The Independent have Jack Straw well and truly cornered:
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Craig Murray, who was sacked as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2004 after alleging that Britain used intelligence obtained by the CIA under torture, said he attended a meeting at the Foreign Office where he was told that “it was not illegal for us to use intelligence from torture as long as we did not carry out the torture ourselves” and claimed this policy came directly from Mr Straw.
The former Foreign Secretary said: “At all times I was scrupulous in seeking to carry out my duties in accordance with the law. I hope to be able to say more about this at an appropriate stage in the future.”
I hope so too, and I hope that the appropriate time is either at the Old Bailey or The Hague.
Straw has climbed down a bit from his days of power and glory, when he told the House of Commons, immediately after sacking me, that there was no such thing as the CIA extraordinary rendition programme and its existence was “Mr Murray’s opinion.” He no longer claims it did not exist and he no longer claims I am a fantasist. He now merely claims he was not breaking the law.
His claim of respect for the law is a bit dubious in the light of Sir Michael Wood’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry. Wood said that as Foreign Office Legal Adviser, he and his elite team of in-house FCO international lawyers unanimously advised Straw the invasion of Iraq would be an illegal war of aggression. Straw’s response? He wrote to the Attorney General requesting that Sir Michael be dismissed and replaced. And forced Goldsmith to troop out to Washington and get alternative advice from Bush’s nutjob Republican neo-con lawyers.
Jack Straw did not have any desire to act legally. He had a desire to be able to mount a legal defence of his illegal actions. That is a different thing.
Should any of us live to see the publication of the Chilcot Report, this will doubtless be clear, though probably as a footnote to page 862 of Annex VII. That is how the Westminster establishment works.
The SNP has weighed in on the side of the angels:
Revelations by the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan of the UK’s knowledge and acceptance of torture must see those involved answer questions on what happened.
In an article in the Mail on Sunday, Mr Murray reveals that he attended a meeting at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office where he was told that “it was not illegal for us to use intelligence from torture as long as we did not carry out the torture ourselves” and revealed that this policy came directly from Jack Straw.
Mr Murray also reveals that “there was a deliberate policy of not writing down anything… because there should not be evidence of the policy.”
Craig Murray also states that “for the past year the British Ambassador in Washington and his staff have regularly been lobbying the US authorities not to reveal facts about the UK’s involvement in the CIA torture programme” and claims that is one of the reasons the full Senate report has not been published.
The SNP has called for a full judicial inquiry to be set up as a matter of urgency to get to get to the truth of who knew what and when.
Commenting, SNP Westminster Leader Angus Robertson MP said:
“Mr Murray’s revelation of the attitude taken by then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw only adds to the urgency with which we need a full judicial inquiry.
“Craig Murray’s article lifts the lid on the UK’s role in the human rights abuses that the US Senate has reported on and there can be no more attempts to avoid answering the tough questions that have been posed.
“Clearly answers are needed just as much from the politicians who led us at the time as from those directly involved in what was going on. The need for an independent judicial inquiry is now clear for all to see.
“It is also long past time that the findings of the Chilcot inquiry were published and there can be no more delays to that report being made public.
“There needs to be a full judicial inquiry to get to the bottom of the UK’s involvement in rendition flights that passed through UK territory and the UK’s wider knowledge of the abuses that the Senate has revealed.”
Craig Murray’s revelations can be viewed on page 25 of today’s Mail on Sunday
But with Malcolm Rifkind being promoted everywhere by the BBC to push his cover-up, it remains an uphill struggle.
You don’t hate torture, Habby. Then how DO you feel about it?
Ah, Habbakuk, I’ve enjoyed reading several of your posts recently, thanks, so this is in a helpful spirit (Curtis is an immaculate researcher):
The myth has long been promoted that Britain refused to send troops to the Vietnam war and played little role in it. The declassified British government files on the war are therefore little short of a revelation, showing that Britain gave important private backing to the US at every stage of military escalation, and also revealing its own covert and military role. The reality is that Britain was complicit in the aggression against Vietnam and shares some responsibility for the massive human suffering that resulted.
https://markcurtis.wordpress.com/2007/02/01/britains-secret-support-for-us-aggression-the-vietnam-war/
Anode: from limited experience, the NHS in Wales is certainly better in some ways than in England. Prescriptions are free, for one thing.
“So the NHS in Wales, N. Ireland and England is better than in Scotland?”
How many of them have a hundred mile journey to hospital if they have an accident? How many of them have a hundred miles to go if they are having a baby and there are complications?
Health is devolved, the National Resource Allocation Committee says Highland NHS is underfunded to the tune of £11 million. As of yesterday we just have one surgeon in the hospital instead of three and no 24 hour cover. So next time there is a crash because all the money for roads is being spent in the Central Belt not in the Highlands the injured will have a long way to go.
Thom Hartmann excellent on the US Constitution and UN Charter on Torture, which the US signed up to… (scroll through first 10 mins or so unless interested in Friends of the Earth and Peru climate change agreement)
http://rt.com/shows/big-picture/214683-climate-gmo-torture-us/
This responds mainly to Habbabkuk at 5.13 pm, but some other comments bear on the same point. The majority of commentators here, including Craig – who sets the tone and the themes – are not critical of “the West” but of the neo-lib foreign policies followed by the USA and its allies, principally the UK. Like most people, we British [and many others] are relatively insular [in a mostly neutral sense] in that we are more likely to read UK novelists, political commentators, poets and politicians than Australian ones. So Tony Abbott and his predecessors as Oz Primos get less mention here than they merit; similarly for Stephen Harper.
Many disgusting policies and practices take place in other countries – eg slavery, genital mutilation, homophobia, use of the death penalty within politically-controlled legal systems which have a high chance of convicting on the basis of flawed or fabricated evidence. Others can add to the list. But those immediately responsible are not people whom we or our fellow UK citizens have elected.
For my part, I am appalled at the treatment of the Tibetans by the PRC, of bushmen by Botswana, of Japanese “scientific whaling”, of the degradation of many World Heritage sites etc. But if one’s aim is that the UK government should conduct a foreign policy that reflects our (ie my) values, it’s entirely natural to concentrate on issues where HMG and its very close ally, the USA. Get it wrong. A lot of that has to do with the Middle East, so natural also for Israel/ Palestine/ theocratic oligarchies to be under close scrutiny.
As Giyane observed at 1.25 pm, people, parties and states have form. That’s why reminders of US actions in Vietnam (and elsewhere) are sometime worth including. They provide evidence of the long-standing perversion of the Old Testament advice that justice means ONLY “an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth” Americans (and Israelis and some others) who regard themselves as a chosen people find it all too easy to operate with the distorted arithmetic: “one American life is worth ten British, 20 Turkish, 50 Russian, 1,000 Chinese and whole cities of Moslems, whether devout Sufis or militant Sunnis.” That arithmetic underpins the technological advance and moral decline of waging invasive wars through the use of drones and summary executions of people selected by meta-data algorithms.
“Does Mr Goss therefore agree that commenters on here applaud Russian atrocities in Chechniya by remaining silent about them (as they do)? KOWN please note.”
Are these the atrocities to which you refer?
http://rt.com/news/beslan-anniversary-school-massacre-274/
Habbabkuk
I don’t think your response lays even the sniff of a glove on my piece – ad homs such as dismissing my argument as an act of faith ( and thus by implication irrational) don’t come close, and neither does simply discounting it as specious.
Therefore I see no need to comment further. The piece speaks for itself.
However, I accept the charge that I am not entitled to appoint myself as spokesperson for the others. Indeed after I posted the piece I regretted not making it clearer that these are just my own views and I cannot speak for other people.
Sorry about that folks,
And to those posters who have expressed approval of my words, heartfelt thanks!
The UN Convention against Torture, 1984:
http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/catcidtp/catcidtp.html
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/16/u-s-tv-media-gives-ample-platform-american-torturers-victims/
1/. “much” appreciated – by three or four people?
———————————————————————
You’ll be resitting maths at Blyton again this year Noddy.
I made it seven people before your ill-informed comment. That’s the majority of commenters especially when you add Node to the list, who commented after your libellous denigration of “much appreciated”. Those who commented favourably before were: Peacewisher, Dreoilin, Iain Orr, Robert Crawford, Ishmael, myself and Nevermind. I know it takes two hands to count so high but do buck up boy.
Have you finished Big Ears goes to Toytown yet?
Cheney on Torture:
http://rt.com/usa/214411-cheney-torture-report-us/
PS He seems to have forgotten the relevant section in the US Constitution as defined by the UN Convention against Torture. What is the punishment for going against the constitution?
No, dear Habbascr*p-nothing of the sort. I had a Jewish grandmother. I have been a vegetarian since the age of ten. Long ago I had a temp. job in a large engineering factory. I had to go and get the sandwiches for about thirty people on my office section. As I never had one, vegetarian fare being thin on the counter in those days, one wag gave me that name. He used to greet me with it-plus a loud snort. I believe absolutely in freedom and equality for all believers and unbelievers. Do You???
“Iain Orr”
If I were accused of a serious crime, I’d not want you to be the judge.
You may not have noticed but I have accused you of a very serious crime, but your FCO mind does not recognise it as a crime.
Under the PM ship of Tony Blair, Craig realised that in his work he was now expected to accept US policy without questioning. Considering that the US, at the behest of Israel, was now embarking on a war against Islam, through torture, false imprisonment, psychotropic mind control, direct invasion, false-flag operations by mercenaries such as Belhadj in Libya and Shimon Elliott in Iraq, that meant that a whole new raft of previously unheard-of atrocities had become US policy and required his personal acquiescence.
He had participated in Iraq trying to prevent Saddam from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, in other words assisting in Saddam’s purchase of a supergun which could target Israel and then exposing the contract in order to frustrate Saddam’s ambitions.
The mass torture, execution, drugging, imprisonment and brutal murder of Muslims is a far cry from the purchase of a supergun.
Nobody else in the FCO withdrew UK endorsement of the new, appalling US Zionist plan. We are not talking about bad things other people do. We are talking about the new bad things the US wanted the UK to endorse and countersign for Muslims.
Craig withdrew his support but the FCO did not grind to a halt for the opposition of one man. After he had brought the world’s attention to what the US wished the UK to countersign, anybody who continues working for the FCO was complicit in the US torture, imprisonment, Mind control and murder plan.
You really don’t get it. You think it is a minor philosophical problem, an irrelevant detail, that an FCO worker agrees to collective international responsibilty for major international crimes.
That makes you very much part of the problem, same as the UK imams suckling up to Cameron’s war crimes and New Labour’s torture program. The very people whom we pay as taxpayers or whom we are commanded to respect for their knowledge, are in fact betraying what we stand for either as a UK citizen or as a Muslim.
You are a proper nasty piece of bent power, or as Jesus put it Matthew 23:27:
27″Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.
28″So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.…
I know you are incapable of understanding what I am saying, but fortunately for the world a new generation of younger minds is born each day without the sealed lids of cynical old age.
@KOWN: “However, I accept the charge that I am not entitled to appoint myself as spokesperson for the others.”
I didn’t think you had, and nothing in your piece suggested that’s what you were doing. It looked like you were attempting to answer a frequent question as to why many regular contributors here took the positions we did, in very general terms.
In doing so, you summed up very well my own general position and – I’d wager – that of many of us on the “right-on” side of the divide here. Of course you’re not my official spokesman, but I’m happy to hear you represent my sort (generally) in the very sincere way that you did. Fine effort, and thank you.
*
It does actually remind me of an American colleague who was all for bombing and invading Iraq, for reasons he found it hard to explain (other than, as an American, his country is never wrong). Why wasn’t I protesting outside the Iranian embassy, he demanded? Well, because Iran isn’t currently invading anyone, nor has it done so for a good couple of hundred years, for a start. There are any number of countries which abuse human rights, but which aren’t Official Enemies of America, for another, so there’s no particular reason to single out Iran other than the fact that America doesn’t like them.
But most of all, it’s because Iran does nothing in my name, is not in the least accountable to me, nor me to them. My government’s actions all are, and failure to protest the reprehensible policies of my elected representatives – and by extension, those of the chosen best friends and allies of my country – would be a lacking on my part.
“What is the punishment for going against the constitution?”
A tax rebate. ?
LOL… probably, Ishmael. According to one poster it is almost a badge of honour for a “progressive” senator to do something that is “against the constitution”. How did it get this bad?
Aangirfan, spot on as usual about CIA false-flag terror against Muslims.
http://aanirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/cia-gangsters-attack-school-in-pakistan.html
“Who, by comparison, have Russia and China bombed? Whatever their crimes, they are small beer compared to those of the US ”
Forty five million Chinese dead as a result of the Great Leap Forward, maybe 1.2 million dead and ongoing human rights abuses, including torture, in occupied Tibet. Top end estimates reckon as many died in Soviet backed Vietnam after the war as during it, 2 million dead in Cambodia, 1.6 million in the Gulags and so it goes on and it was Chinese and Soviet support for communist forces in Korea and Vietnam that was as much responsible for both conflicts as the US/UN intervention.
Posters here tend to concentrate on the crimes of the West to the extent of ignoring, belittling or twisting everything else. The excuse making for Putin, how every terror attack is a false flag and attention is deflected away from any attrocity carried out by Islamists by reference to something the US/UK/Israel have done. A typical example from Mary on this very thread:-
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Similarities:
16 December 2014
Taliban massacre children at school
Militants from the Pakistani Taliban attack an army-run school in Peshawar, leaving at least 135 people dead, most of them children.
31 Jul 2014
‘The world stands disgraced’ – Israeli shelling of school kills at least 15 children
– Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us’ UNRWA
• UN condemns IDF attack on sleeping children as violation of international law
• Strike on crowded market in Shujai’iya during ceasefire kills 17
• Death toll now more than 1,300 after three weeks of fighting
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There is a clear anti-west bias on this blog and there’s no point trying to deny it. We can only speculate as to the reaction here had a US drone killed those children but I think it would’ve well surpassed the near silence we currently have.
“How did it get this bad?”
I don’t know, but you have to think we are luckey in some ways comparitavely (worse in others), but what a mountian that hill is for some to climb.
Maybe they can turn public opinion.
It’s stinking though isn’t it, beacon of freedom and democracy mostly supports torture. Hope springs eternal. I heart America.
“Aangirfan, spot on as usual about CIA false-flag terror against Muslims. ”
As sure as night follows day.
Of course it HAS to be the fault of the west and not those nice peace loving Muslims.
Kempe prat.
The subject under discussion is the West’s crimes. Oh dear the bus you want is in traffic. You’ll have to wait for a another few mins.
Kemp: Are you actually incapable of distinguishing between a country’s crimes against its own people (which we do condemn, btw), and our own on-going assault against other countries which have never done us the least harm? Seriously?
Bert
Perhaps it would be truer to say that Charles Manson was never convicted of killing anyone with his own hands, rather than that he never killed anyone. He was perfectly capable of murder, as evidenced by his shooting of Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe. Manson believed for some time that that shooting had killed Crowe.
It actually seems to me to be more shameful to induce other people to kill or torture on one’s behalf than to do it oneself. I am sure we can all imagine “ticking bomb” scenarios in which it would, theoretically, be morally right to torture information out of someone. If I were ever placed in such a horrible scenario, it seems to me that I would want to do that repugnant work myself. It would seem cowardly to cede it to others: and also torture and killing have an effect on the torturer or murderer as well as the victim.
Kind regards,
John
I know i’v posted this before, but it’s appropriate. Because I said. And I could not give a shit what others think about my so called “bias”, go shove it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8urGMpYqX2c
How is our glorious country ploughed?
Not by iron ploughs
How is our glorious country ploughed?
Not by iron ploughs
Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet
Feet marching
Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet
Feet marching
Oh America, oh England
Oh America, oh England
How is our glorious country sown?
Not with wheat and corn
How is our glorious country sown?
Not with wheat and corn
How is our glorious land bestowed?
How is our glorious land bestowed?
Oh America, oh England
Oh America, oh England
Oh America, oh England
Oh America, oh England
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is orphan children
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children
Pj Harvey – The Glorious Land Lyrics
No Bravery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbFr8mc9rj4
Ishmael I love her work especially
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_England_Shake
Thank you Giyane and Glenn. Typical attempt to try and wriggle away.
KOWN clearly refered to whatever crime Russia or China had committed and SE Asia is not their own territory.
An Italian journalist was arrested in Talin, Estonia, a couple of days ago, and put in a prison cell. He had been invited to a conference in that city. The reason, it would appear, was MH17. He was released thanks to the Italian Ambassador.
It appears that only a very small number of mostly Italian media outlets have covered the story:
https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=giulietto+chiesa&tbm=nws
Part of Sir Michael Wood’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry. Very interesting indeed.
http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/44205/20100126am-wood-final.pdf
Mr Murray says the Foreign Secretary requested the Attorney General to dismiss and replace Sir Michael Wood. I have not been able to find back up for that yet.
Kind regards,
John
Kempe, there is no comparison. People have listed the US/US-instigated crimes against humanity many times starting from Hiroshima. No other country gets anywhere near.