From Democracy Now

“In this week’s issue of the New Yorker, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a “green light” for an attack on Lebanon. The Bush administration approved, Hersh says, in part to remove Hezbollah as a deterrent to a potential US bombing of Iran. A government consultant said the Bush administration also saw the attack on Lebanon as a “demo” for what it could expect to face in Iran.”

From the New Yorker

“The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”

From Media Lens

“In the international arena, Reid, during his drinking days, fell into bad company in the Balkans with the Bosnian Serb mass-murderer Radovan Karadzic, who tops The Hague’s International War Crimes Tribunal list of wanted men. Reid has admitted spending three days in 1993 at a luxury Geneva lakeside hotel as a guest of Karadzic. “He used to talk to Karadzic, he admired Karadzic. He mistook the Bosnian Serb project as the inheritor of the united Communist ideal,” says Brendan Simms, a Cambridge academic and author of Unfinest Hour: Britain And The Destruction of Bosnia.”

The Guardian, 2 March 2002.

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this, I believe, is the true story.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes – which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.

The gentleman being “interrogated” had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for “Another 9/11”. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.

We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that “Some people don’t get” the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.

For those who don’t know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party’s “Enforcer”, (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students’ Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the “Loner” profile you would expect – a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity – that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few – just over two per cent of arrests – who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

George Bush is just following John Reid in ensuring any trials following today’s arrests are irretrievably prejudiced.

It is a fact that only the closest Blair circle bothers to deny, that if young British Muslims are turning to terrorism, it is the Blair-Bush foreign policy of war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine that has driven them to it. The majority of British people share their outrage at our foreign policy. That is not to condone the response of irrational violence. Terrorism is plain wrong. But it is Blair who has, through his evangelical embrace of the neo-con foreign agenda, massively increased any current threat of terrorism to the UK.

But let us do what none of the 24 hour news channels are doing; draw breath and count up to ten. What has actually happened so far?

There have been, reportedly, 21 people arrested. There have been no terrorist attacks, no explosions. US sources are reported as saying that explosive devices have been found, but no news from the Police as yet.

I am reminded of the Forest Gate arrests and the notorious “Chemical weapon vest” which was threatening London and required 270 policemen and a four mile air exclusion zone to deal with. The media was shoving that out just as uncritically as it is shoving out this air attack, even though it made no sense. Anyone who knows anything about weapons knows that for a chemical weapon you want maximum dispersal – the last thing you are going to do is wrap it in fabric around a human body. And why the air exclusion zone? Were they going to throw the vest at a passing jet? The media never did ask any of those questions.

Similarly, I recall the famous ricin plot, where again police and the professional pundits said millions could have been killed. In the event, of course, it turned out there was no ricin and no plot.

And I remember Jean Charles De Menezes, the “suicide bomber”, with his “bulky jacket”, with “wires sticking out”, who “leapt” the ticket barriers and “raced” onto the tube. All lies.

So I am waiting with a little healthy scepticism to see the truth of this “al-Qaida plot” bringing “Mass murder on an unprecedented scale”.

Of course, it helps New Labour look Churchillian, and explains why Israel had to be supported in the ethnic cleansing of South Lebanon, part of the “Arc of extremism”. it is interesting that the timing of these arrests exactly today, after “months” of surveillance, was determined by the Prime Minister – the CO in COBRA, the operational command, stands for Cabinet Office.

The political timing could not have been more convenient – a junior minister had resigned over arms to Israel, and the backbench rebellion demanding a recall of parliament over Lebanon will now be containable in the name of standing together in the War on Terror. And the news agenda has been seismically shifted. The public mood is instantly tilted from sympathy for the people of Lebanon, leading to questioning of the War on Terror, to renewed fear that “Islamic fascists” are planning to kill us all.

So to recap: Blair’s crazed foreign policy has made us a genuine potential target for terrorist attack. The government manipulates and spins that threat to political advantage.

We wait for the court system to show whether this was a real attempted attack and, if so, it was genuinely operational rather than political to move against it today. But the police’ and security services’ record of lies does not inspire confidence.

By John Kampfner in the New Statesman

Blair knew the attack on Lebanon was coming but he didn’t try to stop it, because he didn’t want to. He has made this country an accomplice, destroying what remained of our influence abroad while putting us all at greater risk of attack.

At a Downing Street reception not long ago, a guest had the temerity to ask Tony Blair: “How do you sleep at night, knowing that you’ve been responsible for the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis?” The Prime Minister is said to have retorted: “I think you’ll find it’s closer to 50,000.”

No British leader since Winston Churchill has dealt in war with such alacrity as the present one. Back then, it was in the cause of saving the nation from Nazism. Now, it is in the cause of putting into practice the foreign policy of the simpleton. During his nine years in power, Blair – and in this government it is he, and he alone – has managed to ensure that the UK has become both reviled and stripped of influence across vast stretches of the world. In so doing, he has increased the danger of terrorism to Britain itself.

Israel’s assault on Lebanon is, in many respects, as disastrous as the war in Iraq. But at least then the pre-war hubris and deceit were played out in parliament and at the UN. This latest act of folly took place suddenly, with only the barest of attempts to justify it to global public opinion. And it stems from the core Middle East problem: the decades-old conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

I am told that the Israelis informed George W Bush in advance of their plans to “destroy” Hezbollah by bombing villages in southern Lebanon. The Americans duly informed the British. So Blair knew. This exposes as a fraud the debate of the past week about calling for a ceasefire. Indeed, one of the reasons why negotiations failed in Rome was British obduracy. This has been a case not of turning a blind eye and failing to halt the onslaught, but of providing active support.

(more…)

I usually find that demos are a bit closer to the police estimate of numbers than the organisers’ estimate. But Saturday’s demo against the attack on Lebanon was really big – I was speaking over an hour into the rally, and I could see the march still pouring in.

Craig

Click here to watch Craig’s speech in central London.

Video from the other speakers is also available via Nether-World and photos and write up from The Antagonist.

Video images supplied by Ady Cousins from Military Families Against the War.

From the Financial Times

Mr Blair should recognise his errors and go

By Rodric Braithwaite, UK ambassador to Moscow 1988-92 and then foreign policy adviser to John Major and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee

Aspectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud’s. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency’s box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent.

There is another possible explanation. Perhaps what we see on television is the real Tony Blair, the man who believes that he and his friend alone have the key to the horrifying problems of the Middle East. At first he argued against a ceasefire in Lebanon. Then, after another Israeli airstrike killed dozens of Lebanese women and children, he finally admitted, in California ‘ reluctantly, grudgingly and with a host of preconditions ‘ that military force alone would not do the trick, and now seems to have told his people to look for something better.

The catastrophe in Lebanon is the latest act of a tragedy rooted in European anti-Semitism and in the expulsion of an Arab people from their ancestral home. Both sides claim the right to self-defence. Neither hesitates to use force to pursue aims it regards as legitimate. No single event is the proximate cause of the current mayhem ‘ neither the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, nor the Hizbollah rockets, nor the Israeli assassination of Palestinian leaders, nor the suicide bombings. The causes go back in almost infinite regression. In the desperate pursuit of short-term tactical gain, both sides lose sight of their own long-term interests.

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Over the summer the Home Office is holding two public consultations on

government powers to spy on Internet usage and demand passwords from

computer users. A free public meeting at University College London is

being held on 14 August to hear a range of views on these powers, from

government officials and peers to computer security and human rights

experts. The meeting will also hear about problems in the way that

computer evidence has been used to obtain convictions. Attendees will

get a detailed insight into this obscure area of British law that will

have a huge impact on privacy and human rights in the information age.

For further details go here

From Human Rights Watch

(Beirut, July 30, 2006) ‘ Responsibility for the Israeli airstrikes that killed at least 54 civilians sheltering in a home in the Lebanese village of Qana rests squarely with the Israeli military, Human Rights Watch said today. It is the latest product of an indiscriminate bombing campaign that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have waged in Lebanon over the past 18 days, leaving an estimated 750 people dead, the vast majority of them civilians.

‘Today’s strike on Qana, killing at least 54 civilians, more than half of them children, suggests that the Israeli military is treating southern Lebanon as a free-fire zone,’ said Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. ‘The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area a combatant who is fair game for attack.’

This latest, appalling loss of civilian life underscores the need for the U.N. Secretary-General to establish an International Commission of Inquiry to investigate serious violations of international humanitarian law in the context of the current conflict, Roth said. Such consistent failure to distinguish combatants and civilians is a war crime.

I just don’t know what to say. The bodies of so many children bring tears, not words.

Even if you believed the crazy Bush and Blair logic, I cannot understand how anyone can look at these tiny corpses and say “it is worth it to eradicate Islamic fundamentalism”. If you do that, you could watch the corpses from the gas chambers and say “its worth it to elminate the World Jewish conspiracy.” This is crazed and aburd. We must reject the logic of hate.

Even last night and this morning, the UK and US are still working full out at the UN to head off any resolution calling for an urgent unconditional ceasefire. Instead we are pushing a plan which involves the ethnic cleansing of Southern Lebanon to create an empty zone – and the international community is expected to enforce the ethnic cleansing.

President Chirac’s proposal has much more justice – that there should be an international force deployed equally both sides of the border. We have made plain at the UN that we will veto such a proposal. Blair is still pushing Bush’s view that the US has to have latitude to pursue the military option while diplomacy goes on, until the world is obliged to accept ethnic cleansing.

And if it needed any more underlining, where was Tony Blair? At a meeting addressing Rupert Murdoch’s chief executives from News International. My last musings suggested that anyone who stayed in the Labour Party was a pariah. That was not strong enough.

I don’t know if the bomb that killed 37 – and rising – children was carried on a plane that landed in the UK. Quite likely. I see that Prestwick being considered insecure, they are now coming through USAF Mildenhall.

I hope that everyone will come to the national demo from the Stop the War Movement on 5 August. Once that is over, perhaps the next day, let us organise a reclamation, however temporary, of part of Mildenhall from the Americans.

This is going to involve, at least, getting beaten up and arrested. But how do you weigh that against 37 child corpses? I am up for it. Wire cutters, anyone?

Craig

“We shouldn’t be allowing bombs through our airports to fan this horrendous conflict. This underlines the monumental hypocrisy of the US and Britain. We have been preaching to Iran about arming Hezbollah fighters. And all the while we have been arming the Israelis…”

The Guardian (Thursday July 27)

The chorus of discontent is growing over the US use of British airports as staging posts for transporting weapons to Israel.

Aviation chiefs are investigating whether two chartered flights carrying bunker-busting bombs were properly authorised to stopover at Glasgow Prestwick.

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has insisted she is “not happy” and will lodge a formal complaint if the hazardous material protocol failure is proved – raising speculation of a rift in the Transatlantic ‘special relationship’. She has already contacted counterpart Condoleezza Rice to voice her displeasure, while the White House has sought to play the issue down as a “paperwork question”.

But calls for a blanket ban on the US using UK territory when transporting arms to Israel were increasing in volume, with critics blasting the Government’s “monumental hypocrisy” in asking Hezbollah to give up their weapons.

The embarrassing controversy is threatening to overshadow Tony Blair’s arrival in Washington for talks with President George Bush concerning the deteriorating situation in Lebanon.

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Michael Moore has written to Mrs Beckett requesting an “urgent review” of US flights. “In light of Israel’s disproportionate military attacks against civilians and the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza, in contravention of international law, the Foreign Secretary is right to be angered that the US is supplying Israel with high tech weaponry via the UK,” he said.

A former British diplomat, who quit as ambassador to Uzbekistan after alleging human rights abuses, said the UK was losing “all credibility with the Arab world”. Craig Murray said: “Whether procedures were followed properly is not the issue. We shouldn’t be allowing bombs through our airports to fan this horrendous conflict. This underlines the monumental hypocrisy of the US and Britain. We have been preaching to Iran about arming Hezbollah fighters. And all the while we have been arming the Israelis, while resisting calls for an immediate ceasefire.”

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which is responsible for UK policing of international rules governing hazardous material, said that it expected to decide by the end of the day whether there had been a breach.

Flights such as that by the two chartered Airbus A310 cargo planes – which were carrying GBU28 laser-guided bombs – usually require “specific exemptions” from hazardous material rules, according to a spokesman. However, the CAA said that it would not be deciding the issue immediately, and only “may” reach a conclusion – when Mr Blair’s visit gets under way.

It is understood that any formal complaint by Britain would be pursued through “diplomatic channels” – either in a letter from Mrs Beckett to Ms Rice or with representations from the UK’s ambassador.

Also, for a look at the wider geo-political implications of the war see Washington risks a wider conflict from the BBC

The London CEASEFIRE NOW protest against the war in Lebanon will be in Whitehall on Friday 28 July, 5pm to 7pm, when a letter to Tony Blair insisting that he demand an immediate ceasefire will be handed into 10 Downing Street.

Add your name to the Tony Blair letter here on the Stop the War website at www.stopwar.org.uk

.UNCONDITIONAL CEASEFIRE NOW

.END THE ATTACKS ON LEBANON & GAZA

.END BLAIR’S SUPPORT FOR BUSH’S WARS

London Protest Friday 28 July 5pm to 7pm

Downing Street, Whitehall, SW1

By Thomas Harding Defence Correspondent and Anil Dawar

Daily Telegraph (26/07/2006)

Britain has been used as a staging post for major shipments of bunker-busting bombs from America to Israel. The Israelis want the 5,000lb smart bombs to attack the bunkers being used by Hizbollah leaders in Lebanon.

Two chartered Airbus A310 cargo planes filled with GBU 28 laser-guided bombs landed at Prestwick airport, near Glasgow, for refuelling and crew rests after flying across the Atlantic at the weekend, defence sources confirmed. The airport has also been used by the CIA for rendition flights carrying terrorist suspects.

The Government’s agreement to the bomb flights was criticised last night by the Liberal Democrats.

“In light of disproportionate military attacks, the Government should take steps to suspend all arms transfers to Israel, whether directly from or through the UK,” said Michael Moore, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman.

President George W Bush appeared uncomfortable when he was asked if he regarded the simultaneous American provision of military support and humanitarian aid to Israel as contradictory. He said that America was honouring commitments to Israel made before the current crisis flared up.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are looking at our approach to these flights.”

It has been reported that efforts to crush Hizbollah have been hindered by a lack of bombs capable of penetrating their command bunkers.

I have just watched on television sixty bodies being buried in a mass grave in Tyre, victims of Israeli bombing. At the same time I saw the odious Kim Howells, Foreign Office minister, arguing that a ceasefire would not solve the problem.

British diplomats at the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York – people I know personally – are putting massive effort into working against a ceasefire. They have the ultimate weapon that they and the US can veto any resolution at the Security Council, but are bending their backs into heading the subject off the agenda.

I hope they are proud of their succesful efforts. For every hour they prevent a ceasefire, on average two more Lebanese children are dying. Israel claims now to have killed 100 Hizbollah fightres. Even if true, that means they are killing two children to every fighter.

Blair and Bush take an obscene joy in the killing. It is as though they have to work through their obsession with the concept of “The War on Terror” to its crazed conclusion of eternal conflict. Faced with increasing public scepticism at the hideous quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, I am sorry to say that I believe they both will be secretly hoping for more terrorist incidents in London and New York. By provoking, goading and humiliating the Arab world beyond reason, they can provoke a reaction and rage at us “I told you so”. Then race down the next spiral on the road to mutual destruction in their self-fulfilling warwithout end.

On Tuesday the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are holding an “Open Day” for potential recruits. How large a salary to you need to work to delay a ceasefire and secure the deaths of children? Is there really much fulfilment left in a career as a messenger for a poodle state?

Britain had a certain amount of respect in the Middle East for a consistent policy on Palestine that was broadly fair. Who remembers David Mellor as a junior Tory minister laying into an Israeli soldier for brutality against Palestinians? In his footsteps comes Kim Howells, offering to keep the way clear for the Israeli to get a better shot. We now remember the Security Council Resolution which calls for Hizbollah to disarm, but have forgotten all the other SCRs on the Middle East, most notably the Security Council’s demand that Israel returns to its 1967 borders. Our policy now is to slavishly follow the Bush line that Israel may unilaterally define its own borders.

We condemn Syria and Iran for supplying weapons to Hizbollah, while 100 times their weight of US munitions have fallen on Lebanon, and more US bombs are now being urgently dispatched to kill more children, with UK support. Britain has broken the longstanding EU concensus on Palestine and removed any counterweight to the US. Whenever you think Blair can bring us no lower in international morality, he does it. It is no longer possible for anyone to justify continued membership of the Labour Party. This government is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents through its support for Bush’s imperialist wars. Anyone who stays in the Labour Party should be shunned as a moral pariah.

Craig

By Jack Grimston in the Sunday Times

A ROGUE diplomat has posted evidence on his website of what he says was an ‘extraordinary’ campaign by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to trawl for incriminating evidence about his private life.

The internal FCO documents posted by Craig Murray, who was sacked as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2004, include references to him attending a strip club, and allegations that he kept a flat for unspecified ‘entertainment’ purposes.

The papers also include a summary of passages that Murray agreed to remove from a new memoir. Among them are alleged indiscretions by his US counterpart in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital. Murray decided last week to take down some of the documents after government lawyers threatened to sue him for breach of crown copyright.

The former diplomat, 47, was recalled to London in 2003 for ‘medical reasons’ before being sacked. He is now making a film about his experiences. Murray believes officials were trying to gather evidence about his private life to stop him speaking out about the poor human rights record of Islam Karimov, the Uzbek president. ‘I wanted to publish the documentation to corroborate my story, especially as the FCO is claiming the story is untrue,’ he said.

The documents have angered not only Murray but the anti-war Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay. One, which is heavily blacked out, contains a passing reference to MacKinlay: ‘We also know that Craig Murray has tried to contact Andrew MacKinlay MP.’

Both Murray and MacKinlay said this weekend they had ‘no idea’ how the FCO could have known this, except by bugging. ‘I am frightened and concerned,’ said MacKinlay. ‘It is menacing and an affront to the democratic process that they should try to find out who has been trying to contact an MP.’

Murray was posted to Uzbekistan in 2002. He soon made himself unpopular with his hosts ‘ as well as with the Americans and with the FCO ‘ by being outspoken on human rights. Karimov was seen as a key ally in the war on terror, particularly for operations in Afghanistan, and he was taking draconian steps against anyone suspected of Islamist links.

One of Murray’s claims was that a dissident died as a result of being boiled by his torturers. The documents on the website include a series of angry exchanges with Murray’s FCO masters.

After Murray had sent a draft speech to London for checking, Charles Hill, an FCO official, reproached him for what he called the ‘soapbox tone of the peroration’. In reply Murray noted acidly that one official had called torture by boiling water ‘horrid’ and added: ‘I presume you think he is being a bit strong.’

The passages deleted from the book, Murder in Samarkand, at the request of the FCO, include a reported conversation with John Herbst, Murray’s American counterpart. Herbst and Murray discussed human rights in Uzbekistan and dangers from Islamic militants.

Murray said: ‘NGOs (non-governmental organisations) estimate there are some 7,000 prisoners of conscience,’ to which Herbst replied: ‘Yes, but most of those are Muslims,’ to which Murray responded ‘I’m sorry?’ Herbst corrected himself, saying: ‘I mean Muslim extremists. Most of those prisoners are Muslim extremists.’

Murray said he had not included the comments in the book because they were probably a slip of the tongue ‘ albeit, he added, probably ‘a Freudian slip’, reflecting the American view that the Uzbek regime was justified in locking up suspected militants.

In the same talk, Herbst mused to Murray that if fundamentalists came to power there would be an end to ‘watching the pretty Uzbek girls go by in T-shirts and skirts’.

Some of the memos report tittle-tattle, including a claim that Murray visited a strip club in Warsaw. Murray said this weekend: ‘I went to a strip club in Poland on a stag night once.’

Murray said he deplored the FCO’s digging into his private life rather than taking seriously his human rights arguments. One memo described how, after a dinner in Tashkent, ‘Craig, in the company of a young female fixer, went off in search of a jazz club’.

Murray said: ‘The evening he (the official) is referring to is the evening that we were at the home of a dissident whose grandson was murdered while we were dining. Me going for a drink afterwards rates a mention, but the murder of our host’s grandson doesn’t.’

The FCO said Murray’s book was a ‘betrayal of trust’, adding: ‘Some of its contents are misleading and incorrect.’

Its not only bankers!

Mr Fitzgerald said that the US promises of fair treatment could not be depended upon. “The court should not rely on assurances of that sort,” he said.

From The Guardian

Two British terror suspects being held for extradition to the US could face human rights violations if deported, the high court was told today. Babar Ahmad and Haroon Aswat would face “a real risk of fundamental injustice and discriminatory treatment” if they were sent to the US under the controversial 2003 Extradition Act, says their lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald QC.

The act allows criminal suspects to be deported from the UK to the US if American investigators can present a prima facie case against them, but a planned reciprocal arrangement has been blocked by the US Congress.

(more…)

From the Guardian: Former ambassador posts censored passages from memoir on website

The government is threatening to sue former ambassador Craig Murray for breach of copyright if he does not remove from his website intelligence material that was censored out of his newly published memoirs.

Mr Murray has posted full texts of all passages the Foreign Office ordered deleted from the book version of Murder in Samarkand, the former Tashkent ambassador’s account of alleged British complicity in torture by the despotic Uzbekistan regime. His book contains links to the website.

(more…)

“We are prepared to extend the deadline for you to give an undertaking until 4pm on Thursday 13 July 2006 on condition that the documents referred to in my first letter are immediately removed from your website and not reproduced by you anywhere else…”

Click here for the full text

Craig Murray replies:

Mr Buttrill,

Thank you for this second letter. It is rather a peculiar request. You claim to be willing to extend the deadline for me to be able to take legal advice, providing that I concede the principal point in the meantime.

I cannot see the need for this haste. In copyright cases it is not my understanding that it is generally considered necessary to remove a publication from circulation pending a court decision. For example, there was a recent highly publicised copyright case over the Da Vinci code. Was it deemed necessary by the court to withdraw the Da Vinci Code from sale while the case was heard? No, it was not.

Your peremptory demands reveal the motive behind your actions in this case – the suppression of information for political purposes. I don’t believe it is right to use Crown Copyright in this way. Otherwise the government has an arbitrary power to keep secret absolutely anything that it does. Your contention in your letter of 7 July that the government can use Crown Copyright arbitrarily and politically to suppress material released under the Freedom of Information Act, would obviate the whole purpose of that Act in giving the public a “Right to know” what is being done in their name.

I have this morning contacted solicitors to take legal advice. I could not do so over the weekend as this is not a criminal matter, and copyright lawyers do not run 24 hour call out services. Unfortunately I must spend much of today at St Thomas’ Hospital for treatment of serious medical conditions. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s treatment of me, as detailed in the documents you are trying to suppress, was the direct cause of those medical conditions, a fact I would welcome the chance to discuss in court.

You have been free to advise me what I “Must” do. You must bear in mind what the content of the story is, that I am seeking to tell and the government is seeking to suppress.

I accept your renewed deadline as reasonable, but will not be removing the documents in the interim – until I get advice, I shall go by what I know of the law, and all I know in this matter is the Da Vinci Code precedent.

In the meantime, I should be grateful if, entirely without prejudice, you could furnish me with some practical advice. If the documents are, as you allege, Crown Copyright, where and how do I go about making a formal application for permission to reproduce them?

Also, I am copying your letters to my website. Do you allege that to be also a breach of Crown Copyright? If I remove the documents but not your letters, would you still go for an injunction? If I am served an injunction and remove the documents, but put the injunction on my website to explain why, do you allege I am breaching Crown Copyright by publishing the injunction?

Do you allege it to be a breach of Crown Copyright to reproduce on a weblog any document at all produced by government? The definition given in your letter of 7 July would plainly cover speeches given by Ministers and written by civil servants. Is it a breach of Crown Copyright to reproduce such ministerial speeches on a weblog? How long a quote could you make from a ministerial speech before breaching copyright? Does this cover, for example, letters from local authorities and health trusts, or just from central government? Does it cover parking tickets? What about quotes from the King James Bible?

If all or any of these are, in your view, matters of discretion where the government can exercise Crown Copyright if it so chooses, then the following is perhaps the most important question of all. Are there any criteria of reasonable action which the government is obliged to consider when deciding whether to enforce claimed copyright or not, or is the Crown claiming a power which is solely arbitrary?

I apologise for my confusion. You can see why I need to take legal advice. I will revert to you.

Craig Murray