Craig Murray | ukwatch.net

More Neo-Colonial War for Oil

Ellie Keen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:27:44 +0000

Nobody can accuse New Labour of being half-hearted in their embrace of New Colonialism. But even given the dynamics of the rush for hydrocarbons, Gordon Brown’s commitment to embroil the British military in the troubles of the Niger Delta is appalling.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/britain-to-train-army-in-...

We have got so used to military adventure abroad that there has been almost no reaction – despite the fact that we are going to support the most corrupt regime in the world, in an area where the pollution, social deprivation and political repression spawned by the oil industry are legendary. I know the Niger Delta very well indeed, having served four years in the commercial section of the British High Commission in Lagos. I have seen the environmental degradation, and met with the thuggish local police and military commanders in the pockets of Shell. The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa was one of the rare moments the World focused on the repression in the Niger Delta, but that was the tip of the iceberg of political violence against the local population.

The rebellion in the Niger Delta is not a spontaneous evil, a mindless outbreak of anarchic violence that must be met with still more violence. It is paused by the grinding poverty and economic ruination of one of the most economically productive regions on earth, with the profits channelled to billionaires in Nigeria and to big oil.

Of course, British military involvement in Nigeria is hardly new. The majority of Nigeria’s military dictators were Sandhurst trained (but not Abacha, contrary to popular belief. He attended lesser English military colleges).

African Union prevarication over Mugabe opens eyes to the continuing venality of much African government, but there is perhaps not enough understanding of how far that permeated through into the United Nations (where senior staff require de facto approval of their home governments for appointment). “Professor” Ibrahim Gambari is Under Secretary and Special Adviser on Africa to the UN Secretary General. Gambari was one of Abacha’s closest cronies. It was Gambari who said “Nigerians don’t need democracy because democracy is not food. It is not their priority now.” It was Gambari who told the United Nations that Ken Saro-Wiwa should be hung because he was “a mere common criminal”. It is therefore a certain sign of the bad faith of Nigeria’s negotiation that they pressed for Gambari to be appointed mediator with the rebels.

The only UK connection to this dispute is that the appalling practices of British oil companies have helped create the resentment that turned to rebellion. We should not get involved in more killing for oil.

Frank Goebbels Gardner Strikes Again

Tim Holmes — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:21:56 +0000

With The Queen’s Speech tomorrow and Gordon Brown intent on ramping through 2 month detention without trial for Muslims, the traditional ceremony has been performed of wheeling out the Head of MI5 in advance of the Queen’s Speech to tell terrible lies about the extent of the terror threat.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6149726.stm

Jonathan “Pinnochio” Evans tells us there are 2,000 potential terrorists in the UK – and then throws in casually that it could be double that.

That is plainly bollocks. it is far too high a figure. The IRA – who were much more persistent and lethal terrorists in the UK – had a membership in the 80’s, when at the height of their bombing campaign, of about 90 actual terrorists. The current 2,000 clearly have severe productivity problems by comparison.

Any genuine security expert will tell you that Evans’ figures are far too high. Assuming the large majority of these “terrorists” are adult male, that means according to Evans at least one in every 150 adult male Muslims in the UK is a terrorist, and at his higher surmise signifcantly more than one in a hundred. Plainly, to anyone who actually meets any Muslims, that is impossible.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of “Security consultants” who make a fat living from exaggerating the threat of terrorism and then advising on how to counter it. The BBC usually has no problem finding up this kind of so called “Security expert” to reinforce the ludicrous scare. Today the BBC rolled out Dr Sally Leivesley – who they failed to point out is Managing Director of “Newrisk Ltd”, an archetype of those seeking to make money from spreading fear.

And they have the ever reliable Frank Gardner. Chiselled profile held high, impeccable hair swept back, upper lip stiff, poppy impeccably in place, Gardner can be relied upon to retail any absolute rubbish the security services spew out without the slightest danger of passing it through a filter of independent thought. He can also be relied on to produce a meaningless graphic to illustrate the most ludicrous of propositions.

To date his finest hour was when 250 police stormed a house at Forest Gate and shot a completely innocent young postman as he got out of bed. The police explained that they were searching for a “Chemical weapons vest”.

There has never, ever been a “chemical weapons vest”, anywhere in the World. The very concept is nonsense – the point of a chemical weapon is to achieve maximum dispersal of the chemical, and wrapping it in fabric around the human torso would be ludicrous. That is why there has never been a chemical weapons vest.

Nonetheless the noble, earnest Gardner introduced a graphic of what a chemical weapons vest might look like – a laughable photo of a camouflage pattern waistcoat full of suspicious bumps and loops. He might just as well have labelled it a nuclear bomb vest. What a farce! What a wanker!

Anyway, Gardner was at it again tonight with a graphic to explain the latest ludicrous claims. How do they know there are 2,000 terrorists, he asked? Well, they can’t tell us because it’s intelligence, he explained. But the helpful graphic fills the screen, with hundreds of sinister black silhouettes of unknown terrorists, interconnected by numerous black lines indicating networks, nodes and axes of evil. And to explain it all, every so often, there was a not blacked out figure, a suicide bomber or, glowering at us, Osama Bin Laden. Of course!! That’s the evidence!! There really are thousands of them.

I was going to retaliate by producing a graphic of thousands of sinister silhouettes linked by criss-crossing lines, and dotted among them Goebbels, Hitler, Attila the Hun, Stalin, Mao and Frank Gardner. But I can’t be bothered – sounds like a job for Bloggerheads.

The truth is that since September 11 Islamic militants have killed about 70 people in the UK. That’s 12 people a year in a country of 60 million. Every death is terrible, but a threat to our existence it is not. You have a much better chance of drowning in your own bath, of being struck by lightning or of winning the national lottery than of being killed by a terrorist. But that wouldn’t persuade you to give up your civil liberties, or that we have to invade more oil rich countries for our security.

The Folly of a Short-Term Approach

Tim Holmes — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:44:10 +0000

The following is Craig Murray’s essay for the September 2007 edition of Foreign Service, house magazine for US diplomats, on his time as British ambassador to Uzbekistan.

I am very pleased to be offered the chance to pass on to you some thoughts on the conflict between human rights and the “War on Terror,” drawn largely from my recent service as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Uzbekistan. As a result of that experience, I should acknowledge, I was recently vetoed as a participant in a U.S.-sponsored seminar on that topic by a very senior State Department official, on the grounds that I was “viciously anti-American.”

That is not true, of course. Yes, I am a person who holds his beliefs very dear and who believes strongly in individual liberty in all spheres. Thus, I am a passionate supporter not just of democracy and human rights, but also of capitalism and free markets.

So how could someone with that belief set come to be perceived as anti-American? The answer is that I do not believe that recent U.S. foreign policy has promoted those goals at all, but rather has been doing something very different.

Walter Carrington Avenue

To illustrate what I mean, let me offer an example of diplomacy at its best. One of my inspirations was Walter Carrington, the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria from 1993 to 1997. Amb. Carrington never accepted the brutal dictatorship of the Sani Abacha regime (1993-1998), and constantly went beyond normal diplomatic behavior in assisting and encouraging human rights groups, and in making outspoken speeches on human rights and democracy.

Carrington’s approach was a direct challenge to the British Embassy in Nigeria, which pursued a much more traditional line of polite interaction with the president and his cohorts. This appeasement did us no good, as Abacha repeatedly moved against our interests; for example, he banned British Airways from flying into Nigeria. Nonetheless, my diplomatic colleagues looked down their long noses at Carrington with disdain, for raising unpleasant subjects like torture and execution at cocktail parties. (I regret to say that some of the career subordinates in the U.S. embassy did the same.)

The Abacha dictatorship hated Carrington so much that the Nigerian armed forces even stormed the ambassador’s farewell reception and arrested some Nigerian participants, a breach which was rightly condemned by the U.S. Congress. But a grateful Nigerian people did not forget his efforts on their behalf, and soon after Abacha’s downfall, the street on which the U.S. and British consulates in Lagos were situated was renamed by the local authorities as Walter Carrington Avenue. I believe it is still called that.

Carrington’s example taught me a great lesson in diplomacy: that the relationship of an embassy should be with the people of a country, not just with their authorities. Regimes which are hated by their people will never survive indefinitely, though they may endure a very long time. A fundamental role of an embassy in these situations should be to do everything in its power to hasten the dawn of freedom.

A Perfect Failure

Uzbekistan is undoubtedly one of the most vicious dictatorships on Earth. Freedom House ranks it as one of just five countries scoring a perfect 7 – complete lack of freedom – on both political rights and civil liberties. The Heritage Foundation’s view of economic freedoms there is similarly critical. In short, Uzbekistan does not follow the Southeast Asian model of an authoritarian government overseeing a free economy and rapid economic development. It is more akin to North Korea than to Singapore. Soviet institutions have been strengthened and corruption even increased. Only the iconography switched, from communism to nationalism.

Yet Uzbekistan was embraced as a Western ally following the 9/11 attacks, a member of the “Coalition of the Willing.” In 2002 alone the U.S. taxpayer gave the Uzbek regime over $500 million, of which $120 million went to the armed forces, and $82 million direct to arguably the world’s most vicious security services. Also during that year, according to impeccable British government pathology evidence, at least one Uzbek dissident was boiled alive. The U.S. taxpayer paid to heat the water.

I arrived in Tashkent as British ambassador in August 2002. I was a career Diplomatic Service officer with about 20 years’ service. I was “Fast Stream,” and well thought of. My four overseas postings had run: second secretary, first secretary, counselor, ambassador, which is not a bad record. I was 42 years old.

It is perhaps significant that I had been selected to be ambassador before 9/11, when priorities for Uzbekistan and the other former Soviet republics were rather different. During the late 1990s I had been deputy high commissioner (the equivalent of your deputy chief of mission position) in Accra, and was thought to have a particular expertise in democratization. In Ghana the U.K. financed and, in large part, managed free and fair elections that ended the 20-year rule of Jerry Rawlings and his party. I had led that process, incidentally with very good cooperation from our American colleagues. The Ghanaian elections followed years of work on building media and civil society, and the country remains a tremendous model for the rest of Africa.

Excellent work on this has been done by U.S. Ambassador Mark Palmer, whose book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil I recommend to all serving diplomats. His position is underpinned by two basic tenets: “All people want freedom and can achieve it.” And: “In the sea of tyranny, a democratic embassy must be an island of liberty and a steady, and not always subtle, proponent of change.”

Four False Principles

I would most heartily endorse those assertions. Lamentably, however, I do not believe many embassies, British or American, follow them in practice. I also believe the Palmer approach has been set backward by the “War on Terror.” That, I would argue, is due to embassies acting on four “false principles,” which that war has brought to the fore:

Putting short-term expediency ahead of long-term interest;

Pursuing specific sectoral or commercial interests as the interest of your whole nation;

Convincing yourself that your allies are good guys, because they are your allies; and

Following the “Precautionary Principle”: If things change, they will probably get worse.

All four of these attitudes were powerfully in play in dictating U.S. policy in Uzbekistan in the period 2002 to 2004, which I believe is a case study in how not to handle relations with a dictatorship. Before I expand on that, however, let me add a fifth one, the “comfort” principle. I may well enrage many readers of this magazine by saying this, but in my experience it is sometimes the most powerful of all.

Like many of you reading this, I have paid my dues on diplomatic lifestyle questions, having served in West Africa (twice) and Central Asia. But the truth is this: While there can be serious strains and disruptions, Foreign Service officers do enjoy the compensation of a privileged lifestyle. They have very high social status, attend a lot of cocktail parties and banquets, are invited to many social events, have great housing and pools, and are automatically accepted to membership of the best golf or country clubs. The personal comfort level can be very high, and most of your socializing is done with the host country’s often oligarchical elite, and with fellow diplomats who are unlikely to lose much sleep over human rights concerns. In contrast, the Walter Carrington approach causes a degree of conflict, discomfort and social difficulty that many diplomats just do not want disturbing their sybaritic lifestyles.

There, I have said it straight out, and you know damn well it is true in very many cases. If any diplomat reading this article can swear to me that they do not know a senior colleague to whom that would apply, I will send them 10 dollars!

Clearing a Path for Extremism

On Sept. 16, 2002, I sent a cable back to London, subsequently published by the European Parliament as part of their report on extraordinary rendition, analyzing the problems with U.S. policy in Uzbekistan. That contemporary analysis dovetails neatly with some of the “False Principles” outlined above. My principal criticism related to the first principle: putting short-term expediency over long-term interest. As I reported:

.”.. [President Islam] Karimov is driving this resource-rich country towards economic ruin like an Abacha. And the policy of increasing repression aimed indiscriminately at pious Muslims, combined with a deepening poverty, is the most certain way to ensure continuing support for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. ... I quite understand the interest of the U.S. in strategic air bases, but I believe U.S. policy is misconceived. In the short term it may help fight terrorism, but in the medium term it may promote it.”

At that time, Islamic fundamentalism was at an extremely low level in Uzbekistan. I know scores of Uzbeks, most of whom consider themselves good Muslims, and only one who doesn’t drink vodka! But Karimov was keen to portray all his opponents as linked to al-Qaida. He used his torture chambers to extract confessions to that effect, and the CIA not only funded much of the operation but was a major customer for the intelligence from the torture chambers. I knew and confirmed those facts while still ambassador.

Torture was of the most indisputable, physical kind: insertion of a limb in boiling liquid, smashing of knees and elbows, rape, sodomy, electrocution, mutilation of genitalia. It affected hundreds of people every year. One evening while I dined with an eminent dissident in Samarkand, his grandson was abducted by local militia from right outside the house and tortured to death. His body was dumped back on the doorstep in the early morning.

I also knew that the CIA was bringing in prisoners, using a front company called Premier Executive. They were being handed over to the Uzbek security services, a practice I protested as a blatant violation of Article 3 of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. I should be plain that I did not realize at the time that Uzbekistan was a destination for the wider extraordinary rendition network, as recently detailed in the Council of Europe report. But I did know that our support for an increasingly unpopular dictatorship, where there was no outlet of any kind for free expression of political views, was driving people away from the Western alternative and clearing the path for Islamic extremism.

That support was not only financial but political. In 2002 Karimov had been a guest in the White House. Throughout this period there was a veritable procession of senior U.S. civilian officials and military figures bearing similar messages, not to mention the day-to-day pronouncements of the U.S. ambassador. For instance, in February 2004, during his third visit to Tashkent, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference: “I brought the president the good wishes of President Bush and our appreciation for their stalwart support in the War on Terror.” It is almost impossible to describe, if you have not witnessed it, the obsessive attention to promoting Karimov’s personality cult by the entire Uzbek media and education system.

These U.S. endorsements were continually recycled and pumped out again and again by Karimov’s vast propaganda machine. The suffering people of Uzbekistan had no doubt whose side the U.S. was on — and it wasn’t their side. That is short-termism indeed.

Conflicting Narratives

My cable of Sept. 16, 2002, also referred to the fourth of the false principles listed above – self-delusion. I wrote: “The U.S. are trying to prop up Karimov economically, and to justify this support they need to claim that a process of economic and political reform is under way. That they do so claim is either cynicism or self-delusion.”

In the period of the U.S.-Uzbek alliance, there was an astonishing mismatch between the reality on the ground, and the official version of what was happening in the country.

In real life, repression was tightening: There were more political prisoners, an increase in torture, more NGOs banned, more Western media organizations thrown out, heavier censorship, and more elections rigged or postponed. There was more nationalizations or forced closures of enterprises, more forcible takeovers of foreign investors’ assets, more consolidation of key assets into the hands of the Karimov family, more closures of roads and dynamiting of bridges, more tariffs, more non-tariff barriers, and more physical sealing of the country’s borders.

Yet in the official narrative, censorship was ended, political prisoners released, currency made convertible, agriculture reformed. The economy and trade boomed. The problem was that the official narrative was simply the use of the “big lie” technique. The Uzbek ministers, ex-Soviet officials to a man, had no concept that the official account should match the truth. The amazing thing was seeing United States officials struggling to believe them for the sake of the alliance, and struggling to persuade international organizations to accept the Uzbek narrative, as well.

It was a disheartening exercise to be party to compromises, under which international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund would publish statistics somewhere between the official statistic published by the Uzbek government and backed by Washington, and the truth — which often told the opposite story. This was most sharply expressed in economic growth statistics, which were always accepted as positive even when the economy was plainly in freefall.

At this time the U.S. was also defending Uzbekistan from well-deserved criticism at the U.N. Human Rights Council and elsewhere. Such self-delusion principle opens you up to the accompanying danger of window-dressing. This is where your host dictatorship is very happy to accept your consultants’ reports, training and courses on human rights or economic reform, without any intention at all of putting any of the teaching or advice into practice, but the existence of the training workshops or consultants’ reports becomes a useful proxy for the reform itself, and can be quoted as evidence of reform.

The U.S. paid a great deal of money for innumerable inputs on media and legal training, yet the media and the legal system in Uzbekistan remain 100 percent not free. From 2002 to 2004, Washington repeated ad nauseam the claim that the existence of such programs itself was evidence of progress, and praised the intention of the Uzbek government to reform — even as several journalists who learned to respect freedom during such courses ended up in jail if they tried to practice their new knowledge. For its part, the wily Karimov regime was very adept at playing along.

SOB Stories

The American experience in Uzbekistan illustrates the adoption of false principles over true ones. It also beautifully illustrates the entire fallacy of what I might call the “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he’s our son-of-a-bitch” approach. An SOB is never “our” SOB. He is always his own man; indeed, that is what defines an SOB. Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were all “our” SOBs for long periods — before they bit the hand that was providing their support.

Karimov proved just as unreliable an ally. By May 2005 the argument that he was a reformer had already become untenable, when his troops massacred over 600 almost entirely unarmed demonstrators in the town of Andijan. Shortly thereafter he served the United States with notice of eviction from their large air base at Karshi Khanabad.

There has been a concerted attempt by Republican institutes to rewrite history to pretend that the U.S. quit the base in response to the Andijan massacre. That is not true — the U.S. had no intention of leaving prior to being evicted. Moreover, the entire Peace Corps operation and dozens of U.S. NGOs were also evicted. Karimov quickly moved back into the Russian orbit, following a deal struck by his daughter. In exchange for massive bribes, the country’s substantial gas reserves were handed over to the Russian energy monopoly, Gazprom.

So the U.S. lost in every respect in Uzbekistan. It forfeited its moral standing, acquiring a reputation in the Muslim world as a hypocritical and self-serving superpower, interested in democracy and human rights only when convenient. In return, the intelligence the U.S. gained from the torture chambers of the Karimov security services was self-serving propaganda that muddied the picture by providing a stream of false information exaggerating the strength of al-Qaida in Central Asia.

Elsewhere in the former communist bloc (e.g., Ukraine and Georgia), Washington backed the people against their dictatorships. That policy contributed hugely to the successful revolutions that spread so much freedom in the world. But in Uzbekistan, blinded by the short-term dictates of the “War on Terror,” the U.S. backed the dictatorship against the people. That is always a very bad call.

There's Good Money in Death

Tim Holmes — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 03:08:47 +0000

In posts below I outlined the theory, first put forward in JA Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study, that imperial adventures abroad impoverish a nation but enrich certain powerful interest groups within it. I applied this to the Iraq war. Market events of the last few days bear out my description of the fragility of the United States’ current financial architecture. Gordon Brown has loyally bought $125 billion of US Treasury Bonds in the last few months to help shore up his ally, with my money. Brown is a man who prides himself on economic prudence, that is a move he will come to rue.
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/08/us_economic_vul.html#comments
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/08/j_a_hobson_impe.html#comments

When I give talks on Murder in Samarkand, I am keen to emphasise that the driver behind US Central Asian policy was the meeting between Bush, Enron and the Uzbek Ambassador in 1997. From twenty years experience as a diplomat I can tell you that the idea that big companies drive foreign policy is not an abstract concept, but comes down to very real contracts, very real money and very real, and often very nasty, people.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/bushlay12.html

The same point was made last week by a BBC report that the arms manufacturer British Aerospace has made record profits due to the War in Iraq. The BBC, for once, deserves some credit for the frankness of this report, which begins:

BAE profits soar on Iraq conflict Work to re-equip UK and US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has helped profits to soar at defence group BAE Systems.

The UK’s largest defence firm, BAE made a pre-tax profit of £657m ($1.4bn), compared with £378m a year earlier.

BAE said the “high tempo” of UK and US military operations was increasing demand for land systems to support armed forces overseas. BAE, which is facing an anti-corruption probe by US authorities, saw its half-year revenues rise by 10%. The firm said its sales had benefited from its US operations, which achieved organic sales growth of 12% during the period.

Overall sales at BAE’s Land & Armaments business, which includes everything from tanks to munitions, rose 43%.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6938085.stm

British Aerospace is of course the company that provided $1.2 billion in bribes for Saudi Princes, as well as trafficking in sex for them, and had Tony Blair decide that an investigation into the crime should be dropped “In the national interest”.
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/bae_corruption.html
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/transcript_of_t.html

British Aerospace has the closest relationship with New Labour. When Robin Cook became Foreign Secretary in 1997, he announced that he intended to institute an “Ethical Foreign Policy”. Blair was determined to scupper this, particularly as it was known in the FCO and Downing St that Robin Cook planned to block a substantial sale of British Aerospce Hawk jets to Indonesia, a country which had a record of using air power against civilian populations in internal dissident areas.

Before Cook was ready, Blair ambushed him on the issue at one of New Labour’s very first Cabinet meetings. Jack Straw led the attack speaking in favour of BAE, strongly supported by Gordon Brown. In the first few weeks of Blair’s premiership, nobody was prepared to speak against him at Cabinet, and Cook was not just defeated, but deliberately humiliated by Blair. I have had an eyewitness account of this meeting from a then Cabinet Minister.

Cook was later to say that:

“I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10. Certainly I never knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE.”

Jack Straw has always been the most pervasive and insidious supporter of BAE in the Cabinet. It was Straw who lobbied hardest against Cook’s plans to limit BAE arms sales, and when Blair sacked Cook it was Straw who replaced him as Foreign Secretary. It was Straw who lobbied hardest for the investigation into the BAE bribes to be dropped, and it is Straw who now has become, supreme irony, Minister of Justice.

When Straw escorted Condoleeza Rice around the North West of England in March 2006, a BAE arms factory was the highlight of the trip.

Straw’s links with BAE are partly conducted through Lord Taylor of Blackburn, the former leader of the Blackburn with Darwen Council that includes Straw’s Blackburn constituency. Lord Taylor, an archetypal New Labour apparatchik from Straw’s constituency machine, has lived off the taxpayer in Labour Party appointed posts all his life. He is now chiefly known as the second highest claimer of expenses in the House of Lords. In 2005 Lord Taylor claimed over £57,000 of tax-free expenses, over three times the average claim of under £19,000. he spoke 15 times in the year.

But he doesn’t really need that public money anymore, as the grasping creep Taylor is the primary conduit between the defence industry and New Labour. He has been a highly paid “Consultant” to BAE for over a decade. He also has used some of that money to make major contributions to Jack Straw’s election expenses in his Blackburn constituency, declared by Straw in the Register of Member’s interests. Lord Taylor also regularly makes large contributions to fund Blackburn New Labour. When I stood against Straw in Blackburn at the last election, Taylor was present with Straw at a black tie event hosted by BAE in the constituency said to be “unrelated to the election”.

Interestingly, this year in the House of Lords’ Register of Members’ interests, BAE has disappeared from Taylor’s list of eleven paid consultancies and two paid directorships. It might be interesting to dig for links between these companies and BAE. Some are certainly arms firms – including the highly sinister Electronic Data Systems.

EDS is another of the arms companies that has made many billions from the Iraq war. Among their many current defence contracts is a $12 billion project on electronic systems for the US armed forces. Presumably a well-plugged in New Labour apparatchik like Lord Taylor was of no hindrance to EDS in March 2005 when they landed a £2.5 billion contract from the UK MOD for a similar project. Indeed, if Lord Taylor cannot help swing that kind of contract, why are EDS paying him?

I do not have power of words sufficiently to condemn the institutional sleaze of a system where a scumbag like Lord Taylor can be put, unelected, by Blair into a seat for life in the national legislature. There, while a legislator, he can act as a well paid and highly connected lobbyist for the arms industry. As someone who has been deeply patriotic, I must now say that I find myself unable to have any pride in my own country any longer.

What are our soldiers dying for again?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2091253,00.html

CIA Torture Results

Tim Holmes — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:15:37 +0000

One of my repeated arguments with the FCO was that torture is not just immoral. but fouls up the intelligence stream with highly dubious material. In my Ambassadorial telegram to then Secretary of State Jack Straw of 22 July 2004, I made the following points:

We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror…

In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of this practice…

I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN Convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the then CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think that there is any doubt about the fact…

..this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, and they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.

I do urge you to read the full telegram if you have not already done so:
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/documents/Telegram.pdf
I think my next point about the Butler inquiry showing the intelligence services prefer their material sensational, was a particularly good blow.

The New Yorker has pioneered in reporting on extraordinary rendition, and the latest effort by Jane Mayer refers to Khalil Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to every crime that he or his CIA torturers had ever heard of, including the murder of Daniel Pearl:

A surprising number of people close to the case are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. A longtime friend of Pearl’s, the former Journal reporter Asra Nomani, said, “The release of the confession came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales’s resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy to change the subject. Why now? They’d had the confession for years.” Mariane and Daniel Pearl were staying in Nomani’s Karachi house at the time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach a course on the topic at Georgetown University. She said, “I don’t think this confession resolves the case. You can’t have justice from one person’s confession, especially under such unusual circumstances. To me, it’s not convincing.” She added, “I called all the investigators. They weren’t just skeptical—they didn’t believe it.”

Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed—and whose lead role investigating the murder was featured in the recent film “A Mighty Heart”—said that he has interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them named Mohammed as playing a role. “K.S.M.’s name never came up,” he said. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer, said, “My old colleagues say with one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not K.S.M. who killed Pearl.”

http://www.newyorker.com:80/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer

Meanwhile, the rats are deserting the sinking ship. Now that Iraq is such a disaster that nobody now argues that life for ordinary Iraqis is better than it was five years ago, everyone is anxious to pretend that they were against the war all the time, really, honest. Even the security services are now sending out weasel signals through their pet journalists.

Security Correspondents are amongst the worst denizens of the media, because they are so dependent on the security services feeding them tidbits to retail that they are terrified of offending them. Frank Gardner of the BBC is an especially bad example. His “This is a mock-up what a terrorist chemical weapon vest at Forest Gate might look like” was possibly the worst bit of journalism I have ever seen.

Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian is another such. When I was astonished to wake up one day and see that the British government had published a totally fake map of the Iran/Iraq border, in relation to the sailors captured by the Iranians, and that the media were buying the fake map, I phoned Richard Norton-Taylor. I was offering a major scoop, free. He didn’t want to know.

So I published on this blog – and had 60,000 hits, and the entry repeated all over the web.
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/03/captured_marine.html
The Mail then published an expanded version, and got a great reaction. I genuinely believe that making it public knowledge that our map was fake, helped to put Tony Blair back in his box and allowed diplomacy to get the captives released.
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/07/british_map_in.html

All of which was ignored by Norton-Taylor because he preferred to side with his security service contacts. It is worth noting that every time I was brought on the the BBC to say the map was a fake, the government put up against me “Sir” Alan West, who told a load of patent lies about the boundary on the government’s behalf, including the extraordinary lie that the Iran/Iraq maritime boundary had been settled by an agreement beyween the UK and Iran. I am quite sure that a number of questions about that impossible assertion occur to you reading that now. Not one of those questions occurred to any BBC “Journalist” interviewing Sir Alan.

At the time, Sir Alan was presented as a retired Admiral and independent expert. Just a few weeks later he now re-emerges as a much higher paid liar as our Minister for Locking Up Bearded Men Without Trial. I may have got the offical title a bit wrong, but the appointment of an unelected military man as a minister in charge of “Domestic security” is a development so sinister I cannot believe the lack of concern shown by the media. But then of course, it is the fiefdom of their security correspondents.

Which brings me back to Norton Taylor. MI6 are now using him to claim that they were against the Iraq war all the time, and were overruled by that awful Bush and Blair:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2141372,00.html

I have no doubt they were against the war, in the sense that they would rather we hadn’t done it. But did they refuse to compile the dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which they knew full well was untrue? No, and John Scarlett who actually compiled it is now head of MI6. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into the disastrous “War on Terror”, embraced torture and the other new techniques, and lapped up the extra funding and prestige it gave them. Did MI6 ever give plainly worded advice to the Cabinet that they were against the war? No – in fact they permitted the Cabinet to be fed the opposite impression. Has a single member of MI6 resigned over the War? No.

I am not unhappy to see rats leave a sinking ship. But to try to pretend they were never on board…

Met Chiefs' Lies

Tim Holmes — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:43:32 +0000

I know that headline comes in the “Old news” category, but for once it’s official. The Independent Police Complaints Commission has ruled that the public were “Misled” over the death of Jean Charles De Menezes, the innocent Brazilian executed on the London Underground.

The lies which the Metropolitan Police told – from Sir Ian Blair down – in the ensuing cover-up were inexcusable.

Catalogue of Lies

- The Met maintained that De Menezes was a terrorist for 24 hours after they knew he was innocent.
The Met then proceeded to tell a series of lies about De Menezes behaviour to justify his killing. They said he had: – Run into the tube station – Vaulted the ticket barrier – Raced through the subway and dashed onto the train – Been wearing a bulky jacket from which wires protruded

These were 100% lie. In fact De Menezes had – Picked up a newspaper in the station – Used a ticket in the normal way – Walked calmly throgu the station – Been wearing tight clothing with no wires

These lies by the Met are inexcusable. In fact the IPCC were unable to get to grips with much else for lack of evidence – the cover-up went much deeper. Especially

- The CCTV footage of De Menezes throughout the station and at the shooting got “Lost” or corrupted

The IPCC named only Andy Hayman, the Head of counter-terrorist operations at the Met, as guilty of these lies. But we all know it went both higher and deeper. In fact:

- Police chiefs ensured the removal of criticism of more senior officers by the Police Federation taking out legal cases against the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

In any real democracy this scandal would cause not just major resignations amongst senior police, but a government to fall. Unfortunately we are no longer much of a democracy. News reports are emphasising that the shooting was “understandable” as it happened the day after the attempted July 21 bombings. In a classic piece of news management, the immediately preceding news item is that a man has today been charged with “Witholding Information” about the 21 July bombings.

Two years after the event, the police arrested him two days ago, and now charge him on the day that the IPCC report came out. Both those timings were within the sole remit of the police. Anyone who believes the timing is coincidental is so naive as to be certifiable.

Given the catalogue of lies they told in the De Menezes case, I am not prepared to believe the police version of what happens in any “Terrorist” incident without other verification. That goes for the recent London alleged car bomb too. Just like Tony Blair and WMD, the same applies to Ian Blair and Andy Hayman:

- Never take the word of a proven lying bastard.

Whitewashing Torture

Tim Holmes — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:55:39 +0000

I have just got round to reading the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee’s report into Extraordinary Rendition.

This really is the most laughable cover-up job I have ever seen. The committee does venture that some things might have happened which were – well perhaps morally difficult. It even in one sentence goes so far as to hint that the United States might have been a bit naughty:

“What the US rendition programme has shown is that these ethical dilemmas are not confined to countries with poor track records on human rights – the UK now has some ethical dilemmas with our closest ally.”

But fortunately, nobody actually did anything wrong and the phrase “No evidence” repeats again and again like a mantra. Nobody ever saw any evidence. British intelligence officers interrogating detainees in the rendition programme never saw any evidence of torture. The police never saw any evidence of rendition flights in the UK. Nor does the committee think that anybody should have looked to see if they could find any evidence – of course the police and security services are too busy protecting us from those dreadful terrorists to worry about the odd British Muslim being tortured by the Americans.

The Committee also fails to address the straightforward question of whether we do or whether we do not obtain intelligence from torture. It dances around the subject with equivocations like:

“These issues are not easily resolved. Intelligence and security services, here and abroad, rarely divulge information on their sources when sharing intelligence with foreign liaison services. The location, circumstances or treatment of a detainee (or even the fact that the source is a detainee) would not usually be shared.”

So there you have the basis of a defence: “We had no idea the Algerians had tortured him to get the information, your Honour.” Except that the statement above from the report is a direct lie. You very often know it is a detainee, and can easily discover from your liaison something about his circumstances, including torture, if you ask. If you’re a good enough liaison officer you’ll find out without asking. The details the Committee claim we “Don’t know” are in fact deliberately sanitised out by the Security Services before the intelligence report is issued, to give Ministers plausible deniability of knowing the information came from torture.

The Committee however have a second line of defence. Torturing people is OK anyway because it saves lives. Take Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

“When he was in detention in 2003, place unknown, he provided [The pseudonyms of] six individuals…who were involved in AQ activities in or against the UK. The Americans gave us this information… These included high profile terrorists – an indication of the huge amount of significant information that came from one man in detention in an unknown place.”

In fact, KSM confessed under years of torture to an incredible amount of stuff, much of which could not possibly have been true. The Committee give a lot of space to the “Torture Works” arguments put forward by our security services, but fail to address – or even to meniton – the counter argment that torture gets you not the truth, but what the victim thinks will make the torturer stop. A few hundred years ago we would have succesfully been making KSM confess to communing with the Devil in the form of a cat. That wouldn’t make it true.

My breath is taken away by the moral cowardice of the committee in putting forward the argument that we need intelligence from torture, while pretending not to know if people are actually tortured or not. I could have given them irrefutable evidence that we do have a policy of obtaining evidence through torture – which I presume is why they did not call me to give evidence. I am named in the Report as having given evidence to the European Parliament Report on Extraordinary Rendition, but they make no mention at all of what my evidence was. They then dismiss the European parliament report of having “No real evidence”.

It is a matter of genuine sorrow to me that I have never given evidence in this country to the events outlined in Murder in Samarkand. I was called to give this evidence to both the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, but our own parliament – including all three major parties – regard it as far too embarassing. Acknowledging our involvement in torture is inconvenient, because politicians would then have to support or oppose it. Everyone prefers that the security services do it, with government approval, while we all pretend it isn’t happening.

This was the result when I tried to submit evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee:

Dear Mr Murray, The Committee considered your e-mail at its meeting yesterday, 15 March. As you requested, it was made available to all members. The Committee decided not to receive the communication as evidence. Steve Priestley Clerk of FAC

Dying to Protect Drug Barons

Tim Holmes — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:11:06 +0000

This week the 64th British soldier to die in Afghanistan, Corporal Mike Gilyeat, was buried. All the right things were said about this brave soldier, just as, on current trends, they will be said about one or more of his colleagues who follow him next week.

The alarming escalation of the casualty rate among British soldiers in Afghanistan – up to ten per cent – led to discussion this week on whether it could be fairly compared to casualty rates in the Second World War.

But the key question is this: what are our servicemen dying for? There are glib answers to that: bringing democracy and development to Afghanistan, supporting the government of President Hamid Karzai in its attempt to establish order in the country, fighting the Taliban and preventing the further spread of radical Islam into Pakistan.

But do these answers stand up to close analysis?

There has been too easy an acceptance of the lazy notion that the war in Afghanistan is the ‘good’ war, while the war in Iraq is the ‘bad’ war, the blunder. The origins of this view are not irrational. There was a logic to attacking Afghanistan after 9/11.

Afghanistan was indeed the headquarters of Osama Bin Laden and his organisation, who had been installed and financed there by the CIA to fight the Soviets from 1979 until 1989. By comparison, the attack on Iraq – which was an enemy of Al Qaeda and no threat to us – was plainly irrational in terms of the official justification.

So the attack on Afghanistan has enjoyed a much greater sense of public legitimacy. But the operation to remove Bin Laden was one thing. Six years of occupation are clearly another.

Few seem to turn a hair at the officially expressed view that our occupation of Afghanistan may last for decades.

Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell has declared, fatuously, that the Afghan war is ‘winnable’.

Afghanistan was not militarily winnable by the British Empire at the height of its supremacy. It was not winnable by Darius or Alexander, by Shah, Tsar or Great Moghul. It could not be subdued by 240,000 Soviet troops. But what, precisely, are we trying to win?

In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards. Yet we are not trumpeting it. Why not?

The answer is this. The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.

The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. I would not advocate their methods for doing this, which involved lopping bits, often vital bits, off people. The Taliban were a bunch of mad and deeply unpleasant religious fanatics. But one of the things they were vehemently against was opium.

That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure. Nobody has denied the sincerity of the Taliban’s crazy religious zeal, and they were as unlikely to sell you heroin as a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

They stamped out the opium trade, and impoverished and drove out the drug warlords whose warring and rapacity had ruined what was left of the country after the Soviet war.

That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban; there are plenty of very bad things to say about them. But their suppression of the opium trade and the drug barons is undeniable fact.

Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.

When we attacked Afghanistan, America bombed from the air while the CIA paid, armed and equipped the dispirited warlord drug barons – especially those grouped in the Northern Alliance – to do the ground occupation. We bombed the Taliban and their allies into submission, while the warlords moved in to claim the spoils. Then we made them ministers.

President Karzai is a good man. He has never had an opponent killed, which may not sound like much but is highly unusual in this region and possibly unique in an Afghan leader. But nobody really believes he is running the country. He asked America to stop its recent bombing campaign in the south because it was leading to an increase in support for the Taliban. The United States simply ignored him. Above all, he has no control at all over the warlords among his ministers and governors, each of whom runs his own kingdom and whose primary concern is self-enrichment through heroin.

My knowledge of all this comes from my time as British Ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan from 2002 until 2004. I stood at the Friendship Bridge at Termez in 2003 and watched the Jeeps with blacked-out windows bringing the heroin through from Afghanistan, en route to Europe.

I watched the tankers of chemicals roaring into Afghanistan.

Yet I could not persuade my country to do anything about it. Alexander Litvinenko – the former agent of the KGB, now the FSB, who died in London last November after being poisoned with polonium 210 – had suffered the same frustration over the same topic.

There are a number of theories as to why Litvinenko had to flee Russia. The most popular blames his support for the theory that FSB agents planted bombs in Russian apartment blocks to stir up anti-Chechen feeling.

But the truth is that his discoveries about the heroin trade were what put his life in danger. Litvinenko was working for the KGB in St Petersburg in 2001 and 2002. He became concerned at the vast amounts of heroin coming from Afghanistan, in particular from the fiefdom of the (now) Head of the Afghan armed forces, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, in north and east Afghanistan.

Dostum is an Uzbek, and the heroin passes over the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it is taken over by President Islam Karimov’s people. It is then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to St Petersburg and Riga.

The heroin Jeeps run from General Dostum to President Karimov. The UK, United States and Germany have all invested large sums in donating the most sophisticated detection and screening equipment to the Uzbek customs centre at Termez to stop the heroin coming through.

But the convoys of Jeeps running between Dostum and Karimov are simply waved around the side of the facility.

Litvinenko uncovered the St Petersburg end and was stunned by the involvement of the city authorities, local police and security services at the most senior levels. He reported in detail to President Vladimir Putin. Putin is, of course, from St Petersburg, and the people Litvinenko named were among Putin’s closest political allies. That is why Litvinenko, having miscalculated badly, had to flee Russia.

I had as little luck as Litvinenko in trying to get official action against this heroin trade. At the St Petersburg end he found those involved had the top protection. In Afghanistan, General Dostum is vital to Karzai’s coalition, and to the West’s pretence of a stable, democratic government.

Opium is produced all over Afghanistan, but especially in the north and north-east – Dostum’s territory. Again, our Government’s spin doctors have tried hard to obscure this fact and make out that the bulk of the heroin is produced in the tiny areas of the south under Taliban control. But these are the most desolate, infertile rocky areas. It is a physical impossibility to produce the bulk of the vast opium harvest there.

That General Dostum is head of the Afghan armed forces and Deputy Minister of Defence is in itself a symbol of the bankruptcy of our policy. Dostum is known for tying opponents to tank tracks and running them over. He crammed prisoners into metal containers in the searing sun, causing scores to die of heat and thirst.

Since we brought ‘democracy’ to Afghanistan, Dostum ordered an MP who annoyed him to be pinned down while he attacked him. The sad thing is that Dostum is probably not the worst of those comprising the Karzai government, or the biggest drug smuggler among them.

Our Afghan policy is still victim to Tony Blair’s simplistic world view and his childish division of all conflicts into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. The truth is that there are seldom any good guys among those vying for power in a country such as Afghanistan. To characterise the Karzai government as good guys is sheer nonsense.

Why then do we continue to send our soldiers to die in Afghanistan? Our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is the greatest recruiting sergeant for Islamic militants. As the great diplomat, soldier and adventurer Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alexander Burnes pointed out before his death in the First Afghan War in 1841, there is no point in a military campaign in Afghanistan as every time you beat them, you just swell their numbers. Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London.

Remember this article next time you hear a politician calling for more troops to go into Afghanistan. And when you hear of another brave British life wasted there, remember you can add to the casualty figures all the young lives ruined, made miserable or ended by heroin in the UK.

They, too, are casualties of our Afghan policy.

Justice Equals More Convictions

Tim Holmes — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 18:48:32 +0000

The great rafts of new anti-terror laws put into force by Labour are insufficient to protect us, as witness the tens of thousands of rotting corpses of terror victims currently strewing the streets of Britain. On the other hand, getting rid of Saddam Hussein has made Iraq safer for its people, as witness the complete lack of corpses on the streets of Baghdad.

Brown is attempting to establish his hard man credentials by trailing the next bunch of anti-terror laws. The most publicity has been given to the proposal that wiretaps should be available as evidence in court.

I have always favoured this, provided the wiretap is legal; and not just in terrorism cases. I blogged recently that I had never understood the government’s objection, but suspected it was because they did not want juries to be exposed to the extremely tenuous interpretations which the security services often put on communications – which I have personally seen on the inside.

After I posted this, I met with a friend, still in the senior civil service, who filled me in on a fuller picture. I now realise, which I did not at the time, that he or she was telling me this because a move was imminent.

The concern is that intercept evidence might be more helpful to the defence than the prosecution. Where communication intercepts are used, as in the USA, the laws of evidence are that the prosecution must make complete disclosure of all the wiretaps made. The defence can then search this for evidence that points to innocence.

Compare this to the situation that operates with control orders, or indefinite house arrest without trial. Here the prosecution just feeds to the judge (no jury) an isolated snippet of information from “intelligence”, reflecting not a whole picture but just the security services’ interpretation. Judges tend to be impressed by this “Top Secret” stuff.

To let the defence at raw intercepts threatens the intelligence services’ greatest lever of power – their monopoly of interpretation of raw data. Even Ministers, or Ambassadors as I was, don’t get the raw data, but a “Report” summarising, interpreting and selectively quoting.

So the proposal being considered by the Home Office is this – that the defence should not be allowed access to all the material from wiretaps of the accused. The prosecution would have to disclose in full only the conversation, or conversations, being directly quoted from. The security services are prepared to go along with that, and the Home Office believe that the public demand for wiretap evidence to be admissible will drown out any protests from lawyers. We will be told the Security Services are not staffed to cope with fuller disclosure.

You read it here first. As my friend put it: “You see, in the minds of the Home Office, justice equals more convictions.”

The other point my friend flagged up was that some in the Home Office are arguing that the classification of many intercepts is such that they could not be available to juries. The demand to bring in intercept evidence might therefore be used to push the case for Diplock Courts in terrorist cases. I should be surprised if we see that kite flown at this stage; the government’s technique so far is to push back liberty by a series of hefty shoves. That is probably next year’s argument. But then I hadn’t realised my friend was warning me about something imminent on Wiretaps, so I could be wrong.

The other proposed Brown measure getting most attention is another call for ninety day internment without charge. But in many ways the most insidious proposal of all is the idea that you should still be subject to questioning after you have been charged.

This is a fundamental rebalancing of our legal system. It means that the police can charge you on spec, and then harass you for a confession when you are banged up in jail on remand and subject to extreme pressure, and all kinds of possibilities of physical abuse from fellow convicts -“trusties” working with the police. It removes a fundamental safeguard, that once charged the questioning takes place in open court before a jury. It is a huge change.

This proposal also completely obviates the whole ninety day detention question. At the moment, the police do not charge without a firm case, because then they can no longer question. If this new proposal goes through, then the police can just charge willy-nilly and hold the suspect for the usual remand of two or three years in terror cases.

Needless to say, the BBC and Sky have been able to find Lord Windbag Carlile, various “security experts” and Gordon Brown himself to explain while all this is necessary. Even Simon Hughes turned up to pledge Lib Dem support for the right to question after charging. Obviously the whole country supports all this, as they have been unable to find anyone to argue against.

"I Found Iraq's WMD"

Tim Holmes — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 18:31:37 +0000

I have been meaning to blog about this article for some time.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/printer-friendly/29092/i-found-saddams-wmd-bunkers.thtml

In it, Melanie Phillips claims to have learned from a Dave Gaubatz of the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations that “Saddam’s WMD did exist”. They were buried, then removed to Syria after the occupation.

This places Phillips in a minority of neo-cons who are still spinning the line about Iraqi WMD. Most, including Blair, have moved on to the “Hell, we got rid of Saddam, so what does it matter?” line. Plainly, others like Phillips feel their intellectual credibility is at stake. These are people whose fanatical world view does not permit of the possibility of having been wrong. Those weapons must exist.

So, Phillips buys the story of Mr Gaubatz, who tells us that the weapons were buried in four vast, thick, concrete bunkers in Southern Iraq.

He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.

This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.

After we had invaded and occupied Iraq, in the massive search for Iraqi WMD, with Bush and Blair’s credibility vanishing by the hour, inexplicably nobody would listen to Mr Gaubatz saying he had found the WMD. From this account, apparently Mr Gaubatz did not feel that the discovery of Iraq’s WMD was important enough to put in his requests to the Iraq Survey Group in writing. I presume that is what Phillips means when she says he “verbally” told them, although of course writing also uses words and she intended to say “orally”.

And then what happened?

the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria.

Now let us consider what Phillips is selling us here. Sometime after July 2003, with some quarter of a million coalition troops and other personnel occupying Iraq, four vast bunkers of WMD, presumably weighing hundreds of tonnes, were secretly excavated, some from thirty feet under the Euphrates, and then smuggled many hundreds of miles in trucks across the desert and across the Iraqi border, without anyone noticing or a single weapon being caught?

Don’t forget that these are not facilities hidden in deep desert near the Syrian border. They are under the Euphrates – the great river along which most Iraqi towns lie, and alongside which all the roads and other infrastructure run, in constant use by allied forces, who were also patrolling the river in boats.

Think about the building of these facilities in the first place. Iraq was under intense scrutiny from both satellite and aerial photgraphy. UK and US airforces were in constant sortie over the area described, which lies within the Southern no-fly zone. On the ground UN inspectors were roaming widely, poking into anything suspicious.

The Euphrates is not a stream. it is one of the great rivers of the World. Phillips tells us these great projects involved diverting the Euphrates around dams. And no-one noticed?

This story goes beyond the unlikely into the ludicrous. Phillips has obviously allowed political and atavistic hatred to override her powers of reason. Put starkly, the woman has gone barking mad.

All of which would be funny, except that she is given the widest access to all forms of media to broadcast her racial hatred against Arabs and Muslims, and her vile, hate-filled books sell well. Yet the rational can easily dissect her output as rubbish beyond the pale of reason.

Glad to see that she has made up with the Spectator though. On 21 January 2005 she wrote in her published diary

The Spectator. What kind of hatred of the Jews resides at that magazine…

http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001013.html

A Tool of New Labour?

Tim Holmes — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:52:52 +0000

I had been more than a little disconcerted by what I discovered of the administration of Dundee University since I became Rector two months ago. In particular, at my first University Court meeting, held the first working day after I took office, the University administration forced through the closure of undergraduate teaching in modern languages and in town planning, and adopted a five year framework of cuts. Accepting hypothetically that short term savings were necessary, I could not see the need for the immediate adoption of a five year programme before their Rector had even had time to read through the papers (which I received two hours before the meeting). Interestingly every academic and graduate representative on Court voted against the cuts, but they were rammed through by an array of co-opted members, who appeared without exception to be either businessmen or from the government’s educational administration establishment.

The atmosphere at the meeting really was an appalling bulldoze. I waited some time before catching the Chairman’s eye, and was astonished when, one minute into my first observation, the Chairman rudely interrupted me to allow the Principal to “Correct” me. This happened several times in the meeting, to me and to others. I wondered who this chairman could be – his name was John Milligan. More on that later.

In short, the Univeristy appeared to have come a long way from being the self-governing democratic community it is supposed to be. In the analysis given by the University administration of different academic departments, they were viewed solely in financial terms. Just what they cost and what they brought in. There was no mention of educational values or wider societal considerations.

It also was plain there was an inner group who were running things, and each subject was introduced with people primed to support. I was sitting close enough to the Chairman to note that while he acknowledged those wishing to speak and ostentiously was writing a list of names, he would vary the order of the list when he felt a need to influence the debate.

It was also plain, from numerous little indications, that this was not just a clique in charge, it was a New Labour clique. This became even more plain at my second Court meeting on Monday, when the Principal, Sir Alan Langlands, spoke of a recent visit to the Life Sciences Department by the vacuous Scottish First Minister, Jack McConell, in quite blatantly electoral terms.

(In Scottish parliamentary elections on 3 May the Labour Party looks set to lose political control of Scotland for the first time in fifty years).

I might have let that go, but for what followed. The University has been in discussions with the Victoria and Albert Museum about the possibility of opening a branch museum in Dundee. It is a wonderful idea – the V & A has vastly more than it can display, and it would bring jobs and tourists to Dundee.

However Sir Alan Langlands said to the Court that a public announcement would be likely to be made by Jack McConnell in the context of an election promise.

That really is too much. This has nothing to do with New Labour – the discussions have been between the University and the V&A. To try to use this University initiative to New Labour advantage is completely illegitimate. The University of course sits in Dundee West, a key Labour/SNP marginal. I therefore said at Court that the University needed to be careful to avoid identification with any political party.

I was still wondering who this Chairman of Court, John Milligan, was and how he had got the job. I have been a member of the University since 1977, and had not come across him. He is not a man who exudes the mores of higher education.

Then today all became clear. As`I am currently in Ekaterinburg, I saw it several days late, but I came across reports that one John Milligan, ex-Chairman of Atlantic Power, on the Sunday Times rich list, and (wait for it…) a high profile donor to the Labour Party, had organised and paid for an advertisement attacking the idea of Scottish Independence, signed by a lot of rich people, some of them very unpleasant indeed.
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1352249.0.0.php
http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=635452007

The move was widely reported to be inspired by Gordon Brown and timed to coincide with his electioneering breakfast in Edinburgh.

Among those who had signed for Milligan and Brown was the Principal of just one of Scotland’s thirteen universities. You guessed it, Milligan’s team-mate, Sir Alan Langlands of Dundee University.

As these two are so keen to help New Labour by entering into the hurly-burly of politics, let us treat them to some of the heat.

Alan Langlands has questions to answer. After retiring in August 2000 as Chief Executive of the NHS, in March 2001 he quickly reemerged as a Director of Patientline, the disgraced rip-off company which enjoys a monopoly of patient personal communications in the NHS. They charge the ill – who are disproportionately poor and elderly – 26p a minute to make a call and 49p a minute to recieve one. They also provide personal televisions at great cost, and, worst of all, have campaigned succesfully to have mobile phones, pay phones and communal TVs removed from hospitals. Langlands was a Director of Patientline when I was in Westminster Hospital for two months in Autumn 2003 and unable to talk to Nadira as Patientline phones won’t call, or receive from, Uzbekistan. He resigned in 2004.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/04/patientline_ups_charges/

Patientline is one of the most appalling examples of greed triumphing over the needs of ordinary people in Blair’s Britain. But for Langlands to move so quickly from heading the NHS which gave Patientline its monopoly, to the board of Patientline, is in my view of the world a disgrace which in a civilsed country ought to be be criminal. What do you think?

As for Milligan, we know the rewards that giving money to the Labour Party might bring. Who is to say that the chairmanship of a University is not that sort of carrot? The University is now sewn up very tight indeed, with all future appointments having to be initiated by a nomination committee of just six people, of whom Milligan and Langlands are two, and at least two others are from their “Trusty” circle. At the last committee it made two appointments – from amongst its six members.

This whole sorry tale of New Labour Croneyism is typical of much of Scotland, but relatively new in the University sector. I do hope that it causes a backlash of revulsion. I urge everybody with a vote to vote anything but Labour on May 3.

Leaking Secrets

Tim Holmes — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:44:09 +0000

I was dismissed as Ambassador to Uzbekistan when one of my diplomatic telegrams was leaked to the Sunday Times. The telegram complained of our continual receipt, via the CIA, of intelligence obtained by torture in Uzbekistan. It detailed London meetings which had approved this policy, referred to the CIA flying people to Uzbekistan and handing them over to the Uzbek intelligence services, and explained the illegality of this activity.

Interestingly the Financial Times decided to publish only a tiny fraction of this information, which was explosive back then in October 2003, as extraordinary rendition had not yet hit the headlines. But the leak was enough to get me sacked, and to institute a formal leak inquiry. Once it became plain that I was not the leaker, the inquiry was quietly stopped.

I have therefore been more sensitive than most to the Government’s continued habit of leaking “Intelligence” when it suits it. My objection has largely been that the government does this in order to exaggerate the threat of terrorism and instil fear, which they view as helpful in rallying popular support to the “War on Terror”.

I was therefore furious when I saw a headline “Al-Qaeda planning Big British Attack” in the Sunday Times of 22 April. So furious I have been carrying the cutting in my pocket all the way to Moscow, until I got the chance to blog about it. I see in the interim the opposition have started making a related point.

The Sunday Times journalist, Dipesh Gadher, claims to have seen a Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) report which justifies the terror stirring headline.

But JTAC reports are almost always Top Secret, and are always classified. Unless Gadher made it all up, he and whoever showed it to him, and his Editor, are all guilty of a serious criminal offence. They should be jailed for many years under the Official Secrets Act.

This is especially true as two gentlemen are currently being tried under precisely that draconian legislation, for possessing the minute of the meeting where George Bush proposed to Tony Blair the bombing of Al-Jazeera TV.

The truth is that both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service act in these matters in a way that is blatantly political. There is no even-handed administration of justice here. If a pro-war antagonist leaks information to whip up public opinion, no action is ever taken. Let me be plain – there is nothing in law that says that secret material can be leaked if it supports the government. Yet they do it all the time.

By what right was David Shayler jailed, but Dipesh Gadher and his informant not even looked at?

Government members and supporters do what they like. But should anyone else follow suit, the full wrath of the Establishment crashes on their head. Even, as in my case, when they didn’t actually do it.

The administration of justice is not impartial in the UK.

French Hijack Warning

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 20:34:02 +0000

There has been something of a stir lately over Le Monde’s revelation that France passed warning to the CIA in 2001 that Bin Laden was planning an aircraft hijacking.

Nobody has paid a great deal of attention to the fact that the French intelligence came from the Uzbek security services.

But the headlines about France warning the US of 9/11 are complete nonsense. The alleged intelligence was about a plan to hijack a plane at Frankfurt airport. Flying the plane into buildings didn’t feature.

There was then (and is) intelligence cooperation between France and Uzbekistan, but in 2001 as now the Uzbek intelligence liaison relationship with Germany and the US was stronger than with France. It seems most improbable that the Uzbeks learnt of a plan to hijack a flight between Germany and the US, and told only the French.

An Associated Press report speculates that the Frankfurt plan was disinformation spread by Al-Qaida to distract attention from the 9/11 plot. http://www.topix.net/content/ap/0152981010029215169242201015390845871804 That is obvious rubbish. Bin Laden would not want to give any indication that he was switching tactics to aircraft hijack, and have people looking at aviation security.

A far more likely explanation is that this was disinformation by the Uzbek security services. I have seen a great deal of intelligence passed on by the Uzbek intelligence services. It is inevitably self-serving, and almost always untrue.

The purpose of the Uzbek intelligence services in passing intelligence to the West is to persuade us that they and the Karimov regime must be supported as a bastion against a massive Islamic terror plot. They seek to portray all domestic opposition as al-Qaeda linked.

It goes wider than that. Consider this – across a huge swathe of the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkic peoples have been struggling to emerge from colonial occupation. This belt runs from the Chechens of the West through the Tatars, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Kazakh, Kirghiz and Mongols to the Uighurs of China in the East. The wave of struggles for national liberation of these peoples is perhaps the most important political fact since the fall of the iron curtain, yet completely neglected.

The Chechens and Uighurs are being brutally suppressed by the Russian and Chinese imperial powers respectively. Those like the Uzbeks who have achieved nominal nation status are suffering under the fierce regime of the surviving indigenous colonial cadres.

As it happens, these Turkic nations engaged in a struggle for liberation are Muslim. By one of history’s unpleasant chances (and I would argue it is no more than that – there are transactions, but almost no causal relationship either way) their efforts at national re-emergence have coincided with a surge in fringe Islamic radicalism. This has enabled their opponents to attempt to tar them with that brush.

Uzbek intelligence is therefore primarily aimed at portraying Uzbek dissidents as Islamic terrorists, and linking them to Al Qaida and to Chechen and Uighur “terrorists”. The governments of Russia and China are enthusiastic co-participants in building the same story to discredit their own Chechen and Uighur dissidents, and the other authoritarian governments of Central Asia join in too. The most important diplomatic entity in the region – the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement – functions entirely on this principle.

The sad thing is that, such is the appetite of Western intelligence agencies for any material that stokes the so-called “War on Terror”, MI6, the CIA and others accept this self-serving dross as true, even when it is fabricated in Uzbekistan’s notorious torture chambers. That is the issue over which I resigned from the diplomatic service, as detailed in my book “Murder in Samarkand”.

The clue in the 2001 French intelligence causing the current stir is that the Uzbeks claimed that Bin Laden met with Chechen terrorists to plan the Frankfurt hijack. Of course there was no such plot. This so-called Uzbek/French intelligence was just part of the propaganda campaign to link the Chechen cause to Bin Laden.

Secret Confessions and Torture

Tim Holmes — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:11:16 +0000

Mohammed Sheikh Khalid has now, voluntarily and of his own free will, admitted he masterminded every significant event from the Norman Invasion through the bubonic plague, fall of Constantinople, and Great Fire of London, to the Battle of Little Big Horn, assassination of JFK and the Oklahoma bombing.

Or he might as well have. The extraordinarily comprehensive list of terrorist outrages for which he claims responsibility would be beyond the capacity of any but the most brilliant and inspired mortal; Khalid, I fear, is a more run of the mill thug.

But in truth, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, he has confessed at all. The BBC brazenly reported all of yesterday that while Khalid did allege he had been tortured during his four years of secret detention by the CIA in various locations around the globe, he is now freely confessing under no duress and does not retract any of his confession.

Who says? The proceedings being held in Guantanamo Bay, and which the BBC report so uncritically, are held behind barbed wire, machine guns, gun emplacements, reinforced steel and concrete and combination locks, before an exclusively military panel. Khalid does not even have a lawyer present. For all we know, his confession could be an entire fabrication. The blandness of the BBC reporting in these circumstances is one of the worst examples of the appalling desertion of the principles of that once worthwhile institution.

The readiness of the rest of the media to push the “instil fear” button on behalf of the Orwellian government is predictable. They report as fact that Khalid also planned to blow up Heathrow, Canary Wharf, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and any other British building the Pentagon had heard of.

If Khalid really is freely and openly confessing all of this stuff, then what possible reason can there be to deny him a lawyer, and not allow public and media access to his trial? The atrocities he allegedly confesses – the Twin Towers, Madrid, Bali – left thousands of bereaved families. They have a right to see justice done, rather than this elaborate propaganda set-up, with its total lack of proper legal process or intellectual credibility.

Did Khalid really do all of this? Two facts must be considered. He has been through years of vicious torture and of solitary confinement. If the experience of others who survived extraordinary rendition is typical, he has been kept in total isolation, in darkness, beaten, cut, suffocated and drowned, suffered white noise and sensory deprivation. He will have been moved around, often not even knowing which country he is in. One good contact has told me that the CIA gave the Uzbek torturers their turn with him. I do not know that for certain, but who can contradict me?

After years of this, a person can be so psychologically damaged that they believe the narrative of their torturers to be the truth. It is perfectly possible that he now in fact believes he did all that stuff on the list, when he did not.

Alternatively, he may have decided to exaggerate his own role and achievements for the personal glory it brings. We can get the appalling situation where both the sides which benefit from and wish to promote the War on Terror – Al Qaida and the CIA – indulge in what becomes a grim mutual cooperation in exaggeration as each seeks to glorify their role. Thus do those on both sides who actually desire a “Clash of Civilisations”, promote one.

What is happening now in Guanatanamo Bay is a disgrace. We cannot in present circumstances accept anything that comes out of it as other than a completely unsubstantiated claim by the Pentagon. Some of it is quite possibly true. But this is no way to make the case.

Levy, Blair and Injunctions

Tim Holmes — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:25:38 +0000

Much has been said about the injunctions, or attempted injunctions, against the BBC and Guardian, to prevent the publication of information relating to Lord Levy’s alleged attempt to pervert the course of justice in the cash for honours enquiry.

For the benefit of bemused non-British readers, in the UK the media are not allowed to publish the details of any potential evidence in a criminal trial, in case the jury are prejudiced by media reports before they enter the jury box.

Most other countries see no need for such restrictions. I have mixed thoughts about the system, though like all media restriction it is in danger of being made redundant by the internet and other new technologies. It is no longer a question of controlling a handful of presses and broadcast channels.

But what is undeniable is that in Britain today there is no attempt at fairness in the application of this principle. Senior New Labour figures are entitled to the full protection of this law. Is the same consideration applied to Muslims accused of terrorist offences?

The answer is a resounding no. Instead we receive a constant drip-feed of supposedly terrifying information, from police, Home Office and security services, sometimes open and sometimes just named as, for example, “Police sources”. So in the case of the so-called “liquid bomb plot”, such sources were only too keen to tell us under whose bed suicide videos had been found, near whose home were bottles containing hydrogen peroxide, who had a map pf Afghanistan, and a whole welter of such information. This was spun all over our front pages for a fortnight.

Where was Lord Goldsmith and his concern for the right to a fair, unprejudiced trial then?

I heard Louise Christian, a lawyer involved in the defence of a number of such cases, speak on precisely this point in January. She recalled a local newspaper printing a front page photo of two of her clients the day before their trial, with the banner headline “Terror sisters”. That is not permitted under our law – but it is one of the many protections of the rights of citizens that no longer in practice applies to Muslims in the UK.

Meanwhile, I am stunned that last week Sir Ian Blair, head of the Metropolitan police, shared the top table at a Jewish community dinner with Lord Levy. Blair is the head of the police force that has arrested Levy, removed his passport and, from the actions of Lord Goldsmith this week in seeking to suppress information that may be used at the trial, is likely to charge him shortly with an imprisonable offence.

It cannot possibly be right for the head of the Metropolitan Police to be hobnobbing socially with a prominent alleged criminal. And this is the ultra-sensitive Ian Blair, whose concern for social form is so acute that he demanded an offical report when a female Muslim police officer refused to shake hands with him. The report presumably explained that many Muslim females do not shake hands with men.

Ian Blair and Levy are of course both close members of the Prime Minister’s social and political circle. It is by no means the first time that they have dined together. In July 2005 the two of them ran up a £140 ($270) bill at a London restaurant, which Sir Ian Blair charged to the taxpayer. There was no investigation into Levy at the time, but his being dead sleazy was hardly a secret.

Ian Blair’s explanation of that charge to the taxpayer was that Levy was a representative of the Jewish community. Now, there are many eminent and worthwhile people in London to whom that description applies, but I don’t think that Levy holds any community posts. He is no more a representative of the Jewish community than I am of the Scottish community. Besides, how many one to one £140 meals has Ian Blair had with a representative of the Muslim community? Or the Irish, Iranian, Kurdish, Turkish, Polish, Palestinian or Greek communities? Other than ultra-rich New Labour supporters who happen to have that background?

So Ian Blair and Levy have form. In current circumstances it was a gross error of judgement for Ian Blair to sit at a top table with Lord Levy. Levy should have realised that himself and made his excuses, but nobody could mistake Lord Levy for a gentleman. Therefore Blair should have made an excuse and left. As it is, some of the smell has rubbed off. Ian Blair should resign.

The State Without

Tim Holmes — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 14:36:10 +0000

I was first alerted to the new BBC flagship drama The State Within by a friend who pointed out some of the BBC publicity to me. It concerned a character in the series, a former British Ambassador, who the BBC described thus:

James Sinclair. An outspoken critic of President Usman and the human rights abuse he encountered in Tyrgyzstan. As a result he was recalled and subsequently fired from the job of Ambassador. Seen as an embarassment to the UK government, who support Usman and have many commercial and strategic interests in the country. Now determined to turn Western public opinion against Usman. And to force both the UK and US administrations into withdrawing their support for him.

Now if you substitute the very real Uzbekistan of President Karimov for the fictional Tyrgyzstan, you get a description of me precise in every detail. Uniquely so – there is nobody else that description remotely fits.

There are other coincidences the Prime Minister of Uzbekistan when I was Ambassador was named Usmanov. James Sinclair is an anglicised Scot like me. I live in Sinclair Gardens. Sinclair’s wife has the common Uzbek name of Saida. I have an Uzbek partner. Like me, his tipple is neat Scotch (not as common as you might think).

Both Tyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are in Central Asia; both have major US airbases threatened by a change of allegiance of the dictator. Both are described by the US and UK as an ally in the War on Terror and A backdoor to Afghanistan. Both have perpetrated a large scale massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators.

Which was fine by me. I like the series, and James Sinclair is well played. I have received scores of emails from viewers, mostly complete strangers, commenting on the series, often asking me about its accuracy.

So I was pretty surprised to hear that the BBC were not just denying that the character was based on me, but denying it vehemently, as though it were an appalling accusation. A journalist had inquired, and received urgent rebuttals from both the Press Department and a producer.

Some of the things which the BBC asserted were simple nonsense. They claimed that many Ambassadors had resigned over human rights, not just Craig Murray. In fact, the only other example is David Gladstone about twenty five years ago and he wasn’t in a stan. The BBC even denied knowing that I had written my memoir, Murder in Samarkand. That is very strange, because the BBC had it in manuscript and I had formal meetings with BBC Drama over the film rights..

So what do I think of the series? On occasions the director is over-impressed by his own slickness. Rapid cutting between five second scenes accompanied by urgent percussion undermines some rather good writing, which builds up its own pace without such cliché. The atmosphere is nothing like that of any Embassy. FCO house style is much more ponderous. Nor do we sit in rooms whose walls are inexplicably all made of glass, surrounded by scores of flickering screens.

But that is to carp. This is important television. It touches on some of the most profound themes of our worrying times. In three episodes we have seen persecution of Muslims, attacks on civil rights, US support of dictatorships, false flag War on Terror operations, out of control private military companies, distorted intelligence and a very powerful statement against the death penalty.

Since resigning, I have spent the last two years in drafty halls speaking to small audiences about just these issues, and despairing as to how you reach a mass audience in these days of desocialised consumers sitting in front of their televisions. This series does it.

Bewildered as to why the BBC was denying the obvious connections, I spoke with a senior BBC contact. They sounded about as nervous to speak with me as my FCO friends, but told me that The State Within had terrified the BBC top brass because of its attack on the special relationship and the war on terror. They dreaded the government reaction. An edict on the line to take had therefore gone out to all, including the actors. The State Within is purely entertainment, with no political meaning and has no relationship to any real people, places or incidents.

But it has. The plot of The State Within begins and ends with a terrorist bomb blamed on the Islamic Movement of Tyrgyzstan, which turns out to be perpetrated by others entirely. In Murder in Samarkand I detail bombings blamed by Colin Powell on the real Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. British Embassy investigation proved these not to be what they seemed.

Getting my book published involved tough negotiations between the publisher and the FCO, determining what could be published without the government taking legal action. My conclusions on who was behind those bombs were scrubbed out. But I managed to slip past the censors: it is instructive to read Graham Greene’s great novel The Quiet American and acquaint yourself with the historical truth behind it. Greene’s novel hinges upon a real event a terrorist bomb planted by the CIA and blamed on the Viet Cong.

In fact the world of The State Within is more real than you might imagine. There may yet be a story twist to please the conservatives. But already the BBC has produced something brave, relevant and timely, worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as Edge of Darkness.

They are just too scared to admit it.

Hitting a Nerve

Tim Holmes — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:24:16 +0000

[From 17 August 2006]

I appear to have hit a nerve with my call for a sceptical view of the alleged “bigger than 9/11” plot. Over 50,000 people so far have read the item on my own blog, and it has been quoted and reposted all over the web.

In the UK, at least, the more serious wing of the mainstream media is beginning to catch up with the idea that all is not well here.

Still, after eight days of detention, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was “imminent” and “Mass murder on an unbelievable scale” is, to say the least, rather peculiar. The 24th person, who was arrested amid much fanfare yesterday, has been quietly released without charge today. Breaking news, another “suspect” has just been released too.

The drip, drip of information to the media from the security services has rather dried-up. The last item of any significance was that they had found a handgun and a rifle – neither of which could have been in any use in the alleged plot. If you were smuggling undetectable liquid explosive onto a plane, you would be unlikely to give the game away by tucking a rifle into your hand baggage.

As with the murder some years ago of the uncle of the suspect held in Pakistan, it remains a possibility that there could be some criminal activity here involving a few of the suspects, which is not terrorist linked.

As the Police immediately told the press about the guns, it is a reasonable deduction that it remains true that they still have found no bombs or detonators, or they would have told us, particularly as they haven’t charged anyone yet. They must be getting pretty desperate to announce some actual evidence by now.

This brings us to one particuarly sinister aspect of the allegations – that the bombs were to be made on the plane.

The idea that high explosive can be made quickly in a plane toilet by mixing at room temperature some nail polish remover, bleach, and Red Bull and giving it a quick stir, is nonsense. Yes, liquid explosives exist and are highly dangerous and yes, airports are ill equipped to detect them at present. Yes, it is true they have been used on planes before by terrorists. But can they be quickly manufactured on the plane? No.

The sinister aspect is not that this is a real new threat. It is that the allegation may have been concocted in order to prepare us for arresting people without any actual bombs.

Let me fess up here. I have just checked, and our flat contains nail polish remover, sports drinks, and a variety of household cleaning products. Also MP3 players and mobile phones. So the authorities could announce – as they have whispered to the media in this case – that potential ingredients of a liquid bomb, and potential timing devices, have been discovered. It rather lowers the bar, doesn’t it?

This has a peculiar resonance for me. I spoke at the annual Stop the War conference a couple of months ago. I referred to the famous ricin plot. For those outside the UK, this generated the same degree of hype here two years ago. It was alleged that a flat in North London inhabited by Muslims was a “Ricin” factory, manufacturing the deadly toxin which could kill “hundreds of thousands of people”. Police tipped off the authorities that traces of ricin had been discovered. In the end, all those accused were found not guilty by the court. The “traces of ricin” were revealed to be the atmospheric norm.

The “intelligence” on that plot had been extracted under torture in Algeria – another echo here, as the “intelligence” in this current case has almost certainly been extracted under torture in Pakistan. Another police tip-off to the media was that the intelligence said that the ricin had been stored in plastic jars, and they had indeed found plastic jars containing a suspicious substance. It turned out the containers in question were two Brylcreem tubs. What was in them? In the first, paper clips. In the second, Brylcreem.

I told the story in my speech, and concluded with a ringing “So we must congratulate the government for saving us from a dastardly Islamic plot to take over the World using hair styling products.”

I fear the government may have taken me seriously!

I do not discount the possibility that there is a germ of something behind the current alleged plot. Will it be anything like the hype? No.

The hype scarcely lowers. On the flagship ten o’clock news last night, the BBC reported breathlessly on the United flight diverted from Washington to Boston last night, and its fighter escort. We had very earnest besuited security experts terrifying us about the dangers.

The extraordinary thing was that, by this stage, we knew definitely that this was a 60 year old woman with claustrophobia, who had a few loose matches and some Vaseline intensive care hand lotion in the bottom of her handbag. The facts reported were totally at odds with the whole manner of the “be terrified” report and the analysis being built on it. But that didn’t stop them.

It has, of course, worked. When did you last see Iraq on the news? Where is Liebermann’s defeat now on the news agenda?

A blog like this is much too small a player to affect the public mood. What it can do is tap into it. The extraordinary response to these posts shows that there is a very significant section of the public not prepared to buy more Bush/Blair propaganda.