Tomorrow morning, Sir Michael Wood, former Foreign and Commonwealth Office Legal Adviser, gives evidence to the Chilcott Inquiry. To my mind, this is the most important evidence to be given so far. Michael’s then deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who resigned over the war of aggression, will give evidence in the afternoon, I believe speaking in public for the first time since her resignation.

The Legal Adviser at the Foreign Office is a very grand person indeed. You should understand it is a full time position. The FCO has a big department, named Legal Advisers. It is staffed by the cream of public international lawyers. There are assistant and deputy legal advisers,serving in the FCO in London and sometimes being posted to large Embassies abroad. Then there is THE Legal Adviser, who is a very grand personage indeed, with a palatial office overlooking St James’ Park.

I have no doubt at all that both Wood and Wilmshurst will rebuke Starw’s appalling lie that UNSCR 1441 was considered sufficient to justify an invasion, at the time that it was adopted. Wilmshurst’s resignation letter made it perfectly plain that was not true.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/jack_straws_big.html#comments

But the question is, whether the Committee will manage to hide that truth by leading the lawyers away from it in their questioning. I have previously described their method as obscuring all the key points in a comfortable fog of chuminess. Expect every possible use of the lateral tangent, the chairman’s intervention and the friendly assumption.

I am very sorry that until now Sir Michael Wood has perhaps been best known to a wider public as the man that the FCO wheeled in to tell me that it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/documents/Wood.pdf

As I explain in Murder in Samarkand I was shocked by this because I knew Michael and he is a nice man. Even though he made a point in the meeting of indicating moral disapproval of a policy of using torture, it seems to me there should be a limit to which a lawyer is prepared to advise what the government can get away with.

I am hoping that Michael will redeem himself in the eyes of decent people tomorrow, and I believe that he will.

One of the most important structural questions that the Chilcott Inquiry must ask, is this:

Why does the Attorney General have the power to overrule the Legal Adviser on a point of international law?

The answer is not that the Attorney General has a democratic mandate. Nobody has ever voted for Lord Goldsmith. His only qualification was that he was a buddy of Tony and Cherie Blair.

Here is a select list of some of Sir Michael Wood’s internationally accepted publications on international law:

“The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, including Diplomatic Agents”, 23 International and Comparative Law Quarterly (1974)

“The European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism”, 1 Yearbook of European Law (1981)

“The Legal Status of Berlin” (1987, with I. D. Hendry)

“Participation of Former Yugoslav States in the United Nations and in Multilateral Treaties”, 1 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law (1997)

“The Interpretation of Security Council Resolutions”, 2 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law (1998)

“International Seabed Authority: the First Four Years”, 3 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law (1999)

“Northern and Western European Maritime Boundaries”, in: Colson/Smith, International Maritime Boundaries, Vol. V (2005)

“Towards New Circumstances in which the Use of Force may be Authorized? The Cases of Humanitarian Intervention, Counter-terrorism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction”, in: The Security Council and the Use of Force: Theory and Reality – A Need for Change? (eds. N. Blokker/N. Schrijver, 2005)

“The United Kingdom’s Acceptance of the Compulsory Jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice”, in: Festskrift til Carl August Fleischer (eds. O Fauchald/H Jakhelln/A Syse, 2006)

“N?cessit? et l?gitime d?fense dans la lutte contre le terrorisme: quelle est la pertinence de l’affaire de la Caroline aujourd’hui?”, in: La n?cessit? en droit international Soci?t? fran?aise pour le droit international, Colloque de Grenoble, 2006

“The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and General International Law”, 22 International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law (2007)

“The Selection of Candidates for International Judicial Office: Recent Practice”, in: Law of the Sea, Environmental Law and Settlement of Disputes: Liber Amicorum Judge Thomas A. Mensah (eds. T M Ndiaye/R Wolfrum, 2007)

Three lectures on “The UN Security Council and International Law” (2006), available on the website of the Lauterpacht Centre for Intenrational Law, University of Cambridge. An expanded version of these lectures will be published in due course by Cambridge University Press as a book within the Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures series

“The Law on the Use of Force: Current Challenges”, 11 Singapore Yearbook of International Law (2007)

“The Security Council and International Criminal Law”, 5 Romanian Journal of International Law/Revista Rom?na de Drept International (2007)

“The International Seabed Authority: Fifth to Twelfth Sessions (1999-2006)”, 11 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law (2007)

“The General Assembly and the International Law Commission: What Happens to the Commission’s Work and Why?”, in: I Buffard, J Crawford, A Pellet, S Wittich (eds.), International Law Between Universalism and Fragmentation. Festschrift in Honour of Gerhard Hafner (2008)

“The Principle of Non-Intervention” (with Maziar Jamnejad), 29 Leiden Journal of International Law (2009)

“Detention during International Military Operations: Article 103 of the Charter and the Al-Jedda case”, 47 Revue de Droit Militaire et de Droit de la Guerre/The Military Law and the Law of War Review (2009)

Entries in R Wolfrum (ed.), Max Planck “Encyclopedia of Public International Law” (online edition 2008), including:

Committee of Legal Advisers on Public International Law (CAHDI) International Courts and Tribunals, Discontinuance of Cases Final Act International Seabed Authority Legal Advisers Macedonia Peace, Breach of State Practice Teachings of the Most Highly Qualified Publicists United Nations Administrative Tribunal, Applications for Review (Advisory Opinions) United Nations Charter, Enemy State Clauses United Nations Security Council Use of Force, Prohibition of Threat

Here is the complete list of all of Lord Goldsmith’s internationally accepted publications on international law

NOTHING

Which is why the Legal Adviser is paid more than the Attorney General.

So the government spends a very great deal of public money on employing a whole cadre of the best public international lawyers in the world, but takes its legal advice on matters of war and peace from a shifty barrister mate of Tony Blair.

The decision whether to go to war is a political question. But the legal advice should come from the most qualified source, not the source most likely to agree with the Prime Minister.

Even that commonsense observation is going to be much too radical for the stuffed Establishment shirts of the Chilcott Committee.

The Iraq Inquiry has taken us back again to that period where the government had engaged in a massive military build up ready to invade Iraq, and was desperately looking for evidence on WMD to trigger the invasion – an invasion on which the Washington neo-cons had pinned their entire hopes for the future of the Bush presidency.

Just at that crucial time, one of the UK’s foremost experts on Iraqi WMD had let slip to the BBC that the government’s claims did not stand up. As a result, he was found dead in a wood, while the BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, who correctly reported that there were no WMD, was fired for telling the truth.

The punishment of the BBC for failing to unquestioningly echo Blair lies went much further. The Chairman and Director General were forced out. All because the BBC said there may have been no WMD, when there were not.

It is almost incredible even now to state what New Labour have done. God know what future historians will make of it.

The BBC was traumatised, and went through an acceleration of cultural change that prized “managers” over journalists, and stopped criticising government. A foundation stone of democracy had been blasted away by Tony Blair.

Kelly’s death was extremely convenient for Blair, Cheney and a myriad of other ultra ruthless people. It paved the way for war. We should not forget how very crucial the WMD issue was in convincing enough reluctant New Labour MPs to go along. Without the UK there would have been no coalition – most of the other Europeans would have quickly dropped out too. It is by no means clear that, despite Cheney’s bluster, the Americans would have invaded Iraq alone.

So Kelly was the first man killed in the Iraq war. Hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq after Kelly. Arms manufacturers, mercenary companies and the security industry made tens of billions in profit. That’s a powerful motive to remove an obstacle. The Western oil companies are getting back into Iraq.

We will never know if Kelly would have gone on to repeat his – perfectly correct – doubts about Iraqi WMD, or if he would have shut up, as ordered by Tony Blair through the MOD. I do know, as many doctors have attested, it is extremely unlikely to bleed to death by cutting a wrist. I do know that the paramedics who attended said there was very little blood at the scene. I do know that the painkillers he took were a tiny proportion of a fatal dose and were not an anticoagulant. I do know that a chemical weapons expert like Dr Kelly would know better ways to kill himself.

And I do know that the government is keeping the evidence hidden for seventy years.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245599/David-Kelly-post-mortem-kept-secret-70-years-doctors-accuse-Lord-Hutton-concealing-vital-information.html

The most revealing moment of the Iraq Inquiry so far – probably the most revealing moment we will ever get – occurred yesterday in the evidence of Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff. A stark sun ray of truth burst through for just a few seconds before the Committee allowed it to be closed over by the fog of chummy complicity that has characterised these evidence sessions.

Asked whether he agreed with Sir Jeremy Greenstock that more time for diplomacy would have been helpful before the invasion started. Powell bluntly disagreed. As there were in fact no Iraqi WMD, more time would have weakened, not strengthened the case for war. That would have been unhelpful.

WHAT?

Powell had just sliced clean through the mound of lies constructed by himself, Alistair Campbell and Sir David Manning (you can tell when Manning lies – his lips move). After a huge pile of verbiage claimimg that the War was only about WMD, Powell had just admitted that they were absolutely bent on war whether there were WMD or not – indeed WMD were a problem, as the lack of them weakened the case for war.

This is where any person of average intelligence on the committee would have siezed on what Powell had just said. He had just admitted they wanted war irrespective of whether Saddam might have any WMDs. But the committee failed completely to pick up on the point. They moved swiftly on. They allowed the clouds of obfuscation to roll swiftly back in.

That is because the entire committee at abse agree with Powell. They accept the premiss that the war was a good thing. The composition of the committee, entirely from known pro-war advocates, is a national disgrace.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/11/iraq_inquiry_th.html

That nobody should even put to Powell the thought that perhaps, as Iraq had no WMD, the war was not neceassary, is as revealing of the Committee’s guilt as it is of Powell’s. Similarly, Powell was permitted several times to refer to 9/11 as leading to the war in Iraq, without anybody on the Committee ever putting to him the lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

No matter how stubborn the truth may be, it is not beyond the committee and the media to ignore it.

Which helps account for the quite astonishing fact that 32% of the electorate apparently think that Tony Blair genuinely believed in Iraqi WMD. It is a great pity that we don’t have any breakdown on the other social and political attitudes of these extraordinary people.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ibGYwlSSoYuPSO7_qBm54sKjWvYQ

I am going to spend the next few weeks sitting on the tube wondering which third of the passengers is dull enough to buy that.

Powell, meantime, appears to have taken lessons from that other war criminal, Radzvan Karadzic, on image makeover.

I should like to think that John Major’s attack is a sympton of the establishment washing its hands of Tony Blair, as the US extablishment once backed away from Joe McCarthy after worshipping him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/02/john-major-dismisses-blair-iraq

I hold the deeply unfashionable view that John Major was the best Prime Minister in my lifetime, out of a deeply depressing bunch. I was born in 1958.

Assuming you might find that thought surprising, I might surprise you further by my solution in a little fantasy game – compiling the best possible Cabinet from current parliamentarians.

Prime Minister Malcolm Rifkind

Deputy Prime Minister Andrew Mackinlay

Chancellor Kenneth Clarke

Foreign Secretary Charles Kennedy

Home Secretary Simon Hughes

Defence Secretary Jeremy Corbyn

Education Sarah Teather

Health Hilary Benn

DFID Baroness Chalker

Trade and Industry David Davis

Environment and Rural Affairs Alistair Carmichael

Lord Chancellor Lord Phillips of Sudbury

Transport and Communications Dai Davies

Chief Secretary John Redwood

Work and Pensions Vince Cable

Energy and Climate Change Alan Whitehead

That’s enough of a Cabinet to be going on with, and organised differently to the current and shadow ones. No, I’m not joking. Dai Davies’ key task would be to renationalise the mail and railways. You can guess my reasoning on the others, if you can stop spluttering.

The Blackwater mercenaries who massacred 17 Iraqi civilians have been let off by a US judge because they gave evidence under duress – the threat of losing their jobs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/31/us-court-dismisses-blackwater-charges

Yet evidence given by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during hundreds of torture sessions, including over a hundred sessions of waterboarding, is admissible in the US, torture apparently not being duress like the threat of losing your job.

The US is at the same time going through more angst about the underpants bomber. Get this into your heads; people want to kill you because as a nation you behave in a murderous and arrogant way. That does not justify a terrorist in killing innocent civilians; but killing innocent civilians did not seem to bother the Blackwater boys, or the US armed forces who kill innocent civilians every single day.

I know from personal experience that Jeremy Greenstock is an unusually kind person. It was interesting to watch his evidence this morning, and I am particularly pleased that Sky gave us two hours of it uninterrupted.

Jeremy’s contention that the Iraq war was legal but not legitimate is an interesting attempt at nuance. I don’t buy it, but it illustrates that he was plainly very uncomfortable about the whole thing. I am not sure that even now he has really come to the terms with the fact that all he was involved in was a charade. Bush and Blair had decided to invade at Crawford, a full year before Jeremy’s painstaking crafting of fig leaf resolutions and attempts at consensus building. As Greenstock conceded, the military timetable had been decided and the diplomacy had to try to run ahead. When it stumbled, the invasion carried on regardless. Greenstock was ridden over.

I thought Jeremy’s attempts to convince himself rather than us that Britian’s “commitment to the diplomatic route” won friends and helped to build a consensus after the invasion, was a rather pathetic (in the true meaning) attempt to explain away his own futility.

There was one hilarious abandonment of logic when Jeremy said that he believed Iraq did have WMD, but they are still hidden. He offered two attempts at evidence for this. One was that they had a concealment committee. Well, if so, somone on the committee would have leaked post-invasion. The second was that some fighters had been buried in the sands, and revealed when the wind blew away the sand. He offered that as evidence that weapons can be concealed in the desert sands. Actually, Jeremy, it is evidence that they can’t.

But what was entirely plain is that Greenstock is much more sceptical of the Iraq War than the committee who were questioning him. The packing of the committee with confirmed war supporters (Greenstock at one point made what I believe was a sly dig about committee member Rod Lyne’s role at the time in question) makes the whole exercise futile, not least by limiting witnesses to answering non-sceptical questions. There was a priceless moment when Gilbert invited Greenstock to agree that the French and Russians only opposed the war from national and personal interests, and Greenstock declined to do so.

Still in Ghana, and the “Broadband” connection here can’t handle the live feed of the Iraq Inquiry, so I am following through the Guardian blog.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/nov/26/iraq-iraq

This struck me strongly:

11.09am: Lyne asks if the window the weapons inspectors were given to operate in was “so small it was not a window at at all”.

Meyer says he discussed this in a memo to London. He says he has not been abel to find it. It’s about the fourth time he has said that the inquiry has not been able to produce a document that he knows existed. So much for Chilcot being able to see everything!

It is of course possible that documents are being kept from Chilcot. It is however much more likely that Chilcot and his “independent” team of known Iraq War supporters are colluding in suppressing the documents.

I have to say that I rather like Christopher Meyer. I don’t put him forward as a candidate for sainthood, but he is the second witness (after Bill Patey) who is in fact a nice person. His evidence appears pretty candid and a damning confirmation that Blair was set on war for years before it was admitted, and that the whole WMD “issue” was a pretext.

Sir John Chilcot was just ten minutes in to the first public session of the Iraq Inquiry when he told the first big lie – and a lie which, when examined, exposes the entire charade.

“My colleagues and I come to this inquiry with an open mind.”

That is demonstrably untrue. Three of the five members – Rod Lyne, Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman – are prominent proponents of the Iraq war. By contrast, nobody on the committee was in public against the invasion of Iraq. How can it be fine to pack the committee with supporters of the invasion, when anyone against the invasion was excluded?

Let us look at that committee:

Sir John Chilcot

Member of the Butler Inquiry which whitewashed the fabrication of evidence of Iraqi WMD. The fact is that, beyond doubt, the FCO and SIS knew there were no Iraqi WMD. In the early 1990’s I had headed the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, tasked with monitoring and preventing Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement. In 2002 I was on a course for newly appointed Ambassadors alongside Bill Patey, who was Head of the FCO Department dealing with Iraq. Bill is a fellow Dundee University graduate and is one of the witnesses before the Iraq Inquiry this morning. I suggested to him that the stories we were spreading about Iraqi WMD could not be true. He laughed and said “Of course not Craig, it’s bollocks”. I had too many other conversations to mention over the next few months, with FCO colleagues who knew the WMD scare to be false.

Yet Chilcot was party to a Butler Inquiry conclusion that the Iraqi WMD scare was an “Honest mistake”. That a man involved on a notorious whitewash is assuring us that this will not be one, is bullshit.

Bill Patey (or “Sir William”, as they call him) is a witness before the committee this morning. Doubtless between Sir John and he, they will manage to steer round the fact he knew there were no WMD.

Funny thing is that, just as with Sir Michael Wood and his view on the legality of torture intelligence, Bill Patey is also an extremely nice man. When you unleash the evil of aggressive war, the corruption of your own body politic is one of the consequences.

Sir Roderick Lyne

Last time I actually spoke to him we were both Ambassadors and on a British frigate moored on the Neva in St Petersburg. Colleagues may have many words to describe Rod Lyne, some of them complimentary, but “open-minded” is not one of them.

If the Committee were to feel that the Iraq War was a war crime, then Rod Lyne would be accusing himself. As Ambassador to Moscow he was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War. He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war.

From Uzbekistan we always copied Moscow in on our reporting telegrams, for obvious reasons. Lyne responded to my telegrams protesting at the CIA’s use of intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, by requesting not to be sent such telegrams. Somewhat off topic but amusingly, he also responded to my telegram warning about Alisher Usmanov and his growing influence in the UK, saying that Moscow had never heard of the man – one of Putin’s closes oligarchs.

An open mind? Really?

Sir Lawrence Freedman

Lawrence Freedman is the most appalling choice of all. The patron saint of “Justified” wars of aggression, and exponent of “Wars of Choice” and “Humanitarian Intervention”. He is 100% parti pris.

Here is part of his evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution on 18 January 2006:

The basic idea here is that our armed forces prepared for what we might call wars of necessity, that the country was under an existential threat so if you did not respond to that threat then in some very basic way our vital interests, our way of life, would be threatened, and when you are looking at certain such situations, these are great national occasions. The difficulty we are now facing with wars of choice is that these are discretionary and the government is weighing a number of factors against each other. I mentioned Sierra Leone but Rwanda passed us by, which many people would think was an occasion when it would have been worth getting involved. There was Sudan and a lot of things have been said about Darfur but not much has happened…

…Iraq was a very unusual situation where it was not an ongoing conflict. If we had waited things would not have been that much different in two or three months’ time and so, instead of responding either to aggression by somebody else, as with the Falklands, or to developing humanitarian distress, as in the Balkans, we decided that security considerations for the future demanded immediate action.”

An open mind? Really?

Martin Gilbert

Very right wing historian whose biography of Churchill focussed on Gilbert’s relish for war and was otherwise dull. (Roy Jenkins’ Churchill biography is infinitely better). Gilbert is not only rabidly pro-Iraq War, he actually sees Blair as Churchill.

Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did – that the war on terror is not a third world war – they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1379819,00.html

An open mind? Really?

Baroness Prashar

Less known, and my cynical side says she ticked the female and ethnic minority boxes. But a governor of the FCO institution the Ditchley Foundation – of which the Director is Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK Ambassador to the UN who presented the lies about Iraqi WMD and was intimately involved in the lead in to war. So very much another cosy foreign policy insider.

So, in short, the committee – all appointed by Gordon Brown – have been very obviously picked to provide a complete whitewash. They are people whose attitudes and mindset lead them to accept the war as justified without the need for conscious connivance on their part. But if conscious connivance should be required, they are just the boys for it.

Several people have emailed me to call my attention to this article in The Nation, which is well worth reading – I particularly recommend you to follow the links and read the affidavits themselves.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/scahill

These remain allegations, though they are consistent with a general picture of Blackwater and its operations. Mercenaries are, after all, killers for hire. They are paid murderers, no matter how they try to glamorise themselves. That their leaders are ruthless individuals is a matter of course. Sadly, bringing anyone associated with the rape of Iraq to justice is viewed as undesirable by both the Democratic and Republican establishments, so I expect Mr Prince is safe to enjoy his money, his passion for killing and his neo-Templar fantasies.

This blog told you immediately that Gordon Brown’s “Very big terror plot” at Easter was a complete fake, and this blog was telling the truth. But the media in the UK have never realy admitted that the whole thing was a government con.

But, four days after this blog told you the New York terror plot was a blatant agent provocateur operation –

Groom Your Own Terrorist – FBI Agent Provocateur Operation Leads to Terror Arrests – the mainstream media have finally caught on. The reason for the difference between New York and Manchester being that there are still a few investigative reporters left in the United States, whereas ours either repeat lobby briefing or write stories about Simon Cowell.

The Sunday Times headline sums it up entirely – “FBI lured dimwits into terrorist plot”.

One question [about the synagogue case] that has to be answered is: did the informant go in and enlist people who were otherwise not considering trouble ?” said Kevin Luibrand, who represented a Muslim businessman caught up in another FBI sting three years ago. “Did the government induce someone to commit a crime?”

The other question that US security experts were debating was how much had been achieved by assigning more than 100 agents to a year-long investigation of three petty criminals and a mentally ill Haitian immigrant, none of whom had any connection with any known terrorist group. “They were all unsophisticated dimwits,” said Kindlon.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350389.ece

David Aaaronovitch’s new “conspiracy debunking” book Voodoo Histories is getting an extraordinary level of boosting by the mainstream media. Here are a few highlights from this masterly exposition:

– No government has ever done anything nasty to any of its citizens, ever, unless they were Socialists (including National Socialists) or Islamists. All other government is entirely open and secretive acts do not occur.

– All official inquiries, commissions and judicial investigations in history have been composed of entirely honourable people with no agenda to serve political masters and inspired only by a pure devotion to unalloyed truth

– There was no conspiracy to lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell did not lie and show fake photos to the Security Council. Tony Blair did not lie to Parliament. George Bush did not lie to the American public. Nobody was waterboarded into confessing to the Al-Qaida/Iraq link. The dodgy dossier on weapons of mass destruction was a figment of the imagination of socialists/Islamists/other mad people, and anyway it was all true except they have hid the WMD, so there.

– The Zinoviev letter, Roger Casement’s diaries and the Jacobite order to massacre all prisoners if they won Culloden, were all quite genuine just like the government said.

– There was no St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

– The US had no part in the overthrow of Allende.

– Patrice Lumumba just went away on holiday.

– There was no conspiracy to kill JFK, or if there was, it was the Socialists

– Anybody who ever takes a different view on any of the above is a dangerous lunatic whose views on no subject at all need to be taken seriously.

– Belief in the official narrative is the definition of sanity.

– To defend the official narrative, the establishment needs to employ fat ugly propagandists with greasy hair and incredibly bad complexions.

Oh look, so they do.

Anyway, now I’ve saved you the trouble of reading it, you can buy Murder in Samarkand and The Catholic Orangemen of Togo instead.

Apparently some of the Blairite right of New Labour are in talks with Paddy Pantsdown over the possibility of defecting to the Lib Dems. As the Blairite right is well to the right of Thatcher, drove the most determined attack on civil liberties since 1818, launched a devastating illegal war on the basis of lies, and reintroduced torture as public policy, one would hope the Lib Dems would tell them where to get off.

The point of immediate dispute – the introduction of a 50p income tax rate on marginal income above £150,000 – is probably the only sensible thing Brown has done.

We have been here before. Remember Dr Death. Dr David Owen is now comfortably ensconsed in the huge Mayfair office of Uzbek billionaire gangster and convicted blackmailer Alisher Usmanov, whose extremely highly paid PR catamite Owen now is.

What has the UK has come to, when its former Foreign Secretary is the paid lapdog of the most criminal of all the Russian oligarchs!

If you were very shortsighted and in a bad light, it was possible not to realise what kind of creature Owen was before he abandoned Labour for the Liberal/Social Democrat alliance. (Although it is often forgotten now that support for Trident missiles was the shameful cause of that realignment). There can be no excuse now for the Lib Dems to ally with the Blairites.

If there are any real Liberals left in the Left Dems, as opposed to nastly little careerists, they should be in revolt over even the mention of the admission of just one Blairite. John Stuart Mill must be spinning in his grave.

I have just learnt something which has convinced me that Bush, Cheney and Rice are indeed evil in the sense that Hitler was evil. I did not actually believe that until today.

The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.

Everybody in the intelligence and security worlds knew there were no such links – Bin Laden and Hussein were enemies. Only torture could yield “intelligence” of such links to provide a justification of the invasion of Iraq. There could be no clearer indication that these evil people wished to launch an illegal war of aggression for their other reasons.

If it is not evil to use torture to try to create a pretext for launching aggressive war, then what is evil?

Here is the full text of Marjorie’s article.

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.

The Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding on July 17, 2002 “subject to a determination of legality by the OLC.” She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Team Bush claimed – and still claims – that it had to use harsh techniques to protect us from the terrorists. They really sought to create evidence to rationalize an illegal, unnecessary, and tragic war.

That is absolutely stunning in its implications. How much of this did Blair and Straw also know?

Rather horrifying news reaches me from old FCO buddies. Instructions are starting to go out for the first time to British embassies in EU states, telling them to begin discreet lobbying for Tony Blair to be appointed as the first permanent President of the European Union. The post is created by the Lisbon Treaty on which the Irish are being forced to vote repeatedly until they get the answer right.

Horrifyingly, it appears that Blair may well be able to get a majority of EU member governments prepared to support him. That is despite his record as Bush’s poodle in launching illegal war, as one of the chief architects of the banking bubble economic disaster, and as the Middle East Peace Envoy who held the ring for Israel’s murderous assaults on Lebanon and Gaza.

My whole political life I have supported the EU. I was born close enough to the Second World War to understand its most fundamental negotiation, and I have seen the economic and cultural benefits it has brought. But at the same time I have been horrified by its bureaucracy, corruption and the gaping democratic deficit in its structures.

For anyone to occupy the position of President without a popular election would be very, very wrong. But Tony Blair? It is simply an appalling thought.

There are two factors which EU states should take into consideration.

The Irish Factor. The Irish are even less likely to vote for the Lisbon Treaty if they realise that it means they get Tony Blair as President.

British membership. To appoint Tony Blair as EU President will be a massive boost to anti-EU feeling in the UK. I personally pledge to campaign actively to leave the EU if this arch war criminal becomes President – and I will not be alone.

The Conservative, Lib Dem, SNP and Plaid Cymru parties should make plain that the Blair candidacy does not have all-party support in the UK. New Labour are arguing that Blair will command support in the White House. If that’s the criteria, let’s have an Irishman.

Contrary to what the media are telling you, Barack Obama is not in any real sense visiting Iraq. He is visiting a US base which, under the Status of Forces Agreement, is US territory under US legal jurisdiction. He is not visiting Iraq any more than a vist to Guananamo Bay (Good Lord! Is that still open? What happened?) would be a visit to Cuba.

Which is a point worth making as he delivers an almighty snub to the Iraqi President and Prime Minister. For a visiting Head of State to come officially to your country and not meet the host President or host Government is an almighty breach of protocol, a gesture of supreme contempt. We are told he is going to telephone them. Well that’s OK then.

We already knew they were pointless American puppets. Isn’t he supposed to be hiding that?

The visit has the look and feel of an exercise in Imperial hubris, an entirely militaristic display. The Iraqis lost hundreds of thousands killed and saw the deliberate destruction of their water, electricity, sewerage and other civilian infrastructure. They are being visited by a new leader of their occupiers who made a virtue of opposing their invasion and their suffering. They might have expected him to walk on foot and say sorry to the Iraqi people, not glory in the power of his military and hand out medals.

The US occupation is coming unstuck again, in a way that is a familiar pattern to all students of Imperialism. Militias of all stripes, and particularly the “Sons of Iraq”, were bought off by the payment of huge bribes, or what in the British Empire were termed “Subsidies”. There always comes a stage when these large payments are scaled back in the interests of financial prudence. Then the militia,now much richer and better equipped, kicks up trouble again. It was the immediate cause of the British disaster in Afghanistan in 1841.

The Americans just cut their payments to the Iraqi militias, and the result has been 250 civilian deaths in a fortnight.

I am stunned by Canada’s decision to ban George Galloway from entering the country. I have known George for too many decades to share in the hero-worship he attracts from some; but he is a truly talented speaker and debater. George was right on Iraq when so many Western politicians hid behind the coward’s shield of patriotism. He is right on the disaster of Afghanistan too, the full horror of which is still unfoldng. I see that three more Canadian soldiers were killed there yeasterday, and nine maimed. The kind of debate George brings is urgently needed in Canada.

I was also surprised by the Canadian government spokesman’s description of him as an “Infandous street corner Cromwell”. Cromwell was a truly great man, a towering figure, with a driving concern for the common good. His statue stands guard outside Parliament. A peculiar comparison indeed.

Canadians should be ashamed today. George has fallen foul of the trick by the Israeli lobby of tarring everybody sympathetic to the Palestinians as a terrorist.

There is a spirit of protectionism abroad in these troubled times – of intellectual protectionism. As the frailties of an economic system built upon unrestrained greed and speculation become clear, as it becomes more and more obvious that recent Western invasions of Muslim lands are a drive to corner key areas for access to increasingly scarce hydrocarbons, and as the spectre of climate change looms over everything that was viewed as “Progress”, governments are desperate to control the narrative thier population hears.

The British government banned Geerst Wilders and several Muslim theologians. Canada is banning George Galloway, of all people. When the British banned the Dutch MEP Wilders, the Dutch government commendably supported the right to free speech in Europe and the Dutch Ambassador offered to meet him at Heathrow. The British government should make Canada know of our displeasure at the banning of somone for voicing opinions which are held by a large proportion of the British nation.

Fat chance.

My previous attempts to explain that Andrew Mackinlay is the greatest man in Parliament have been met with some scepticism by my readers.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/07/andrew_mackinla.html

But nobody can deny that this week he was absolutely magnificent against Jack Straw’s continued efforts to hide behind a wall of lies over the invasion of Iraq:

Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock) (Lab): Has the Justice Secretary looked behind him to see that there are only two office holders?”a Parliamentary Private Secretary and the Church Commissioner?”who support him? Not a single one of his hon. Friends is here endorsing him today. Could it be that they are ashamed and embarrassed by this announcement? Will he not reflect on the fact, which really is breathtaking, that he, who clearly was one of the people who piloted this policy and persuaded us?”I remember him, as it is photographed on my mind, promising that we would get the second UN resolution?”should also decide that those documents should not be available? It is appalling.

It is also a bad day for Parliament when we get synthetic anger from the Opposition, who are cosying up?”the Privy Council club closing down debate and discussion on things that must be revealed.

I bear the scars of having trusted the Prime Minister on this matter and I shall take to the grave the fact that I regret having listened to the porky pies and the stories of the Intelligence and Security Committee and of the Prime Minister. I shall regret it to the day I die. I should never, ever have trusted them.

Mr. Straw rose?”

Andrew Mackinlay: And I never will again!

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090224/debtext/90224-0006.htm

The closing of ranks by New Labour and the Conservatives to frustrate the Information Tribunal’s decision to release the Cabinet discussion that led us to war, simply illustrates the astonishing democratic deficit in the UK which enabled bellicose politicians to launch an illegal war in the first place.

I was deeply frustrated last night watching Question Time, where there was again a general closing of ranks by Labour, Tories and the Political editor of the Sun, offset only by a nice but inarticulate Lib-Dem non-entity. Everyone sagely agreed that it was necessary for participants to be assured of secrecy, or they would not be able to give their best advice.

Nobody countered this argument, which has been rolled out by almost the entire mainstream media. But it is nonsense. Is advice which of which somebody might be ashamed and which cannot stand up to public scrutiny always the best advice? Does the best government really thrive only in the darkest of corners, operating by subterfuge? I worked in government for over twenty years, including in some pretty senior positions working with intelligence and military affairs. I never gave any advice that I would not have been prepared to defend robustly and openly.

Indeed advice which you would not be prepared to defend robustly seems axiomatically more likely to be flawed.

The obsession of the British establishment with the view that the best government is hidden government must be challenged. What it does of course is to permit government for motives and interests they don’t want the rest of us to know about.

If that plinth in Trafalgar Square is still vacant, let us erect a statue to Muntadar al-Zaidi, the brave Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush. I gather they have beaten him up very badly indeed.

One day there will be a statue to him in Baghdad – possibly quite soon.

An inquest jury has started hearing evidence in the case of the killing of Jean Charles De Menezes. New Labour has made damn sure that no inquest jury has heard the evidence on the death of Dr David Kelly.

The difference, of course, is that the murder of Mr Menezes was a low level decision.