FCO Finally Admits To Receiving Intelligence From Torture

March 28th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Craig Murray

This is the most important blog post I have ever made. I would be grateful if you could do everything in your power to disseminate a link to anyone you know who has the remotest interest in human rights – or should have. This blog will be silent for a few days now.

Tucked away at Page 15 of its annual Human Rights report, the FCO has finally made a public admission of its use of intelligence from torture. Despite the Orwellian doublespeak about “unreserved condemnation of torture”, this is the clearest statement the government has ever made that it, as a policy, employs intelligence from torture.

Read the rest.

Via D-Notice

Willing instruments of power

March 13th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Hagley Road to Ladywood

The Sun likes to sneer at “council estate parents” who stick up for their kids even after they’ve been convicted of heinous crimes. Nothing can get those mums and dads to disown or condemn their criminal children, not even in the face of evidence. Whether it’s manslaughter, drug dealing, murder or setting fire to a bin, “he’s my son and he could never have done such a thing”, and cue the reports of the offenders’ families laughing in court or pulling faces at the victims’ relatives.

But if you just look at it, the Sun and the Daily Mail perpetrate this sub-human pattern in a much grander scale. The way they lashed out at the anti-Iraq war protesters in Luton (who accused British soldiers of brutality as well as of illegally invading another country) was textbook.

Read the rest

Ensuring the right result

March 12th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Timothy Garton Ash (CiF) [my emphasis]…

So, here’s the charge sheet in shorthand summary: American-authorised torture; British complicity; an American-British attempt to withhold evidence; and now the predictable temptation to cover up.

Last October, all the papers from the court hearings, open and closed, were given by the home secretary to the attorney general. If she thinks there might be a case for criminal prosecution against Witness B, or anyone else, she must either start a criminal investigation herself or hand it over to the director of public prosecutions. More than four months later, nothing has happened. Why? Well, perhaps she has just been busy. But there remains, in the British system, this latent conflict of interest which the high court summarises thus: “the Attorney General is a Minister of the Crown and thus a member of the Executive branch of the state whose officials are alleged to have facilitated cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture“.

A comment of Justins’ applies equally well here, I think…

They’re going to get away with this, aren’t they?

Get over it

February 26th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Who is this twat Richard Beeston? Should I know him from anywhere?

He sound like a bit of a git to me. Get this

Of all the parochial, navel-gazing, non-issues surrounding the Iraq war, the endless debate about the lead-up to it has wasted more time and energy than any other.

Some key participants are out of power and writing their memoirs (George Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder). Some have died (Saddam Hussein, Robin Cook). The only man left standing is the improbable figure of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister. Dozens of books have been written and films made on the subject. At least one public inquiry has been held. It is tempting to think that anyone left in any doubt about what transpired is not really trying very hard. Jack Straw’s decision to keep pre-invasion Cabinet minutes secret is of little consequence to anyone outside Westminster. All this happened six years ago. Get over it.

‘Get over it’?

What has happened since the invasion, the way troops have been equiped, the planning of the whole post invasion thing, the, basically, slaughter of Iraqi civlians and the behaviour of the troops, when under orders and when using their own initiative, does need debating and investigating. I don’t deny that at all.

But to dismiss the whole reason why we’re there with a ‘get over it’ when the architects of the illegal invasion have not been, at least, brought to trial is, just, well, shit. He should be ashamed of himself.

Just because the key warmongers are out of power, doesn’t mean they can’t be tried.

I do not have time to look up this turds views on the war during the build up, but it’s fairly obvious that he was in favour of it and now instead of admitting he was wrong or anything like that, he just wants to sweep it under the carpet.

Just to dismiss the reasons for the war are a smack in the mouth for everyone.

Dr David Kelly. British soldiers that have died or been injured, the thousands of Iraqis that have died needlesly (pdf), and to a lesser extent the country as a whole in our reputation.

To put this chicken-shits argument in a way that is easily understood, what he is saying is, if the police doesn’t catch a rapist in 6 years, or the victim cannot report it in that time for whatever reason then, tough. Get over it.

“Preintroduction” to war

February 1st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

antiwar.com:

After ordering a cameraman to turn off his camera, Israeli Ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem engaged in a very frank discussion about the recent Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, calling it “a preintroduction” to an attack on Iran that Israel apparently expects within the year.

Before the camera was turned off, Ambassador Rotem said “the best thing to do is to have a very open dialogue if there are no reporters or journalists here,” adding “I am far more reserved in the way I am saying my things (on camera).” Unbeknownst to him however Sarah Cummings, a reporter for Australia’s Seven News service, was actually in attendance at the meeting after having been “accidentally” invited.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran, and while its officials have repeatedly attempted to tie the Iranian government to its war on the Gaza Strip this is the first time one of their officials has publicly (if inadvertently so) suggested that the attack on the strip was a warm-up to its long talked about attack on Iran.

Via

Washed out

January 29th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

BBC:

Iraq will not renew the licence of US security firm Blackwater, which was involved in an 2007 incident in which at least 14 civilians were killed.

Five former Blackwater guards have gone on trial in the United States over the killings in Baghdad.

They have pleaded not guilty to killing 14 Iraqi civilians and wounding 18 others by gunfire and grenades.

A US embassy official confirmed it had received the Iraqi decision, and said US officials were working with the Iraqi government and its contractors to address the “implications of this decision”.

Morality spots

January 25th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Mark Steel, from 9th January:

Amidst the coverage at the start of the year of all the bombing and lying and murdering and justifying and slaughtering, there was a splendid moment on Wednesday morning on Radio 4’s Today programme. The genetics expert, Professor Steven Rose, was introduced to talk about some new discovery that means we can identify the bit of the brain that deals with morality, which have been called ‘morality spots’. “How can we know about these spots?” he was asked. And with posh English academic authority he said, “Well – we could study the brains of the Israeli cabinet to see if they had no such morality spots whatsoever.”

heh.

Telling it like it is

January 23rd, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Adbusters:

On February 29 last year the BBC’s website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a ‘holocaust’ on Gaza. Headlined “Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust,’” the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours. Before the day was over, the headline would read “Gaza militants ‘risking disaster.’” (The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedalling Vilnai’s comments). An Israeli threatening ‘holocaust’ may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state’s criminal behaviour. With the ‘holocaust’ reference redacted, the new headline shifted culpability neatly into the hands of ‘Gaza militants’ instead.

One could argue that the BBC’s radical alteration of the story reflects its susceptibility to the kind of inordinate pressure for which the Israel lobby’s well-oiled flak machine is notorious. But, as I will show in subsequent examples, this story is exceptional only insofar as it reported accurately in the first place something that could bear negatively on Israel’s image. The norm is reflexive self-censorship. To establish evidence of the BBC’s journalistic malpractice one often has to do no more than pick a random sample of news related to the Israel-Palestine conflict currently on its website. In a time of conflict BBC’s coverage invariably tends to the Israeli perspective, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the semantics and framing of its reportage. More so than the quantitative bias – which was meticulously established by the Glasgow University Media Group in their study Bad News from Israel – it is the qualitative tilt that obscures the reality of the situation. This is often achieved by engendering a false parity by stretching the notion of journalistic balance to encompass power, culpability and legitimacy as well. The present conflict is no exception.

Read the rest

Related: Beau Bo D’Or – The BBC reinforces the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza

Stop the War Coalition attacked

January 11th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

From an email newsletter received approx 10am today:

Stop the War Coalition
Temporary email address
stopwaruk@gmail.com

STOP THE WAR WEBSITE AND EMAIL ATTACKED

Stop the war has suffered a serious attack on its internet
site, which has been hacked, we assume by supporters of
Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Our website is down and our usual
email address not functioning.

We have set up a temporary email address for you to contact
Stop the War: stopwaruk@gmail.com

We expect to restore normal service soon.

Abstention

January 9th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Parts of the US right likes abstaining, whether sex or international politics, so this should come as no surprise, especially with the USs’ record:

The Guardian

The UN last night passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the 13-day conflict in Gaza, breaking a deadlock in the international community’s response to the crisis that risked exposing the UN to ridicule .

The vote was passed by 14 votes to nil, though the US, represented by secretary of state Condolleeza Rice, abstained. It came after three days of intense Arab pressure at the UN’s headquarters in New York and in the face of stiff Israeli opposition.

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