Trenchant criticism of the UK by the United Nations over its human rights record would have been major news in the pre-Blair days. One of Blair’s “achievements”, which in the 1990s I should have thought impossible, was to win the acceptance by the public and the media of the practice of torture and other gross abuses by the state.
Ian Cobain continues his dogged work on the subject, and everyone should read his report. The lack of prominence accorded to it on the Guardian’s website is telling. I should acknowledge that for some reason Ian has conceived a serious dislike of me; he remains one of the few mainstream journalists worth reading. Pilger, Fisk, Oborne, Cockburn, Cobain, Milne – that’s about it for those I look forward to reading.
I am speaking today at a rally for Bradley Manning outside the US Embassy. I was reflecting, that when I leaked a few secret telegrams on UK complicity in torture, despite many threats the government did not prosecute me under the Official Secrets Act because they did not want the publicity. Today, under the Justice and Security Act, I would be tried in secret, would have still been in jail now, and anybody who reported the facts of the case would have suffered the same fate.
Government Seeks Life for Manning; Hammond Could Face Ten Years
Michael Ratner: The [US] government uses a sledge hammer to go after “truth tellers” Bradley Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Julian Assange.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/16695-government-seeks-life-for-manning-hammond-could-face-ten-years
I agree with your sentiment about journalism. But Glenn Greenwald is also wonderful, and a very welcome addition to the pack.
The comments on this article are extremely interesting – the British public are getting wise. Unfortunately, it seems to me when comments are overwhelmingly against the government the comment section gets closed down.
Craig, the tide is turning. You, Glenn Greenwald, Kevin Gosztola, Marcy Wheeler, Rainey Reitman, Trevor Timm, Chris Hedges, Alexa O’Brien, and many others are hammering away day-after-day and will in the end finally be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
We in Austraia are seeing major shifts aimed at covering or compensating for previous failures. The two mainstream parties have been busy creating new laws to hide their deceit, google “secrecy-law-veils-mp-perks-20130531” and even are attempting to vote themselves special funding to ensure their re-election, google “backbenchers-turn-against-cash-for-votes-deal” but are being exposed and defeated at every turn.
The tide is turning, transparency, and voices like yours are hastening the turn.
Keep up the good work.
Flaggery will get you everywhere.
Oh the benefits of the WoT, directly the result of the hysteria generated over the
THRUSH*al kaidy along with it’s worldwide franchise (more branches than you can shake a stick at) manned by the hoards of Taaayyyyyrrrrreesrrist. Hatching away its dastardly plots to destroy our “values”. Resulting in the conclusion; clearly we have no other alternative; we must destroy our “values” before those “Muslims Extremist Scum” can destroy these and force us all to speak “Sharia” and eat “halal” stuff!Fucking pitiful, the Cointelpro II has robbed us from our “rights” (however scant these may have been) whilst we have walked into this abyss eyes wide shut, to the cheers of the idiots, and promises of hell-fire and brimstones from the fuckwits in security industry/military industrial complex.
* THRUSH Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity
the arch-enemy of United Network Command for Law and Enforcement
The comments section in the article have now disappeared
Would Emily Wilding Davison be picked up under the current raft of legislations, as a “terrorist” (a suicidal one at that) and her cause the suffrage movement be considered a “terrorist organisation” ?
Yes, sorry, I haven’t mentally re-pigeonholed Greenwald into “mainstream” yet.
Ruth – in general the Guardian don’t mind anti-government comments. Comments which point out that New Labour is also guilty is what really upsets them.
Is it being filmed Craig? Will you be posting a video of it here? I’d love to hear your speech but can’t make it down to the US embassy today.
Arbed
I don’t know – if I can find a copy, I will post it.
Comment is not free apparently Ruth.
~~~
They Thought They Were Free
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
Re Craig’s ‘secret telegrams’ http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Wood-2.pdf and no offence by [the UK] obtaining torture intelligence There is an arguable case (but weak unfortunately) that UK officials could be regarded as accessories after the fact in insisting to receive torture intelligence (eg NSW law, UK may be similar)
Question being, was assistance rendered to the principal? (Uzbek torturers/chain of command) – in a way yes, keeping it all secret for a start, assisting them ‘to avoid detection’
Arguable but not in a practical sense seeing as the UK government would never prosecute their own officials over this in a million years.
OTOH it should be an offence and well done, Craig was so correct in querying the policy.
was near harrods the other day, could not see j.assange
peeping out from somewhere.
branning? the hero of all times…
oh, by the way, may i add sander hicks to your list? and possibly rodney stich, turned 90 recently and: have you ever heard of oswald le winter?
“Would Emily Wilding Davison be picked up under the current raft of legislations, as a “terrorist” (a suicidal one at that) and her cause the suffrage movement be considered a “terrorist organisation” ?”
Yes, undoubtedly they would be considered a terrorist movement now just as they were then. They were a terrorist movement. They did nothing to further the cause of women’s suffrage and probably hindered it considerably, if the government had given in to them it would have encouraged a wave of terrorism.
When women did eventually get the vote it had nothing to do with them, it was the role women played in the First World War that swung it.
Medialens recently published the results of a ComRes poll on the British public’s perception of the number of civilian casualties in the Iraq War. The results were astounding.
http://www.zcommunications.org/poll-shows-that-uk-public-drastically-under-estimates-iraqi-war-deaths-by-joe-emersberger
viz
How many Iraqis, both combatants and civilians, do you think have died as a consequence of the war that began in Iraq in 2003? Please just give your best estimate.
The responses are summarized below:
Up to 5,000………………44%
5,001 – 10,000…………..15%
10,001 – 20,000…………..7%
20,001 – 50,000…………..8%
50,001 – 100,000………..11%
100,001 – 500,000………10%
500,001 – 1,000,000………4%
1,000,001+…………………2%
Don’t know/Not stated…….0.3%
Craig mentioned John Pilger above. This is an exchange between him and a David Fuller who is writing a Newsnight item on the ‘body count’ (what a horrible expression that is).
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1370074389.html
PS The ComRes poll was initiated by a Medialens contributor Daniel Thornton and was paid for by donations from Medialens readers and contributors. Well done to all concerned.
“Today, under the Justice and Security Act, I would be tried in secret, would have still been in jail now, and anybody who reported the facts of the case would have suffered the same fate.”
The Justice and Security Act 2013 is apparently and conspicuously an attempt to conceal in law, government and their agencies apocryphal acts including illegal intercepts, torture, subversion and covert military or paramilitary operations designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities, groups or nations than those who actually planned and executed them.
Craig exemplifies these diabolical methods used by our governments past and present and their intelligence agencies.
Interestingly a classic example is described by Voltaire.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177357.html
Britamgate: Staging False Flag Attacks in Syria describes a sinister plot I outed in 2012 after President Obama prepared the ground with his drawing a ‘red line’ for Syria on chemical and biological weapons.
It was known to me in 2012 from information obtained by a ‘mercenary’ -an ex-SAS close protection officer working out of Dubai, that a complex plan was in place that would convince the UNSC that Assad had used poisonous gas against his own citizens. Such action would justify NATO action against the Syrian government.
The Justice and Security Act would be used in this case to subvert and impede justice, concealing the heinous and vile way deception is used to change public opinion in favor of aggression and war.
Would those celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Derby “perambulation” of Emily Wilding Davison (including the Mayoress who is dedicating her chain of office to her) considered aiding, abetting, promoting terrorism, and thus ought to be arrested and placed in HMP Belmarsh?
Further, would there be a need for more funds and a whole raft of new legislations to stop such an awful display of pride and respect towards the said terroristess and her cause? Should BBC and the Media stop propagating the messages of those engaged in preachings of hatred and incitement to lawlessness and terrorism, by celebrating the centenary of the the terroristess Emily Wilding Davison? ie the Media should only show their faces and not broadcast their messages of praising hate and terrorism.
Find no mention of the failure of Northern Ireland to hold a new inquest into the ambush/murder of Francis Bradley in February 1986, and a new inquiry into the killing of all those securocrats on that Chinook helicopter at the Mull of Kintyre on June 2,1994 most disturbing. They are worse than the failure to hold a public inquiry into the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane.
The lack of a new inquest into Bradley’s murder seems to be that one of his killers, Derrick Bird, went on his killing rampage in Cumbria when he assumed that he was being set up as the culprit in the practice assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme 10 days later. Apparently, Bird’s death was good enough for the province’s new Attorney General, John Larkin, to forget about the inquest, especially because it might arouse interest in who killed Palme, still an unexplained, most serious assassination.
And a public inquiry into the needless deaths of those 29 military and police intelligence officers could raise serious concerns about the real significance of the questionable Good Friday Agreement.
Britain wants to keep its failures in this whole area on a personal level, and the UN committee has conveniently obliged.
And Glenn Greenwald is getting a bit too big for his breeches, going after James Comey to be the next FBI Director when he is certainly the best candidate who has any chance of being confirmed.
Those die-hards had to be sidestepped albeit somewhat overtly to pave the way for the later developments in rearranging the power constructs to evolve into the power-sharing arrangements. Fact that few SIS rouge elements can derail or stop a government from engaging in governance is the shocking factor.
PS Poor pilot and his family, he was blamed for the crash and although his father tried to clear his name, the poor old man got nowhere.
Sorry, Fedup, but you are quite wrong .
It wasn’t the die-hards who died at the Mull. Police like Fitzsimmons and Phoenix had learned the hard way, as had MI5’s Deverell, that only a fair agreement would satisfy the Provsionals in the long run.
The die-hards were led by MI5’s Jonathan ‘Bob’ Evans aka William Perkins who wanted the IRA to give up its weapons but they will get them back one day.
And the last judicial inquiry ruled that the pilots were not to blame.
“When women did eventually get the vote it had nothing to do with them, it was the role women played in the First World War that swung it.”
Rubbish, Fred.
Really?
I always thought that women over 30 were given the vote because they could be relied upon to support a conservative establishment rather than bolshie left wing radicalism that Tommy recently returned from the trenches might have had a notion to favour. But of course just to make sure though the Liberal candidates were vetted and given a coupon of endorsement by the Conservatives because ladies of a certain age, heads full of non-sense and given, as they were, to fits of the vapours might not have been tactically astute enough to avoid a splitting the establishment vote.
Before the days of internet, it was damn hard to make a head or tail of any affair. Thus, open to suggestions.
“ladies of a certain age, heads full of non-sense and given, as they were, to fits of the vapours might not have been tactically astute enough to avoid a splitting the establishment vote.”
Indeed. Maggie Thatcher had fits of the vapours over such things as hunger strikes in the H blocks. She was heard, late at night in her office, shouting “No! No! Nooooo!!” to the walls and the furniture, and occasionally, “We must not give in to mere thugs and criminals!”
Ultimately, her fits meant that the strike radicalised nationalist politics and was the driving force that enabled Sinn Féin to become a mainstream political party.
Women? Votes? Pffffffft!
All I can suggest is that you, Fedup, follow up on what you have implied.
In this case, read the report that Lord Philip made on the tragedy – what should have induced any reasonable government to immediately appoint an inquiry to determine why it happened.
Certainly looks like an inside job where operators on the ground deliberately guided the helicopter into the Mull’s Hill of Stone.
Touching faith in the UN, its human rights efforts often fronts for covert operations. It is an organisation in need of root and branch reform, as is the EU.
The UN that allowed Afghanistan and for all its huffing and puffing couldn’t stop the Iraq war crime, nor can it do anything about the slaughter in and destruction of once stable Syria.
Can’t seem to stop these Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israel Decimates Village, Leaving Many Homeless Including 24 Children
Not a great record at all, toothless wasters.
General assembly should vote to kick out US, Israel and UK and other psycho regimes.
Worldwide protests planned on eve of Bradley Manning trial
May 31, 2013
http://rt.com/usa/meade-bradley-protests-manning-077/
“THRUSH Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity” FedUp
Natural yoghurt is good for that. I propose a deluge of natural yoghurt upon the body of the hard state; microbial warfare of a very special sort.
It sounds like U.N.C.L.E. (as in ‘The Man from…’).
Fedup The then King and Queen were more concerned about the horse and the jockey. Queen A sounds a kindly type.
‘King George V wrote in his diary that “poor Herbert Jones and Anmer had been sent flying” on a “most disappointing day”.
Queen Alexandra sent Jones a telegram wishing him well after his “sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal lunatic woman”.
Emily Davison died four days later in hospital from internal injuries and a fractured skull.’
Epsom Derby jockey ‘haunted’ by suffragette death myth?http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-22717894