Half a Million Pounds of Taxpayers’ Money Bails Out Criminals Jack Straw and Sir Mark Allen 170

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So the Belhaj family have accepted an apology and half a million pounds of our tax money to drop their legal action against HMG and against Jack Straw personally over their extraordinary rendition to torture in Libya.

The British establishment, whichever party is in power, continues to do everything possible to cover up the shameful history of its complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition, and in particular to hide the authorisation by Jack Straw and Tony Blair and the involvement of senior MI6 officials like Sir Mark Allen and Sir Richard Dearlove.

A judicial inquiry by Judge Gibson into British government complicity i torture was cancelled when he showed signs of being an honest and independent man, and was replaced by an inquiry in secret by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. I gave evidence to that inquiry but no report has ever issued.

Most tellingly, a police investigation into the Belhaj case and other cases was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service ensuring that Jack Straw never stood trial. Senior policemen in the investigation had told me they believed they had sufficient evidence to prosecute. That evidence included my own sworn witness statement, taken by the Metropolitan Police over two days of interviews.

This is the crux of my sworn evidence, where I testify that the decision to use intelligence from torture came from Jack Straw and Richard Dearlove.

You can see my full evidence and an account of the circumstances of the CPS dropping the case here.

On the same issue of complicity in torture, in the US Gina Haspel, like Straw, Dearlove, and Allen here, has got away with her crimes, to the extent she has now been appointed head of the CIA. My good friend Ray McGovern yesterday made a protest over her very close involvement in authorising torture, at her confirmation hearing. As a result Ray, who is 78 years old, was brutally assaulted by six policemen who kept yelling “stop resisting” at this unresisting 78 year old man, as they dragged him around the floor, dislocating his shoulder.

Nobody has gone to jail in the UK for a complicity in torture which everybody knows occurred. Everybody also knows precisely who ought to have gone to jail, including Blair and Straw. The government spent over £4 million in legal battles to try to keep the evidence in the Belhaj case secret, before they settled out of court to avoid a public trial and to save the Establishment being exposed.

Never was there a plainer example of the neo-cons sticking together than the Tory protection of Blair and Straw.

I am personally not happy at this waste of taxpayer resources to keep Jack Straw out of jail. Are you?

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170 thoughts on “Half a Million Pounds of Taxpayers’ Money Bails Out Criminals Jack Straw and Sir Mark Allen”

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  • Yonatan

    The UK has recently passed its version of the Magnitsky Act. This case would have been an ideal inaugural case to show the legislation has teeth. What a missed opportunity for the acts proponents. (/sarc)

  • Charles Bostock

    In the links on Ray McGovern supplied by various commenters (none of those links could be called favorable to the US in general) I can find plenty of references to his ‘brutal’ removal but nothing on a dislocated shoulder. What is Mr Murray’s source for that claim?

    • Dom

      If you don’t see that as brutal treatment of a 78 year old man then you’re a fool.

      • Charles Bostock

        Thank you. Could you please provide the link for ease of reference?

    • Duane Renault

      Charles Bostock: In the video our that our host links to, the full unedited clip of Ray McGovern’s removal begins at 1:47. If you watch it, and listen to the audio, you ought to obtain plenty of evidence.

      At 2:17 Mr McGovern can clearly be heard crying out “It’s dislocated, man!”.

      Direct link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE1hT0koseg

      • Charles Bostock

        Thank you also, Duane. But at the risk of sounding ungrateful, I think I’d like more evidence than Mr McGovern’s own on the spot cry (he is not a medical man I assume). I myself once thought I’d badly sprained my ankle but a visit to the hospital revealed a broken fibula and if I thought hard enough I could probably recall occasions where I thought I’d broken something but hadn’t. So perhaps one should wait for more conclusive evidence, eg a medical report which I’m sure Mr McGovern will be more than pleased to release should his shoulder indeed have been dislocated.

        I also wonder exactly what constitutes, in the eyes of certain sources, a “brutal” eviction. But in any event it was obviously nowhere nearly as ‘brutal’ as the techniques you allege in your contribution on the previous page (and which, if true, I would certainly agree are brutal by any standards).

        I wonder whether a story which is of course basically true hasn’t been embroidered just a teeny bit?

        • Dennis Revell

          :

          You’re trying to tell us that a medical opinion is needed to tell someone that their upper arm has come out of the shoulder socket? What an idiot.

          .

    • D_Majestic

      Well his removal by thugs should be enough to bring severe criticism from any reasonable human being, one would have thought. Apart from those whose hobby is the splitting of hairs.

      • Charles Bostock

        Well, you haven’t set out what constitutes a “brutal” removal (may I suggest that that is a matter which could be discussed?) and of course, linked to that, you’re happy to call the Capitol Police “thugs” (presumably you think that they are always thugs?).

        Have you read or are you aware of any confirmation that Mr McGovern’s shoulder was actually dislocated? If it was, that could signify either bad luck or brutality; if not, are we perhaps dealing with a smidgeon of fake news?

  • Bunkum

    Strongly support Israel, who is she speaking on behalf of?

    PM call with Prime Minister Netanyahu: 10 May 2018

    Prime Minister Theresa May spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

    A Downing Street spokesperson said:

    The Prime Minister held a telephone call with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier today.

    The Prime Minister condemned the Iranian rocket attacks against Israeli forces, and said we strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself against Iranian aggression.

    The Prime Minister noted our statement calling on Iran to refrain from any further attacks, and for calm on all sides.

    They agreed it was vital for the international community to continue working together to counter Iran’s destabilising regional activity, and for Russia to use its influence in Syria to prevent further Iranian attacks.

    The Prime Minister reiterated our position on the Iran nuclear deal, noting that we and our European partners remain firmly committed to ensuring the deal is upheld, as the best way of preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-call-with-prime-minister-netanyahu-10-may-2018

    • Casual Observer

      Looks like she’s trying to ride both horses at once ? A difficult feat, and one that generally ends in a fall 🙂

    • Sharp Ears

      Well, she is a fervent member of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Perhaps her Pa, the Rev Hubert Brasier, was a Christian Zionist.

      • David Avi

        You seem never to fail to inform readers that MPs are Conservative/Labour/LibDem ‘Friends of Israel’ even when what you’re writing about has nothing to do with Israel, Palestine of the Middle East in general.

        Could you clarify whether you think that such membership is ipso facto a black mark in the book of the MPs in question. If you don’t think it is, why do you keep telling us about it?

    • Jack

      Shes apparently talking not for british people but israeli lobby groups.
      Israel attack on occupational land. But Iran is the aggressor, when Syria LEGALLY respond.
      This is so 1984 its unbelivable.

  • Charlie Grafton

    Very evident and has been for nearly two decades that senior members of government and their departments are above the law, protected from it, and that this is the foundation of our covert authoritarian regime. Although it is time to be calling it out for what it is, we are lacking media sufficiently bold and independent.

    • Clive p

      Speaking from direct personal experience MI5 has always been above the law. They have their own lawyer who liaises with the DPP to get police investigations stopped and charges dropped. This includes murder.

      • BarrieJ

        There’s little doubt that our security services have played a significant role in protecting paedophiles and in preventing them from being brought to trial. They are an enemy of the people and rejoice in the part they play. Entirely without shame or conscience.
        We are a country governed by gangsters.

      • Rhys Jaggar

        Speaking from direct experience, refusal to engage in surveillance of colleagues i.e.being a stooge of MI5/6 is a prohibitive block to promotion in careers like research science, management condultancy and VC fund management.

        But you will not officials ever admitting to that…..

        It is something all 18 year olds should told is the price of ‘ambition’…….and any head teacher who refuses to inform them should be thrown out of education for life….

  • Blissex

    And as our blogger certainly remembers but bears reminding, Jack Straw was fired brutally from his post as foreign secretary by the USA government because he was not not extreme far-right enough, as reported by W Rees-Mogg in “The Times” of 2006-08-07:

    “When Jack Straw was replaced by Margaret Beckett as Foreign Secretary, it seemed an almost inexplicable event. Mr Straw had been very competent — experienced, serious, moderate and always well briefed. Margaret Beckett is embarrassingly inexperienced.
    I made inquiries in Washington and was told that Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had taken exception to Mr Straw’s statement that it would be “nuts” to bomb Iran. The United States, it was said, had put pressure on Tony Blair to change his Foreign Secretary. Mr Straw had been fired at the request of the Bush Administration, particularly at the Pentagon. … The alternative explanation was more recently given by Irwin Stelzer in The Spectator; he has remarkably good Washington contacts and is probably right. His account is that Mr Straw was indeed dismissed because of American anxieties, but that Dr Rice herself had become worried, on her visit to Blackburn, by Mr Straw’s dependence on Muslim votes. About 20 per cent of the voters in Blackburn are Islamic; Mr Straw was dismissed only four weeks after Dr Rice’s visit to his constituency.
    It may be that both explanations are correct. The first complaint may have been made by Mr Rumsfeld because of Iran; Dr Rice may have withdrawn her support after seeing the Islamic pressures in Blackburn.
    At any rate, Irwin Stelzer’s account confirms that Mr Straw was fired because of American pressure.”

  • giyane

    Belhaj was working for USUKIS when they were arrested in Malaysia and rendition/torture/brainwashed back to Libya. He has of course been liberally rewarded, both financially and by being put in a position of power over his Libyan enemies. USUKIS recognised his value to them in removing all trace of Gaddaffi. Since he has now completed his part of the bargain with USUKIS to hand over the oil wealth of Libya into their charming hands, he has now got an apology out of the UK government and a few quid for remaining loyal to his sponsors.

    Such are the vermin of Islamist confederates with the enemies of Islam. A walking talking catastrophe for Islam who will burn forever in the fire of Hel with his fellow confederates in Al Qaida and Daesh. Oh but you’re all much too polite to mention this as part of the realpolitik of neo-colonial power.

    • Sharp Ears

      Oh yes Ms Coburn. Just a technical hitch of course. 🙂

      Incidentally, she is a member of the congregation at the Ealing synagogue.

      She is no better that Neil in the Daily Politics chair. Their output of propaganda is identical.

      • David Avi

        ‘Incidentally, she is a member of the congregation at the Ealing synagogue.’

        Yes, Ms Jo Coburn is a practising J*w. Do you have a problem with that, and if you do not, why did you mention it?

    • Jones

      @ Dave Lawton
      BBC propagandists thinks it needs to be kept quiet even though the whole wide world knows the truth !, defend the criminal but attack the protester of the crime !

      Straw and Blair are living in comfortable luxury after committing heinous crimes and Haspel is awarded promotion while McGovern gets roughed-up and dragged off to jail, it’s now crystal clear your position in society directly equates to accountability to law.

  • giyane

    Mrs May always rides 2 horses at once. She is a global Zionist first, like Trump, with absolute loyalty to Israel and a European politician second, in which her role involves service to Israel in the local hegemon. No conflict of interests for her. she giveth not a shit about the UK which she preferreth to take to the brinkshit of bankruptcy by her stupid Brexit ideas. Low life like her would never be able to contain 2 ideas at any one time. Her make-up on the outside of her face says she is female, but her mouth utters only male fundamentalist Hebrew ideas.

  • giyane

    This event, a trite apology from a government that is up to its neck in both continuing torture rendition brainwashing and re-colonisation of the empire given up at the end of the war, epitomises the insult of neo-con power. They assume that they will prevail, and will be forgiven by the general public. By Allah, they will never be forgiven. They will squrm in eternity for their continuation of global vice, that even 2 world wars has failed to teach them not to continue. This day is the epitaph to their illegal, murderous carnage which has consumed all our lives. May Allah consign each and every one of them to the Fire.

  • Skyblaze

    Hard not to believe in the death penalty for this…losing my faith in humanity

  • giyane

    On this Day they will pray for 1000 deaths.

    Anyway, we were deviously misled by the propagandists of the USUKIS empire into thinking that oil production was past its zenith. No, it has been slowly garbered for the economies of the developed world at the expense of the Muslim worlsd , where by and large the deposits mainly are.

    maybe somebody has an excuse for the murderous kleptomania of Western psychology, by which vast and educated nations totally ignore the criminality of their leaders and repeatedly vote them into power.
    I do believe that anybody who has been subjected to any form of political encarceration in the West or by the West has undergone chemical brainwashing , which is an excuse of some sort for those who have been subjected to it to attack their hired torturers, Assad, Saddam, Mubarak etc. it isn’t an excuse for them choosing to earn a living betraying their own countries and countryfolk, but it is an excuse for them being brain dead after being poisoned.

  • Sharp Ears

    The BBC gave the job of reporting the Belhaj case to Correra, the BBC’s very spooky ‘Security Correspondent’ speaking from Istanbul. When I first came across him, years back, he was working out of an office in Slough as a consultant. Hasn’t he come on since then. LOL.

  • Anne McCullagh- d’ Lyske

    Terrible equivocation. Why can’t these crooks Blair and Straw be held to account? People are harassed, pursued and jailed for trivial crimes, and these monsters continue to enjoy their ill gotten gains in perfect liberty. We fought them in 2005 over these very issues of torture and rendition and the public chose to re-elect them regardless. A sad and sorry reflection of our national zeitgeist…..

  • Angela Kelly

    I am livid that my money is used to pervert the course of justice and also to give even more funding to the White Helmet terrorist fraudsters!

  • lysias

    I heard on Radio Sputnik D.C. around 5 PM Eastern Daylight Time today that Ray McGovern is still in jail and in bad condition.

  • Radar O’Reilly

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/cia-veteran-tackled-at-gina-haspel-hearing-charged-with-resisting-arrest

    The Only two people arrested/jailed for United States’ torture related activities are those exposing/protesting the crimes. The torturers are *actually* promoted!

    Seems that similar rules apply in UK, the 14-years of judicial evasion by rendition facilitating/complicit Brit-gov has worked.

    What is to stop this type of illegal activity from happening again?

    • Trowbridge H. Ford

      Even if those arrested, including Ray McGovern, had not been injured, I find it much more important why they were protesting Gina Haspel becoming DCI.

      Haspel went to extreme lengths to establish more about the known 19 suicide bombers being really just hijackers who the American leaders were emphasizing to cover their asses for the massive screwup which resulted, and has changed the world.

      Haspel helped keep it from becoming an unprecedented scandal which would have resulted in GW and his minions, especially Cheney, from being removed from office and going to jail.

      That’s why they wanted to beat the crap out of McGovern!

  • giyane

    Radar O’Reilly

    ” What is to stop this type of illegal activity happening again.? ”

    So long as there are Muslims who are ready to betray their countries, their religion and their fellow Muslims for cash and power, the law is irrelevant because all these transactions are done in secret. The Qur’an plainly states that those who betray their religion to the enemies of Islam, must removed / killed etc before dealing with those enemies themselves. It plainly states that those Muslims who hypocritically make a confederation with the enemies of Islam and assist them against the Muslims will never be forgiven by God, even if people find it in their heart to forgive them.

    Basically, if a Muslim like Belhaj, won’t listen to the Qur’an, there is absolutely nothing to stop the enemies of Islam doing whatever they like to the Muslims. I see MSM are putting up a spivved-up dream photo of Belhaj. He is not a victim. He was working for MI6 and the CIA, who always torture their agents to keep them in line. Torture is a component of brainwashing. It is used by the British army on its own special forces in order to harden them psychologically to commit illegal crimes.

    What Craig is not telling us , by swiftly moving on to a new post about the BBC, is that he himself had to operate such agents, and he himself was distressed by the fact that the CIA and MI6 tortured the agents he was operating. Craig was not willing to do this work any more at the incredibly extreme levels of ruthlessness being deployed by USUKIS at the time. Will that ever change. No, the only way to stop it is from the Muslim side when greedy ambitious bastards like Belhaj see no profit in their treacherous trade.

  • Steve Hayes

    Belhaj was a jihadist terrorist. A member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist organisation committed to the violent overthrow of the Libyan state. An organisation that the British state has both supported and opposed. An organisation that the British state supported under the present administration, whilst May was the Home Secretary, whose members were allowed to freely travel between this country and Libya in order to foment civil disorder, which was used as a pretext for the bombing of Libya back into the middle ages. There are serious crimes here. The CIA’s torture of Belhaj is but the tip of a very large iceberg.

  • Sharp Ears

    ‘An illustrative if sharp point in Wednesday’s proceedings came when former CIA operative Ray McGovern made an intervention at Haspel’s refusal to consider the moral dimension of enhanced interrogation techniques. What of instances, suggested Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, when a CIA officer might be tortured? Would such conduct be immoral?

    McGovern duly stood up in the audience and uttered, somewhat inscrutably, that “Senator Wyden, you deserve a direct answer.” (Wyden was not questioning Haspel at the time) The outcome was swift and violent: committee head Senator Richard Burr ordering the Capitol Police to frogmarch the one time chair of the National Intelligence Estimates out of the chamber.

    Prior to the hearings, McGovern had penned a powerful note** on the lamentable nature of Trump’s appointee. We already knew that Haspel had sought to destroy “dozens of videotapes of torture sessions, including some before her arrival.” Haspel was also part of that industry of deception on “the supposed effectiveness of torture”, something she repeatedly fed “to CIA superiors, Congress, and two presidents.”

    With protestors crying foul, and the senators probing the prospects of what a Haspel-led CIA might look like, torture is again making an appearance as prospect and reality. McGovern’s ejection simply served to sully things further.

    The Spectre of Torture: The Gina Haspel Hearings
    Binoy Kampmark / May 10th, 2018
    https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/05/the-spectre-of-torture-the-gina-haspel-hearings/

    **
    Will a Torturer Become CIA Director?
    May 7, 2018
    Gina Haspel faces a confirmation hearing on Wednesday to become CIA director despite her record of supporting torture, which even the Pentagon admitted does not work, says Ray McGovern.
    https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/07/will-a-torturer-become-cia-director/

  • nevermind

    I’m ot happy about Jack Straw/Tony Blair getting away with it. Anybody has a plan to get these two what they deserve? i.e. some of their very own methods should be applied to if justice can’t reach them.

  • giyane

    Sharp Ears

    ” What of instances, suggested Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, when a CIA officer might be tortured? Would such conduct be immoral? ”

    There is massive dependence on psychotic drugs in the US. The society is very deliberately kept extremely violent, extremely immoral and extremely unstable economically. It’s much easier to control the masses if they are jumpy, and if they are not jumpy enough they can be made jumpy by ridiculous false-flags.

    There is no difference at all between stimulating violence in society, plus moral outrage, followed by mind-altering drugs and what takes place in rendition torture brain-washing. Note the absolute outrage of Belhaj’s pregnant wife being handed over to Libyan torture. she was totally innocent of her husbands crime of collaborating and working as a jihadist terrorist for the CIA and MI6.

    Senator Jack Reed , thinking his question would stimulate thought , soon found out he had touched the main nerve of Western society, that we are collectively de-stabilised by systematic lies, de-stabilised by systematic family deprivation by forcing women go out to work and abandon their offspring to un-carers at great expense, deliberately not assisted in matters of divorce, deliberately encouraged to take drugs they import for us, smoke cigarettes they manufacture for us, and drink revolting alcohol they distill for us, to keep us deeply brain-washed.

    The Islamic up-bringing, having few of these faults, requires them to imprison, torture and dose with drugs to achieve the same effect our society has just by being the shit-hole of UK life.

  • giyane

    nevermind

    The war-criminals aforesaid, Jack Straw, Blair, Bush Cheney, Obama, Cameron, Haig Fox and May are not keeping up either with external reality in which China and Russia have overtaken their military and financial supremacy or their inner reality as they no longer command the slightest respect from the majority of the electorate.

    The presence of men of integrity and understanding like Craig and Jeremy Corbyn is making them start to twitch. Can you imagine George Bush tweeting, or cokehead Cameron apologising like Taz? they definitely don’t like it up ’em. They know the Brexit referendum was a rebellion and they are trying very hard to pretend not to be pissed off. The fact is that when we are outside the EU, the EU will spill the dirt on every nasty bent little trick in the Anglo-saxon book. If Scotland chooses to remain in the EU, or indeed any of us move out of the UK into Europe with our feet, we will be able to use the EU against the English war-criminal class.

    We might not see them prosecuted, but we will definitely see them unable to raise their heads over the political parapet without getting their coifs blown off.

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