wives’ and children’s use of computers, who do not use wifi so that they can check the history on individual computers, I know Muslims who pick up the second phone when their family are talking. I’m not talking here about state activity, I’m talking about the activity of electronic stalking by psychologically strange people. It happens. It’s here.
Hand in glove –
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238071/Kazakhstan-dictator-axes-paper-critical-Blairs-8million-job-adviser.html
“if not to re-open healing wounds”
I didn’t bring up the subject, Nevermind. Guano did: 28 Apr, 2013 – 10:46 pm
Dreoilin
You can read anything into anything. Weird.
The Mail, the Spectator and I agree on one thing – Blair. Some background.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7360458/mr-blair-goes-to-kazakhstan/
Jon Pelfrey, “. . . the company you keep on this blog is full of hateful scoundrels and conspiracy nuts and gullible losers.”
You need to read some history. What they taught you at school was wrong. America is not great! Neither was the British Empire, though they taught me at school that Rothschild-funded imperialists, like Cecil Rhodes, were great. Both empires left in their wake, and are leaving in their wakes, countless innocent deaths. Worst of all, and I am sure that you will agree with this if you have children, is the cowardice of Americans, who sit behind joysticks in the safety of air-conditioned offices killing and maiming children, women and men thousands of miles away from the US. Though Americans, and to a lesser extent the British, have always been cowards this is the ultimate in cowardice. The first settlers shot with muskets the indigenous hunters and gatherers of North America who only had bows and arrows with which to defend themselves. It was racist. Movies portrayed the cowboys as the ‘goodies’ and native Americans as the ‘baddies’. In their next racist abomination for two-hundred years they enslaved black Africans who had nothing with which to defend themselves except the mighty and powerful words of Martin Luther King, which won for them a degree of freedom. Now there is a racist ‘War on Islam’ wrongly described as a ‘War on Terror’. My only conclusion is that most of the really good Americans were shot in the back in some gross indecent act to leave at the helm of government the latest bunch of cowardly cowboys.
Let that be your first lesson in re-learning history. All the experienced comment-makers on this blog had to re-learn history. It is why we seem in your blinkered vision to be “hateful scoundrels and conspiracy nuts and gullible losers”. We don’t wake up every morning and sing the national anthem any more. When you look inwardly and stop singing “God Bless America” you might start to see yourselves as others see you.
“You can read anything into anything. Weird.”
I didn’t have to read anyting into anything, Guano. You stated, “Mary has recently been spied on in the privacy of her home” – for which you have no evidence at all.