Dear President Ahtisaari,
I had the pleasure of meeting you on a number of occasions over the years, including when I was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and I recall your genuine concern for democracy and human rights in a region where they are sadly neglected.
Like a great many people in Scotland I was shocked that CMI is employing Jim Murphy. Of course, in a democracy there are always losers as well as winners in elections, and both are genuine and valid participants in public life. It is not the fact that CMI employs a politician who has been so recently, comprehensively and humiliatingly rejected by his national electorate that will do any damage to CMI. In a sense I think it does you credit.
What shocks many people here is that Mr Murphy is by any standards a dedicated warmonger. He was a major and important proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and is the strongest of supporters of the massive increase of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, in breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty.
Mr Murphy is a member of the Henry Jackson Society, which as you know is a body which exists to promote United States neo-conservative foreign policy in its most aggressive sense, and openly and actively supports and condones extraordinary rendition and the use of torture by the CIA. It has supported every single military action by the USA since its formation, and defends United States exceptionalism in international law, including US non-membership of the International Criminal Court.
Mr Murphy’s belief set is therefore fundamentally at odds with the stated aims of CMI. Indeed, his employment by you can only lead to the suspicion that CMI’s stated objectives are not its real objectives, and that like Mr Murphy and the Henry Jackson Society your overriding goal in the regions where you operate is to promote the interests of the United States.
As you are funded by charitable donations and by governments, I think some explanation of your employment of Mr Murphy is in order, particularly when you have employed him as a conflict resolution expert in the Caucasus and Central Asia when he has no relevant experience of conflict resolution at all, virtually none of the Caucasus, and absolutely none of Central Asia.
I was the Head of the UK Delegation that negotiated the Sierra Leone Peace Treaty, and certainly under no circumstances would I let Jim Murphy anywhere near that kind of negotiation.
With All Best Wishes,
Amb (rtd.) Craig Murray
Ben
I thought that it was Alzheimer’s that turmeric protected against
“We are still trying to civilise brown people. We still think we have the right to change them, bend them to our will, improve them by force. We still want to lecture them, condemn them, threaten them, overturn their elections, arm their oppressive leaders, plunder their resources.
And after we have destroyed their societies, we expect to be able to shut our borders to them as they make desperate journeys to find some peace, some safety away from the war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere we either created directly or supported with our money and arms.
Our racism has not changed. It is alive and creating new justifications for our selective compassion every day.”
Jonathan Cook
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-11-14/outrage-at-paris-attacks-masks-our-racism/
Jonathan Cook
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2015-11-14/outrage-at-paris-attacks-masks-our-racism/
My thoughts exactly. He refers to the New Matilda piece. I posted that here this morning.
‘Hardly mentioned by our corporate media but RT reported it. 43 killed and more than 200 injured in Beirut.
Paris Attacks Highlight Western Vulnerability, And Our Selective Grief And Outrage
November 14, 2015
https://newmatilda.com/2015/11/14/paris-attacks-highlight-western-vulnerability-and-our-selective-grief-and-outrage/ ‘
Lang may yer lum reek, Bri.
Why Be….:
Many anecdotal benefits on Turmeric. Research online is free.
Yes Mary, but what about letting Gurkas come to Aldershot?
“Much encouraged by the relative silence. Let haddakok and anon have a conversation amongst themselves. They really do enjoy one another.”
Then this defensive retort;
“Do you have any nice names for male homosexuals, black people, Jews and handicapped people?’
Methinks the lady doth protest a little too much.
It was a joke, Glenn. Don’t lose you sense of humour even if you do hate my guts.
Far be it from me…to suggest an illicit relationship ‘twixt some of our well-worn trolls. 🙂
Now that’s a conspiracy they will deny, especially if true. 🙂
If we’re on conspiracies, what I really want to know is why nothing like this happened in Canada or Portugal recently. No earthquakes or plane crashes either.
hard-wired war policy – true Suhayl and the justification for that ‘war policy’ is soft-wired in the form of ‘what if’ modelling complete with parameters such as ‘Charlie Hebdo’ or ‘Friday the 13th’ and lastly ‘look up’ tables to determine the assets…
When is the next Government motion on Syria?
It certainly was surprising — if not suspicious — that the Charlie Hebdo shooters were able to drive out of Paris away from the downtown in the middle of the day on a Wednesday and then to evade detection for a couple of days, whereupon they were conveniently shot dead. (Assuming, that is, that the people shot were in fact the shooters. The identification in this case also involved a document — an ID card in this case — conveniently left behind.)
I always carry ID when I’m driving, but I never take it out of my pocket and leave it in the car when I park. What reason could I have for doing that?
I always carry ID when I’m walking around, but I only take it out of my pocket when someone who has reason demands to see it.
Occam’s razor says it was about France. If the message was intended for someone else it gets too confusing. Who gains? Marine le Pen in upcoming regional elections. If I really wanted I conspiracy theory I would connect the financial backing the FN have been receiving to a recent airline crash, caused allegedly by those who seem to have been behind the Paris attack
Never Forget… what Karl Rove said:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
“Nous sommes solidaire”
I suspect M. Cameron parle francais a lot better than his hideous accent was trying to convey. Politicians always lie, otherwise we might connect up dots.
Hollande declares war on who exactly? His own ex-legionnaires who train Daesh? Or his own security services who Erdogan his own flesh and blood?
Nice one that he was actually in the stadium when the bombs went off. This is a man who used a moped to perform his French extra marital duties. The limo stayed parked.
Cameron ought to have said, we are very spooked by what our colleagues have achieved in France.
STOP
Time for Peace..
And The best Beer Garden in Europe.. Is on My Hebridean Islse of Iona.. Kos I Know
Great Version of a Magical Waterboys Song –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_nh0x1KW68
Exexpat
Quite right.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This, from UBS, is amusing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krbX-9ugbI4
I think they just kinda like the vibe of it. Like in a PoMo way.
But, isn’t it actually making a point.
About them.
Much trollery herein tonight.
Fakes.
I very much doubt that Friday the 13th is unlucky in Muslim countries, as Friday is the Muslim Sabbath.
Just as I know that 911 is the emergency number only in the U.S.
Would Muslim terrorists have chosen those dates?
False-flaggers:
How is it that whenever these events occur, it’s immediately assumed those involved are fake police, fake passengers, “crisis actors”, and fake observers, with captured film, testimony, and fake (or non-existent) victims.*
Until it obviously isn’t – and people are caught, confess (really!), get locked up for years, admit to terrorism but justify their actions by blaming their victims. Do you revise your knee-jerk “false flag!” assumption then? Why, of course not.
Why isn’t anyone claiming (such as the Sandy Hook massacre apologists) that all the people at that concert, including the band, were all put-up jobs, “crisis actors”? Or do “crisis actors” only show up at areas less likely to have press crawling all over it within seconds?
The State is a pretty integrated system. The idea that international figures duck and weave around, setting up entire structures to cause death and mayhem in compliant first-world largely democratic countries, is a pretty strong accusation. Where if anything of the supposed “Truth” were to leak out the entire political party would be destroyed just to start with, never mind just the ministers in charge. With all the operatives in-between happy to see their countryfolk murdered, with not a whisper in a massive chain of command.
So where’s the strong case? The extraordinary evidence for such extraordinary claims? They don’t exist. Supposition will do.
Were the IRA all false-flag too? Jesus H Christ, is there any point in even discussing this?
For Christ’s sake, stop making fools of yourselves by claiming this is a set-up, unless you want to go the way of that blasted moron Spivey, who is insane enough to think a runaway dustcart is a “false flag operation”. And there are some right here who actually believe it.
—–
* Some freaks are still callous enough to accost bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook massacre, and accuse them of leading their lives (for years!) just as if their shot dead 5-yo kid was actually real. They destroy their memorials, and denounce the parents as liars and frauds.
Fact is Glenn, the only person advancing such claims (it’s immediately assumed […] crisis actors etc.) is erm … you. You seem unable to distinguish between the very real false-flag events which, the explanation that more often lies behind such events, than not and some other fantasy version of a false-flag. You’re suggesting that crisis actors, fake victims etc. are telling indicators of false flags, when of course the opposite is the case, false flag victims are very much real victims, there is nothing false about them, deep states will without even a flicker of inhibition, mow down, massacre people, their ‘own’, or the other, without distinction between them. The playground for their activities might as well be in another country than in their own too, I think if the French state wished to generate domestic cause for military action, action by itself, with others or by others, they’d take little to do with the manufactured outrage necessary stampede public opinion, their intelligence services would sub-contract it to those of allied foreign agencies, to ensure a passing plausible deniability. False-flags don’t mean no-one real and innocent doesn’t get dead or hurt.
Do you want someone to claim the band or whoever came from central-casting? so you’re not alone in muddying the waters with such impossibly complex and improbable propositions?
The groups concerned, identified as The Enemy in the WOT have close ties, are infact proxy armies and warriors for western intelligence services, that much is an unassailable certainty that has dawned finally even upon the masses. Are such groups in that position capable or likely to go off script and act independently of their (pay) masters. We cannot rule out the possibility of a false flag on the strength of any seeming absence of clumsy actors tripping over the set and blurting their lines off cue and in a monotone.
Blowback is not ruled out. At its simplest A facilitates incites and encourages and pays B to do damage to the house of C, B takes the doo-dahs and blows up A’s garden shed instead, to stick it to them. It seems the natural thing for a reluctant agent-provocateur to turn the weapon round 180 degrees to target its source, it seems entirely rational. There’s a strong likelihood the wronged party, France with the usual Five-Eyes cohort, Israel too, Turkey, the Gulf despots, aided and facilitated those very same persons who went on to rampage in Paris, at some stage in their jihadist/mercenary careers and travels to exotic places, what is in question is whether they dropped out of that rat-race, went freelance or stayed loyal to the company and recent events are the culmination of that career, the equivalent of a fat pension and a carriage clock and a card signed by all the guys at ISIS Incorporated. Cell organisation this isn’t, ISIS is preposterously and improbably loud and proud and lacking credibility as not a real threat, but a media boogeyman fast falling foul of a fickle fidgeting audience.
Nevermind
13 Nov, 2015 – 3:27 pm
thanks great Poetry… And thank you and the Others For Haiku
TonyM
Amazing Stuff
1st para, 2nd sentence above (4:15am) is a bit garbled, meant something like:
“You seem unable to distinguish between the very real false-flag events which explanation (that it was infact a false-flag) more often lies behind such events, than not, and some other fantasy version of a false-flag.”
The goal being to pin the blame on someone else. To justify whatever.
Some quotes which might or might not apply.
“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich”
attributed to Peter Ustinov (father was a spook of sorts)
“The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.”
from ‘The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad’
It wasn’t particularly coherent Brian, but then neither was Glenn’s primal scream.
@Habbabkuk (Sorry I’m loosing my marbles!)
14 Nov, 2015 – 5:31 pm
You’re really not doing very well with your continuous strings of ad homininem fallacies,are you!?
Instead of mocking @Mary 14 Nov, 2015 – 5:08 pm for linking, quite properly to Gilad Atzmon’s insightful post, why dont you engage with the points Gilad Atzmon makes?
Is that beyond your seeming ever diminishing wit?
Just to help you out a little, here’s Mary’s post again:
Here is Gilad Atzmon
Yesterday morning, the news was broadcast of extensive ‘heroic’ allied drone attacks in Iraq and Syria in support of the battle for Sinjar. We also learned about the assassination of Jihadi John. We were told some revenge might be on the way. As promised, last night Paris was bathing in blood.
Welcome to World War III – a global conflict with unlimited battlefronts. We, as people of the world, are all caught in the middle in this disaster. We see that our universe is crumbling, we want peace, yet we don’t even know who the enemy is.
For some of us, this recent escalation is not a surprising development. We have been writing about it for years. We have been scrutinising the disastrous impact of the matrix of Ziocon immoral interventionist lobbies that have been relentlessly advocating more and more conflicts. The CRIF in Paris, CFI in London and AIPAC in Washington all push for escalation of the battle against Arabs and Muslims in accordance with the Israeli plan for a new Middle East.
We are forced to accept the fact that extremist Muslims are very upset and they can hit hard and in a very short time. Russia saw one of its planes falling out of the sky, killing more than two hundred innocent holiday makers. Paris has again suffered. We must ask, is it necessary? Do we have to live in fear from now on? Is peace an option?
The terror is a message that we have to understand. What is its message? ‘Leave us alone’ is what these homicidal terrorists are trying to tell us. Is that too complicated for the Western subject to take in? ‘Live and let others be,’ is what this is about. The pragmatic implication is obvious. The West must immediately stop serving Israeli and global Zionist interests. We must cease all operations in Arabia and the Mid East. For that to happen, and for a chance for peace, opposition to global Zionism and Israeli lobbying is imperative.
Here is some practical advice; next time Bernard Henri Levy, David Aaronovitch or Alan Dershowitz attempt to sell a new conflict-pack in the name of ‘human rights,’ we should politely advise them that we have learned our lesson – no more wars for Zion. Then, peace may prevail.
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2015/1/1/a-battle-with-no-front
In what way is Gilad Atzmon wrong?