Or be a hypnotist. Or be able to “talk away my face” like the great John Wilkes.

I was much amused by the comments on this entry in the always interesting einekleinenachtmusik blog.

http://einekleinenichtmusik.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-kind-of-world-are-we-creating.html

If Persephone were to read Murder in Samarkand, she would find I do in fact consider and answer her question.

UPDATE

Oops, I forgot the link, without which this post seemed even weirder. No, Arsalan, I haven’t gone nuts, just was tickled by Persephone’s coments and feeling the need for some light relief. And no, technicolour, I was not seriously positing that possession of a huge penis or hypnosis is the way to attract women. Nor was I actually claiming to have one. I just thought charm, money and alcohol was an unimaginative list, and could be added to.

A number of pro Iraq War bloogers have started commenting more or less full time on this blog for the last few weeks. If you look through a number of comments threads, you will see that angrysoba and Larry from St Louis, for example, have actually spent more time on this blog in the last couple of weeks than I have.

When they first appeared, I made a point of saying that free speech is the basic rule of this blog, and they were welcome.

But increasingly angrysoba, Larry from St Louis, and alan campbell are not putting any rational argument about the whole string of vital, evidential posts on Iraq that prompted their appearance. Instead they seek to provoke commenters into discussing, 9/11, and attempt to provoke anti-semitic commenters to inhabit the blog.

For example, in the post about Lord Goldsmith below, at 11.47am Alan Campbell posted:

“And not only is he not an expert in international law, he’s looking particularly Jewish, ‘eh lads?”

Nothing in my post or in any of the comments had made any inference at all about Goldsmith’s ethnic origin, of which I know nothing and which is in any case completely irrelevant.

Similarly Larry from St Louis at 8.56pm on the thread “Government Ban Protest Outside Blair Iraq Hearing” posted

Still waiting on Craig to delete references to the Protocols …

on a thread where the only nutter wittering on about the Protocols of Zion was Larry.

The object of these interventions is to provoke anti-semites and others to comment on this blogsite. On other sites around the blogosphere, the same individuals then post entries and comments saying

“Ignore Craig Murray’s articles, his site is inhabited by 9/11 truthers, green lizards and anti-semites”, with an inference, or sometimes direct accusation, that I hold those views myself.

The objective of the exercise is to reduce public belief in my evidential postings on extraordinary rendition, Iraq and Afghanistan.

I am not positing that the individuals involved are anything other than individuals with an amazing amount of time on their hands and a fervent attachment to the “War on Terror”.

I remain fundamentally committed to free speech. Contrary comments from all angles remain welcome here. I don’t read all comments – it would be a full time job – but I will knock out racism where I come across it. You can bring it to my attention by email. The only views which are mine are those I post myself.

We have some regular commenters who regularly take an opposite view to me, and who remain welcome – Eddie for one is a good example. Eddie does argue about the posting in question and does not routinely try to provoke strange views. But I will be much more ruthless in deleting off topic comment.

Could someone who knows how to do it, kindly replace my photo on Wikipedia with a more flattering one?

I am very grateful to the person who took and posted it, but at the time I was standing on a train while stooping to speak into a microphone tethered on a short lead three feet from the ground, As a result I look stunted and a very strange shape (no offence meant to anyone who is a very strange shape).

Pure vanity, and I am sorry 🙂

What do you make of the intellectual capabilities and mental state of the man who said this unedited passage in a speech to the diplomatic corps?

“To carry our reflection further, we must remember that the problem of the environment is complex; one might compare it to a multifaceted prism,”

“Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes,”

“I am thinking, for example, of certain countries in Europe or North and South America,”

.

It sounds like the obscure ramblings of a senile old fool, but actually it was worse than that. The Pope meant it as a calculated attack on legal equality for gay people.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100111/tts-uk-pope-ca02f96.html

Once a Nazi…

Been doing some filing. Thought you might like these statistics relating to legal threats received by this blog since it started five years ago. These figures also include letters from the Treasury Solicitors threatening action under the Official Secrets Act and other legislation.

Dedicated to Jack Straw, Alisher Usmanov, Tim Spicer, the Quilliam Foundation and nine other bad people with something to hide, who have wasted money trying to frighten this blog out of telling the truth:

Number of letters received from lawyers threatening legal action 47

Number of lawyers involved 11

Number of lawyers told to go ahead and sue or prosecute 11

Number of suits/prosecutions brought Nil

Number of apologies and retractions issued Nil

Damages Paid Nil

Number of flasehoods published Nil

Who says it is not fun running a blog?

Of course, some of these rich criminals and mercenary killers have succeeded in hindering me by legal bullying of other people. Alisher Usmanov had us closed down for three days when he got my webhost to close down the site by threatening legal action. (The Quilliam Foundation tried to pull the same trick but found I now have a much more robust webhost).

Ultra wealthy mercenary killer and war profiteer Tim Spicer threatened my publisher into preventing commercial publication of the Catholic Orangemen of Togo. But he backed down when I published it in full online.

Britian’s notorious libel laws are designed to inculcate fear in those who would publish the truth. But, as with most situations in life, a lack of fear makes things much less fraught.

Difficult journey to Ghana Europe snow now here very intermittent connection speedtest 3kbps (sic) when working. Almost impossible post. Ghana Telecom privatised to Vodafone much worse. Try post tomorrow.

I take Emily to York, and at a freezing cold Kings Cross station decide to wait in the first class lounge as I have a first class ticket. I am told that as I have a First Advance rather than a First Open ticket, I have to pay £10 to use the lounge. What? I would have thought £90 for a single to York was quite enough to buy me a smidgeon of comfort.

I receive a letter from Ealing Council threatening to fine me £80 for rubbish left on the street outside my house. This is infuriating because it is mostly not my rubbish, and it consists of flattened cardboard boxes left out for recycling. I send this email to the Council:

Dear Yusuf,

07979 691085

Both my problems with the railway and the refuse collection arise from public services being handed over to private companies whose only interest is profit. The Tories believe more of this is the answer to our edonomic problems. Ha!

(Yes, I know the East Coast railway has just gone back into public hands. But the First Class tickets not valid for the First Class Lounge policy was introduced by National Express just before it lost the franchise).

I am not a fan of Kevin Pietersen. I have never felt very happy about the South African mercenaries who have played for England throughout my adult life, not even Allan Lamb.

I feel an increased interest in the Test at the moment, with Cook and Collingwood at the crease – the first time in this Test so far when there have not been South Africans on the field on both sides. And Pietersen’s motives for quitting South Africa, at least as relayed by the media, seemed particularly unfortunate.

Having said all that, I have watched Steyn’s dismissal of Pietersen and replayed it myself in slow motion several times. There seems something very wrong with Steyn’s action – a very definite snap of the elbow at the end of the delivery. I haven’t really seen that snap of the elbow again in his deliveries since, at least not in such definitive form, although Morkel looks much purer.

Sky did not show the delivery side-on. There does not seem to be much internet chat about Steyn being a chucker. Does anyone else see it?

“Am I sometimes exasperated by the barmier entries, including by those who appear to believe that all terrorism is always false flag? Yes, I am sometimes. But no more than I am exasperated by those who swallow the entire war on terror agenda and the associated wars and attacks on liberty at home.”

I am having an interesting dialogue with angrysoba in comments on his blogpost about one of my blogposts. Some people don’t seem to get the concept of open debate. Angrysoba appears to be angry because he believes it is wrong for anyone to be allowed to express views which he deplores.

http://angrysoba.blogspot.com/2009/12/british-ambassador-and-his-loony.html

My blogging has been intermittent for the last few months, and this reflects a continued angst since the Norwich by-election about what I am doing, and why I am doing it. It is traditional to take stock at this time of year, so here are a few thoughts on 2009.

Two wonderful old radicals left us in 2009. Ed Teague and Gerard Mulholland both fell firmly into the “Cantankerous old git” category. Ed was well known in the blogosphere as Postman Patel:

http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/

Gerard didn’t run a blog but you found him all over the place:

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/profile.jspa?userID=2435194&isComplaints=false&start=30&#paginator

I had some arguments with both of them, but continual interaction with both these larger than life personalities helped keep up my morale. I miss them.

Cameron’s arrival has been the most significant and wonderful event of the year. I am extraordinarily lucky to have Nadira, Jamie, Emily and Cameron, and that my first children have been not just accepting but loving of their new family. My home life is really happy.

I have no selfish need to take an interest in public policy. I derive no income from it – indeed it costs me money. I do it because I believe that politics is in the grip of a rapacious and warmongering elite who need to be countered. I have just finished reading Peter Oborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class, and I must recommend it as an essential work. His basic thesis that modern professional politicians are bereft of concern for the common good – of any but their own good – is devastatingly accurate.

Which brings us to the MPs’ expenses scandal. It is a symptom of an underlying rottenness in our politics, and it revealed for all to see just what kind of contemptible people so many of our politicians are. Which is why I hoped that the Norwich North by-election would provide an opportunity for the public to express their disgust at the party system by voting for an independent candidate.

I was by no means insistent that I should be the candidate – indeed as Ingo can testify, I put some effort into contacting other possible independent candidates who might do better. But the by-election showed that the political parties have an unbreakable grip on the electoral system – not least through their monopoly of media access.

In fact, independent candidates only ever win – or even score over 5% – when one or more of the major parties stands down in their favour. Only Reg Keys has made it over 10% as an independent against all parties, and my own Blackburn result was the second best.

The circumstances could hardly get more auspicious for an independent than they were in Norwich, with the expenses scandal plus all the main parties supporting an unpopular war. I cannot imagine the circumstances in which I would stand as an independent again. I am considering whether the only way to have any practical impact on politics in the UK is to join a political party.

The tremendous plus about the Norwich campaign was the wonderful group of people who turned up to help – both locally and from a distance. Ingo, Steve, Iain, Owen, Stuart, John, Duncan, Alan, Keith – I shouldn’t have started to list names as there are scores and those not mentioned will be disappointed. I am feeling guilty at not keeping in touch with everyone.

The Norwich result was the lowest point of the year for me – I really did think we would do better than that – perhaps equalled as worst by the moment when the nice Iranian couple left saying they just didn’t find me a very warm and welcoming person.

The Chilcot Inquiry has been deeply depressing, with his panel of carefully chosen Iraq War supporters failing to ask relevant questions of a stream of witnesses. It is of course more interesting to me than to many people, as I actually know a lot of the witnesses. Bill Patey, Jeremy Greenstock and Christopher Meyer I am sure would all have liked to say more, given the chance by the panel. Scarlett looked like Faust just before midnight. David Manning and John Sawers, on the other hand, were lying through their teeth throughout.

There were some high points. On the wall in my lounge is a rather striking photograph of Milan cathedral, which I took myself. I had stopped seeing it, through familiarity, but now it makes me smile several times a day. I wonder if the spire of Salisbury or the sheer weight of Durham would be best for Blair?

But we still have a political leadership of all important parties committed to continuing the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan and attacks on Pakistan. Universities are subject to philistine attack by Mandelson, while all “major” parties are committed to the ruinously expensive upgrading of the British paid arm of the US nuclear deterrent. British families all carry a huge burden of debt because their money has been given to the bankers; the full ramifications of that have not yet entered public consciousness. What political debate there is, takes place at a trivial level and the under-educated public are kept happy with a major overdose of manipulated “Reality TV”.

Blogging about it all is like throwing a banana at a nuclear explosion in an attempt to counteract the blast.

Happy New Year!

My schedule for blogging gets further and further behind, as I try to cram six weeks of parenting and husbanding into two days. Then Monday am flying up to Dundee for University Court and flying back to London same day, then Tuesday first thing flying back to Accra. Hope to blog something tomorrow between present buying, turkey ordering etc. But anything blogged at the weekend gets less than half the readership and almost no repostings on other blogs.

As a campaigner for liberty, and a sucker for damsels in distress, I was looking to work up a piece in defence of Amanda Knox.

Incarceration is a horrible thing. We lock up far, far too many people in the UK. Punishment is necessary in society, but there are innumerable other forms of punishment possible apart from prison. The only real reason I can think of to lock somebody away is that they pose a physical danger to others; why we lock people up for non-violent property crime I have no idea, especially as in the vast majority of cases the cost of incarceration is greater than the value of the property which was stolen.

But I am genuinely sorry to say that the more I researched the more I came to the conclusion that locking up Amanda Knox is rather sensible. Having previously simply seen the odd bit of news coverage, I am quite sure after further research that the balance of that reporting has been rather kinder to Amanda Knox than she deserved.

She gave a series of lies to the police about where she was at the time of the murder, and has no corroborated alibi. She did not just (as news reports I have seen implied) suggest to the police that it may have been Patrick Lumumba, she actually told them that she was present in the flat when he murdered Meredith. Lumumba – who it is worth stating is entirely innocent – had many witnesses to the fact he was in his bar all evening. Knox later changed her story back to not having been in the flat that evening at all.

She also claimed that the next morning she came back to the flat, found a broken window and blood on the floor and wall, and Meredith’s door locked, but did not call the police or in fact anyone. Instead she took a shower and washed her hair in a bloodstained bathroom. Rudy Guede’s unflushed faeces now eight hours old and presumably pretty smelly – we in the toilet, and it was one of those ledge ones so they sit above the water. She didn’t flush them, but showered, brushed and blow dried her hair all standing in the small bathroom next to them.

That tiny detail is for me a clincher that her story is untrue. Yes, it is of course physically possible to wash brush and blow dry your hair right next to a pile of someone elese’s faeces, but do you know a girl who would do it?

The glass from the broken window had fallen on top of belongings of another flat mate that had been strewn around the floor, and had not been strewn around when the flatmate left that afternoon. But the glass landed on top of the strewn around things. So the strewing around was not done by someone who broke in through the window. The window breakage therefore looks like a later effort to simulate burglary.

Knox testified that she had been worried when she found the blood and the broken window and no Meredith, so she had phoned several times to check if she was OK. Phone records show that she had phoned each of Meredith’s phones, but only once – and for three seconds and four seconds respectively. That is less than two rings.

Knox was leaving the flat with a mop and bucket when the police arrived. She had not called them and Meredith’s body was still locked in its bedroom. Police had been alerted by finding Merdith’s phones, apparently flung out of her window. Knox had a mop and bucket with her which she said she was taking to her boyfriend’s house to clean up a pasta spill. When police got to his place, everything was newly cleaned – with bleach – including the knife which matched one of the wounds. Have you ever cleaned a knife with bleach?

So the white charger is staying the stable on this one. The defence are making much of the fact that Knox had no motive. But what precisely is the motive of the Perugia authorities for setting her up meant to be? Chillingly, someone who worked with Knox in the US and is Jewish said that Knox, who has German ancestry, taunted “My people killed your people! My people killed your people!”

This blog has plenty of typos and spelling mistakes too, but I still couldn’t help chuckling at Iain Dale’s Carousal Fraud.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&postID=8183810523040307456

(You have to click on show original post. I haven’t worked out how you link to individual entries on Iain’s site).

Delicious images of people pretending to stagger around, hug each other and sing. But the linked article by Charles Crawford is worth reading.

I have many friends in Ghana, but when a stay becomes extended like this one I miss Nadira, Jamie, Emily and Cameron dreadfully.

When I was about 8 years old and living in a bungalow at Beeston Regis with my mum and brothers and sister, we had one of the very few christmasses in my early childhood when my father was at home. We had a black and white TV and the big BBC film on Christmas Eve was “Calamity Jane” with Doris Day. My parents and especially grandparents were quite excited about this and had been talking about it all day.

We had eaten our tea, the children sat on the floor with our Corona pop and the adults sat behind with their Guinness or Mackeson, sherry or whisky as we focussed on the small television.

We had placed pillowcases around the christmas tree. I decided that I was so excited about Christmas that I wanted to go to bed early so it would come quickly. I thought as my dad was home I would get a really good present (I did. I got a bike. It wasn’t new, but my grandad got a tin of silver spray paint from Woolworths and sprayed it. I thought it looked new. I couldn’t touch the pedals at the bottom of their rotation. I rode that bike until my knees scarcely unbent as the pedals turned).

I left the party, though everyone told me it was a really good film. Of course, I didn’t sleep. I lay in my bunk bed staring out at the stars and listening to all the songs from Calamity Jane through the wall, with various family members singing along.

I never did see Calamity Jane, until last night when it came on satellite TV in Accra. Then, in the dark of an African night, in a small house alone in a big compound, through the one lit window a stupid old white man sat, with tears streaming down his face, sobbing out loud for all that was lost, for every hurtful word he had said to those who were gone, and for all the good he had not done.

Eid Mubarak!

Still in Accra. Nadira just phoned me from London to say that little Cameron – now 6 months old – was playing with the keys of her laptop – he has a fascination for mobile phones, remote controls and anything technical. Somehow he managed to open up firefox and navigate to Iain Dale’s blog.

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/

The amazing thing is that it was Nadira’s laptop, not mine, and she can’t work out how he would have found the site, which she never looks at. Cameron is a family name – it was my father’s and is my brother’s middle name. But now I am worried that he has caught the zeitgeist and baby Cameron has become a Tory. Should I seek medical advice?

The mind-numbingly stupid Mary Dejevsky seems to belive that diplomats should not be allowed to be divorced, or should lose their jobs if they do divorce.

…it has come out that our man in Yemen, Tim Torlot, is living at his official residence with an American journalist, who is expecting his baby… does the Foreign Office have to be quite as indulgent as it appears to be when the face of Britain abroad trades in a long-time partner

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mary-dejevsky/mary-dejevsky-cashmachine-man-in-need-of-withdrawal-1823873.html

Wow! Ambassador has a girlfriend! Absolutely shocking. How did the Independent miss this one off the front page? But hasn’t this happened before somewhere? Mary reminds us:

The courage of our (former) man in Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, in exposing torture, seemed to blot out in the generous public mind the fact that he had installed a cabaret dancer in his official residence.

And plainly that was much more important than the torture stuff eh? And even worse than an American journalist, a cabaret dancer. Whisper it quietly.

I hope that none of this will “blot out in the generous public mind the fact” that Mary Dejevsky wrote this shameless gushing puff piece about murderous co-dictator of Uzbekistan, Gulnara Karimova:

What is certain is that Karimova is the product of a unique moment in history, her fate caught up between two ages and cultures: between Soviet Communism and its chaotic, free-market successor, between Asia and the West.

http://www.uzland.info/2004/january/07/01.htm

Interestingly the Independent seem to have been embarassed into pulling the piece from their website.

For someone who lectures us on morality, Dejevsky’s own seems to be curiously pliable. Besides which, she must have fucked someone at the Independent to be writing there rather than at Mills and Boon, where she belongs.

Have been away simply because the internet connection has been down for five days due to problems at Vodafone (formerly Ghana Telecom and a very murky privatisation deal indeed). Delighted to have a connection again, however slow, and hope to blog tomorrow.

I most missed the chance to tell you how much I hope the new President of the EU Council will be caught having an affair in Portsmouth.

Yesterday afternoon I received an unusual phone call. A man telephoned me and said that he had been following my blog for some time and was most impressed by it, and would like to know how to make a donation. I replied truly that I was extremely grateful, but the website really was just me, and therefore I did not request donations, unless for some specific expense like an election campaign.

You may be surprised to hear that people do not generally phone me up out of the blue and offer cash, so I was a bit suspicious. I did go on and suggest that if he wanted to be helpful he could buy my books, but he lost interest in the conversation very quickly in a manner that just seemed wrong compared to his initial eagerness.

So when I got a letter today from lawyers threatening libel action, I wondered if this was an attempt to get financial information on what funds they might target. So today I phoned him back. He gave his name as Ed, so I asked directly if he was Ed Husain or Ed Jagger of the Quilliam Foundation. At first he replied “I am not Ed Husain”. I had to ask again before he admitted he was indeed Ed Jagger of the Quilliam Foundation.

I put it to him that he had lied when he phoned and said he wanted to make a donation. He said that he just wanted to establish my contact details for the lawyer. I said that if he had asked me openly and honestly, I would have told him. He concluded by saying that any further communication should be through our lawyers (which will be tricky as I can’t afford one: Unlike Jagger I am not funded by taxpayers’ money.)

I don’t suppose there is any law against Mr Jagger telephoning and lying to me about wishing to make a donation. Indeed I would write it off as a harmless ruse, and amusing he had been caught. But for an organisation funded by the taxpayer to telephone someone and lie to them is quite a different thing.

Should anyone wish to make that point to Mr Jagger, the number from which he telephoned me was 07780 685592.