It is ten years since I ended my FCO career by going on the Today programme and blowing the whistle on CIA/MI6 complicity in torture. It was on my 46th birthday, and I was in my second year as an Ambassador and my seventh as a top Whitehall civil servant, a member of the Senior Civil Service.
Looking back now, what is most striking are the blatant lies by the FCO that they were not obtaining intelligence from torture. As the BBC reported:
In one he claimed MI6 had used information passed on to it by the CIA but originally obtained in Uzbek torture cells – something strongly denied by the Foreign Office.
I do not think there is a single person in public life or social media nowadays who would not accept that the FCO were simply lying. Jack Straw was blatantly to lie about it to parliament. But ten years ago the public and media knew much less than they know now. Nobody outside secret circles had ever heard the words extraordinary rendition. It was a year later – May 2005 – before the New York Times revealed the CIA was sending people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, precisely as I had stated.
It sounds incredible, but in October 2004 many people believed it was Craig Murray who was a liar, not Jack Straw. Again I do not think there is a single individual today who does not understand that Jack Straw was lying through his teeth. But back in 2004 life was hard for me.
After going on the Today programme I went on the run, in fear for my life. I am not paranoid, remember David Kelly. I first stayed with my old friend Andy Myles in Edinburgh, then I think Chief Executive of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. He was phoned the next morning by the FCO. When he denied knowledge of my whereabouts, they not only said they knew I was staying with him, they said which bedroom I was sleeping in. Ten years ago today I was hiding in Aviemore in the house of my old friend Dominic.
That was the start of a decade as a dissident where I have devoted my life to exposing, and trying to counter, the evil of the neo-conservative policy pursued by our political class at the behest of the corporations who fund them. I have suffered a huge loss in money, status and most of the other normal aspirations. But what I have gained is invaluable. I have respect and love, while Blair and Straw will forever be despised.
@Mary. Good old Tony Blair… no-one can be a winner for Labour except him. Thinking back to “The Deal”, it was made clear that he was/is just interested in getting power and never mind the principles (including getting into bed with Murdoch). I’m with Craig (and most of you?) in being disgusted that he was re-elected with such a majority in 2005 after all that had happened since the 2001 election.
‘(including getting into bed with Murdoch).’
and Wendi Deng from all accounts! 🙂 🙂
Thanks Rose – much love to you.
Your input is important Guano – make light of the detached comments.
Plain old HTML web-sites are immune from malicious hacking it seems. I had to suspend a number of WordPress template web-sites because of susceptibility to attacks that exploit the WordPress code to violate more sites.
http://unmatchedstyle.com/news/the-wordpress-vulnerability-database-that-will-help-you-secure-your-site.php
“Sofia, Peacewisher. Not the Saker’s site THIS SITE http://www.craigmurray.org.uk is now hosted by google. Thanks mystery mod/admin for this retrograde mis-step.”
I thought they were hosted by Crissic Solutions in Florida.
Thank you too Rose and Guano and others for your messages and observations.
I had a nice young paramedic (Chris) here at 5.30am this morning. I found I could not breathe when I woke and pressed the call button on my careline. Five minutes later he arrived and set to work. A truly amazing service for which I am eternally grateful. This is the third time I have had to call for similar help since my op. He was pleased to have an actual medical problem to deal with. He had spent most of the night dealing with drunks in the town. Shocking is it not?
@Fred: According to the footer they are hosted by expathos.
More detail:
https://trustcloud.com/!/expathos
No indication of any association with Google though.
“I agree that Habbabkuk’s behaviour is obnoxious but I don’t think he should be banned, because
(1) it wouldn’t work, it’s simple to re-appear in a new identity.
(2) there’s a much more effective solution – ignore him.
This blog doesn’t need stricter mods, it needs self-discipline from its contributors.”
With due respect this is nonsense; either you believe somebody’s behavior warrants banning or not.
You don’t have to make excuses for not banning if you believe it is warranted.
You would have us believe that banning doesn’t work per se, which will be news to Craig who successfully banned Larry from St Louis, or to the countless other Sites like Medialens who continually & successfully operate a banning policy. We all know that the HabbuClown Troll would have been banned from any other Blog right from the very start, but there is a reason that he hasn’t here, and it’s nothing to do with “free speech”.
This particular troll is as vain as he is vile, a deluded narcissist who gets his kicks because he is too stupid to realize that he’s really not very bright, so deprive him of a consistent identifiable persona by persistent banning, and he will very quickly fade away.
“According to the footer they are hosted by expathos.”
According to the traceroute they are hosted by Crissic. The IP before that is Atrato in the Netherlands which is where I believe Craig thinks the blog is hosted.
I’ve just done a DNS lookup. The server is definitely expathos (who are based in The Netherlands).
Head in the cloud Fred?Makes a change.
12 180 ms 174 ms 172 ms eth1-1.r1.jax1.us.as5580.net [78.152.35.222]
13 172 ms 174 ms 172 ms 78.152.57.70
14 172 ms 173 ms 174 ms 107.150.0.38
15 174 ms 172 ms 172 ms craigmurray.org.uk [107.150.20.192]
*****************************************************************
NetRange: 107.150.0.0 – 107.150.31.255
CIDR: 107.150.0.0/19
NetName: CRISSIC
NetHandle: NET-107-150-0-0-1
Parent: NET107 (NET-107-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Allocation
OriginAS: AS62639
Organization: Crissic Solutions, LLC (CSL-161)
Well done Craig for blowing the whistle on the accountable to nobodies. Of course they knew where you were, and know, where you are. Anybody with a mobile phone can be tracked. They had been capable for above a decade in 2004 to listen in to conversations so it only needed Andy Myles to say to you that your bedroom is the one overlooking the road and they could repeat that back to him the next morning. Presumably you ‘phoned him first to ask to stay. So they knew where to listen.
I’ve been taking a break from writing and politics to recharge my batteries and rediscovered a childhood fondness for birdwatching. This is time-consuming but therapeutic. I recommend. Blood-pressure right down.
I used MXToolbox. Done it again. Same results for server. Consistent with footer on webpage.
Same IP address as you Fred, so this anomaly is strange.
@John: Good for you!
[email protected]
Apologies for the late reply. You mean Academi et al are shelling Donetsk?
I can buy that: A private army spreading freemanmoxy, as Dubya used to conflate. Capital now fights its own wars for its own needs, without the messy business of parliamentary scrutiny, however half-hearted that might be.
It used to be that the US Government prepared the way for its own corporate interests. Is capital now doing that by itself, with the Government reduced to selling the justification?
The tail wagging the dog.
“I used MXToolbox. Done it again. Same results for server. Consistent with footer on webpage.”
MX is for mail servers.
It is called MXToolbox because it provides a range of tools, including DNS. Still stand by expathos as host.
“Head in the cloud Fred?Makes a change.”
No down to earth. If the blog physically resides on a server in America or even a server outside America but owned by an American company we are subject to American law.
Quite agree Macky 10.50am
Apart from anything else, the presence of the troll must be intimidatory to new and other previous posters and is therefore detrimental to the quality of the comments. If you look back at some of the old threads, there is a much wider audience than currently.
Also why did Craig send him a special message of welcome? Does Craig know what has been going on for nearly three years now? It is ridiculous.
Just finished Murder in Samarkand. Congratulations and thanks for your courage and principle.
Here is the review on Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1075161990?book_show_action=false
Are you a “professional activist” these days?
The spirit of the true citizen dwells in Mr. Murray.
I see old skanky pants aka Elizabeth Regina, has sent her first tweet in her own name, old decrepit Lizzy dripping, tweeted, “Its a pleasure to open the Information Age Exhibition” a new science museum. Apparently, Mrs Windsor’s tweet, has been re-tweeted over 722.000, it would appear Buckingham Palace’s 50 Cent Party, are working overtime.
HOSTING UPDATES
Expathos are exiting the hosting business and have asked Craig to investigate other hosting arrangements. No final decision has yet been taken by Craig on new hosting but options are being tested over the transition period so expect to see IP address changes.
At no time has the site been hosted by Google but Google page cache was tested for a few hours. As for US companies even Wikileaks used Amazon hosting until they got kicked off.
Yesterday the site address resolved to 64.233.166.121 and a short time later to 74.125.195.121 both within address ranges owned by google; did anyone else actually register the comment from the admin/mod at 8:38pm last night confirming this ominous development. Now it has settled down to 107.150.20.192, which is a change from the long term fixed address this site has had for yonks: 94.124.88.232 but latterly it had changed to 194.50.163.175. Are we all looking at different versions, stale versions of the site, which is the real craigmurray.org.uk, has Craig been replaced by a clone, have none of you noticed the parting in his hair now goes to the other side and his feet are bigger? Which is the doppelganger. Honestly you people would fight over a scrap of hollowed out marrowbone, for point-scoring purposes, it isn’t a competition, it’s just you’re all most of the time utterly wrong on everything and I rarely am, if ever at all, and modest with it. The substantive point is google has long become too big, too powerful and ubiquitous, and where almost any activity on a vast spectrum of sites are tied to Google Inc., directly or indirectly, to the point whereby without their ominous footprints everywhere so much of the internet is dysfunctional and broken, which cannot be, clearl isn’t a good thing.
The universal backdoor. That silly little javascript code that gives you mouseover effects or some other such frippery, a sliding banner of featured articles, a captcha or libraries of generic universal javascript routines, which many sites could serve themselves but instead pull in from third party sources, without which whole sites are dysfunctional, and which can for all or for others or one person, depending on the requesting IP address(es) or other identifier supply anything it likes, named the same, but doing anything it likes, in the place of or in addition to the original function(s). This is not good in my view, it goes against resilience and reliability and distributednesss, it goes against reasonable expectations that traffic between you and the website you’re interacting with is between your client browser and their server and there is little or no legitimate reason for involvement of other third or fourth parties.
So Johann Lamont resigns, as she doesn’t want London to control the affairs of Labour north of the border. Well Johann that’s why we had a referendum to stop that kind of thing, you silly silly woman.
What now for Labour in Scotland, who’ll take over as leader in a party full of vipers and snipers jostling for position, who will stick their head in the lions mouth. Also there’s a 2016 Scottish election ahead and with the SNP, miles ahead in all departments, who’ll take charge for the forseeable future, only to be soundly thrashed by the SNP, and to add insult to injury, they’d need to fall on their sword.
Only now does Johann Lamont realise, that Labour who’s first leader was Keir Hardy are, not the party they once were, they now pander to middle England, and it vote. I have no sympathy for Johann Lamont, see sided with the devil, Westminster, and has gotten her just rewards, good riddance.
@Republicofscotland
25 Oct, 2014 – 2:29 pm
Amen to that, but on the other hand if she comes to realise the errors of her ways there will be more rejoicing in heaven over that one sinner ..
I shall consider myself, well rid of this islands pathetic, grovelling population of celebrity obsessed superficiality fixated-wankers.
I shall not miss the institutionalised servility, that is the worship of the Royals. Nor the cringing respect according to the shiteing out, of value bereft Ruritanian honours, by the government of the fucking day.
Or the hounding of the poor and disabled,and cossetting of the rich and privileged.
Iain Banks.
Scottish author died June 9th 2013.
Node:
“I agree that Habbabkuk’s behaviour is obnoxious but I don’t think he should be banned, because
(1) it wouldn’t work, it’s simple to re-appear in a new identity.
(2) there’s a much more effective solution – ignore him.
This blog doesn’t need stricter mods, it needs self-discipline from its contributors.”
Macky:
You would have us believe that banning doesn’t work per se, which will be news to Craig who successfully banned Larry from St Louis, or to the countless other Sites like Medialens who continually & successfully operate a banning policy.”
Banning doesn’t work. Habbabkuk was banned once before – he carried on posting under various aliases until the ban was rescinded. Larry from St Louis was banned – Craig himself said that he believes Larry still returns from time to time under an alias. Medialens require registration, which requires time-consuming supervision.
Banning is an empty gesture which solves nothing.
Everybody knows what the true solution is. The solution which is easy, effective, obvious and so well known that it is a cliche: don’t feed the trolls. Do you honestly believe that the pompous Habbabkuk would continue posting here if he was ignored? He thrives on attention. His tactics are transparent – provoke a response, any response – and time after time, he succeeds and his distractions are doubled by the replies. He doesn’t care if the reply is clever, stupid, right, wrong, polite or insulting, just as long as you reply. And people do. Every time. Frankly, he is making fools of a lot of the posters here, and the real mystery to me is that it is often those selfsame posters who otherwise make the most perceptive contributions to the blog.
If you believe someone is a troll yet you keep engaging with him/her, you are part of the problem too.
The moderators here are unpaid volunteers. Demanding your rights from them is futile and rude. It is up to all those who care about this blog to do whatever we can to protect it from the wreckers. Self- discipline is the answer, not loud but empty gestures.
“Interesting point. Are you suggesting that it’s a bit much to take full advantage of free speech rights for oneself, but eagerly denounce another as some kind of “terrorist sympathiser” or some-such, as soon as views contrary to our official understands are voiced by others?”
Glenn; As you know the 1st amendment is not absolute in protecting speech. If I abuse it by defaming others I am guilty of slander or libel depending on whether written or spoken.
In addition; I think it was Hugo Black who was asked for a definition of pornography…”I know it when I see it’, making judgement somewhat subjective except when conjoined with ‘community standards’, so I guess it’s up to this community to determine the tolerance for what speech is protected here….Oh wait !!!.
As I said Node, you can’t expect everyone to ignore a turd on the sofa. Banning does work even if anonymizer is used. Exhaust the available IP’s and VOILA !.
It takes the same determination as tactics against spamming. There seems to be some dedication to that forceful threat.