Craig Murray's Blog, page 25

Trains (Mostly) Planes and Automobiles Part 5

It was 2.30am in Bochum before Niels finished setting up his security and self destruct mechanisms on my new laptop, as we sat in my gloomy little box of a room in the Mercure Hotel.

About a decade ago, chain hotels universally abandoned the idea of a central bright light to illuminate a bedroom, in favour of scattered little lights at bedsides, desk and in an odd corner, all of which require separate switches to be tracked down, and each of which struggles to reveal objects within a two foot distance. They mostly act to accentuate the overall murk.

At least it led my colour changing keyboard to feature sharply, brightening my mood. When Niels had locked within a passworded box, within a passworded box, on a passworded Wikileaks server, somewhere inside an Icelandic volcano, the ages long password to the last of my programmes he was protecting, he finally got up with a Nordic huffy noise and went off to his own bedroom.

I then spent until about 6am going through all my accounts for signs of intrusion and sending warning emails to key contacts. It felt like I had just put my head down on the pillow when the door was ruthlessly banged and the telephone simultaneously shrilled, to tell me it was 11am and I should have checked out.

Bochum railway station was not a very welcoming place that morning. It was about minus 5 degrees, the snow was whipping into my face and I was regretting still more keenly the loss of my gloves.

At least we had a very simple trip that day, to Münster. The itinerary for 3 December was 12.42 RE89719 Bochum to Hamm, 13.20 RE89978 Hamm to Münster arriving at 13.47. It was to be our first day riding on regional trains in Germany.

Since we had started the tour, new dates had been continually added and rest days been wiped off, so that it seemed likely the 15 travel days on my interrail pass would not be enough. You cannot extend the pass. I considered saving a day by buying a ticket for this short journey, but decided my brain was too frazzled by events of the past 24 hours for any extra complication.

Niels had a solution. It is fair to say that my determination to do the journey to the continent and the whole tour by rail, to help save the planet, was regarded by others involved as somewhat eccentric. From the start, Niels had been looking up hire cars and lovingly showing me pictures of BMW or Mercedes SUVs and describing their comfort levels.

Freezing in the driven snow on Bochum station and watching the board announce ever increasing delays, it was impossible not to have a certain sympathy for this view.

It is time to say something about German station clocks, as I was spending so much of my life staring at them. Germany has magnificent analogue clocks in its railway stations, but they have a most peculiar mechanism.

The minute hand does not glide smoothly and continually. The second hand goes round until it reaches the top of the dial, at which point the minute hand clicks forward one notch.

But there is a correction involved. The second hand evidently travels slightly fast, so when it reaches the top it pauses and there are a couple of seconds when no hand is moving, until the minute hand jerks its notch and the second hand starts its journey again.

I am almost, but not quite, certain there is another peculiarity. The second hand appears to glide smoothly rather than jerk, but in fact pauses momentarily at every second mark before gliding on to the next one.

At first I thought this was an optical illusion caused by the black tip of the second hand becoming hard to discern as it passes in front of the black second mark on the dial, but after acute observation from a variety of angles I think this momentary pause is really happening.

I am not sure what is the purpose of this observation, other than to illustrate that Germany’s horribly unpunctual train service can drive you nuts.

As we waited on the platform, we were approached twice by beggars. This happened on almost every station. Niels commented that they were much more aggressive than in the UK.

This is true, not in the sense of threatening physical violence, but in the sense of intruding forcefully into your personal space and being unapologetic in their demands. It really was not very comfortable.

Anyway, eventually we had one of those hurried last moment platform changes and caught what was supposedly an earlier train than the one we were booked on, which was running over an hour late, but with no change needed for Münster.

This particular privatised train service was run by the UK bus company National Express. It was a double decker train, clean and comfortable. We did not bother to go upstairs to first class.

I was not paranoid about a third laptop getting stolen on the train in the slightest…

The journey was uneventful save for an incident where the guard was arguing with a passenger over his ticket.  The thin young man, who was wearing jeans and a hoodie, was thrusting his ticket forward towards the short, bull-necked guard who was refusing to look at it, alternating between shaking his head and yelling ferociously.

It was very noisy and the levels of anger on both sides seemed wildly disproportionate to the subject. I could not understand anything said, but even assuming the passenger was indeed trying to cheat on his fare, the level of aggression from the guard, who was attempting to corral the passenger against a door, was extraordinary.

In the end the passenger pushed past the guard and moved to the back of the short train. The guard seemed to be looking around for support, while the other passengers were pretending nothing was happening. I do not know how this confrontation eventually played out.

Stella was joining us again in Münster, having been lobbying in Berlin and elsewhere in the interim. It had been very difficult and very expensive to book hotel rooms in Münster. In fact, Stella, Niels and I were all in different hotels, as we could not find rooms together.

I was in the Mauritzhof hotel, another building of stunning ugliness on the outside. It looks like a fortified police station in a particularly incendiary area of a troubled city.

In fact the hotel was very warm and pleasant inside, with a big open fire in a cocktail bar with a wide range of malt whiskies, and particularly friendly and helpful staff.

By contrast Niels was in one of those self-catering places where you get in through a combination for a key safe and discover nothing is clean, nothing works and there is nobody to talk to for assisatance.

Stella was in the impressive sounding Kaiserhof hotel, which somehow managed to be even more expensive than the Mauritzhof, but which was staffed by people who all appeared not only to be on their first day working in a hotel, but to be entirely unbriefed on what a hotel is.

Niels and I had a late lunch at the cinema with our hosts, who included the university branch of Amnesty International, several of whom were students of public international law.

I was able to discuss with them the international law aspects of Julian’s case, and particularly the judgment in Julian’s case affirming that the UK is not bound in law by international agreements or treaties not incorporated into UK domestic law.

In Julian’s case, political extradition is specifically forbidden by Article 4 of the 2007 UK/US Extradition Treaty. However the courts have ruled that the Treaty has no effect in UK law as it has not been incorporated in UK domestic legislation.

The British courts argue that the Treaty depends for its force on the 2003 Extradition Act, which does not exclude political extradition. But the 2003 Act is an enabling act on which subsequent treaties depend. It does not dictate the provisions of those treaties and it most assuredly does not say those treaties may not exclude political extradition.

The argument is extraordinary that the extradition is only taking place at all under the UK/US Extradition Treaty, but that Article 4 of the Treaty is not operative – but all the other articles are.

The rest of the Treaty is no more incorporated in UK domestic law than Article 4 is. It is a nonsensical argument, tying knots of legal sophistry to justify the extradition.

What interested the German students even more than the individual instance was the extraordinary general claim that the UK is not bound by provisions of international law in treaties it has ratified.

The accepted procedure in international law is that there is a two stage process, signature and ratification, for accession to international treaties.

A treaty is signed by the governmment of a state, as a statement of agreement and intent. Only when all necessary approvals have been obtained – which generally means when the Treaty has been through approval by the legislature – is the ratification stage then completed.

The UK, however, ratifies agreements on Crown prerogative without its legislature having passed them as domestic law. It then argues that because of the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament, the ratification by the Crown does not bind the UK to abide by the provisions of the Treaty it has ratified.

This bizarre situation really is true. I am not making it up.

This is known by lawyers as a “dualist system” (“dishonest” being too straightforward a description) and is the subject of an immense academic literature – one of many possible starting points is here – and a large number of UK legal judgments.

That the UK government does not consider itself legally bound, not only by customary international law but even by treaties it has actually ratified, was astonishing to the German students.

I later received an email from one of them saying they had found it hard to believe, so had asked a lecturer who confirmed it for them.

The cinema seemed everything an independent cinema should be, with a really good slate of arthouse and documentary films and a quirky, very busy cafe bar full of interesting people. The next screenings were shown on an old railway departure board that clicked over noisily. In fact the cinema is part of a chain owning much more conventional multiplexes.

On the top shelf of the bar, high up amid some very obscure liqueurs, was a glass globe about twelve inches high with a glass looped valve on top, containing a startlingly clear liquid with an ultra violet tinge. We asked what it was, and the barman did not know, so we ordered two of those.

It was some kind of grappa, but extremely smooth, though highly potent as it burnt the back of your throat. It was immensely satisfying so we had another two. There was no label of any kind on the glass globe, which sat in an iron stand. Perhaps most strange of all was that the barman said he had been there two years and nobody had ever asked for it: it looked irresistible.

The large cinema was full for the screening, and Stella spoke passionately and well, particularly on the obscenity of sending Julian legally to a state which had tried to kidnap and assassinate him. It was a good, full audience and a lively discussion that left me feeling warm and useful. The gladhanding afterwards felt especially heartening all round.

We then went out into Münster and walked around the Christmas markets, which are particularly famous. We were told that a million visitors come to Münster for these markets, primarily from the Netherlands. This explains why a night in a hotel costs as much as a car.

While the fairy lights and wooden huts were again all very pretty, it still all boiled down to huts selling sausages and gluhwein. At every large church, crowds shuffled round the outside in a circuit, forming knots around the alcohol stalls which had long queues. We braved these a few times for gluhwein, which we all enjoyed.

St Lambert’s church tower is decorated with three cages, in which were hung the tortured corpses of the Anabaptist leaders after the revolution and siege of 1534/5.

When I was 14 years old I read with great relish Norman Cohn’s great book, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Cohn’s life work was to try to  understand the phenomenon of Nazism in the context of other historic movements that practised mass extermination in the name of ideology. His riveting account of the siege of Münster has stayed with me for half a century.

The great city walls of the siege were demolished and are now a promenade, the Church of St Lambert was substantially rebuilt in 1901 and again after World War II, and the dangling cages don’t look nearly old or crude enough, but still I was now there, on the spot I had visualised so clearly in my teens.

The Anabaptists preached equality of wealth as well as religious iconoclasm, and looked to divide the property of the very wealthy city of Münster with all who joined them. They practised ardent polygamy; sexual ecstasy was an important part of their revolution.

However they had no qualms about executing those who did not accept their adult baptism, and they did not care about the wild impracticability of most of their governance, as they believed the second coming of Christ to be literally imminent.

What is perhaps truly extraordinary is not just that the Anabaptists gained full control in Münster, but that they came close to doing so and held real influence in broad swathes of Northern Europe. It is important not to be seduced by their professed communism into overlooking the fact they were extremely violent, religious nutters.

The revolutionary millenarian wave that swept Europe in the early 1530s was the product of the usual famine and disease, but also fueled by the economic dislocation caused by emergent nationalisms disrupting the free trading of the Hanseatic network. I throw that in for you to draw your own modern parallels.

History is one long roll of ironies, one of which is that it was the genuine tolerance of Münster’s Catholic Prince Bishop Waldeck which had allowed Anabaptist doctrine to spread and made Münster an international haven for dissenters.  It was the same ex-tolerant Waldeck who later hung the Anabaptist leaders in those cages (or their originals) after their slow execution by red hot shears.

The whole is a fascinating story. I recommend Cohn’s book. I was told by the hotel that there was a German TV mini-series thirty years ago of the Münster uprising, starring a young Christoph Waltz.  I would love to see that. But for now it was good to walk through the holiday crowds in the snow and take in the town, imagining those events, in good company and with brandy-laced gluhwein.

The next day, Sunday 4 December, we left Münster for Dusseldorf on the 10.25 RE10212 which went direct. Again it was a two decker National Express local train and it was actually on time.

We went up to the very comfortable first class upper deck, where we were alone. The only incident of note occurred when a burly man came down the train, flicking something at each table with a metallic clang. Niels explained the man was opening the metal bin covers, on the lookout for discarded bottles which might have a deposit he could reclaim.

That seemed a lot of effort for little reward for a middle aged man. He made no attempt to disguise what he was doing, and presumably ought not have been in the first class carriage.  It led me to recalculate the odds of my laptops having been simply taken as opportunistic thefts on the train.

It is worth noting at this point that all the trains now had parties of men in vests marked “security”, patrolling up and down to ensure that everybody was wearing a face mask. Their general demeanour was not very friendly.

Stella would be leaving to fly back to London and her children, after the early evening screening in Dusseldorf. Niels and I were staying in the Stage 47 Hotel, which again was really delightful.

The hotel has been carved out of space from the adjoining theatre, and the reception is crammed into the narrow entrance corridor in a way that looks very unpromising indeed on first arrival. But the rooms are beautifully planned and all different, each one named after and containing a massive photographic portrait of, a star who has appeared in the theatre.

My room had the bed on a mezzanine level and loads of space, which was great but not designed for a man with bad eyesight likely to need to fumble his way down the tight spiral staircase from the mezzanine in the dark for a 3am pee, whilst not entirely sober.

The hotel was very much in a Turkish area. A Turkish travel agent was next door, a Turkish shop the other side, then a kebab shop, and there was a substantial looking Turkish restaurant just opposite. Leaving Stella’s suitcase in Niels’ room, we repaired to the Turkish restaurant for lunch.

They did not seem very pleased to see us. It was again very cold, and after some humming and hawing as to whether we could have a table at all, they seated us at the first empty one, right next to the front door.

We were constantly subjected to a vicious icy blast when the door opened, and a persistent very cold draught when it didn’t. Several times other tables emptied and we repeatedly asked if we might move, but were always waved back down.

The food was very good but the service terrible. I do not know whether this was because we seemed to be the only non-Turkish customers, but we all agreed we had the feeling of not being welcome. I have always found Turkish people extremely hospitable, so it seems strange.

I hurried back from lunch as at 2pm I was giving a Zoom talk from my hotel room to Alba International, on the subject of the way forward to Scottish Independence.

The background to this was the UK Supreme Court decision that the Scottish Parliament had no right to hold a referendum on Independence, which you may recall I had attended the Supreme Court to hear, the day before leaving on this European tour.

The discussion was also informed by the excellent work of Salvo, and of Sara Salyers in particular, in defining Scotland’s own historic constitution as an independent state and its continuing legal persistence.

I felt time and distance had given me a useful clarity in considering the Supreme Court decision and its consequences, and in brief, this is what I outlined.

The UK Supreme Court was quite right within the narrow confines of UK domestic law. Plainly the Union of England and Scotland is a reserved matter under the Scotland Act of 1998, and the Scottish Parliament could not hold a referendum on it in terms of that Act.

But UK domestic law is entirely irrelevant. The Kosovo Opinion of the International Court of Justice makes crystal clear that the domestic law of the state being seceded from, is not the determining factor as to whether a secession is illegal.

Whereas the reliance by the UK Supreme Court on the criteria of the Federal Court of Canada in the Quebec judgment, over fifty years old and superseded by the cold hard fact of over 23 non-colonial secessions since, is simply laughable.

But while the right of self-determination of peoples in international law is crucial in the case of Scotland, and while Scotland undoubtedly qualifies as a “people” because it is a long established historic nation with its own legal system, culture and institutions, there is one overwhelmingly important criterion for recognition grounded in pure realpolitik.

It was long accepted as the only criterion for recognition that a state had factual, practical control of its own territory. That position has become softened by more principled considerations since the second world war, but the actual control of the territory claimed remains the most important factor in gaining international recognition.

Why did Catalonia fail where Slovenia, Kosovo and the Baltic states succeeded?

Because realpolitik rules in practice, and the Slovenians, Balts and Kosovans had obtained actual control on the ground of the land they claimed. The Catalans had not.

Physical control is not a sufficient condition for recognition – see the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus – but in effect it is a necessary condition.

The UK Establishment will never agree to Scottish Independence. Scotland’s resources are far too valuable to them. Scotland has to declare Independence unilaterally, and take it.

It is no use doing this like Catalonia, where the Spanish civil guard and judiciary effectively wiped out the nascent state before it could breathe.

A Scottish government, whether arising from the Scottish Parliament or from another body, needs in declaring Independence to ensure it has practical control of Scotland.

That means that the organs of the state have to acknowledge the Scottish state. All taxes collected must go to Edinburgh, not to Westminster. The judiciary must apply Scottish laws and not Westminster ones, where they conflict, and specifically apply all new laws post the Declaration of Independence. The police must answer only to Scottish authorities. Ultimately so must the military stationed in Scotland.

At the time Independence is declared, immediate action must be taken to ensure all civil servants, judges, police and military take an oath of loyalty to the people of Scotland and its new government, and renounce any previous loyalty to Crown and to UK political institutions. Anybody refusing must be summarily dismissed from their positions.

We have the example of Catalonia before us. We also have the example of Egypt’s only ever democratically elected leader, President Morsi, who died horribly in jail after being overthrown by a CIA coup because he failed to take the elementary precaution of dismissing and imprisoning all the military regime’s corrupt judges. He should have learnt from Fritz Bauer.

Let us not make those mistakes.

Ultimately, it boils down to this.

1) Westminster will never agree to Scottish Independence.

2) Scotland therefore has no option but to declare Independence unilaterally.

3) Any independent state must be prepared to defend itself by physical force from foreign attack. So must a newly declared Independent Scotland.

4) All who refuse to serve an Independent Scotland must then be removed from all organs of the state.

5) Once an Independent Scotland has physical control of its territory and resources, international recognition will soon follow. Brexit has completely changed the political atmosphere with regard to the crucial attitude of the European Union to London’s government.

Not to mention that London’s government is an international laughing stock.

Interestingly enough, in the discussion that followed my talk, nobody fundamentally queried the radicalism of this approach. Most of the questions revolved around what I might call the determinism of Salvo’s approach.

To put this another way, no matter how many irregularities there might be in the 1689 Act of Settlement, no domestic or international court is going to annul it now. It is realpolitik again – no state exists whose form and institutions would survive re-examination of all their historic foundations under modern criteria.

I further clarified that while I support the notion of registering a Scottish liberation movement at the UN, it is going to take a lot of evidence of liberation struggle to achieve this. The notion which has somehow got abroad that it just needs 100,000 signatures, appears to me without foundation.

It was a really good 90 minutes discussion with excellent people, after which I had do dash to the cinema and turn my head back towards rescuing Julian.

The cinema had the interesting quirk that to get a big wide screen, the projector was separated from the hall by a number of corridors and offices, with glass windows that the picture passed through. This lent itself to a variety of interesting photos.

Stella was on excellent form.  In Dusseldorf she concentrated particularly on the extraterritorial jurisdiction the United States was claiming, in its effort to imprison an Australian journalist for acts of publishing, carried out entirely outside the United States.

Stella also expressed the relief we all felt that finally the Australian government was living up to its responsibilities and directly asking the United States to end the persecution of Julian Assange.

I was not on the best of form, and was perhaps a bit tired. But as usual there were inspiring activists on hand to give me a real boost afterwards. All over Germany, groups are out every weekend for Julian, demonstrating, manning stalls, collecting signatures and bearing witness to the truth.

After the meeting, Bibi gave us a lift back to the hotel, demonstrating in so doing that her definition of “a short walk to the car” was fundamentally different to my own. She then took Stella on to the airport.

I had a sudden and improbable rush of common sense, refusing Niels’ offer to go for a drink, in favour of an early night in my comfortable mezzanine bed.

The next day was a rest day, so we stayed again in Dusseldorf. Not only was it a day off, but the hotel did laundry – the first time since this adventure began!

In the morning I discovered that nobody sold gloves in a six block radius, except for a motorbike shop at astonishing cost, which I declined. I spent the rest of the day reading the Fritz Bauer biography.

About 4pm Niels called and we went out. The receptionist had recommended the winter market on Konigsallee, so we headed there.

We had walked a few metres when a great stream of fire engines and police vehicles came blaring past us. As we approached traffic lights, a number of ambulances came charging down from another direction and for a while there was a veritable traffic jam of emergency vehicles. The cacophony was awful.

New sirens continued to join in from all around us, apparently converging towards us. When we got to Konigsallee it was largely deserted. While the shops all remained open, all of the wooden Christmas market stalls were closed and the shoppers had disappeared.

We wandered around the empty stalls trying to work out what was happening, until policemen started yelling at us in a most threatening manner.

It appears there had been a phoned in terrorist threat of an attack on a Christmas stall, to which the police had overreacted by closing down all of the hundreds such stalls, placed on every shopping street and square in Dusseldorf, and calling out all the ambulances and fire appliances.

It was of course a hoax. It was also another example of my continually landing in unlikely drama on this trip. Niels, who had spent weeks photographing anything that moved, managed to capture almost nothing of the massive security presence closing down the Christmas market. He said he had previous experience that German police do not like cameras.

He did however manage to capture umpteen shots of me looking cold and miserable. My voluminous luggage was well prepared for the winter, except for a lack of boots. The streets were covered in ice and my leather-soled shoes felt distinctly insecure.

From Oxford Street to Princes Street, the UK’s flagship shopping streets have collapsed into tat and squalor, but Germany has maintained its high end shopping districts without apparent loss. So much so that the first shop I entered had no viable boots below 700 euros.

Round the corner I found a more practical shop and bought a pair of Skechers. This troubled me, as I recall my brother Stuart taunting my brother Neil that possessing Skechers was the first step on the road to adult diapers. They were however cheap, waterproof and had deep treads, so I got them and am now a convert.

While the shops had all stayed open, the restaurants appeared to have all been closed by the police alert and we went around for a while before we found a fancy burger restaurant, one of a franchise chain with a rustic, birch tree decor.

This seemed marginally better than starvation, so we ate a couple of burgers, which had a small nugget of meat drowned in various treatments of vegetable, from pickled, through mayonnaise-covered to caramelised, the whole shoved between vast mounds of bread.

The restaurant was very full indeed, being the only place open, and the excitement of the police closures gave the venue a vibrant buzz. We struck up a friendly chat with the manager, who was working the floor because it was unexpectedly busy.

We worked our way right through the cocktail menu and then had the Johnnie Walker Black Label brought down from a high top shelf. It was the worst fake Black Label I have tasted in decades, like cheap vodka with added Bovril, but  we drank it all anyway. We had a rollicking time. The drinks bill came to six times the food bill.

We both had horrible hangovers the next day, almost certainly from the fake Black Label. Fortunately we had the morning to recover, then it was up and off again, and our itinerary was 6 December ICE 714 Dusseldorf 13.33 to Bremen, arriving 16.15.

The train was comfortable and more or less on time, and I was able to write up some of the journey for my blog.

The large cinema was very full, I felt I spoke particularly well, and we had a good talk with activists afterwards. Bremen seemed a delightful city and the cinema was in a district surrounded by really good restaurants and bars.

Niels spoke particularly well. He outlined Julian’s vision of responsible, scientific journalism, where references would always be given with links to the original source material which should be made available to the public.

This of course had not happened, and even as mainstream media had been forced to move largely online, they had not taken the opportunity this offered to present the public with links to the actual source materials their journalists were discussing. This level of transparency was expected of bloggers but largely eschewed by the media, despite all their resources.

It was a good point and well put over. It is continually important to think of the work Julian can take forward on his release from jail, not only to think of him as a victim or a symbol.

This was one of the first meetings where the audience had required sequential translation into German. It is always very difficult, given the need to split up your argument into short cadences for translation. But it did not seem to spoil the evening or the enjoyment and interest of the large audience.

We had booked in Bremen into the Aparthotel Adagio. I was by now fairly sick of restaurant food, and wanted to be able to cook myself something very plain and simple. I called in to a local supermarket and was able to make myself a basic tomato and bacon sauce to eat with spaghetti and a baguette. It felt like a great relief.

One thing I liked about Germany was that the ambient soundtrack was much more to my taste than I generally heard in the UK. The taxi taking us to the cinema was playing Bachmann Turner Overdrive. The taxi taking us back was playing Fleetwood Mac. The supermarket where I bought the spaghetti was playing Supertramp. None of which was very German.

I had finally relented. The next day we were off to Halle, which was a complicated journey by rail but simple by road, so I had caved in and agreed Niels could finally get his hire car.

As I drifted off to sleep I was sure I could hear him making vroom! vroom! noises in the distance.

 
 

————————————————-

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

The post Trains (Mostly) Planes and Automobiles Part 5 appeared first on Craig Murray.

Trains (mostly), Planes and Automobiles Part 4

Having entirely unexpected cause to become acquainted with the subject, I learn that all main railway stations in Germany have their own police stations. At Bochum, you have to walk round the outside to find a door with a buzzer, which nobody answers.

Heading back into the station, I approach the first pair of policemen I come across (the visible police presence on German stations is also remarkable). I explained to them I had a bag stolen and they walked me round to the police station which, once inside, is full of policemen, all carefully ignoring the buzzer.

I am ashamed by my lack of German and very impressed by the police language skills. But unlike his colleague in Frankfurt, this policeman made no pretence at all of interest in actually finding the thief.

He laughed nervously at my suggestion I was being targeted, having had two laptops stolen in four days. He looked at me suspecting I was not quite sane, and said it happens all the time. He just shook his head when I suggested the CCTV on Duisburg or Bochum stations might show the thief with the laptop bag.

He very quickly completed the theft report and gave it to me. I think he suspected I was engaged in a repeated insurance fraud he could not be bothered investigating, and just wanted me out of his hair.

We were staying in a particularly barren Mercure Hotel in a high block just opposite the station. I was on the 12th floor. Once checked in I decided that despondency would not help, and that I should turn the situation around by embracing the chance for laptop shopping.

Bochum is a city with dreadful problems. Leaving the next day we passed on the train a vast Opel plant which extended for miles and was in varying stages of decay. It closed down five years ago. Shortly before that Nokia closed a major plant in the city. Before that the mines closed.

If you go back further, three quarters of all the buildings of Bochum were destroyed by allied bombing in the Second World War. This was ironic because the city was predominantly Polish, one of those isolated populations left stranded by the tides of European history.

Large numbers of Poles were sent to the concentration camps alongside the Jewish population (many of whom were also Polish) and the rest put to forced labour. Additional slave labour was brought from Poland by the Nazis to keep the industries going.

As a centre of Ruhr heavy industry, Bochum was largely obliterated by the allies but most of the victims were Polish. With this horrible history, it seems churlish to note that the current shopping centre is just horribly modern and ugly.

I went to a large chain shop called Cyberport near the hotel. It had a great range of laptops but the prices were very inflated. Every laptop was marked not just with its price but with an interest free credit offer and the price of monthly instalments.

This explained the prices – it was a rip off, never never shop for computers. It was also an indicator of Bochum’s economic woes.

I next went to a flashy store called Gravis, where a very keen and polite assistant was all over me, but sadly they only sold Apple. I explained to him politely that I didn’t use Macs and was too old and tired to want to learn new systems. He replied they sold accessories not specific to Macs, like mouses and keyboards. I politely declined this rather random offer, and went in search of my next shop.

The streets of the centre were closed off for the Christmas Market, with little illuminated wooden kiosks everywhere and crowds it was difficult to get through.

These were in every city we visited, and great fun. But they had changed since I first saw them in Germany in the 1990’s, with much less selling of handicrafts and decorations, and a much higher percentage of alcohol and sausage stalls.

Bunches of people stood around in the freezing temperatures for hours eating and drinking. Bochum was a bit rowdier than most. It was snowing, and I was very much regretting that the thieves had got the Gore-tex gloves that had been a Christmas present from my sister.

Call me a grinch, but half an hour below zero with the Gluhwein is enough for me. Give me a nice warm pub.

Anyway I pushed my way through to Saturn, Germany’s big chain computer store. It was a huge shop, but the actual range of product surprisingly limited and customer service almost non-existent.

They had no model like the one just stolen. Then my eyes were drawn to a laptop with a glowing back and illuminated keys which constantly changed colour.

Colour-changing keys! I had to have it! It was a brand I had never heard of – Captiva – and it was half price because you were buying the display model.

Niels had helped me set up the Laptop of the Four Days with massive security, so I couldn’t even start up the damn thing. (The first stolen laptop had once been secured by Julian Assange with a process involving a gold plated USB stick. That too had been totally beyond me to get into, and much of that had to be removed).

Niels was horrified by my choice. It was a gaming laptop, he said. The money had all gone into graphics. It absolutely was not what I required.

If you can imagine somebody saying “Colour changing keys” in the voice of Homer Simpson saying “Donuts”,  that is how I replied. We bargained them down further from a half price 790 euros to 750 euros, and here I am! The keys were a sexy turquoise when I started that sentence and now they are the deepest ocean blue. What bliss.

Orange! They’ve gone orange!

We then had to get a taxi to the cinema, which was right on the semi-rural outskirts of the city, a lovely little independent venue in an old railway station building. It was a joint screening with Amnesty International, the cinema was full and the audience was not only comprised of committed activists.

I was also pleased to meet Bibi, who had been coordinating these events, and with Irmtrud Wojak, a local campaigner who has written a fascinating biography of Fritz Bauer. He was a great prosecutor who went after not just Eichmann, but the “respectable” Nazis and their enablers, particularly in the legal profession. She gave me an English copy which was to make train journeys pass faster.

The only problem with the location was that it was a long walk to the nearest restaurant and very cold and snowy outside. Niels and I had eaten no lunch or dinner so we were keen to eat while the film was showing, and we ordered pizza delivery.

I was just tucking in to my Hawaiian pizza, amid general comments on my bad taste, when my phone started pinging incessantly.  There was a whole stream of codes for two factor identification. They were from my various email accounts, from Facebook, Twitter, my bank, shops – a plethora of accounts.  All coming through almost simultaneously.

This meant that somebody had got past the password and fingerprint protection on one of the two stolen laptops, and then got through the passwords on the individual accounts (which had all been changed after the first theft).

The question was, had they access to my phone?

I will confess this put me in a state of some shock.  I had been trying very hard not to let the laptop thefts get to me. On the first laptop, I had convinced myself some random thief may have just pinched it when I was in the toilet, even though it was obviously outdated, filthy, cracked and in poor condition.

But the theft today was inexplicable. We had changed into that train at Frankfurt airport station, and that first class compartment was absolutely heaving with expensive luggage.

There were many choices to steal that looked much more potentially valuable than my twenty year old, large and very battered laptop bag. The luggage racks right by the exit doors were overflowing with expensive bags of all shapes and sizes.

The risk and technique required to lift my old bag from the overhead rack right above our heads in the middle of the carriage made no sense as a random theft, when many almost risk free thieving options were available.

At the micro level my bag was next to Niels’ camera bag. The contents of that were ten times more valuable and the bag looked like that would be the case. But it was not taken.

When I blew the whistle in 2005 on extraordinary rendition and torture, I was for a time subject to the very close and obvious attentions of the security services. That died down, but at times flared up again, particularly around interactions with Wikileaks.

In the Spanish case against UC Global for spying on Julian, on his lawyers and on others in the Ecuadorean Embassy, which included spying on me and hacking my phone, and following and burgling several people, Julian’s Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez has told me that the evidence shows the CIA were “obsessed with” me as a target.

So none of this was new to me. Let me put it this way.

I am an admitted whistleblower of Top Secret information (to compare, nothing Chelsea Manning disclosed was above Secret). I collaborate with Wikileaks. I am at the most hardline end of supporters of Scottish Independence. I reject NATO, nuclear weapons, Israel and neo-liberalism. I have high level friends and contacts across the globe. If the security services are not targeting me, what are they doing?

I know the capabilities of the security services, and I have always assumed that they have access to the entire contents of my laptop anyway. Encryption may work for avoiding some mass surveillance, but not for individual targets when the state are prepared to put in the resource.

I also choose openness to my fellow man. I have no desire to view the world through a fug of suspicion. I have read the comments on previous instalments from the wise people who tell me that they never travel without a moneybag around their waist and their laptop bag tied to their legs.

Well, that is simply not who I am. The seven year laptop that was first stolen had been with me everywhere for hundreds of thousands of miles. It had traveled over much of Africa several times. It had been to the United States more than once. It had been simply all over Europe.

I had left it unattended while going to the loo on a train or in an airport lounge, many scores of times. I had left it sitting in hotel rooms in Washington DC. Once or twice I have checked it in to a flight. It had sat at the back of a bar at Doune the Rabbit Hole.  It has hung from restaurant coat racks. It has sat in the back of a pick-up in Ghana.

That was just that one laptop. I have used a succession of laptops for around thirty years and always acted in the way I describe. I have lived in Russia and Poland and Ghana and left my laptop bag on seats when I go dance, or on a table in a conference while I have some lunch. None had ever been stolen.

I could have spent thirty years with my laptop tied between my legs, but that would not be me.

If you choose to live that way, do what makes you feel happy and safe. But let me point out the logical fallacy that because you obsessively tie yourself to your laptop, it does not follow that anybody would have stolen it had you not done so.

Anyway, while two random thefts of laptops in four days was not impossible, I do not believe it was that, particularly given the quite extraordinary circumstances of the second theft.

This was also particularly annoying because of the loss of the other contents. The gloves I have noted. I had also lost my reading glasses, which are very essential, my phone charger, my bank verification machine, all the receipts from my trip and a variiety of other letters and documents.

With all those two factor verification notices coming through, I needed to get back to the hotel, set up my new laptop and change every password I have. But the audience was now waiting to hear me speak.

I am nothing if not an old trouper, so I went on. I believe it went very well. But frankly my mind was so frazzled I do not remember anything that evening after the phone started pinging.

Back at the hotel, Niels started setting up my new laptop with dizzying layers of disc encryption and self-destruct mechanisms.

Everything now had passwords of enormous length and complexity, containing characters I had no idea existed, from an external random generator.

Presumably, like the monkeys, if you kept it going infinitely you would get the complete works of Shakespeare.

It was 2am before I could actually start getting into my accounts.

There was no evidence that anybody had got past the two factor identification and actually been inside anywhere. As I say, I had always assumed they can remotely anyway, and I suspect most likely the whole thing is just an attempt at intimidation.

Most importantly of all, none of Niels’ security installations had stopped the keys from changing colour.

Merry Christmas Everybody.

————————————————-

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

The post Trains (mostly), Planes and Automobiles Part 4 appeared first on Craig Murray.

Not a Fit and Proper Person

After a two year process, the NUJ Executive have finally rejected the renewal of my NUJ membership based on social media posts I allegedly made which they refuse to show me and of content and subject of which I genuinely have not a clue.

But apparently these social media posts make me not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ.

Murdoch employees are fit and proper persons. The Guardian journalists who produced the front page of lies about Manafort meeting Assange are fit and proper persons.  The security service mouthpieces at the BBC are fit and proper persons.

The NUJ even accepts for membership copywriters for corporations working in PR companies. All these people are fine.

But I am not a fit and proper person because of some things I allegedly said on social media, which I am not allowed to see or to explain.

I am also not a fit and proper person because I published the NUJ’s incredibly deceitful handling of my renewal application, when apparently the NUJ believes it should have been secret (why?).

Finally I have failed to produce evidence of my income from journalism. I provided them with a download from Paypal of my monthly subscription totals. Apparently this was not sufficient, but they refuse to say what would be sufficient.

I have appealed against the decision, but given it is plainly politically motivated I do not expect much joy. There appears to be a universal effort across the political establishment to deplatform and isolate anybody who queries official narratives. Given that mainstream media are such a large part of that, it is perhaps not as surprising as it should be to find the National Union of Journalists an enthusiastic part of the process.

I hardly dare to imagine the long-suffering readers of this blog would support yet another legal case, but in the New Year we may need to try.

 

Craig Murray

Edinburgh

18 December 2022

Thank you for your email of 18 November informing me that my application for renewal of my NUJ membership has been refused, on the grounds that I am not a fit and proper person to be a member, and that I have not provided sufficient evidence of income from journalism.

I wish to appeal this decision.

Point 1 – The Evidence Against Me

The first test of natural justice has been failed by the NUJ. I have no idea at all what are the social media posts and correspondence which you state render me not a fit and proper person to renew my NUJ membership.

I have never seen these. You have never put them to me. I have been given no chance to check if they are genuine nor to explain their context. There are two sides to every story and you have made no attempt at all to hear my side.

I have been very active on social media for 15 years and I have never been suspended nor, to my knowledge, reported for inappropriate content. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about.

I believe the “fit and proper person test” may here be being used as a tool for an exclusion actually based on difference of political opinion.

I am myself continually subject to unprovoked attacks on social media by mainstream media journalists, many of whom I presume will be members of the NUJ. One that I know is a member is Mr David Leask, because you name him as one of the complainers against me.

Here is a link to just Mr Leask’s latest unprovoked rant against me on twitter, in which he casts aspersions on my linguistic skills for no other reason than to malign me (in fact I passed the FCO’s extremely difficult operational level exams in both Polish and Russian).

https://twitter.com/LeaskyHT/status/1598771344891486209

I am really not certain why Mr Leask remains a fit and proper person if he attacks my output, but it makes me not a fit and proper person if I attack his? I should be grateful for an explanation on this point. To be plain, I see no reason why sharp disagrrement should bar either of us from the NUJ.

I am equally often subject to unprovoked attack by mainstream media journalists in their publications. Here is a link to one one by Mr Paul Hutcheson of the Daily Record, in which he published a photo of my home next to an article inciting against me, and put me in fear for the safety of my wife and infant children.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/alex-salmond-blogger-trial-high-21789285

It is highly probable that either Mr Hutcheson or some of the editorial chain who approved doing this to me are members of the NUJ. Why does that behaviour not call into question their fit and proper person status, and how is my alleged behaviour – and I still do not know what it is – worse than that?

Again, that is not rhetorical, it is a question to which I should like to see an answer.

Point 2 – Proper Procedure Wilfully Ignored

The NUJ rulebook is perfectly plain that when an application is received, it should be sent to the applicant’s own branch or chapter for comment by members.

This rule was breached in my case. My own branch, Edinburgh Freelance, has still never had sight of my application, plainly contrary to the rulebook. I was a member for three years quite happily, with zero friction or adverse comment.

Instead what happened was that NUJ officials politically hostile to me circulated my application for comment, not to my own branch as the rules dictate, but only to a secret selected cabal of colleagues of similar political persuasion, in order to generate objections.

The chronology is important here – objections were generated before I published the fact of my application.

Point 3 – Publicising My Application

When an organisation is behaving deviously, maliciously and not in accordance with its own rules, it is of the essence of good journalism to publish it – even when that organisation is the NUJ.

I can see no reason at all why a NUJ membership renewal application should be secret if the applicant does not wish it to be. To claim my publicising the NUJ’s extraordinary handling of my application, as in itself evidence I am not a fit and proper person to be an NUJ member, is self-serving nonsense of a particularly devious kind.

Point 4 – Earnings From Journalism

I am really at a loss here. I do get more than 50% of my income from journalism, from subscriptions and donations to my blog. I have provided you with a printout from Paypal showing a year’s monthly subscriptions.

In response your membership department stated that you need to see payment per article, rather than payment by subscription. Is it really the case that journalists in new media who receive their income by subscribers are excluded from NUJ membership? If so, what is the legal basis for excluding this particular method of payment? It is the most common form of new media operation.

My last letter to your membership department specifically asked what further evidence was required, and volunteered to pay my membership fees based on gross subscription income rather than net if that were easier.

I never did receive any reply to my offer to provide whatever proof you need, provided it is also what is asked of others. To simply state I have failed to satisfy, while refusing to advise what would satisfy, is yet further evidence this has been a politically motivated process aimed at justifying refusing renewal.

Point 5 – The Purpose of the NUJ

The NUJ does not exist purely to provide those with comfortable berths in corporate media, the BBC or PR firms with their press cards, It has a particular responsibility to support journalists with views that are disliked by the political establishment, and to uphold their freedom of speech.

The sub-committee agreed that my output of articles does meet the criterion of journalism. I therefore have a right to join the union. The “fit and proper person test” is not meant to exclude people some members dislike or disagree with.

To pretend that I am in any way more aggressive in dialogue with those members objecting than they are with me is a fake made possible only by the outrageous device of the sub-committee never putting the allegations and evidence to me.

Point 6 – Health

It is true that very occasionally I have made social media posts I subsequently regret. I generally apologise very quickly. It is fairly widely known that I have been diagnosed bipolar my whole adult life, and can therefore sometimes be intemperate. That puts me in a class the NUJ should particularly seek to protect. It may well be relevant to the evidence before the committee – I do not know as I was not shown it. Nor was I given the chance to make this, nor any other, point to the sub-committee.

Point 7 – Late Appeal

I hope you will accept this appeal which is just beyond the 28 day cut-off point due entirely to force majeure. My laptop was stolen two weeks ago while on a month long tour of Germany, Austria, Slovenia and France with the Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign – a cause the NUJ supports.

I lost my draft reply to you when my laptop was stolen. Astonishingly, five days later my replacement laptop was also stolen in extraordinary circumstances. At that point I also lost access to my email accounts, including your email and the sub-committee report. I only recovered the material on return home this weekend .

May I conclude by wishing all the best to you and yours in this the festive season.

Yours,

Craig J Murray

Journalist

————————————–

Dear Mr Murray,

Further to you application for membership of the NUJ I wish to advise that the application was considered directly by the National Executive Council in accordance with Rule 3 (b) of the union’s rules.

At a meeting on Friday 11th November the NEC accepted the report of the panel set up to consider your application.

The panel found that you do not meet the membership criteria in relation to proven earnings from journalism.

The committee also considers objections to the application based on published material in the public domain and your conduct towards NUJ members.

The NEC accepted the recommendation that:

you should be considered not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ within the context of Rule 3 of the NUJ Rule Book, specifically the NUJ Code of Conduct and the obligation under Membership Responsibilities.

If you wish to appeal the determination to the Appeals Tribunal you may do so in writing within 28 working days of the decision.

Please address your appeal to the General Secretary by email to generalsecretary@nuj.org.uk

For reference I attach a copy of the report to the NEC.

Membership Application:  Craig Murray

Background: The NEC appointed a subcommittee to consider the membership application of Craig Murray comprising the Honorary General Treasurer, the Chair of Finance Committee, and the NUJ Vice President. The committee held two meetings and reviewed substantial material relating to the application.

Mr Murray’s previous application, in March 2020 was the subject of a number of objections. It was not processed because the application form was not complete, in accordance with the NUJ Rule Book. 

Context: Mr Murray applied for membership on 5th March 2020. In May 2020, the General Secretary appointed the Assistant General Secretary (AGS) to carry out a preliminary investigation into objections to Mr Murray’s application.

Two objectors confirmed that they wished to proceed with their objection in accordance with the provisions of Rule 3 (iii): Chris Diamond and David Leask.

A third applicant had confirmed that they wished to proceed with their objection but

following the decision of the applicant to publish details of private correspondence between himself and the AGS, and the comments made by the applicant in his post and subsequent comments on his social media blog, the third complainant advised the AGS that he wished to request anonymity due to the perceived risk of social media abuse. 

Two other members sought to raise objections but requested anonymity.

The objectors raised concerns that their objections and personal details could be posted on social media and that they may be the subject of online abuse or harassment.

An NEC panel was established to review the applications and to consider the complaint.

Since the application did not meet the membership criteria the complaints were moot and not considered at that time.

It was recommended that the complaints be noted and, in the event of a future application by Mr Murray would be considered by the NEC. 

New application:  A fresh application by Mr Murray was received in February 2022. The application was referred directly to the NEC.

The NEC established a sub committee comprising of the Vice President, Chair of Finance and Hon Gen Treasurer.

The subcommittee considered a significant volume of correspondence between Mr Murray and the Membership Department relating to his application.

The committee also noted correspondence from third parties relating to the application.

It was also obliged to consider previous objections.

The subcommittee was satisfied that, subject to proof of income, Mr Murray would satisfy the requirement for membership in terms of membership criteria.

Mr Murray did not provide sufficient information regarding his earnings from journalism to satisfy the panel as to his entitlement to full membership. On that basis Mr Murray was deemed ineligible for membership.

The subcommittee then reviewed the objections to the original application and the material cited in the complaints, including social media posts and Mr Murray’s blog.

The committee noted with concern Mr Murray’s behaviour towards NUJ members and office holders.

The subcommittee viewed his behaviour towards NUJ members as being inconsistent with the NUJ Membership Responsibilities and the NUJ Code of Conduct.

The committee felt that those who sought anonymity were justified in doing so, given Mr Murray’s published comments and his decision to publish correspondence relating to the investigation while the process was underway.

The committee recommends to the NEC that Mr Murray is not a fit and proper person to be a member of the NUJ within the context of Rule 3 of the NUJ Rule Book.

November 11, 2022

Yours sincerely

Jackie Clark

Head of Finance and Membership

It perhaps goes without saying that this fight to keep alternative media going in face of universal onslaught really does need your financial support, no matter how small your contribution. My work is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going.

This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

 

 

 

The post Not a Fit and Proper Person appeared first on Craig Murray.

Trains (Mostly) Planes and Automobiles Part 3

It is good to be joined by Niels Ladefoged on this tour. Niels was the Director of Photography on the film Ithaka, and as such a fly on the wall of the Shipton/Assange family for two years. But his commitment to Wikileaks goes back much further. He is a very helpful and calming influence to have around when facing a crisis like a stolen laptop.

It is a crisis. I have much important data stored on a copy hard drive, but that was made some time ago and much else has been lost. I do not maintain sensitive material on the laptop. But the risks of identity theft and the danger to my own access to all kinds of different accounts is very real.

Fortunately Sunday 27 November is a rare day off on the tour. The hotel does not do laundry at the weekend, and Germany allows workers a rest day on Sunday in a way that has been forgotten in the UK – so laundries are shut, and so are laptop shops.

There is another peculiarity. The laptop appears to have been taken out of the laptop bag, but the fairly large sum of cash in the bag was not taken. However what has also vanished is my heart medicines (Apixaban and Digoxin for the medically minded), which were in their boxes and kept in my laptop bag in a ziploc sandwich bag.

By one of life’s peculiar little coincidences, Niels, who arrived on a different train from Erfurt, found his vital prescription medicine had disappeared from his luggage the very same day. So we both need to sort out our prescriptions.

The day is spent in several return trips to the railway lost property office and in making a police report. The lost property office counter alternates between a man in a peaked cap who ignores you, and a woman in a peaked cap who yells at people to go away.

In the police station I am taken upstairs by a very earnest young policeman with a fashionably sparse beard, who speaks excellent English. He takes all the details and determines exactly where I was sitting, which door I exited the train by, what I was wearing and what route I took to the hotel. He says he will look at the station CCTV cameras. There were none on the train.

I tell him I am dubious that a thief would target such an obviously old and cracked laptop. He said he was not at all surprised. Thieves board the train at the station just before Frankfurt and walk up the train. They would take the laptop from its bag in a second, without looking at it.

He said it was not unusual for thieves to take the laptop and not the bag. He smiled at my concern about identity theft, saying that was not their level at all. The policeman seemed genuinely eager to get on to the CCTV footage and start lookiing for the thief.

This left me more open to the idea it was just a random theft, but I had seen nobody moving through the train as he described, and the very few people left in the first class compartment all looked entirely respectable.

In the evening Niels and I went to the old town of Frankfurt, of which there is not a great deal. It is not a good city to spend a Sunday. Everything seemed to be closed. Eventually we found a very local restaurant, where the waitresses wore what looked like football socks over their jeans.

The restaurant was splendidly decorated for advent, with what seemed like half a forest festooned in great boughs all over the place, through which peered the light of big chunky red candles. The place had plainly already survived hundreds of christmases without burning down, but I have no idea how.

I ate roast ham hough with sauerkraut and pan fried potatoes, washed down with a shared litre flagon of local wine. The crackling on the ham hough was superb. We felt a lot better after this, and asked the waitress for a local schnapps. She brought something really sweet and horrible with an alcohol soaked apricot in it. We drank it for research, and even ate the apricots, but I don’t recommend it.

Niels (at this point I shall blame him) then asked if they had a schnapps more like Danish schnapps. They brought us a couple of glasses of Korn. We knocked them back and agreed they did not seem like spirits. No burn and we guessed 20% alcohol. They were only 40ml measures, not 50ml.

So we thought we should have two more. That went quite well so we decided to repeat. After we had knocked back six each, we looked at the bottle and saw it was 32% alcohol. We thought it might be sensible to stop at this stage, but unfortunately the waitresses started to give us free schnapps.

It would have been rude to refuse.

This did not really help with the aim of forgetting my troubles and relaxing. I slept very badly, fretting over my missing laptop. The next morning, I had still lost my laptop and I now had a headache.

I also felt a terrific guilt – which I do most days here – at enjoying myself whilst campaigning for Julian, while he is in terrible conditions in a maximum security prison.

I got up, showered and shaved and went laptop shopping. This was quite fun. It soon was obvious to me I could not afford one as good as the one I had lost.

In the end I chose an Acer Aspire 5, with Intel i5 (the stolen one had i7), 8GB RAM (compared to 16GB) and 512GB SSD (compared to 1TB HDD). Even so this cost me 770 euros. But it is a slim and elegant thing of beauty.

It is a 17 inch, like my old one, but when I slotted it in to my old laptop bag it really came home how radically slimmer it is, taking up far less space. It is also a great deal lighter.

Having got through the dash to Slovenia, I was now hoping for a period of much more sedate rail journeys. Our itinerary today 28 November was just 11.53 ICE 623 Frankfurt to Munich, arriving 15.09.

The train left on time and sped along at great speed. Nothing seemed untoward, until a man in red uniform walked through the train announcing that the cafe was closed due to a power failure in the kitchen.

Then about 20 miles after Wurzburg the train slowed to a crawl, before finally coming to a complete halt, next to a yard full of rusted excavation equipment. There it stayed for about 45 minutes. An announcement was made that the line was blocked.

Fifteen long minutes later came another announcement that we would go back to Wurzburg, before proceeding to Munich by a different route. So we headed backwards, very slowly, for about ten minutes, before stopping in front of a different yard, also full of rusting excavation equipment.

It was like watching Scrapheap Challenge without the contestants.

Eventually we started to crawl along again, through Wurzburg station and out the other side without stopping. We picked up speed, heading away from Munich. Then another halt for ten minutes, then the train started running in its original direction once more.

Reaching Wurzburg for the third time, the train halted in the station and everybody was told to get off. Another Munich train was expected the other side of the same platform in five minutes.

A platform change, to one substantially further away, was announced just as the train pulled in to the station. Everyone went running off down the stairs with their luggage.

The last second platform change is the favourite game of German Railways.

We had come in on a huge train – two ICEs joined – while the one being changed to was a great deal smaller and arrived already full. We therefore decided to let it go, as there were now three more Munich trains showing as queued up over the next twenty minutes. We got on the first of these, which was comfortable, and arrived in Munich about three hours late.

Ithaka was being shown in the quirky little Werkstation Kino in a courtyard basement. The local organisers were very enthusiastic, and all sixty seats were sold out. People were being turned away. I introduced the film with two brief observations.

Firstly, I pointed out that the CIA had the spy videos of Julian’s meetings with his defence lawyers. Secondly they had all his legal papers, seized when he was removed from the Embassy. There are two parties to the extradition proceedings, the USA and Julian Assange. In any genuine legal proceeding, where one party had stolen the legal documents of the other and spied on their legal conferences, the case would be instantly dismissed.

Plainly the so-called judicial process is a farce, a piece of political theatre.

Niels and I then adjourned to dinner in another very local restaurant in the same building. One of the peculiarities of the “cinema” was that the public entrance was sealed by a very heavy steel door. It was completely blank on the outside and could only be opened from within. This is locked shut during performances, to the bemusement of latecomers.

One lady had driven from Austria to see the film but arrived too late. She joined us for a pleasant meal, and absolutely insisted on paying. Niels knew her as a long term supporter.

Niels is Danish and therefore very low maintenance – give him a plate of rotting fish with a couple of raw eggs on top and he will be happy for days. He explains to our chairpersons that you pronounce his surname, Ladefoged, by not sounding the d’s or the g. If you want to try it at home, I suggest you try making the noise of a vacuum cleaner blocked by a sock.

Niels is a compulsive photographer, as a fortunate result of which this narrative is now superbly illustrated.

Talking to activists after the film, we learnt the inevitable cause for the ruination of Germany’s once legendary railways – privatisation.

Privatisation has been carried out on the British model, with the track run by a private entity and different operating companies running their rolling stock on the track. This has been an unmitigated disaster from day one.

In a refinement of exquisite stupidity, the private network company is responsible for rail maintenance, but the government pays for any rail replacement needed – which is an incentive not to maintain. The activists in Munich explained this as the root cause of the increasingly frequent line closures and derailments.

We were staying in the Moma1890 hotel in Munich, which was really pleasant. We had two days there, which gave me a day to set up my new computer, and to go and see a doctor for a new prescription, as did Niels. Unfortunately the hotel did not do laundry, and an unpleasant odour was beginning to emit from my luggage.

We visited a small winter market behind our hotel. It was delightful, with lights twinkling brightly in the bitter cold and little santa clauses on bicycles zipping around on cables stretched between the trees.

The gluhwein was very welcome, sweet and strong and tasting as though the wine was drinkable per se. It was a very resonable 3.5 euros for a 200ml glass, and for just 1 euro more you could add an extra shot of spirits.

Niels has a theory that adding enough shots of rum to his gluhwein would counter the sugars. I have a theory that adding enough shots of brandy to my gluhwein will counter the sobriety. We both test this.

You pay a 3 euro deposit for a delicate frosted glass with an etching of a stag. I would like to keep mine, but the thought of carrying anything else in my luggage dissuades me.

We found a nearby tapas restaurant for dinner, and discovered such a very good wine that it is best to draw a veil over the rest of the day: El Canto de la Alondra, Ribera del Duero. You can’t say that after you drink it. Lots of forward fruit for a Ribera del Duero but still very soft and full.

The next day 30 November was a straightforward journey, EC114 at 13.32 from Munich East to Stuttgart, arriving at 15.59. The train arrived about one hour late in Stuttgart.

All but the facade of Stuttgart station has been demolished and the entire railway area is being “redeveloped”. Currently you leave the station on a snaking elevated runway above the building site, with MDF floors. It is a 800 metres walk along this from platforms to taxis.

As I was trying securely to balance my laptop bag on top of my wheeled luggage, Niels pointed out to me that there was a velcro strap on the back of the bag, specifically for that purpose. I was amazed. I have had that laptop bag for seventeen years and never noticed that strap. It has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles with me, all round the world.

The bag was given to me by Alex the Geek, a supporter of my anti-war candidacy against Jack Straw in Blackburn in the Westminster general election of 2005. Alex had a little computer sales and repair store in the town.

The bag was already second hand in 2005. It is very well constructed with industrial strength zips, clasps and fabric. It has about eight separate compartments, and the main area for the laptop is enormously wide, because in those days laptops were enormously wide.

Often on short journeys I use it just as a travel bag. It has an airline luggage label flapping from the handle, which for years has resisted all attempts at removal. It now had my slim little Acer tucked safely inside.

And it has a velcro strap to attach it to my luggage handle!

Niels has taken upon himself the role of Passepartout, having plainly been briefed that I am hapless. Even with his help, having to cart the luggage over the vast redevelopment was a real struggle.

We are very often not seeing the best of the cities on this tour. We arrive at the railway station, usually about dusk, and generally stay close to the station. The cinemas tend to be in the same central area.

Certainly in Stuttgart, from station to hotel to cinema was just horrifyingly ugly. Neither poor nor derelict, quite the opposite. Brash, tasteless. and soulless.

Plainly the railway area buildings just demolished all had to die, as they committed the unforgivable sins of not being of grandiose scale, and of being designed for human use. Nothing else I saw in Stuttgart fits that description.

There was an excellent turnout in Stuttgart and very active hosts in a very good cinema. We were buoyed by the news that five major international media groups, the original publishing partners for the cablegate leaks, had come out strongly calling for an end to the persecution of Assange, in the interest of protecting press freedom.

The real joy of this trip is the people we meet. In every venue there are fantastic local activists, who organise vigils, petitions and other actions for Julian. Many have street stalls on a weekly basis.

I am sorry we will not be visiting Aachen, where a lady held a “Free Craig Murray” banner in the town centre, every Saturday of my own imprisonment. That banner was given to me by German activists at the “Hands around Parliament” event for Julian. But I am meeting hundreds of equally doughty souls.

In Stuttgart the event is hosted by Pax Christi and die AnStifter. They were organising a major human rights festival, “30 days in November”, and this was the closing event.

After the screening and talks we went for drinks and snacks with the organisers. All the events have different local organisers and we do this almost every day. I apologise for not noting and acknowledging every one individually.

The next morning we journeyed on to Wiesbaden. I post this picture of the Stuttgart station departures board to illustrate what I have been saying about German Railways. You can see from the station clock top right the photo is taken at 11.23. So every single train on that board is late – the departure times range from 10.51 to 11.11.

That is absolutely typical of Germany’s privatised railway.

Our itinerary this day, 1 December was 11.37 IC 2312 Stuttgart to Mainz then 13.29 SBA35836 Mainz to Wiesbaden. Hurray! We were on time!.

The train to Mainz was not busy, and very comfortable to write on. Here I am working, with my elegant new laptop and my beloved old laptop bag:

The train from Mainz to Wiesbaden was a little commuter hopper, full of young women and their children, and a great deal of laughter. Wiesbaden appears effectively a suburb of Mainz.

Wiesbaden is very lovely. A spa town, it has natural hot springs bubbling up in various parks and hotels. It is difficult for a British person to criticise German cities for ugliness, the UK having been involved in their destruction, but much of Wiesbaden either survived or has been sympathetically restored.

The facade of my hotel, the Schwarzer Bock, had been restored with studious attention to grim ugliness, but there were some surviving details on the lower two floors from the original hotel, including much of the spa pool area.

Goethe had stayed in this hotel for a cure, and so had Dostoevsky, who had lost all the money for his European tour in the casino. He wrote up the experience as a novel “the Gambler”, in which Wiesbaden in Hesse is called Roulettebad in Hesse.

I am afraid the hotel is now run by Radisson Blu and is pretty prosaic. But Wiesbaden had plenty of evocative architecture,  and is plainly very wealthy. Wilhelmstrasse and the streets off it are full of very expensive shops selling top range products.

There are designer furniture shops, designer curtain shops, designer handbag shops. I saw a shop selling nothing but very expensive garden furniture, and another just selling those kind of stupid and pointless objects interior designers love to shove down next to coffee tables. Driftwood painted gold, peacock feathers in improbably shaped vases, roller skates painted electric blue with crystals round the top.

Plainly Dostoevsky was not the only person in Wiesbaden with more money than sense.

It is not generally recalled that, when Cumberland won at Culloden, most of the cities of Scotland were held down for the English by garrisons of mercenaries from Hesse. Cumberland actually disliked the Hessian officers for treating their adversaries according to the rules of war and refusing to commit atrocities.

Almost certainly, all of the Hessian officers occupying Scotland would have been familiar with Wiesbaden and would have walked around the very streets and buildings I walked around now. Doubtless some of them had stayed at the Schwarzer Bock.

I wondered how seriously Hessian archives had been searched for letters home or diaries on their time in Scotland, or what published memoirs there might be. I made a note on my new laptop to pursue the idea next year.

The cinema was beautiful, an art deco marvel. It was also very large, holding over 500 people, so though around eighty came, they did rattle around a bit. It did get fuller than this picture taken before the start, but not enormously.  Now you get to see what Niels looks like.

There was a dead air around Wiesbaden after the meeting, occasioned I think by Germany being knocked out of the World Cup that evening.

I had bought a new wheeled case at Niels’ suggestion, to replace the rucksack I had been struggling with. I found two wheeled cases much easier to manage, and with my laptop bag now velcroed to the handle of one of them and Niels to assist with lifting when needed, my luggage problems appeared to be over.

2 December we had a comparatively easy itinerary. 12.26 ICE 1651 Wiesbaden to Frankfurt Airport, 13.09 ICE 610 Frankfurt Airport to Bochum arriving 15.09.

Bochum was the first destination on our tour that I had not previously known even existed!

The trains were on time. The change at the airport station went smoothly, but the train from there was very packed. The luggage racks by the door at the carriage ends were overflowing with expensive looking bags and suitcases. We squeezed our luggage into any available bit of vacant floor, and then put my laptop and Niels camera bag into the overhead rack above us.

The rack was made of glass, presumably purposely so that you could look up and see your bags through it. Given recent experience, I repeatedly looked up and saw the comforting sight of the green and white baggage label attached to my laptop bag, pressed against the glass.

And then I didn’t.

Shortly before we arrived at Bochum, I looked up again, and it just was not there. It was gone.

I was stupefied. Niels went running down, collecting together our other bags, then looking for my laptop. I started asking everyone on the coach if they had seen the bag, or seen anybody take the bag.

To be fair, this got a much better response in Germany than it might have done in the UK. Virtually everybody stood up and started rummaging around. One large man was particularly helpful and started moving off and getting people searching in adjacent carriages. But all for naught; nobody could find anything and nobody had seen anything.

We pulled into Bochum. Niels stood preventing the door from reclosing while we searched, which got the railway staff involved. In the end he got off with the luggage while I stayed on the train and continued the search until the next station.

At Dortmund I had to give up. A second laptop in five days had been stolen from me.

I returned on a local train to Bochum. I had lost not just my laptop, but a lot of important tickets, receipts and documents in the bag, plus – and this is crucial to me – my reading glasses.

When the first laptop disappeared, I concede it was possible a thief had quickly taken it from the bag, not noticing how old and beaten up it was.

But I had not removed my new laptop from the bag during the journey, and there was no way of knowing a laptop was in there at all. It was next to Niels’ much more valuable camera bag, which was untouched.

The whole carriage was flooded with luggage, presumably because it came from Frankfurt airport. The racks at the carriage ends were overflowing with expensive luggage, right next to the doors, away from their owners and very easy to steal at a station.

Why would a simple thief instead take my beaten up bag, from right over the head of its owner?

It plainly makes no sense at all.

We headed into Bochum as the night closed in.

————————————————-

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

The post Trains (Mostly) Planes and Automobiles Part 3 appeared first on Craig Murray.

Trains (Mostly) Planes and Automobiles Part 2

When I agreed to do the tour of Germany, I stipulated that I would need to break off to honour a speaking commitment in Maribor, Slovenia. This turned into a crazy epic.

The straight line distance from Berlin to Maribor is 425 miles, not very different from London to Inverness. Unfortunately the entire Alps are in the way and Maribor is much better connected to Eastern than Western Europe. The distance by road is given at exactly 600 miles. I can’t find a distance calculated by rail, but I think it is well over 900 miles. (I can’t find a site which gives rail distances except on a crow flies basis).

My route on for 25 November was 06.01 ICE 1001 Berlin to Munich, 10.17 EC 217 Munich to Graz, 16.27 RE 157 Graz to Spielfeld-Strass, 18.04 RE 4443 Spielfeld=Strass to Maribor.

I should arrive at 18.20 to give a speech immediately. My talk with Stella had finished around 22.30 in Berlin and my talk the next day in Maribor began at 19.00. Then the following day it was back over the Alps and across the German plain again to speak at Frankfurt at 18.00. If my many political adversaries ever needed hard evidence I must be quite nuts, I guess this is it.

But I had said I would go to Maribor, so I did.

I had hung around after the talk in Berlin to chat with those attending – this is important both to motivate and to recruit activists. Because I knew I had a very early start, I had chosen the Intercity hotel, right next to the railway station. This was a mistake. It was very expensive (260 euros the night) and dreadful value for money. The mattresses were very thin, I have had thicker handkerchiefs than the towels and heavier towels than the carpet. There was nothing but water to drink in the room.

After checking in, I walked to the railway station so I would know exactly where to drag all that luggage in the early morning. I am not in general a fan of modern architecture but I simply loved Berlin Hauptbahnhof and spent a rapt half hour wandering around inspecting it closely. St Pancras is always called a cathedral to rail, and this is the modern equivalent. It is breathtaking in both scale and ambition and in quality and detail.

It speaks the same architectural language as some of London’s newer projects like the London Bridge Station rebuilding or some of Crossrail, but with much more assurance and verve. In London the great glass lift columns would have been square not round, because it is cheaper. The multiple levels of trains are dizzying and, reflected in acres of glass, sometimes illusory. There is just so much of it, all designed precisely to function but with an exact role in the aesthetic scheme.

Returning to the mundane, I was very hungry, having eaten nothing since breakfast on a wildly difficult and tiring day (and that breakfast had been mostly champagne). I found the last food outlet open and bought their last cheese baguette, which had reached the stage that sweat fell from the cheese and the bits outside the bread were many shades darker.

And so to bed.

5am; up, shower, shave, off to the station. Finding it difficult simply to lift the luggage. It is very cold. Pass a long queue of homeless people outside the door of a soup kitchen. Get to the platform on the station’s lowest level.

There is a deeply held belief in the UK that German trains are very efficient. I held it myself.

The Munich train arrived seven minutes after it should have departed and left 13 minutes late. First class had the old fashioned system of six seats in a closed compartment, two banks of three against the walls facing each other, with a sliding door and a single corridor running down one side of the train. But it was a very new carriage, and the traditional design was rendered in attractive light wood panelling and with curves in the large glass walls.

I was in the end compartment in the carriage. Germany has re-instituted the compulsory wearing of masks on trains, which specifically have to be heavy PP2 masks. In flying (unwillingly) from Cologne to Berlin I had not had to wear a mask. They are compulsory on trains in Germany but not on planes, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Whether for fear of covid or because I look like a crazed axe killer, the lady who was also in the compartment where I had my reservation plainly was not happy with my being there. She scowled as I came in, made a fuss about moving her luggage (which was in no way needed), and finally demanded I show her my ticket and seat reservation. She then looked daggers at me for 15 minutes.

As I was obviously spoiling her day, I got up, smiled and said goodbye, and went and found another seat.

After a while I went up to the restaurant car to see what could be done about breakfast. I am embarrassed not to speak any German, but the lady there spoke English. I asked her what was available for Breakfast. She told me I had to choose from the menu, and passed me one. There were a range of options from the Kaiser breakfast, including ham, eggs and cheese, to the Wien breakfast, just a pastry and a coffee.

I asked for the Kaiser breakfast. She shook her head, took back the menu, and put a big cross in red biro through the Kaiser breakfast. So I chose the next breakfast down, and she did exactly the same thing. We worked our way down to the Wien breakfast, and finally she crossed that one out too.

So having eliminated all the breakfast options I switched to the other side of the menu and ordered a plate of ham and sausage. The lady said I could not have that either as they had no bread.

I gave up and asked for a latte. She said they had no milk. I went back to my seat clutching a black coffee.

I had been through exactly the same situation in Poland immediately post Communism, where restaurants would not tell you what they had and insisted you order from a menu of non-existent choices, until you chanced upon something available, like a game of culinary battleships.

Apart from that, this was a very pleasant train. The station indicators in the corridor also had a speedometer, and most of the time it hummed along at a highly impressive 260 kph (160 mph). It actually caught up on time before it got to Munich, which was fortunate as it was a short connection to Graz. This change involved humping the luggage quite a way, but I made it.

This also was a train organised in compartments, but the carriage was much older. I shared a compartment with a delightful and friendly lady, traveling with her partner, who was going back home to Salzburg for a break. She is a chef and has her own Michelin listed restaurant in Munich, doing Austrian cuisine. The restaurant only has 23 covers and you currently need to reserve three weeks in advance.

She had survived lockdown by starting to do takeaway food, and in fact had achieved a bigger turnover, and profit, on takeaway than the restaurant ever had before. But she was pleased to be back to normal and stop the takeaway, which was all of the drudgery and none of the pleasure of being a chef.

We had a long and friendly chat about families and life. It made the journey go very quickly.

It is surprising how quickly the Alps came into view after leaving Munich, and you hurtle towards them for a very long time without their seeming to become appreciably closer. Once we reached the Austrian border an announcement was made that we could take off our masks, which we all did.

We were travelling in coach 12. The guard informed us that at Salzburg we had to change from coach 12 to coach 10, as one of the outside carriage doors would not open. This was not a problem in Germany, but meant the coach could not be used in Austria.

The two ladies were only going as far as Salzburg, but once there they insisted on carrying my luggage for me – all of it – and installing it and me safely in coach 10. They instructed the young gentleman sitting in the compartment that he was to look after me.

The line from Salzburg to Graz was extremely beautiful. My new young travelling companion worked for the Austrian rail network and he was very proud of it. He pointed out to me all the landmarks on the way, particularly mountains, castles and waterfalls, of which he had an encyclopaedic knowledge.

He kept telling me to take pictures and was most disappointed with my lack of photographic skills – with some justice. I took lots of pictures of myself reflected in windows and a variety of different passing poles and gantries. Here instead is Interrail’s picture advertising the route.

It is at least this pretty the whole way.

Austria and Italy will shortly be opening a massive tunnel under the Brenner Pass, 34 miles long. The Semmering tunnel, 17 miles long, will complete in three years time. There has been an incredible burst of tunnel building through the Alps which is revolutionising connections between central and western Europe with northern Italy and the Adriatic.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel, 35 miles long – which is longer than the Channel Tunnel – was finished in 2016. The Ceneri Base Tunnel, also in Switzerland, opened in 2018. Further West a major new tunnel under the Alps between France and Italy is nearing completion.

The reason for my companion’s journey was that he was working on a route for a new over 30 mile tunnel that will replace the highest area of the Salzburg to Graz line. This is still in development stage, and even that fact he said is “hot news”.

This day’s journey of 260 kph trains and information of a whole complex of gigantic rail projects, stood in the starkest of contrasts to the impoverished and neglected infrastructure of the UK. We cannot construct even a single and short high speed line; the road between London and Edinburgh is still not fully dual carriageway and parts of Scotland still suffer appalling communications deficits.

Arriving at Graz I again had a change of platforms to negotiate with all that luggage. Fortunately Graz has mid-platform lifts down to the interchange level, and I made it to an adequate little local chugger. I really can’t tell you much about this, except that it was dark outside and I fell asleep more or less immediately.

A friendly man woke me with a shake of the shoulder at Spielfeld-Strass, which is basically countryside with a shed in it. Here we had a remarkable change of trains, all the more peculiar for taking place in the dark.

We descended on to a normal platform and then walked over a footbridge, where I struggled mightily. The other side of the footbridge led not on to another plaform, but down on to the tracks. Half the people were hurrying off to a train in front of us and on our left, which was alongside a conventional train platform, and half of the people to a train front right, which involved crossing the lines and climbing up from a low wooden bench.

Everybody was running. I stopped a bearded man amongst what seemed like a party of young people and asked “Maribor?”. He pointed to the train on the right. I picked up my pile of luggage and ran after the disappearing crowd, again with an aerobic burst I simply would not have thought I could produce. I threw the luggage piece by piece up into the carriage and climbed up after it. The doors closed and off we went.

We had of course just scrambled across the Austrian/Slovenian border and changed from an Austrian to a Slovene local train, although it is astonishing that these two EU states have not devised a more elegant way of doing it by now. The Slovene train was clean and new, one of those low slung designs with three internal steps up to a raised level at each carriage end above the bogies.

We made a couple of small stops on the way to Maribor, at stations – one very illuminated new and steel glass shiny, and one an old weedy unlit platform next to a cowshed. They had in common that neither had a sign saying where it was. A single person hopped on in each instance. Then we came into Maribor, the lights of which appeared very extensive.

Emerging on to Maribor station, which seems made of precisely the same concrete, glass and steel components as Austrian stations, I contemplated wearily that the short train had stopped as far from the exit on an extremely long platform as it was possible to stop. As I prepared for one last battle with the bags, I was delighted to see a huge bearded man stride forward to greet me. They had come to pick me up, and the man, who introduced himself as Matic, lifted my large suitcase as though it had no weight at all.

We drove to the self-declared autonomous zone of the Pekarna Centre, which was hosting me. This is an alternative culture commune which occupies an extensive site stretching over several former military buildings. It is very active in painting, film and the plastic arts, and functions as a very vibrant music venue and youth centre. It also holds a variety of events aimed at social consciousness and well-being. I had been invited in the context of an annual political teach-in to explain the Assange case.

The commune has rehabilitated several of the buildings on the derelict army base, and like many such groups has been through a process of varying relationships with the state. Originally declared by its founders to be self-governing and free from state law, gradually state regulation and state funding for aspects of the commune’s work crept in. This includes subsidies from various state creative arts funds, local council funding for the modernisation of one of the buildings, and eventually the insertion of an “official” NGO and local authority control of the hostel accommodation.

This process has led to the inevitable conclusion – the state now intends to close the centre down entirely and take over the land and buildings for other purposes. There have been two formal attempts to do so in the last few years, and both candidates in the current mayoral election are pledged to shut down the centre. The council always propose ostensible public sector schemes of popular appeal as their aim.

The latest wheeze is to use the site for a dental hospital, although the local university hospital which will purportedly own it has no knowledge of the plan and no funding for it. The commune of course believe this is all fake and the aim is profit making private housing.

A luta continua.

I had been asked in advance what I eat, and had replied pretty well anything. I have to confess I meant Chinese, Italian, Indian etc, and had not expected to be presented with a bowl of rice and lentils. I had eaten nothing since the old cheese sandwich at the midnight before, so I ate my way through it with surprising gusto. It was very nicely cooled and spiced and would have been perfectly fine on the side of a few lamb chops. There was very decent Slovenian wine to wash it down.

After dinner I had a very quick tour of the grounds, mostly very dark but stumbling upon large groups of young people in surprising places. We also went in to the second hand bookshop, which they claim to be the largest in Europe. I doubt this, but it is certainly very large, over two open floors. While they have a great deal of shelving, there are also great rotundas of books simply stacked from the floor, spines outward, though taking out a lower one might be like a game of giant Jenga. This certainly allows a much higher book density than if everything was shelved.

I had a very few minutes but enough to realise there was an extremely productive Slovenian language publishing industry even during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Upstairs included the English language section, most of which was the worst kind of potboiler fiction. Indeed I wondered how on earth these many thousands of light and romantic fiction titles had found their way to Maribor. Sadly I had no time to find out.

I was equally surprised that the upper floor could support what must have been a great many tonnes of books. Passing back downstairs, I could inspect if from below as there was no plaster ceiling and beams and floorboards were exposed. Both were massive – the beams were about 24 inches square.

It was now time for me to give my talk, and we went over to one of the concert halls, which was gratifyingly full. I hope that I will be able to find a video link so you can watch it if you wish. The format was just me speaking for about forty minutes, and then taking questions and inviting discussion. On this tour I am mostly making a short introduction and then taking questions after showing the Ithaka movie. That is very effective, but personally I always prefer giving longer talks where I can expand, explain and explore my views. I felt very at home doing this before the Maribor audience.

You are going to get very bored if I recount to you twenty very similar talks I am giving on this tour. But each has unique aspects, often in response to questions. I recall in Maribor giving the example of the Panama Papers as illustrating what happens when a whistleblower goes the traditional mainstream media route rather than going for full exposure through Wikileaks.

When the papers were leaked of a law firm representing many thousands of people and enterprises hiding their assets in parliament, the western media filtered the information and hid everything connected to prominent western companies and individuals. Instead they deliberately gave the entirely false impression that the bulk of money laundered through Panama is Russian, and made the headlines entirely about Russian and Russian-linked individuals, including a chef with tenuous connections to Putin as an official caterer.

Out of 10 million documents leaked, about 120 were actually made available as documents by the journalists, and about a number 200 had their contents referred to by mainstream media journalists – how fully and how honestly we have no way of knowing.

We live in a world of fake investigative journalism. Access to the Panama Papers was strictly controlled by a Washington-based entity, the “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”. Their funders include

Ford Foundation
Carnegie Endowment
Rockefeller Family Fund
W K Kellogg Foundation
Open Society Foundation

Is it surprising they hid all the evidence about corporate America in the Panama Papers? The contrast to the Wikileaks model of giving the citizen access to unfiltered source material could not be clearer.

I was very warmly received by the audience in Maribor, and afterwards we had a party. The following is what I picked up from many conversations. There may be other contrary or balancing information. I am just reporting the views of those I met.

Maribor was Slovenia’s major industrial centre and the main textile manufacturer for the whole of Yugoslavia, integrated into other Eastern European markets. It went through rapid deindustrialisation in the 1990s and had never really recovered. There remains high unemployment, though things have improved a little since EU membership as there is greater integration with Graz in Austria – a city which has been through similar problems. Graz currently has a Communist Party local administration.

Maribor feels cut off from Ljubljana. It is only 70 miles away but transport infrastructure needs upgrading. The train takes two hours and twenty minutes and the road is poor. There is a strong feeling that money from the EU and other international bodies never gets further than Ljubljana. The capital is booming and has significant funding for renovation, the arts and tourism. I encountered a lot of resentment towards the council.

I was very flattered to meet a couple who had journeyed from Graz just to hear me speak having read my books, and that two others had come with copies of Murder in Samarkand for me to sign (one in the US edition, Dirty Diplomacy).

I also took the opportunity of being in Slovenia to discuss the route they took to Independence, where I believe there are vital lessons for Scotland. I shall be discussing this in a Zoom talk to Alba International on 4 December, which I hope will be made more widely available afterwards.

I spent the night in the hostel, which is not a phrase you will hear from me very often. The next morning it was off to talk in Frankfurt.

The train schedule was 26 November was very slightly more forgiving. 07.19 INT 311 Maribor to Graz, 08.26 RJ 74 Graz to Wien Meidling, 11.22 ICE 26 Wien Meidling to Frankfurt.

This arrived in Frankfurt at 17.36 for a 18.00 talk, so there was no room for error. The big worry was a 4 minute change in Graz, with all the luggage. If I missed that, there was no way to make the talk in Frankfurt.

Matic arrived in a car to get me to a very cold Maribor station in plenty of time. Unfortunately, the train arrived 13 minutes late. It was a Ljubljana to Budapest direct train, which underlined the fact Maribor is very much in Eastern Europe. It consisted of only three rather tired carriages, of which the back one was first class, in which I was the only passenger.

Fortunately this train went straight through the border at Spielfeld-Strass without our having to change trains, but the train did change from a Slovenian to an Austrian crew, which took 15 minutes.

I have no idea how, but leaving the border 15 minutes late it still arrived in Graz bang on time. The next train was straight across the platform, so I made that four minute change with the luggage, in two swift trips.

I was now on the train from Graz to Prague. The carriage was Austrian Railjet and it was my favourite so far. Spacious and light, with plenty of tables, and a really helpful attendant who served at the table from a good menu of food and drink that actually existed. I had Goulash soup and a bottle of beer.

The train journey from Graz to Vienna was even more spectacularly beautiful than that from Salzburg to Graz. Not as high and the valleys were a little gentler, but the villages, castles and valleys were like an ever unfolding stream of picture postcards.

At Wien Meidling I changed to the train to Frankfurt. Here I was in an open first class carriage, mostly airline seating and quite full. Seats were three across, two one side of the corridor and one the other. I was in a single seat.

I slept for a couple of hours, and then I folded down the airline style table in the back of the seat in front. I was just about able to balance my bulky old 17-inch laptop on it and started to type this article.

It is a lovely old laptop of a very high spec. It had been all round the world with me for seven years. It has Intel i7, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB HDD. But it looks like rubbish. Far thicker than a newer version, it made a very significant contribution to the weight I was carrying, was very dirty indeed and the case is cracked.

The train wifi being pretty useless, I was using my phone as a portable hotspot. I was confused to note that the phone was displaying “two devices connected”. I tapped on this and found that one was the pairing name I had set for my laptop, and one was a succession of numbers and symbols. I had never seen this before.

(UPDATE I thought it went without saying, but the portable hotspot was protected by a password – I had not changed the strong random one generated by the phone. That is why I was surprised).

The carriage was about half full. Everybody seemed normal. There was one young man, athletic looking with neat short hair, who had been already on the train when I boarded. He was working concentratedly on a small laptop on the table in front of him, and he continued to do so without a break for the entire six and a half hours from Vienna Meidling to Frankfurt.

He never looked at me and there was nothing strange about him other than his levels of concentration. But he was the only passenger near me who went the whole distance from Vienna to Frankfurt.

Indeed, rather to my surprise by the time we approached Frankfurt the carriage was very nearly empty, as people got out stop by stop. As Frankfurt is a huge place I expected the opposite.

As we neared Frankfurt, I packed up my laptop, disconnected the charger, and put both in my laptop bag which I left on my seat after putting the table back up. I then went quickly to the toilet (in a wooden cabinet actually inside the carriage) for a pee.

I came back just as we pulled in. There were only four of us getting off this first class carriage at this final stop. I got down with the bags, put the rucksack on my back, balanced the laptop bag on the wheeled suitcase, and set off down the platform.

At some stage another ICE train had joined us and I was sixteen carriages from the end of the platform. I was panicking a bit as my talk started in half an hour, although both hotel and venue were close.

Hurrying, I dropped the laptop bag from the top of the wheeled case. In picking it up I noticed the zip was partly undone. It just crossed my mind as strange, as I knew I had not left it that way. But I did it up and hurried on.

The Metropolitan Hotel is right next to the station. I checked in and hurried up to my room. Something was nagging at me and I opened the laptop bag. The laptop was gone.

I raced back to the station, but the train was as gone as the laptop. I went to the information desk, and they directed me to lost property. I went to the lost property desk, where a man in a red peaked hat was studiously unhelpful, and told me to go online and fill in a form.

Niels was filling in at the talk. I joined him and it was a disastrous attendance – only twelve people. They seemed subdued by the simple fact of being such a small gathering. I could not understand what had gone wrong.

It was good to see Niels. Given that we had been meant to travel together ever since London, and had not even managed to set eyes on each other these first three days, it was a happy reunion and he cheered me up.

But you lose a huge amount of information when you lose a laptop – including a lot of research for my book on George Murray. You then start to get into all the perils of identity theft. There was a huge task ahead, in warning people, in blocking and securing, and then recovering accounts.

Then on top of this, the comparative failure of the Frankfurt event (and I say that with due respect to the dozen great people who did show).

Oh well, I said to Niels. Things can only get better.

I was very wrong.

————————————————-

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

The post Trains (Mostly) Planes and Automobiles Part 2 appeared first on Craig Murray.

Trains (Mostly), Planes and Automobiles

When asked to do a three week speaking tour of Germany in conjunction with the Ithaka movie, I was delighted to finally get an Interrail pass after 50 years of unrequited longing. Hoary old followers of this blog will recall I love trains and used to write about them from time to time.

So it was my intention to do a bit of old fashioned, internet diary blogging to recount the virtues of the Interrail card and how much better European railways are than British. The best laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley.

Let me say now, if you find travel blogs and trains boring this will annoy you in parts. You are not obliged to read further. I warn you that I get very annoyed by people telling me what in their view I ought to be blogging about and not blogging about. Start your own blog and choose your own content.

Having bought my senior Interrail card – the 15 days over two months Global Pass – I was astonished at the value. 591 Euros, first class, and including the trip down and back to London from Edinburgh and the Eurostar. With unlimited travel around Europe on 15 days in the middle.

So I used my first journey on 22 November from Edinburgh to London. The conductor scanned my pass ticket on my phone, and made no comment at all, leaving me comfortably ensconced in first class and eating food from the ever worsening LNER menu (although the wine was good).

The system for using an intermittent days pass like this one is different from using a continuous days pass. There you have just one ticket to show. With the intermittent days pass I had to download against the specific journey and activate on the day I used them 15 effectively separate tickets.

I just had time to check in to my hotel and dash to Stefania Maurizi’s talk at SOAS for her steamroller of a book on the Assange case, called Secret Power.

There was a sparkling panel, including Ewen MacAskill, John McDonnell and Estelle Dehon, so I was rather flattered to be asked to speak too and take questions. The speakers rightly highlighted Stefania’s dogged pursuit of Freedom of Information Act requests as a useful journalistic tool.

Two particular threads are worth serious consideration. The first is that it was Stefania who discovered that the Crown Prosecution Service had been insisting to the Swedish prosecution service that the allegations against Julian must be continued, when the Swedes had wished to drop them for lack of evidence.

She also found that the Crown Prosecution Service had deleted almost all the relevant emails – allegedly because the staff member working on the case had retired.

The CPS had claimed that when anyone retired their records were deleted, even on continuing cases. That is utterly false – government archives are not personal to the individual and case files do not belong to one person.

As a lie it is particularly desperate. It is of course the case that once Julian was actually in custody, the Swedish allegations, which never had any real foundation, simply disappeared.

Three things are being hidden – how far the CPS knew the Swedish allegations were dead meat; how far there was discussion with the Swedes on coordination with the United States over the planned extradition to the USA for which the Swedish fake extradition was a placeholder; and the involvement of the Head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Keir Starmer.

There is no doubt at all that Starmer would have been involved in decision making on his Department’s highest profile case. All the records of emails and critically of internal meetings have been conveniently deleted.

This deletion has happened while Starmer has been an ostensibly an “opposition” MP, embarked on his career of being promoted as the Establishment’s safe “alternative” neoliberal to the Tories.  The deletion of these records to protect an “opposition” leader tells you an enormous amount about how the British state really functions.

Watching John McDonnell try to skate round the question of Keir Starmer’s involvement was quite amusing, but in general John spoke well. As did Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian. He credited Stefania with freely sharing with other journalists the results of her research, which had resulted in two excellent Guardian articles. Ewen ran into some audience reaction when he denied the Guardian had become too close to the security services and claimed Luke Harding as a personal friend.

The second strand of information requests that Stefania had pursued were for the records the Metropolitan Police held on Wikileaks journalists including Kristinn Hrafnsonn and Joseph Farrell. She never obtained any documents, but the key point is that initially the reason the Metropolitan Police gave for not producing the documents was the FOIA exemption for “terrorism”.

Which tells you a lot about how the state views real independent journalism.

thank you @SOASICOP for the truly excellent debate on the Julian #Assange and #WikiLeaks case and my newly released book #SecretPower with @ewenmacaskill, @estelledehon,@johnmcdonnellMP and @CraigMurrayOrg! So many questions!https://t.co/H0GhmvrJFk

— Stefania Maurizi (@SMaurizi) November 23, 2022

The next morning I was up at the Supreme Court for the judgment on the Scottish Independence referendum, on which I blogged immediately. I promised you a more detailed critique, which will follow when I get the chance. I spent the evening going through a lot of personal admin. I was then ready to launch on my European adventure – and the problems began.

To be fair, they began three days earlier when I tried to book the Eurostar.

I discovered that Eurostar only allow a limited number of passes to Interrail ticket holders on each train – and there were no places available at all on the 24 November. I needed to get on the 08:16 to be able to get to Berlin in time for my talk, but not only was this impossible to book on Eurostar, no train on 24 November was possible. Nor was there any availability on 23 November straight after the Supreme Court judgment.

So you need to book more than four days ahead, even at this lowest of low seasons. If you do get the Eurostar pass, there is a 45 euro surcharge on top of your Interrail pass (each way). You can get an actual Eurostar ticket for almost the same price if you book well ahead.

The ever excellent Your Man in Seat 61 blog explains here how the system works. Interrail passes count as in the third pricing “Bucket” for ticket availability, with prices going up as each “bucket” sells out. I can only say that the higher priced “buckets” must be enormous, because there were vast swathes of empty seats, but no Interrail passes for sale.

At this stage I also discovered that I could not have used my Interrail pass anyway, even if there had been places available and I paid the supplement.

The Interrail card allows you one journey domestically to your port of exit from your home country and then from the UK on the Eurostar (and same on return). So I can travel from Edinburgh to London and then by Eurostar from London (if available). But it turns out this all has to be on the same day. You cannot overnight in London and then use the Eurostar.

The one journey to port of exit is explained in the Interrail blurb, but I had not seen the regulation that this has to be the same day you leave the country. Perhaps it is supposed to be obvious, but I only learnt it from Eurostar after I had booked the first Interrail ticket from Edinburgh.

So I had to buy a whole Eurostar ticket. My itinerary for 24 November was Eurostar from St Pancras 08:16, Thalys 9423 from Bruxelles Midi to Cologne 11:25, and ICE 951 from Köln to Berlin 13:42, arriving Berlin 18:10. My friend Graham told me that this would not be possible unless I went Business Premiere on Eurostar. I could not quite understand why, but complied, at a cost of £280.

The next morning I was at St Pancras in good time to check in, but had not allowed for one Brexit “benefit” – enhanced passport checks and passport stamping. Most passengers were being waved away from the electronic gates to join a long snaking queue in front of a very unfriendly French passport officer, who was either working with the world’s slowest loading computer, or pretending to.

Security checks had been a breeze, with Eurostar not enforcing any stupid security theatre over laptops being in bags or your toothpaste in a ziploc. I am delighted to say that the government is proposing finally to end the War on Toothpaste nonsense at airports in a year or two.

I recall that I once got over-enthusiastic with pouring whisky over our Christmas pudding to light it, after several glasses too many of Chateauneuf du Pape with my turkey. The drenched pudding sat there on its elegant Minton plate in a veritable puddle of spirit, and it fired with enthusiastic blue flames. In fact it was so enthusiastic I lost some eyebrow, and it was a rather hurried procession to the dining room.

Once put down, the children cheered. A few seconds later the place mat underneath it started to singe, and then that beautiful and expensive Minton plate cracked rather explosively.

Now after they have checked your toothpaste and taken away your water at airport security, you can waltz into duty free and buy several such bottles of spirits. Soak the airplane seat and carpet and set light, you will pretty quickly bring the plane down.

But at least your toothpaste was in a separate plastic bag.

By the time I finally got through passport control, they had been flashing last call for the 08:16 for a long time. I should explain I can hardly carry my luggage. The three week itinerary of constant traveling has no obvious opportunities for laundry, so I am traveling with 20 shirts, 20 pairs of underpants and 20 socks, as well as jumpers, trousers etc and a lot of books. I had a rucksack on my back, a heavy suitcase and a bulging laptop bag.
I had to make a lung searing run to get on the train before the doors closed. I was genuinely amazed I could still do that.

Niels Ladefoged is traveling and speaking with me. Niels was the brilliant cinematographer on Ithaka and had me wired up for sound literally for hundreds of hours during the shooting of that film. He shot huge amounts of footage of me, including in my home, none at all of which was used.

Niels is still permanently filming everybody in Wikileaks as they go about their business and campaigning; I have no doubt he will be filming me as we travel round Europe. I have no idea why. I don’t like to ask him in case there isn’t actually a reason, and he is just living life under the comforting delusion he is shooting another film.

Niels had booked Standard Premier class on Eurostar, unable to believe I was so extravagant as to book Business Premiere. This meant he was in coach 1 and I was in coach 16. We both made efforts during the journey to walk the 15 coaches inbetween, but both gave up fairly easily.

I got the world’s tiniest cooked breakfast. It was squeezed into a little plate the size of the average mobile phone. All the normal things were there – sausage, bacon, omelette, mushroom etc; only in bonzai. It was very pleasant. Six of them would have been breakfast. Still worse, it was served with mango and banana juice. Bloody middle classes. Suddenly the charm of traveling was diminished.

So I wandered into the kitchen and asked if they were not serving champagne at breakfast. They looked at me as though I had just asked for crack cocaine, as opposed to something which was literally on the menu. But they directed me back to my seat and, two minutes later, a very substantial glass of champagne arrived.

The attendant said that as they had needed to open a bottle, I had better drink all of it. I certainly did my very best. I sent photos of each glass down to Niels. It’s my way of sharing.

That may be why I did not really notice we were running a few minutes late – and with a short connection in Brussels which we had to make to be in Berlin on time. When the Eurostar empties, a huge scrum develops around the single escalator and two lifts at the exit. It takes quite some time to funnel through.

I was again back in that gut busting run with the rucksack, laptop bag and suitcase, down to the below ground level interchange, charging along to platform 8 and rushing up the ramp to the Cologne train. I just made it literally as the door was closing, and threw myself onto the first carriage I came to, ignoring the protests of the chap checking tickets.

Unfortunately Niels did not make it. Being in coach 16 I had arrived right at the exit gate and got out before the crowd developed. Having to walk 13 carriages further, Niels got stuck behind the impenetrable crowd.

So I was now on a Thalys train. This had been my next disappointment with Interrail. Thalys trains also require you to buy a supplementary pass, which had cost 27 euros, which I suspect is not too different from a Brussels to Cologne fare anyway. Certainly the guard only wanted to see my Thalys pass and did not care about the interrail ticket.

What is more annoying is that Thalys trains will only allow you to buy a second class supplementary pass, even if you have a first class Interrail pass. So I was trying to squeeze my mass of luggage into a totally stowed out carriage.

I remember first being on a Thalys train decades ago and thinking it the epitome of French travel chic, with Virgin Atlantic evoked in the high broad backed velvet seating and red lights. It has not aged well. All that red velveteen seems very tawdry, like something taken out of a Turkish brothel – Bransonesque, in fact. The airline style seating is too closely jammed, the broad seat backs block the light. A peculiar air of Stygian damp pervades the train.

Fortunately this did not last too long. Getting down at Cologne – and by now I was struggling just to lift the suitcase – I was delighted to see that the Berlin train ICE 951 would arrive the other side of the same platform, in 25 minutes. Not having the strength to move the luggage further, I decided to stay there and wait. An elderly French couple who I had noticed since St Pancras were also waiting on the same platform.

Hundreds of people had got off the train from Brussels and I had felt surprise not more of them were going on to Berlin. With about three minutes to go, it was plain something was wrong. There were only about 6 people waiting for the express to Berlin. But it was plainly advertised both on the main board and platform board.

Then, with two minutes to go, an announcement came in German and English saying the train was cancelled due to a line closure. Neither the departures board nor the platform board showed it cancelled; they never did, the entry just disappearing after departure time in the normal way.

Niels was still stuck in Brussels. The next train to Cologne from Brussels had also been cancelled because the toilets had failed. So he was in Brussels, I was in Cologne, but had no means of getting to Berlin to give my talk. I phoned Adrian at our Cyberterrorism HQ. He found a flight from Cologne Bonn airport to Berlin that would get me there on time.

I raced to the taxi rank, running with my back bowed horizontally under the luggage. An inexplicable 60 Euro taxi fare (it didn’t seem far) and I was at the German Wings counter being ripped off an amazing 470 euros for a one hour budget flight. That mountain of bags was largely to blame again. So half way through day 1 I was already 530 Euros over budget.

I was still fuming on the plane, made worse by being charged 5.70 euros for a cola after paying so much for the ticket. The seat was a strip of curved plastic with a thin bit of nylon rug glued on top. It was uncomfortable enough to keep me awake to hear the captain announce “Berlin airport has been closed. We could circle here but we shall instead land at Dresden due to our fuel situation”.

“Due to our fuel situation” are not words you ever want to hear from the captain of your plane. But we made it to Dresden, where we sat on the tarmac. The day had taken on an entirely nightmarish quality. It seemed astonishing that the Berlin rail line had been closed and then, after a hectic dash to the airport, the plane had been diverted in mid-air. In a lifetime of flying I had never been on a diverted plane before.

After an hour on that uncomfortable seat waiting on the tarmac at Dresden, I finally managed to doze off a bit. I was awakened by the captain saying that Berlin Airport was closed by an invasion of climate activists. I was a little cheered by this, but the layers of irony were extraordinary. I was doing the whole trip by rail in order to keep down the carbon footprint of this Assange campaigning. The trains had then failed me and I was forced to take to the air anyway. Only to be thwarted by climate activists.

Musing ruefully on the unfairness of life, I managed to doze off again. I must have been exhausted because I was next awakened by our touching down at Berlin Airport some hours later.

Berlin is a large airport and we seemed to be at the furthest possible gate. The dream-like quality of what had become a surreal day was enhanced by the night-time lighting of what was an eerily empty airport – I assume we were the first plane in on re-opening. Long moving walkways stretched out into the distance towards blocks of electronic glass doors across the corridor, which were vividly lit with what seemed to be square shafts of a glaring white light, while all else was pretty dark.

You walked through those doors which snapped open before you with a surprising speed and force, and immediately mounted onto another identical moving walkway that stretched out towards another set of light portals in the distance. Then you went through the same experience again, and again. The whole thing had taken on this dreamlike quality in which my mind had disengaged from the strange world it was being carried through. I was in a trance-like state I find very difficult to explain.

It ended after eight walkways and sets of bright doors, then there was a long actual walk until the luggage carousel. The disruption had of course thrown the airport’s baggage system completely, so there was now another long wait amidst a lot of angst and shouting. Finally I was in to a taxi – also 60 Euros despite seeming about three times as far as the Cologne drive – and straight to the venue for my first talk.

I arrived at the venue and through to the back of the stage area at precisely the second Stella walked on to the stage. I could join her in the walk literally without breaking stride. That seamless quality added to the feeling that somehow this was all not really happening.

Am 24.11 in #Berlin, bei der Vorstellung von #Ithaka und anschließender Diskussion mit @Stella_Assange und @CraigMurrayOrg

Thank you for you time! pic.twitter.com/nVBjywkwdl

— Veronika (@Veronik00590743) November 28, 2022

Stella spoke brilliantly, outlining Julian’s achievement in making real source material available to citizens so they could make up their own mind, rather than receiving only that information filtered by corporate and state media organisations that pointed you in the direction they wished. Wikileaks was therefore an alternative model to corporate media that threatened their power. Wikileaks gave you the material to form your ideas, it did not tell you how to think. This explained the sometime reluctance of the corporate media fully to engage in defending Julian, despite the fact that the use of the Espionage Act against a journalist and publisher was plainly also a threat to the mainstream.

I did not speak well. Partly for obvious reasons, and partly because the very good moderator unexpectedly (to me) asked me questions about my own whistleblowing rather than about Julian. I explained my history of exposing torture and extraordinary rendition, and was enthusiastically applauded, but it wasn’t really why I was there.

I did make the point that in any other case, the fact that the state requesting extradition had spied on the legal meetings of Julian and his counsel, and had stolen his legal papers after he was removed from the Embassy, would in itself be sufficient to have the case dismissed, even without my recounting the dozens of other glaring legal inconsistencies in the extradition hearings.

Stella said it had become plain there was no genuine legal process here. This was a political process not a legal one, and the answer was political, including by popular action.

There was an excellent audience, mostly very committed people. I had a quick – and excellent – beer with several of them afterwards.

I learnt one fascinating thing from a trade union activist. The Cologne to Berlin line had been closed for a couple of weeks after a major incident. That is why there were almost no people waiting for the train. The extraordinary thing was the trains were still showing on all the departure boards and I had been able to make a seat reservation the day before travelling. The route had never been a possibility.

This had been supposed to be an easy day of travel – my itinerary was about to get much more complicated. I had also intended to blog this as a same day diary, and here we are five days late. I hope to catch up over the next couple of days, when the reason why the delay (for which I apologise) will become clear.

————————————————-

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

The post Trains (Mostly), Planes and Automobiles appeared first on Craig Murray.

Electronic Grief

My laptop was stolen from me on the Vienna to Frankfurt train on Saturday.

I had been working on a blog article on the train. Approaching Frankfurt I packed up ready to get off, and went to the loo. When I returned the laptop had vanished from the laptop bag. The charger was still there and so was about 500 euros in cash.

I am on a speaking tour around Germany for the campaign to free Julian Assange. Yes, I am thinking the same as you about who would want a battered and dirty six year old laptop with a cracked case and very little retail value, and not the money.

That laptop had literally been all round the world with me and I think for six years had never left my side except when I was in jail.

My life was on it. Have spent 24 hours cancelling everything and now have to spend a week recovering anything.

It was a monster 17 inch screen because of my awful eyesight and a replacement of the same capacity will probably weigh about a quarter of the kilos. But I feel the absence of the weight on my shoulder like the loss of a limb.

For a while look out for fake communications of any kind from me. This is not one!

The post Electronic Grief appeared first on Craig Murray.

Scotland in Chains

I live in the capital of my country. I had to travel hundreds of miles to the capital of a foreign country to hear a bunch of unionist judges, the majority from a foreign country, declare that my country has no right to existence, indeed my country only exists at all in so far as it was incorporated by a foreign parliament in the Scotland Act of 1998.

It was cold and wet, walking to the Supremes Court his morning from Albert Embankment. Londoners were hurrying to their jobs with heads bowed, collars up and gloved hands clutching umbrellas against a driving rain. It was mundane. There was no sense of excitement and no indication anything in particular was happening at the Supreme Court. Arriving at 9am there was no queue, and I was the third person into the courtroom.

The former Middlesex Crown Court is one of the heaviest and most plodding examples of Victorian Gothic architecture in existence. It looks like a set from a 1930s Errol Flynn film of Robin Hood. Courtroom Number One of what is now the Supreme Court has a mock medieval vaulted ceiling, designed to echo that of the ancient Westminster Hall across the square (which is one of the architectural marvels of the world). But the Victorian version fails to soar like the medieval one. It is massive and clumpy and the bosses are like vast excretions of pointless wood. Rather than marvel at its lightness, we fear it will fall on our head.

In Westminster Hall, a pain-racked William Wallace stood his trial before a foreign authority he did not acknowledge, but which insisted it ruled him and had the right to condemn him to death. That same foreign authority was about to come down on our heads again. 700 years later not much has changed; the venue had just shifted three hundred metres.

Inherent in the judgment of the Supreme Court is the proposition, incredibly advanced by Scotland’s Lord Advocate, that Scotland effectively ceased to exist as a nation in 1707 and the Scottish legal principle of the sovereignty of the people was completely replaced by the English legal principle of the sovereignty of the Crown in parliament. Thus Scotland has no authority, power or recourse, in any situation, beyond what is handed down to it by Westminster.

That is in no sense an exaggeration. It is what the ruling is.

It is fair to say – and I published this at the time, long before the judgment – that Scotland’s unionist Lord Advocate got precisely the result her entire presentation of the case was designed to achieve. She did not turn up in court, doubtless having been sent the judgment in advance and perhaps not wishing to be seen to smirk in public.

The Court itself was extraordinarily subdued on an occasion that will be written into every history of the Scottish nation. The public gallery was not crowded, and mostly filled by law students with zero interest in the outcome wither way, turning up as part of some assignment. There were a few gloating members of the state and corporate media. I was there with an old friend from Sinn Fein.

A few of the very best of Scotland’s MPs turned up – Angus Brendan McNeill, Douglas Chapman, Tommy Sheridan, Neale Hanvey, John McNally and Anne McLaughlin (apologies to any I missed). There was a remarkably high correlation between MPs who bothered to turn up to the case, and MP’s willing to be seen to be friends of Craig Murray in public, which I think is not coincidental. Or to put in another way, there was no sign of the troughers who don’t care about Independence beyond the effectiveness of the slogan in getting them elected.

I shall do a proper analysis of the judgment later. It was notable that Reed – whose Scottish accent had once again become almost entirely imperceptible – addressed the international law aspects of the case which had been wrongly and totally omitted by Lord Advocate Bain, but submitted separately on behalf of the SNP. Reed relied heavily on the completely outdated Quebec judgment of the Federal Court in Canada – which is of course apposite because it is a parallel instance of the colonial authority denying democracy. He also very selectively misrepresented the Kosovo Opinion of the ICJ.

So Reed ended up in a situation where this was quite literally the argument of the court.

Scotland is not a colony, Scotland has meaningful access to the political process. No, Scotland certainly does not have the right to hold a referendum.

That he cannot see the glaring contradiction in this is a sign of the effectiveness of Unionist blinkers.

This outcome is precisely what Nicola Sturgeon and her Lord Advocate aimed for. She can now claim she tried to hold an Independence referendum and was blocked, when she plainly never had the slightest intention of holding the referendum in the first place.

We now come to what is known in Scottish politics as “Plan B” – a plebiscite election, which she announced would follow if a referendum is blocked.

A plebiscite election on Independence can only mean an election which, if won by the SNP, will be a mandate to declare Independence. Plebiscite is virtually a synonym of referendum. A “plebiscite election” cannot be an election which will lead simply to a renewed request for permission from Westminster to hold a referendum. A “plebiscite election” is the referendum.

I am pretty confident we will see Surgeon again squirm towards the off ramp and simply try to turn the “plebiscite election” into a demand that we re-elect the do-nothing troughers for a further five years with a new “mandate”. I do believe this ploy is now wearing thin.

We now know Westminster will not grant Independence; we have to take it. We have to take it whatever UK law or the London Supreme Court says. We have to assert the Sovereignty of the Scottish People as an authority that stands, in Scotland, ineffably higher than any parliament in a foreign land.

Independence must be declared in Scotland by Scotland’s people, preferably through Scotland’s government.

Any politician who still argues we must be constrained by Westminster law and bow our heads to London diktats is a unionist. Please see that.

————————————————-

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

The post Scotland in Chains appeared first on Craig Murray.

Your Man in Saughton Jail Part 3

The Scottish Parliament is under the untrue impression that Scottish prisons run under the fairly liberal Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules 2011 laid before parliament by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill MP on 14 September 2011. In fact the Scottish Prisons Service totally ignores them and is absolutely a law unto itself.

I intend to prove this to you. Let me start with a very basic rule: the availability of the rules to prisoners. This is plainly set out in the rules themselves.

This was specifically continued in the covid update:

This law – and it is a law – is deliberately ignored by the prison authorities. On entering the prison, I was asked to wear prison uniform. I had been told by my lawyers that civil and remand prisoners have the right to wear their own clothing. I therefore asked to see the prison rules.

I was not shown the prison rules. First I was told they were held on a different level and arrangements would have to be made. Then several days later I was told they were in the prison library but the library was closed because of covid. Then some weeks later I was told they were unavailable to prisoners.

Prisoners have no internet access, but I had asked my lawyers to send me a copy of the Rules and they eventually arrived, including many documents of amendments. I then took up the matter of wearing my own clothing. This is very important because it affected a third of the prisoners in Saughton, who were on remand – “untried” in official parlance.

It also mattered to me because it was upsetting for my family when visiting to see me in prison clothing. Avoiding This indignity is precisely why civil and untried prisoners – who are entitled to the presumption of innocence – have for centuries been entitled to their own clothing.

Continuation of that centuries old tradition, except in unusual circumstances, is undoubtedly what the Scottish Parliament believed was being laid before them here:

But the Scottish Prisons Service completely ignores the right, established here in law, for civil and untried prisoners to wear their own clothing, claiming that it only applies inside the prison cell (which appears nowhere in the legislation).

I actually took this issue through the complaints process in the prison, to a prison tribunal of three prison officers held on 30 August 2021, the result of which was the tribunal claimed that under para 32 (4) the Governor had the right to instruct civil and remand prisoners to wear prison clothing for the security and management of the prison.

I pointed out that those provisions are clearly meant to apply to any problematic qualities of the particular clothing of an individual prisoner. 32 (4) could not be intended to abolish the entire right that it qualified. 32 (5) plainly reserved to Scottish ministers the power to make any more general cancellation of the right for whole classes of the prison population.

No Scottish minister has ever canceled the right of civil and remand prisoners to wear their own clothes. The Scottish Prisons Service has simply done it contrary to the law laid before Parliament.

This meant nothing to the prison staff forming the tribunal. They did not, at the tribunal, have a copy of the The Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules 2011 available to them either. What they were going by was Scottish Prison Service memos which totally ignore the Rules – which is to say, totally ignore the law.

Rights which parliament believes to have been granted to prisoners are again and again severely circumscribed by the Scottish Prison Service.

The right to have books is circumscribed in Saughton jail by a rule that prisoners may only have books purchased and sent direct from Blackwell’s in Oxford. “Other means of amusement” is circumscribed to a very small list of articles but only if they are purchased through the prison, at a much higher price than commercially.

I bought from the jail an Akai radio for the eye-watering price of £34.95. It took seven weeks to arrive. You can buy a Playstation from the jail, or a choice of just three jigsaws, but you cannot buy a chess set. When you are locked in your cell for 23 hours a day, these things are very important.

The right to correspondence in para 54 of the the prison rules is circumscribed by strict arbitary limitations set by the prison governor on the number of stamps you may purchase. The right to use the telephone at para 62 is circumscribed by the stipulation that you may only call a list of phone numbers you must register in advance. So if you need unexpectedly to talk to your children’s school or to the taxman, for example, you cannot do it.

In short, the prisoners’ rights contained in the law are systematically reduced, again and again and again, by the Scottish Prison Service. Some times this is probably legal, using provisions related to security in the prison rules, at other times it appears simply illegal, as in denying the right for civil and remand prisoners to wear their own clothing.

What is plain is that the Scottish Prison Service cares not one jot for the legal framework under which it is supposed to operate, either in letter or in spirit.

How has this situation arisen? Well, the most important factor is complete neglect by ministers and a lack of any political control over the Scottish Prisons Service.

Following the excellent MacAskill, who established the legislation, Scotland has had two total duds as Justice Minister – firstly Humza Yusuf, who is lazy and feckless, and then Keith Brown, who is lazy and stupid. The SPS has therefore been able to do what it likes.

The second problem is that there is nobody to stand up for the rights of prisoners. As I explain in the first two parts of my prison memoir, the large majority of the prison population have come from lives of deprivation, institutionalisation and addiction. They are not conscious of their rights.

Most prisoners are dependent on legal aid for their legal representation – which is often peremptory at best as the entire system is straining to breaking point. There is no legal aid available for bringing cases on prison conditions. All the actors – prisoners, their lawyers and prison staff – are imbued by the same sense of hopelessness and absolute cynicism.

Those managing the prison have, on a day to day basis, two overriding priorities to which everything else is subordinated. The first is reducing the flow of drugs into the jail. The second is keeping different classes of prisoners separate.

Therefore prisoners’ access to stamps – and thus their ability to communicate with their friends and family – is limited because allegedly stamps are used as currency inside prison to buy drugs. Access to books is limited because the pages of books can be impregnated with drugs. For the same reason prisoners are not permitted photographs of their families, which is particularly cruel.

The extraordinary thing is that the banning of anything and everything in the aim of stopping the flow of drugs has no effect whatsoever. Drugs in prison are available with a freedom you cannot believe. Not one day passed of my time in prison when I did not witness druges passing between prisoners.

Trying to stop the stuff getting in is plainly hopeless. A much more sensible approach would be to look at why people whose basic problem is addiction from the majority of prisoners, when prison does absolutely nothing to cure addiction or change the

Remand prisoners are not allowed to wear their own clothing because the prison’s priority is the distinction of different classes of prisoners. Personally I have my doubts about a system of which the practical effect is to put sexual offenders in maroon so other prisoners know who to kill, but there you are.

The Scottish Prisons Service is not driving a coach and horses through the Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules 2011 legislation out of gratuitous cruelty. It is doing so as it views that as the best way to fulfil its operational plan, and because nobody seems to care enough about prisoners to note that it is illegal.

So we have a massive dichotomy between what the law says about the governance of Scotland’s prisons, and what actually happens.

I should make plain that I did not suffer, at any stage, from any cruelty or unpleasantness from prison officers (bar one brief and minor incident). I was personally treated with kindness and courtesy, and in view of my status as a civil prisoner a number of Saughton’s practices, for example on books, were altered for me to be more in line with the actual law.

I am writing from concern for those now in jail, and for the highly unsatisfactory situation where the administration of the punitive force of the state is itself carried out illegally.

The post Your Man in Saughton Jail Part 3 appeared first on Craig Murray.

FTX

This is what I think of as a signpost article – it points you to something the mainstream media is deliberately not giving the prominence it needs, but I have no personal expertise or inside knowledge to give you. I am just giving you a start to get going. Several readers will have a much better understanding than I, and I encourage you to give your thoughts in comments below.

It is also worth noting that only the immediate improvement to freedom of speech on Twitter by Elon Musk has brought this to my attention. Several sources – particularly Citizens for Legitimate Government – have suddenly appeared in my feed again after being entirely suppressed.

My own tweets are, for now, less suppressed – my own family have been receiving notifications from me after they were stopped for over a year. I am not in general a fan of billionaires like Musk, and I do not know where Twitter will settle, but there is undoubted initial improvement.

The FTX story seems truly remarkable. From being founded only in 2017 it rose to be a “partner organisation” of the World Economic Forum and the second largest donor to Biden and the Democrat’s mid-term election campaign. It has now gone completely bust, taking every penny of its depositors money with it.

That is some trajectory.

The World Economic Forum has deleted its FTX page, but the Wayback machine has it:

I suppose it is inevitable that dodgy chancers would create derivatives markets for gambling on crypto, but I confess I had not given the matter much thought. It goes without saying that in those five years the founder of FTX had managed to take a huge personal fortune out of the company before it went bust.

FTX was a one man company belonging to Sam Bankman-Fried. The board consisted of him, an employee and the company lawyer. Over US$20 billion of investors’ funds from FTX were funneled to a fund management company, Alameda Research, also owned by Sam Bankman-Fried.

$37 million was donated by Bankman-Fried to the Democrats for the 2022 elections. Every penny of that originated with duped FTX investors. That is in addition to the $5 million given to the Biden 2020 campaign. FTX, of course, crashed instantly after those mid-term elections, which is interesting timing.

The BBC and the Guardian were constantly bombarding us with the term “democracy denier” in their coverage of the US elections, strangely not in reference to Hillary’s ludicrous claims that Russian interference was the cause of her loss in 2016.

I view as a joke any notion that the USA is a democracy. Democracy is about giving citizens a choice of political direction. The 2022 elections saw a simply incredible campaign spend of US$ 9.7 billion. Yes, nearly ten billion dollars. This is not democracy, it is a huge exercise in corporate control from which the ordinary citizen is frozen out.

Despite an aggressive tribalism which has stalemated the political system for decades, the difference in policy platform between Democrats and Republicans is highly marginal, with no alternative on offer to rampant and uninhibited commercial exploitation of the population by the super-wealthy.

The Democrats are marginally more keen on attacking other countries; the Republicans are marginally more against measures to curb carbon emissions. Vaunted differences on immigration and welfare turn out to be very small indeed, with very little changing when the White House does.

American elections are simply about the super rich funneling in vast donations, expecting to benefit when their team gets its nose in the trough, or often donating to both sides to benefit either way.

I am not sure what the connection to democracy is supposed to be.

One simple fact illustrates the true nature of the bribery fest. By far the majority of the funds channeled through Political Action Committees (PACs) are given to incumbents who face no serious threat to re-election anyway. The PAC’s are interested in bribing those in power, not changing those in power. They are simply lobby groups with an opportunity for legal bribery. To illustrate that, the largest donating PACs are:

National Assn of Realtors
National Beer Wholesalers Assn
American Israel Public Affairs Cmte
Credit Union National Assn
Blue Cross/Blue Shield
American Crystal Sugar

It is worth noting that Bankman-Fried donated ten times as much as the largest PAC donation. This brought access – he and his brother had meetings inside the White House on 7 March, 22 April and 12 May.

It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that FTX was involved in Ukraine, offering to exchange cryptocurrency for fiat and send it to Ukraine in an official partnership with the Ukrainian government. This from their press release

Aid For Ukraine is cooperating with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX which converts crypto funds received into fiat and sends the donations to the National Bank of Ukraine. This marks the first-ever instance of a cryptocurrency exchange directly cooperating with a public financial entity to provide a conduit for crypto donations. Earlier this month, FTX already converted $1 million worth of SOL and transferred it to the National Bank of Ukraine.

The collapse of the Bankman Fried scam was allegedly caused by hackers stealing what should have been a comparatively small portion of the assets of FTX, had they not been hived off elsewhere. Doubtless we will shortly hear from state salaried conspiracy theorists that this was Russia/Guccifer/an ISP address traced by Bellingcat to inside the Kremlin.

What we really have here is an Allen Stanford for 2022, with added political connections.

We would do well to heed the advice of crypto developer Nikolai Mushegian, who had as his Twitter profile: “Larpers who self-style as CEOs or CTOs or VCs are a bigger problem than the establishment. They can’t build anything and will sell you out in 2 seconds.”

His final tweet was posted on 28 October:

The next day he drowned in the sea off a beach in Puerto Rico, where he lived. He was fully clothed including a jacket. The police are not treating it as homicide so presumably their theory is suicide by wading out to sea.

States of course have a massive incentive to destroy non fiat currencies, or convert them into a new category of regulation. I am interested in the current discussion on smart state digital currencies where the state can track, control and block any transaction and know in real time exactly where each citizen or entity is spending or keeping every penny.

It occurs to me this is the wrong way round. The state belongs to its citizens, not the citizens to the state. We should be able to track online every single penny of public money in real time and see how it is spent. Imagine being able to follow every penny of the billions the Tories spent on fraudulent PPE contracts, for example.

The only people whose personal currency should be able to be tracked are those who hold, or have held, positions of power in the state. Their wealth and dealings should be available in great detail to public view. As for the rest of us, our money is ours and we are entitled to privacy.

————————————————-

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

Recurring Donations3 Pounds : £3.00 GBP – monthly5 Pounds : £5.00 GBP – monthly10 Pounds : £10.00 GBP – monthly15 Pounds : £15.00 GBP – monthly20 Pounds : £20.00 GBP – monthly30 Pounds : £30.00 GBP – monthly50 Pounds : £50.00 GBP – monthly70 Pounds : £70.00 GBP – monthly100 Pounds : £100.00 GBP – monthly

 

Paypal address for one-off donations: craigmurray1710@btinternet.com

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Subscriptions are still preferred to donations as I can’t run the blog without some certainty of future income, but I understand why some people prefer not to commit to that.

 

The post FTX appeared first on Craig Murray.