Strangely, even the sight on television of the body of a small boy, the same age as Cameron, being dug by hand from the bomb rubble, is not what has stayed with me strongest from the latest attack on the Palestinians. Instead, I recall most vividly a radio broadcast on the BBC World Service two days before the attack on Gaza began.

It was a banal, everyday story of Palestinian villagers being evicted from their land in the occupied West Bank, to make way for an Israeli “military zone”. These pastoralists had lost a thousand hectares to the Israelis in the last few years, and now these ancient villages were being finally, forcibly, evacuated in a vicious act of ethnic cleansing. The shepherds claimed that what this was really about, was the precious springs that watered their livestock. Work was already starting to divert their water to nearby, and illegal, burgeoning Israeli settlements.

The BBC World Service TV has this minute, at 9.00am GMT, started its news broadcast as usual from Ashkelon in Israel, highlighting rocket attacks on Israel. There is no mention on the BBC – there has never been any mention on the BBC, or anywhere in the Western mainstream media – that for at least 4,000 years Ashkelon was an Arab town, until in 1948 the entire, Arab population of 12,000 was driven out by armed force, many being massacred. Doubtless some older inhabitants of Gaza are refugees whose home is Ashkelon.

Israel is exercising its right of self-defence in precisely the same sense that Hitler was exercising the right of self-defence in Normandy in 1944 – ie not at all. Why the world puts up with this blatant ethnic cleansing and prolonged, agonizing genocide of the Palestinain people, I have no idea. It is not just about bombs and rockets and deaths now. It is about the shepherds being pushed out of their village in 2012 as part of the same process of the massacre of Ashkelon in 1948, all a process of genocide of the Palestinians in which Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Hague, as two wholw generations of western politicians before them, are actively complicit.

Thanks for the many good wishes. I am now quite well, even if a lot slimmer. The problem was purely physical on this occasion, though Nadira and Cameron flying out to join me certainly helped me feel a lot better. I shall be back in the UK at the weekend.

Hillary Clinton is repeating the methodology of the Iran/Contra affair, using “black” funds to finance the operation to ensure President Correa is not re-elected.

I had two excellent sources for the news that the US/UK strategy against Julian Assange was to ensure the defeat of President Correa in Presidential elections next spring, and then have him expelled from the Ecuadorean Embassy. One source was within the UK civil service and one in Washington. Both had direct, personal access to the information I described. Both told me in the knowledge I would publish it.

Of course Assange is not the only reason Clinton wants rid of Correa; but it adds spice and urgency.

We now have completely independent evidence from Chile that this CIA operation exists, from journalists who were investigating a smuggling operation involving 300 kg per month of cocaine, organised by the Chilean army and security services.

The links to US intelligence emerged after an anonymous source from the Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia (ANI) told Panoramas News that the smuggling of 300 kilos of cocaine was in fact a highly sensitive CIA/DEA operation that would help to raise money to topple the government of Ecuador. The operation is similar to the one carried out by the Agency in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s, the source said.

A few days ago I published information I had received that Patricio Mery Bell, the director of the news programme which broke the story, had been lured to a meeting with a young lady “informant” who had worked with CIA-backed anti-Cuban groups in Miami. She had then accused him of sexual assault (does any of that scenario sound familiar?) He was arrested and his materials had been confiscated. However I took the article down after jst a few minutes because I had received the information in emails from sources I did not know previously, and was unsure it could stand up. It does now appear that this is indeed true.

My Washigton informant had told me, as I published, that the funds for the anti-Correa operation were not from the CIA budget but from secret funds controlled by the Pentagon. This could not be done by CIA funds because, perhaps surprisingly, for the CIA to operate in this way is a crime in the United States.

Whether my informant knew or suspected that the “secret Pentagon funds” were drug money I do not know. They did not mention narcotics.

I make mistakes. I have ocasionally regretted something I wrote. However I have never written anything motivated by hatred of another race or religion, yet I am too “extreme” for the mainstream media. But Melanie Phillips, darling of the Mail and the BBC, can write this kind of incitement to religious hatred:

Romney lost because, like Britain’s Conservative Party, the Republicans just don’t understand that America and the west are being consumed by a culture war. In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Islamic enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void.

With the re-election of Obama, America now threatens to lead the west into a terrifying darkness.

Can somebody please show anything I have written which is anywhere near as ill-motivated? Or anything near as barking mad? Yet Phillips is mainstream and I am in some way understood to be “beyond the pale” of accepted opinion. How does this happen?

Islam is a religion. I know a great many extremely good Muslims. There are also some bad ones, just as there are good and bad Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, you name it. What if I were to write:

“In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Jewish enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void.”

Why is not everybody protected from hate speech? Unfortunately we don’t have an appropriate word as strong as “racist” to describe the kind of vile bigot Phillips is, Muslims not being a race. For Phillips to accuse Obama of conspiring with racial intolerance while promoting evil and hatred herself, is unspeakable.

Actually if Phillips is acceptable as a mainstream commentator, I am proud that I am not.

My friend Mike Arnott of Dundee TUC has done more than anybody to record the story of the outstanding Dundonian contribution to the early war against fascism; seventeen men from Dundee died in the International Brigade.

I wonder what they would think about the alliance between the right wing Spanish “Popular Party” and the Tories plus, reportedly, New Labour to plan a demand for the expulsion of an independent Scotland from the European Union?

New Labour’s commitment to keeping Trident in Scotland, to ending free prescriptions and to imposing university tuition fees makes it, I suppose, unremarkable that they would feel comfortable in this company.

The Tories have today denied that they have made any formal deal on a united front against Scottish and Catalonian independence, while acknowledging that meetings between the Scottish Tories and the Popular Party have taken place. (To discuss what else, one wonders? Property prices on Tory retirement homes in Spain?)

Four more years of drone killings, Guantanamo, crazy FBI agent provocateur plots, whistleblower prosecutions and surveillance of citizens were going to come whoever won. Goldman Sachs funded both candidates royally. I probably prefer the slightly tempered or disguised neo-con to the red meat neo-con, but let nobody pretend it makes a vast difference.

A respected retired African President told me last week that George Bush did more for Africa than Obama. Amazingly, I believe that to be true; whatever his motives, a number of Bush initiatives pumped real money into useful African infrastructure. Obama’s relations with Africa have almost entirely revolved around location of military bases.

Perspective changes as you move around the globe.

This is a genuine offer. I will pay £100 to any person who can provide a convincing reason why Denis MacShane’s expense fiddling, involving his creating false invoices, was not a criminal offence. Your argument does not have to be unanswerable – merely respectable. Up to three prizes will be given, for the three first and not essentially the same convincing arguments.

This competition specifically is open to employees of the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service; we would love to know their reasoning. It baffles me. I confess I can think of no single circumstance in this case that would prevent MacShane being convicted for theft and fraud. What is the answer?

Denis MacShane is a criminal. If he wants to try his chances with a jury, the libel courts are open to him and I am here.

The most reliable Israeli mouthpiece in the House of Commons, Dennis MacShane, has today resigned as an MP after stealing £20,000 in expenses. This was not a case of a doubtful claim – MacShane actually created, himself, 19 false invoices.

Why he has not been prosecuted and jailed is a question well worth discussion.

At the time that he stole that money, his long term partner was the journalist Joan Smith, who presumably also benefited from it. She wrote this astonishing article in the Guardian:

” I am sick of my country and this hysteria over MPs. People have been led to believe that we are governed by a corrupt political class. This is sanctimonious nonsense.”

Smith is of course a great expert in sanctimonious nonsense, and a leader of the New Labour war criminal movement in their attacks on Julian assange:

It was BICOM mouthpiece Denis MacShane who attacked Paul Flynn as “antisemitic” for querying the purpose of the long series of meetings between Matthew Gould, Adam Werritty and Liam Fox, some of which included Mossad. In doing so, MacShane did not mention his own role in setting up the first of those meetings, on 8 September 2009, and that he had been present at the start of that meeting. The FCO tried to hide that fact by deleting the entire diary entry for the meeting – but that very act prompted an old colleague to tell me.

Talk of “round up the usual suspects”. Gary Glitter and Freddie Starr are not even low-hanging fruit for the Met, they are windfalls.

Jimmy Savile’s behaviour was evidently priapistic, and his predeliction for under-age sex, it is plain, was indulged continually in semi-public situations. The risk or exposure, or the thrill of his own incredible immunity, appear to have been part of the enjoyment.

I do not accept that there were two Jimmy Saviles; that one, the open pervert, only appeared when he was with the conveniently already discredited Gadd and Starr, and the other entirely respectable Savile was the friend of Royalty, senior politicians and public servants and entirely blameless in his behaviour. It seems to me much more intrinsically probable that the mutual indulgence of shared vices was the stuff of his friendships in both groups.

Savile’s elevation into the social elite brought him the immunity from prosecution for sexual exploitation that social elites always appear to enjoy. The “posh” part of Savile’s social circle continues to be protected, while Glitter and Starr will satisfy the public mood for revenge.

I am sure there is a great deal more to know than Glitter and Starr. I fear we shall never be permitted to know it.

The rabid anti-Europeanism displayed in the recent House of Commons debate on EU funding was a further clarification of a simple political truth. The real choice facing Scotland in 2014 is, “Which union do you wish to be in?”

Scotland can either be independent within the European Union or part of the United Kingdom outside the European Union. In joining the pro-UKIP wing of the Tory Party in the vote, Ed Milliband was, with short term shrewdness, tapping in to a bottomless well of English atavism that I have no doubt, from living there and simple observation of those around me, is leading England inexorably out of the European Union.

UKIP support rises, the Tory xenophobes bray, New Labour joins them because as always it scents the way to money and power. The English have already kept the UK out of Schengen and the Euro, the two most important developments in the history of the EU and both of which it would be great to be in. (On my advice a company here in Ghana is now buying tens of millions of pounds of manufactured equipment from Sweden, switching source from the UK, because the weak Euro gives much better value for money). The UK is already out of some of the most important aspects of the EU, snad the rest will follow.

When did any major English political figure dare to suggest in public that the EU is a good thing? That, incidentally, is a genuine question. Any answers? Neither English politicians nor media care to hide their gloating at the Eurozone’s economic difficulties, and the London media still makes daily predictions of the end of the Euro, despite having been wrong on the subject 1,000 days in a row.

Most amusing is when pundits who don’t actually support the EU themselves leap with glee when they can find a Spaniard wishing to be disobliging about an independent Scotland’s EU status. Said Spaniard is suddenly the ultimate authority on EU law, even though the same pundits deride Spain in every other circumstance.

It won’t be on the ballot paper. But the real question for the Scots is “Which union do you wish to be in?”

Pulling Imran Khan off a plane in Canada, and making him miss his Eid fundraising lunch in New York, is pretty crass of the United States, a country that claims its foreign policy is motivated by freedom. The idea that low level US immigration operatives needed clarificiation on Khan’s well-known views on killings by US drones in Pakistan is plainly nonsense. But this wasn’t routine or an error; Khan wasn’t questioned at a desk on arrival in New York, he was pulled off a plane by US operatives in Canada. It was an exercise in humiliation.

But if you look under this event you find some interesting, creepy crawly creatures.

From the Toronto Sun report linked above:

The American Islamic Leadership Coalition from Phoenix, Ariz. wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this week, pressuring her to revoke the U.S. visa granted to Khan because of his sympathetic views towards the Taliban.

The American Islamic Leadership Coalition followed this up with a press release with the notably un-Islamic contact name of Gregg Edgar of Gordon C James Public Relations.

From Wikipedia on Gordon C James:

James grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and moved to Iowa in 1969 where he served several years in the Iowa National Guard. James worked in the real-estate management business in Des Moines, renting space to presidential candidates in town for the caucuses. In 1978, he met and rented space to former President of the United States George H. W. Bush (then Ambassador Bush).[1]
After the 1988 election James worked as Lead Advance Representative at the White House for two years under President George H.W. Bush and Director of Invitations and Ticketing for the 51st Presidential Inaugural Committee.[2] James was also employed as deputy director of events for the 54th and 55th Presidential Inauguration.[3] In 1990 he founded the public relations firm Gordon C. James Public Relations.
In 2004, James was employed by former U.S. Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to improve U.S. public relations in Iraq during the transition of governments.[4] For more than five months he served as the Director of Advance and Special Events in the Office of Strategic Communications and Director of the Presidential Palace Studio for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq. While there he advised Ambassador Paul Bremer and was responsible for coordinating the Ambassador’s relations with Western and Pan-Arab media outlets and produced several events including the signing of the Tal (Iraq’s Declaration of Independence) and 100 Days to Sovereignty, the countdown to the transfer of power from the CPA to newly founded Iraqi government.[5]
In 2004 James assisted in several political stops with the Bush-Cheney campaign and in 2005, he was employed as lead advance representative for President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton’s tour of the Tsunami-hit regions of Indonesia.[6]
James has traveled to five continents as a lead advance representative for President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.

There are some Muslims in the American Islamic Leadership Coalition. In Phoenix with Gordon C James is M Zuhdi Jasser, of Syrian origin but for eleven years a medical officer in the US Navy. And the AILC has another interesting Syrian, leader of “The Reform Party of Syria”, Farid Ghadry. The AILC website includes the quote:

“Gossip is he is the next president of Syria”

Ghadry lives in Washington and is the author of such fascinating blog posts as “Israel Builds for Nobel Prizes, Arabs are Suicide Bombers”.

Like the Quilliam Foundation in the UK, doubtless the AILC has hoovered up plenty of public funds for its useful work for the security services. BUt the idea that it genuinely represents a strand in Islamic thinking is ludicrous. It is marvellous what being an establishment shill can do for your media profile though. Zuhdi Jasser addressed his largest mass rally of supporters – highly optimistically estimated by the media as three dozen – in a New York rally in support of NYPD’s controversial surveillance and agent provocateur operations against Muslims. Rather than laughing at it, the tame mainstream media covered it infinitely better than they cover anti-war rallies 1,000 times larger, and portrayed it as a genuine sign of Muslim community support for the surveillance.

Just as none of the mainstream media reporting the current Imran Khan story – most of whon quote the AILC – say anything about who the AILC really are. What do people working in the mainstream media think the purpose of their existence actually is?

Of 110 containers of pharmaceuticals entering West Africa searched in a special operation coordinated by the World Customs Organisation (WCO), 84 were found to contain fake pharmaceuticals. 82 million doses of fake medicine were confiscated which included anti-malarial and anti-HIV drugs and antibiotics.

Here in sub-Saharan Africa, over two children die every minute of malaria – which in 98% of cases can be cured with US $6 worth of genuine drugs. A spokesman for the WCO on BBC World Service radio last night said that the number of deaths caused directly by counterfeit medicine in Africa every year was in the hundreds of thousands. He called it “genocide”.

I might not use that word, but it is beyond doubt true that supplying counterfeit drugs to Africa causes more deaths than narcotics, than the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East combined, and several hundred times more deaths than terrorism.

The supply of fake life-saving drugs to the world’s poorest people is not only on a far greater scale than terrorism, it is morally just as evil, killing innocent civilian populations, particularly children, on an unimaginable scale of slaughter.

So why does this terrible evil receive virtually no mainstream media exposure? Is it because it happens to Africans, and the media coverage of Africa is so negative and relentlessly concentrated on disaster that it leads to a perception that the natural state of Africans is to die of disease?

It is worth noting that this terrible crime is being committed against Africa from outside – almost none of the fake pharmaceuticals are made in Africa. Here in Ghana I know the good people at the Food and Drugs Administration; they are well organised, well-qualified and well-equipped. But they are fighting a huge tide of fake drugs and organised crime on a massive scale.

In Ghana the fake drugs come overwhelngly from China amd India, and I suspect that is true across the BRICS. This terrible dark side – the WCO estimates that the counterfeit drugs trade yields profits of US$9 billion a year – should be borne in mind when considering the success of the BRICS and their possible counterweight to Western influence in foreign affairs.

India and China have vastly more economic resources and greater government control than the African states whose people are the victims of this evil trade. The word “genocide” used by the WCO spokesman causes you to think in this case, because this is mass killing perpetrated by Asians against Africans. The exporting states must face up to their moral obligation to take responsibility for the quality control of the manufacture of their exports, and in particular for controls at ports to ensure fake drugs are not exported.

The United Nations and the World Health Organisation should take action to ensure that the xporting state has a legal obligation effectively to stop the export of counterfeit drugs, with effective redress for victim states against the exporting state.

I had a half-formed post in mind to work on this morning, but then I read Glenn Greewald’s latest and concluded that if you are going to devote ten minutes of your day, nothing I could write would be as profitable as your reading him.

I would only add the obvious fact that Blair had already done to New Labour precisely what Obama has done to the Democrats; and that western “democracy” has lost its meaning because the institutionally entrenched parties offer no actual policy choice to voters, but are all neo-conservative.

I have travelled this world much more extensively than either Obama or Romney, and I still do. I find everywhere, even in areas of conflict and economic difficulty, the vast majority of people are friendly, even kind, and have very similar aspirations, across cultures, to personal development and emotional fulfilment.

The striking thing about tonight’s US Presidential “foreign policy” debate, is when it did occasionally discuss foreign policy, the world out there was discussed not as a place of vast potential, but as a deeply disturbing place full of foreigners who are, apparently, all evil except the Israelis, who are perfect.

The vast benefits from cooperation and trade with “abroad” were not mentioned once that I noticed (though I confess the thing was so awful my attention wandered occasionally). Europe apparently doesn’t exist, other than Greece which is nothing more than a terrible warning of the dangers of not being right wing enough.

The correct attitude to all these foreigners that God so unfortunately and inexplicably placed on this planet, is apparently to maintain incredibly large armed forces, murder people with drones (they were both very enthusiastic on this one), place sanctions on them and declare them “currency manipulators”. The only surprising note was that both agreed that they could not kill everyone in Iran.

But “We can’t just kill our way out of this mess” was spoken with regret, rather than as an affirmation of the possibilities of cooperation instead. What a grim and joyless world view. Maybe I had better not step out of this hotel into Africa this morning; those Islamists might get me.

About a month ago I asked a former colleague in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office what Hague saw as the endgame in the Julian Assange asylum standoff, and where the room for negotiation lay. My friend was dismissive – the policy was simply to wait for the Presidential election in Ecuador in February. The United States and allies were confident that Correa will lose, and my friend and I having both been senior diplomats for many years we understood what the United States would be doing to ensure that result. With Correa replaced by a pro-USA President, Assange’s asylum will be withdrawn, the Metropolitan Police invited in to the Embassy of Ecuador to remove him, and Assange sent immediately to Sweden from where he could be extradited to the United States to face charges of espionage and aiding terrorism.

I have been struck by the naivety of those who ask why the United States could not simply request Assange’s extradition from the United Kingdom. The answer is simple – the coalition government. Extradition agreements are government to government international treaties, and the decision on their implementation is ultimately political and governmental – that is why it was Teresa May and not a judge who took the final and very different political decisions on Babar Ahmad and Gary Mackinnon.

CIA supporters in the UK have argued vociferously that it would be impossible for Sweden to give Assange the assurance he would not be extradited to the United States, with which he would be prepared to return to Sweden to see off the rather pathetic attempted fit-up there. In fact, as extradition agreements are governmental not judicial instruments, it would be perfectly possible for the Swedish government to give that assurance. Those who argue otherwise, like Gavin Essler and Joan Smith here, are not being truthful – I suspect their very vehemence indicates that they know that.

Most Liberal Democrat MPs are happy to endorse the notion that Assange should be returned to Sweden to face sexual accusations. However even the repeatedly humiliated Lib Dem MPs would revolt at the idea that Assange should be sent to face life imprisonment in solitary confinement in the United States for the work of Wikileaks. That is why the United States has held off requesting extradition from the United Kingdom, to avoid the trouble this would cause Cameron. I am not speculating, there have been direct very senior diplomatic exchanges on this point between Washington and London.

There was confidence that the Correa problem would soon pass, but the State Department has since been shocked by the return of Hugo Chavez. Like Correa, senior US diplomats had convinced themselves – and convinced La Clinton – that Chavez was going to lose. The fury at Chavez’s return has led to a diktat that the same mistake must not be made in Ecuador.

CIA operations inside Ecuador are in any case much less disrupted than in Venezuela. I learn that the US budget, using mostly Pentagon funds, devoted to influencing the Ecuadorean election has, since the Venezuelan result, been almost tripled to US $87 million. This will find its way into opposition campaign coffers and be used to fund, bribe or blackmail media and officials. Expect a number of media scandals and corruption stings against Correa’s government in the next few weeks.

I do not have much background on Ecuadorean politics and I really do not know what Correa’s chances of re-election are. Neither do I know if any of the opposition parties are decent and not in the hands of the USA. But I do know that the USA very much want Correa to lose, were very confident that he was going to lose, and now are not. From their point of view, the danger is that in upping the ante, their efforts will become so obvious they will backfire in a nationalist reaction. My US source however is adamant that the Obama adminstration will not actually use the funds to incite another military coup attempt against Correa. That has apparently been ruled out. Assange being expelled into the arms of the CIA by a newly installed military dictatorship might be a difficult sell even for our appalling mainstream media.

The outpouring of evidence about Jimmy Savile shows that scores of people working in the BBC, Hospitals, childrens’ homes and even the police knew – not had heard gossip, really knew – about Savile’s paedophilia, but did not blow the whistle.

To me this correlates with the fact that scores of people in the FCO, MI6, MI5, Cabinet Office and other government agencies knew about extraordinary rendition, but did not blow – indeed still have have not blown – the whistle.

Savile had come to be seen as a big and peculiarly “Establishment” figure. The extreme rarity of whistleblowing in society is a strange phenomenon it is worth taking a few minutes to consider. Why did none of those now coming forward with their stories – not the victims, but the eye-witnesses – come forward at the time? Fear is probably the main answer, in particular fear of losing your job if you rock the boat. One problem in modern society is that people’s job is too central to their identity – most people when asked who they are, will reply what work they do. It is not just the need to earn money; your social status and personal relationships are often dependent on your position at work. To lose your job, or to become a social pariah within the organisation where you work, is too much for most people to contemplate.

That is why BBC producers who knew about Savile, saw him at it, did not blow the whistle on one of the Corporation’s biggest stars. It is why so few whistleblowers spontaneously come forward who have seen corruption in local government planning departments or defence procurement, to give an example. For most white collar crime there are people who are not directly involved bu see it and keep quiet. There is also the deterrent of self-incrimination – after a time silence becomes complicity.

In my own case of blowing the whistle on the international torture network, I know for certain that many other Ambassadors and diplomats knew just what was happening, most of them didn’t like it, but nobody but me blew the whistle. One Ambassador sent me a cheery “Rather you than me!” Some were actively complicit by being involved in rendition arrangements, others passively by not trying to stop it. This is why the Gibsom Inquiry into Complicity in Torture was shelved – it could not have proceeded without revealing that scores, possibly hundreds, are guilty, many of them still high-ranking civil servants. It was to protect them and the institutions in which they work, rather than to protect the high profile war criminals like Blair, Straw and Campbell, that the Establishment closes ranks. I always knew I would never be allowed to testify before an Inquiry into Complicity in Torture.

Whistleblowers are not just thrown out of their jobs. They almost never find new employment, as the one quality every employer values above any other quality is loyalty to the employer, right or wrong. Nobody wants a “disloyal” employee, whatever their motives. And if your whistleblowing involves the world of war and spying, they will try to set you up on false charges, like me, like Julian Assange, and not just sack you but destroy you.

Whistleblowers are rare because it is a near suicidal vocation, and everyone else is too scared to help. The Savile case teaches us far more important lessons than the prurient detail of a lurid life. Think about it.

I am 54 today! That sounds really old, but I can honestly say that I feel as young and hopeful, and my mind feels as open and agile, as when I was twenty. I undoubtedly know a lot more, but I don’t confuse that with wisdom.

I am in a hotel in Ghana and sad to be apart from family today. I have been taking stock a little this morning and my greatest disappointment is that I have not been able to change things in Uzbekistan, or in Western government’s attitude to Uzbekistan.

1.4 million Uzbek children are today working in regime forced labour in the Uzbek cotton fields. They work at physically very tough labour for twelve hours a day in conditions identical to those in which black slave workers suffered in the Southern United States 200 years ago – indeed several US slaveowners would have scrupled at the wholesale use of children as young as eight in the fields, as is done by the Uzbek government. They sleep in barracks on concrete floors, live on weak vegetable soup and drink dirty water from the irrigation ditches.

Of course it is not only children who are forced into the fields, and the system requires extreme compulsion. On October 6 in Kashkadarya 18 year old Navruz Islamov was beaten to death by police for attempting to leave a cotton field when suffering from sunstroke. There are scores more such instances we do not hear about.

I have never felt so outraged as I did two years ago, when a European Commission official told me that the EU would not act on child labour in Uzbekistan as there was “no official evidence” of the preactice, only “rumour”. This year – with the active connivance of EU nation state diplomats in Tashkent, particularly the German Ambassador -the Uzbek Government for the third successive year refused a request from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to visit Uzbekistan to monitor child labour in the cotton harvest. At the same time, the EU says it will not act without this report from the ILO.

This is also the position of the British Government, which has never made a single comment or statement on child labour in Uzbekistan (except by me while Ambassdaor). Indeed the coalition government has never made any statement on human rights in Uzbekistan at all, having no interest in the fate of its 8,000 political prisoners and ever-lengthening list of tortured and killed by the British “ally”, President Karimov.

Cuba has just announced the abolition of exit visas. Uzbekistan is now one of a tiny number of extreme regimes which still locks its people in, retaining the old Soviet exit visa system. The Cameron/Clegg government refuses to raise this with the Uzbek regime.

Britain and the EU are again selling weapons and providing military and secret service training to the Karimov regime, and the UK, US and other NATO countries are negotiating to “Gift” huge amounts of arms and military materiel to Karimov as they withdraw from Afghanistan. Nobody in the West, and particularly in the Western media, appears to have any interest at all in our collusion with the most repressive and corrupr regime in the world.

I won’t have a really happy birthday until Uzbekistan is free. The good news is that I am confident I will have a lot of happy birthdays in a free Uzbekistan in the future.

There is no doubt Malala Yousufzai is a remarkable girl; and that the bigots responsible for her shooting are appalling. But that is only one aspect of Malala’s multi-faceted tragedy.

Here in Accra I have been watching the re-broadcast of the BBC World TV documentary about her, made two years ago. Here is a very revealing and deeply disturbing excerpt that casts a grim light on young Malala’s fate. She is twelve years old in this exchange:

Malala: “I want to ba a doctor but my father told me you have to be a politician. But I don’t like politics.”
Father: “My daughter can be better than a doctor.”

This was the most interesting part of the entire documentary, and the North American accented presenter completely failed to pick up on it. Poor Malala; her desire for an education was genuine and highly commendable; but she was thrust into the firing line by an ambitious father and an ambitious documentary maker apparently unconcerned by her direct statement that she was being manipulated against her will.

Her father’s political ambitions centre around a party representing Swat’s rapacious feudal landlord class (Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus is an excellent and highly readable account for some basic background). The Taliban are an extremely nasty manifestation of ancient hatreds and social structures, but their emergence as a potent force could not have happened without genuine grievances to be exploited; it is hard to think of a more egregious grievance than the feudal landlord system.

Having been shot, Malala is now receiving world class treatment in Birmingham. I most anxiously hope she recovers fully and goes on to a happy and fulfilled life as a doctor. I only wish that more of the children badly injured in the war, including the hundreds of children younger than Malala injured in US drone strikes, received the same level of care and treatment. They don’t. They are left to struggle on and, frequently, die.

Because the truth is that she is not getting this treatment because that is what is done for children shot or blown up in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Plainly that is not the case. She is getting this treatment because she became, and remains, an exploited propaganda symbol. If they really cared about her as a child , they would give the same level of medical care and of publicity to the many, many children injured by “our” side. But we are not to be shown those.

Sunny Hundal is pulling the Nick Cohen trick of claiming that “Lefties” who fail to applaud every action of Bush, Blair, Netanyahu and Obomber are actually supporting Osama Bin Laden’s cause.

The Taliban is an excrescence but it is not a spontaneous outpuring of human evil. Its roots lie in the devastation of Afghanistan by foreign invasion, first by the Soviets and then by the Americans, coupled with the failings of Pakistani society due in very large part to hideously corrupt governments and politically powerful military, aided and abetted by the West. The Taliban is, in short, as much a symptom as a cause of disaster.

Hundal is a sad figure. He asked me to join Liberal Conspiracy when it started, and I refused on the grounds it was going to be a vehicle for New Labour war criminals. It has become precisely that. Hundal’s basic decency has predictably been eroded as he was sucked in by the neo-con establishment. He joined New Labour and the Guardian and is now in the states working for the drone-killer President who has launched a campaign against free speech which has seen the prosecution of more whistleblowers under Obama than under all previous US presidents combined. Hundal recently helped the anti-whistleblower cause further by publishing a fawning “exclusive” interview with the odious Harriet Harman (Of course it’s exclusive – who the fuck other than sell-out Hundal wants to talk to Harman) repeatedly labeling Julian Assange as guilty of rape.

Hundal’s question “Why do lefties keep ignoring the threat of the taliban to Pakistanis” is a stupid slur. “Why is Sunny Hundal a neo-con lickspittle?” is a question worth discussion.

But I can tell you that after I am through with the piece on Jennifer I will write a piece on Craig Murray that will make people think that I was very nice to Naomi Wolf. What is important that YOU DO NOT TELL ANYBODY OF THIS AND WHAT IS COMING.

UPDATE – I published this without explanation and caused some confusion. The quote and link above are from an email exchange in which someone called Goran Rudling says he is planning to publish something about me, but it is a secret. I thought it amusing to repost it. I look forward to seeing what Mr Rudling comes up with.