Craig Murray's Blog, page 116

My Secret Evidence to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee

I have been summoned to give evidence before Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee on 20 October, in a secret session. It ought not to be secret as my evidence goes to illegality at the heart of government and collusion in torture. It will be based around the evidence I gave to the Metropolitan Police, which you can read here.

We are now in the ludicrous position where the FCO is considering whether I can be allowed to see documents I actually wrote myself, communications which were sent to me and minutes of meetings I was at, or whether I should be asked to give evidence without any access to the written evidence. I am also waiting to hear whether I shall be allowed to be accompanied by my counsel, the great lawyer Gareth Peirce. I need help and support in preparing and organising my evidence, and I need moral support in appearing in a secret meeting where the large majority of the committee have been chosen specifically as security service “trusties” with an unquestioning neo-con world view. I expect to receive a very hostile reception.

I have just sent this email to the committee:

Dear James,

I have been considering my appearance before the Committee.

As you will know, there has been very substantial doubt in the human rights community about the good faith of your committee’s inquiry. I have been prepared to give the benefit of the doubt and offer to cooperate.

However if the committee really are genuine, they should wish me to be able to prepare and give the best evidence that I am able to do. There is no doubt that something went very wrong in terms of the UK government’s collusion with overseas torture programmes. The Feinstein report made plain that the CIA was very wrong in what it did, and your committee know very well that the CIA was sharing with SIS the intelligence obtained by torture. The British government has settled with large payments cases where the British government was involved more actively.

To the best of my knowledge, I am the only member of the senior civil service in the UK who attempted to raise a red flag and stop what was happening. My evidence is therefore of some weight. I will also testify there was a deliberate policy of not writing down the policy on accepting torture. I was told this directly and can point to documentary evidence of senior level unminuted policy meetings on the specific subject.

At the time I blew the whistle, Jack Straw denied the existence of the extraordinary rendition programme and I faced 18 trumped-up disciplinary charges, some of them criminal in nature, which resulted in the destruction of my career and my health. I attach a letter from the government to Lord Jones of Cheltenham which confirms I was cleared of all the original charges (but found guilty of revealing their existence). To the best of my knowledge this letter tells a direct untruth that the charges against me arose from formal complaints from members of my staff. I was never told this during the disciplinary process and no such formal complaint was ever put to me.

You will therefore understand that it is essential I am given every facility to give the best evidence to the committee. That means I must be allowed to see the paperwork I have requested already, to refresh my memory. It would make a farce of your inquiry were I not allowed to see communications which were sent to me, minutes of meetings I was at, and even correspondence I wrote myself.

I am not prepared to appear before the committee in a position where the members of the committee have the appropriate documents before them, and I do not. Still less when nobody has the relevant documents.

Similarly, I wish to prepare my evidence with my counsel, Gareth Peirce, and to have her alongside to support and advise me in giving my evidence. If the best evidence to get at the truth is the genuine desire of your committee, I am sure you will decide to allow this.

I should be grateful if you could pass this email and its attachment, which I am publishing, to all members of the committee.

Craig

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The Headless UK European Movement

Tony Blair may have zero moral sense, but he has great commercial acumen, and there is no doubt he spotted a gap in the market in proposing his own return to British politics. The gap is for a pro-EU political leader who does not accept the EU referendum result as the end of the debate, and will stand against the horrifying tide of racism, both on the streets and coming from the Tory party, that Brexit has unleashed.

Where Blair is deluded is in thinking that he can have any role to play. If you have not watched The Killings of Tony Blair yet, I urge you to do so. Apart from the damning verdict of even the ultra-Establishment Chilcot Report on the Iraq War, Blair’s record ever since in whoring himself out as PR man to any rich dictator has damned him forever in public opinion.

I should set out my stall from the start and say I remain strongly pro EU. I don’t see a 52/48 vote as definitive or closing off debate. I am indeed happy that Brexit is giving a boost to prospects of Scottish Independence, but it cannot be in Scotland’s long term interests to have an isolated, impoverished and xenophobic large neighbour, so I shall continue to argue that Brexit should not happen.

While Corbyn has taken an admirable stand against popular chauvinism, he plainly has no interest in trying to keep the UK in the EU, which is consistent with his long term scepticism. That is fair enough. But it means that the 48% who voted against leaving the EU, and are generally aghast that government is now moving to draw up lists of foreign workers and to get primary schools to check birth certificates, are feeling unrepresented. Blair and super-Blairite Jonathan Freedland have genuinely identified a political vacuum. Their folly lies in imagining that they and their chums might fill it.

Freedland’s disconnection from reality is nowhere more starkly revealed than in naming Nick Clegg as a “serious asset” in a pro-EU campaign. Outside the delusions of the Westminster bubble, Clegg is nearly hated as much as Blair. Clegg and friends took Charlie Kennedy’s large left wing party, and turned it into a small right wing party. It says a great deal that in considering leadership for a continued pro-EU campaign against xenophobia, the anti-Gay pipsqueak Farron is a complete irrelevance.

What Freedland does not understand is that it was hatred of his political bubble chums which caused Brexit in the first place. The official Remain campaign director was Jack Straw’s son Will. Peter Mandelson was Vice-President. The top-down campaign was devoid of popular enthusiasm with an almost total lack of popular engagement and community events. It continually paraded figures like Blair, Cameron, Osborne, Straw, Clegg, Kinnock and others, which gave ordinary people a chance to give those they rightly despise a political kick in the pants by voting against their will. Brexit has been caused by a justified hatred of the UK political class.

That those who caused the disaster see themselves as the answer to it is laughable. I remain hopeful that the English in particular will recover from the wave of jingoism which appears to have swept over them like a plague. But resistance must be organic and arise from the people themselves. I hope to see the emergence of a new, untainted and dynamic generation of young activists. My generation have bequeathed a terrible legacy.

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A Blatant Neo-Con Lie

It is a plain lie that Russia was responsible for the leak of the Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks. It is quite extraordinary that the Obama administration formally adopted the accusation yesterday.

The US motivation is apparently to attempt to discredit in advance the further Hillary material that WikiLeaks plans to release in the coming month. The official statement that the leak was “consistent with the methods and motivation of Russian directed efforts” is carefully written by the NSA and, when you analyse it, extremely weak. What it says is “there is no evidence whatsoever but this is the sort of thing we think the Russians do”. As it happens, I have direct knowledge that there could not have been any evidence as it was not the Russians.

That the Obama administration has made a formal accusation of Russia based on no evidence is, on one level, astonishing. But it is motivated by desperation. WikiLeaks have already announced that they have a huge cache of other material relating to Hillary’s shenanigans. The White House is simply seeking to discredit it in advance by a completely false association with Russian intelligence.

It fascinates me that the media reports the story widely with no reference anywhere to what the DNC leak actually revealed – that the body organising the Democratic election had a consistent and active bias, doing everything possible to tilt the plating field and ensure that Hillary “won” against Bernie Sanders.

The US government cares so little about its relationship with Russia that it is prepared to launch completely false allegations at the Kremlin in order to influence a domestic election. The implications of that are chilling.

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Israeli Assault on the Zaytouna-Oliva is Illegal

You can hear my analysis from 5m 40s in here

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Opposing Populist Chauvinism is not Elitism

History demonstrates the evils that arise from whipping up popular xenophobic nationalism. After the Tories trumpeted that companies will have to declare how many foreigners they employ, that foreign doctors will be phased out of the NHS, that taxi drivers will have to prove their immigration status, that fewer foreigners will be allowed to study at British universities and that landlords will have to check the papers of their foreign tenants, we will now be told by Theresa May that to oppose this surge of fascism is elitism. I call it fascist after careful consideration; I don’t know what else to call it. Immigrants to Britain are going to be hauled up to produce documents at numerous moments of daily life to prove their right to be here. They will not yet need to be identified by yellow stars, but anybody who does not see the direction of travel is a fool.

The ability of politicians and media to whip up popular racism is well demonstrated historical fact. I am simply appalled by the catalogue I have outlined above. It is astonishing to me that popular opinion, particularly in England, has been conditioned to the point where outright racism has become the accepted everyday level of political discourse. And it is not just the Tories. Blairites are using populist anti-immigrant rhetoric as their most potent attack on Corbyn. Rachel Reeves made a speech last week that channelled Enoch Powell in predicting violent reaction to immigrants, and in some ways was worse than Powell’s classical allusion. But while Powell’s anti-immigrant rant ended his chances of becoming Prime Minister in a more decent age, Reeves is firmly in today’s UK establishment mainstream.

The argument that immigration is impacting the living standards of ordinary working people is a demonstrable falsehood. If mass immigration made a country’s people poorer, then Germany and the USA would have the lowest living standards for ordinary citizens in the world. An economy is not a thing of fixed size with a set number of jobs. If it were not for immigration, there would have been no economic growth in the UK at all since the millennium.

The march of Tory militarism continues apace. Today we will have a further glorying in the creation of weapons of mass destruction, while yesterday scarcely a hair was turned at the announcement of the reintroduction of military cadet forces in our state schools, to instil militarism and xenophobic patriotism into children. The attempt to elide patriotism, militarism, monarchism and the interests of the corporate elite would be laughable were it not successful.

There is no doubt that the racist mood in England is real, and there is no doubt that it is racist. I have never accepted the argument that to oppose immigration is not racist, and consider myself entirely vindicated by current events. The argument that to oppose immigration is not racist is precisely the same as the argument that holocaust denial is not anti-semitic – you can make out a theoretical case that it isn’t, but in practice it works as an extremely good indicator.

It is ironic that May accuses the opponents of popular chauvinism as elitist. The Tory Conference has had two key themes – one is xenophobic nationalism, and the other is educational elitism. The grammar school policy is being driven through, along with the school military cadets – what kind of crazed government is this? But the significance on the attack on the university sector should not be missed. Overseas students are a vital source of revenue and all are already seeing a drop in interest as nobody wants to live in a country where they will be the subject of patent racist hostility, while EU students cannot know where they will stand on fee structures by the end of their course. However the announcement that “new” universities will be treated differently in terms of numbers of overseas students allowed is a major departure that will inevitably spread into other areas; a de facto return to polytechnic status is in the offing.

The new Tory self-confidence was evidenced also in attitudes to Scotland. Theresa May could not have been more explicit that Scotland is but a part of the UK, that the UK voted for Brexit, that Westminster will handle Brexit negotiations and she really does not care what the Scots think. There very plainly is no process, or any intention of any process, that could result in Scotland maintaining a more integrated relationship with the EU while within the United Kingdom. That idea was always fantastical anyway, as it would be an impossibility to accommodate such an arrangement within EU treaties, as I have previously explained. But the gradualists in the SNP have sought to pretend that such a process is happening of which we need to see the outcome before an Independence referendum.

What Theresa May has done this week is publically to rend Nicola Sturgeon’s tabard, and make absolutely plain that Brexit will be organised, negotiated and decided by the UK government and parliament alone. The Scottish parliament will have associated legislative changes, even on devolved matters, imposed on it from above. Scotland’s response to this has so far been alarmingly supine.

I support Scottish Independence passionately because I have an urgent desire to get away from the control of these appalling Tories. I want to live in a society where I can dissent from populist racism without being condemned by the government as a liberal elitist. I also firmly believe that the shock of the break up of the UK is the dislocation required to break the grip of the Tories and UKIP on the psyche of so much of the public in England. It can provide the revolutionary moment for change that Corbyn and those like him can exploit. Scottish independence is the best hope for the rest of the UK too.

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Forget Blairite Propaganda. Sierra Leone was not Blair’s “Good War”.

This was my speech to the World Beyond War conference at American University, Washington DC on 24 September.

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Peak Kinnock

Neil Kinnock appeared on both Dispatches and Panorama this evening bemoaning the presence of socialists in the Labour Party. Neither programme succeeded in finding anything sinister happening, but they did succeed in playing a great deal of sinister music. This must have been a great boost to the sinister music writing industry, for which we should be grateful. I think they have definitively proved that some people are left wing, and would like to have left wing MPs.

But seeing Kinnock reminded me of another bit of TV I saw today, a heartbreaking advert for Save the Children featuring a dying little baby, unable to ask for help. The advert urged you to give just £2 a month to help save her.

If 11,000 people responded with £2 a month, that would not save the little baby, but it would exactly pay the £264,000 per year salary of Neil Kinnock’s daughter-in-law Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Chief Executive of Save the Children and wife of MP Stephen Kinnock. Indeed if 20,000 people gave £2 per month, that would probably cover Mrs Stephen Kinnock’s salary, her other employment costs and the money paid to Sky for the advert. When you toss in Stephen’s salary and expenses, the Stephen Kinnock household are bringing in just shy of a cool half a million pounds a year from public service and charity work.

The salary of Ms Thorning-Schmidt is approximately twice that of her predecessor, Justin Forsyth, who was on an already unconscionable £140,000. I exposed their massive salaries at the time the Save the Children awarded a “Global Legacy” award to Tony Blair. Indeed to meet the salaries and other employment costs of just the top executives at Save the Children would take 80,000 people paying £2 a month. They would be funding executives with an average salary of over £140,000. For those in work paying the £2 a month, the average UK salary is £26,000 a year, and many retired and unemployed people scrimp to find money to give to try to help the needy.

The use of charities as a massive cash cow for the political classes is a real concern. David Miliband is on over 300,000 for heading the International Rescue Committee. When I listed the Save the Children executives, they included Brendan Cox, on over £100,000. He was the husband of Jo Cox, the murdered Labour MP. Brendan Cox and Justin Forsyth were both advisers to Gordon Brown and both moved to Save the Children when they lost their jobs on Brown losing power, sliding in on 6 figure salaries. Jo Cox was an adviser to Glenys Kinnock and left that job to be an executive at Oxfam before she too worked as a highly paid Save the Children executive.

Brendan Cox left Save the Children due to allegations from several women that he sexually harassed female staff and volunteers. Justin Forsyth left at the same time amid allegations he had not effectively acted to have his friend Cox investigated. This has not stopped Forsyth from now popping up as Deputy Chief Executive of UNICEF. Misery for some is a goldmine for others.

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Sorry, the Boundary Commission is not Gerrymandering

There is no point in declaring yourself of independent mind if you proceed to try to ingratiate yourself with any particular group of people or defined set of political opinions. Occasionally I express opinions which are not palatable to many of my readers, and I am afraid this is one of those times. But the plain fact is, that the boundary review of Westminster constituencies is neither deliberate gerrymandering nor unfairly favourable to the Tories.

The starting point for any sensible discussion must be that the first past the post system will virtually never produce any kind of fair representation, especially in a multi-party system. I detest UKIP, but a system which gave them just 0.15% of the seats for 9.5% of the vote is not equitable. Between the two “main” parties, FPTP in modern times had always advantaged Labour, as boundary changes lagged behind declining populations in old industrial areas. But the 2015 trouncing of Labour by the SNP changed this and it took more votes to elect each Labour MP than each Tory. But in a sense this is all pointless – FPTP is not meant to be fair. Its theoretical advantage is in ensuring the proper representation of individual constituencies.

It is difficult to answer against the principle that the constituencies should therefore be of approximately equal size. Special interest arguments are most strongly put forward in Scotland, where island areas are distinctive cultural communities. But there are obvious problems with arguing that every community that can argue to distinct cultural or geographic coherence should get an MP irrespective of size, and it is hard to explain why the reverse also does not apply – if size does not matter but coherence does, why does Birmingham or Leeds not get just one MP? In general, I accept the argument as fair that if we are stuck with FPTP (and I dearly wish we were not), then constituencies should be more or less equal in size.

Once you accept this, the rest follows fairly automatically. I give no time to arguments that anything other than the electoral register should be used – you are looking to create equal sized blocks of voters. It is an election. If you don’t register to vote, you cannot vote and cannot get considered in parcelling up the voters. Not registering to vote is an opt-out from the democratic process, and one which people ought to be allowed to take. But if opted-out, you are opted out. Nobody will ever know how the unregistered would have voted. Presence of unregistered voters is not a reason to allow a smaller constituency, or you are in effect assuming their wishes in representation.

This argument has been varied recently by the addition of almost 2 million newly registered voters since the register on which the review was undertaken, a combination of the ordinary churn of young people coming on to the register, and expanded registration for the EU referendum. But a register is always a snapshot of the electorate at a particular time. The Electoral Commission, whose cycle of work takes years to complete, is always working on historic data. The newly registered, assuming they stay on, will count in the next review, which will soon be along. Besides, the House of Commons library has researched the new registrations and come to the conclusion that they cannot be viewed as disproportionately concentrated in Labour urban areas. They estimate that if the exercise were based on the current registrations, Scotland would lose two more seats, Northern Ireland would lose one. London would gain two and SW England one. The probable net result would be a Labour gain of 2 seats, a Tory gain of one seat, an SNP loss of two and a DUP loss of one. So it is not in any way the game changer that is being claimed.

Finally, I entirely support the reduction of the House of Commons from 650 to 600. There has been much gnashing of teeth here too, with the comparative size of the ridiculously inflated House of Lords the focus of much comment. But the answer to that is to reduce the Lords, not increase the Commons.

Scotland will see its detailed proposals published next month with a reduction of Scottish representation by 6 seats (England is losing 32 and Wales 11). But I strongly advise the SNP to bite their tongue and concentrate on Independence. Our aim is no seats at Westminster at all.

I see no reason to impugn the integrity of the members of the Boundary Commission, and I feel that has been done in an unfair and concentrated way. They have done their job fairly and conscientiously. It is ludicrous to judge them by the yardstick of whether the result helps the side you wish to win. FPTP is a dreadful system that has contributed massively to the appalling governance of the UK. I hope to see fundamental constitutional reform – including Scottish independence. For the UK I should love to see STV elections and a fully elected upper chamber, not to mention a republic. But whatever we may wish, in terms of their current task working with FPTP, more equal size constituencies will make it a little fairer. If the English electorate continue to vote Tory in large numbers, the answer to that from the left is not the retention of accidental distortions in constituency size.

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The Barrel Bomb Conundrum

Virtually every mainstream media article or broadcast on the United States aerial massacre of Syrian government troops, manages to work in a reference to barrel bombs as though this in some way justifies or mitigates the US action.

It is a fascinating example of a propaganda meme. Barrel bombs are being used by Syrian government forces, though on a pretty small scale. They are an improvised weapon made by packing conventional explosive into a beer barrel. They are simply an amateur version of a conventional weapon, and they are far less “effective” – meaning devastating – than the professionally made munitions the UK and US are dropping on Syria, or supplying to the Saudis to kill tens of thousands of civilians in Yemen, or to Israel to drop on children in Gaza.

If a bomb were to drop near me, I would much prefer it to be a barrel bomb as it would be less likely to kill me than the UK and US manufactured professional variety. If however my guts were to be eviscerated by flying hunks of white hot metal, I would not particularly care what kind of bomb it was. The blanket media use of “barrel bomb” as though it represents something uniquely inhumane is a fascinating example of propaganda, especially set beside the repeated ludicrous claims that British bombs do not kill civilians.

It is of course only part of the media distortion around the Syria debacle. Western intervention is aimed at supporting various Saudi backed jihadist militias to take over the country, irrespective of the fact that they commit appalling atrocities. These the media label “democratic forces”. At the same time, we are attacking other Saudi controlled jihadists on the grounds that they are controlled by the wrong kind of Saudi. You see, chopping off the heads of dissidents and gays is OK if you are one of the Saudis who directly controls the Saudi oil resources. It is not OK if you do it freelance and are one of the Saudis who is merely acting at the covert behest of the other Saudis who control the Saudi oil resources.

I do hope that is clear.

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Britain Cannot Withstand Martian Death-Ray

The broadcast news bulletins are all leading with the claim of some old General that Britain could not resist an attack by Russia. One remarkable thing about this claim, is that all those excitably supporting it are precisely the same people who claim that the countless billions spent on Trident make an attack on the UK impossible. Plainly they have never believed their own propaganda about Trident.

But there is something still more problematic in the General’s argument. The truth is that there is zero chance of Russia attacking the UK. Nothing Putin has ever said or done has evinced the slightest desire to attack the UK. Now I am, as you know, no fan of Putin and I believe he does hanker after annexing to Russia those parts of the former Soviet Union outside Russia which are Russian speaking. But he probably does not see even that limited aim as completely achievable, and indeed in ten years he has reintegrated just Crimea and Ossetia. The UK, being neither Russian speaking nor part of the former Soviet Union, is in no danger of being attacked by Russia at all.

Nor has the UK ever been in danger of attack by Russia. Yet extraordinarily, as discussed in my new book Sikunder Burnes, Russophobia and an explicit fear of Russian attack has been an important part of British politics, actually driving policy, for 200 years. In that period Britain has invaded Russia during the Crimean War, and as early as 1834 David Urquhart, First Secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople, was organising a committee of “mujahideen” – as he called them – and running guns to Chechnya and Dagestan for the jihadists to fight Russia. In 1917 British troops again invaded Russia, landing at Archangel and Murmansk.

Yet, although by contrast Russia has never attacked Britain, and has never had any serious plan, intention or decision to attack Britain, for centuries British foreign and defence policy has been predicated on a non-existent “Russian threat”. Of course, the arms manufacturers and the political and military classes have made incalculable sums out of this long term waste of a significant proportion of Britain’s resources. A Russian invasion of Britain is, and has always been, as likely as an attack by Martian death-ray.

General Barrons does however have one important point. Britain’s forces are not configured for defence. They are configured for attack. Aircraft carriers are of no defensive use whatsoever, and indeed are hopelessly vulnerable against any sophisticated enemy. Their sole purpose today is the projection of power against poor countries. Their use lies only in the neo-con policy of attacking smaller states like Iraq, Libya and Syria. They are Blair force carriers.

Britain is a country where thousands of children go to bed hungry. Yet is spends billion upon billion on Trident missiles whose sole purpose is to increase politicians’ sense of importance, and aircraft carriers designed to facilitate the maiming of other nations’ children. A rational, defence oriented military would have neither. Again, I return to the conviction that Scottish Independence is not just good for Scotland, but the psychological shock that rUK needs to end these imperial cravings for physical power projection.

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