RT: Does MI5 Let Its Informants Commit Crimes?

This is another report from RT, which I don’t recall seeing reported in the British lamestream media. In this video put up on YouTube on 5th October 2018, the broadcaster’s reporter, Anastasia Churkina, discusses a court case being brought to a tribunal by four human rights groups, including Privacy International and Reprieve. They allege that MI5 has a policy of allowing its informants take part in serious crimes, such as murder, torture, sexual assault or other serious criminality, if it is in the public interest, according to their QC, Ben Jaffey.

This policy is supposed to have gone on for three decades, in various guises and under various prime ministers. Amongst the evidence is a heavily redacted note, and a letter from David Cameron to a judge involved in trying these cases, telling him that it has been government policy. It also tells him that such oversight does not provide endorsement of the legality of the policy, and that he would not be required to provide a view on whether any one particular case should be referred for prosecution.

This won’t surprise anyone, who’s read Lobster. The magazine, edited by Robin Ramsay, and now online, was set up to publicise and discuss real conspiracies by the western intelligence agencies to subvert the usual political processes. This has meant the overthrow of foreign governments that America and its allies find inconvenient or which pose a threat to American corporate or political interests. Which meant the CIA organizing coups to overthrow democratically elected left-wing regimes in South America, like Chile and Guatemala, and Britain and America collaborating in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran.

It has also meant the monitoring and smearing of left-wing activists and political opponents in America and Britain. Domestically, there is much evidence that MI5 and the SIS collaborated with Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, operating as death squads against leading Republicans. Over on this side of Irish Sea, there is a lot of evidence very strongly suggesting that MI5 were behind the 1970s smears against Harold Wilson that he was a KGB spy. There have also been serious questions about the deaths of Hilda Murrell and Blair Peach. I don’t doubt that the groups bringing this case are absolutely right.

Regarding the two groups named, Privacy International was launched in the 1990s to stop Britain becoming a surveillance state, in which the government uses electronic means to gather information on its citizens. These include the biometric ID cards and the plans for an ‘electronic bourse’ – basically, forms of electronic payment by card. The government has been keen to promote this scheme as it means that they can track how citizens spend their money.

Reprieve, from what I gather, is an organize that campaigns against the death penalty around the world. It has launched internet petitions calling on the government to intervene in the case of Britons imprisoned abroad and facing the death penalty, as well as direct appeals to the foreign governments involved. It’s kind of like Amnesty International.

I am really not surprised that RT seems to have been the only broadcaster to carry this story, unless I’m mistaken. Fleet Street really wouldn’t like to report on it, because it has been alleged that some of the right-wing press have connections to the intelligence agencies and have served as conduits for their propaganda. Like the Sunday Times when it was edited by Andrew Neil.

Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tory Self-Delusions

I found this little gem in the ‘Pseud’s Corner’ column of an old copy of Private Eye. Amid the usual, very pseudish remarks from football pundits and cookery writers comparing that last goal by Arsenal to Julius Caesar crossing the Tiber, or literary types extolling the virtues of their last excursion around the globe, where they took part in the ancient tribal ceremonies of primal peoples, was a truly astounding quote from the Young Master. This is, of course, the current darling of the Tory party, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who declared.

“I am a man of the people. Vox populi, vox dei!”

This was in response to Andrew Neil questioning him about the influence of public schools on British political life.

Rees-Mogg probably does see himself as ‘man of the people’. He’s in a party, which considers itself the natural party of government. Decades ago, the Tory ideologue, Trevor Oakeshott, tried to justify the overpowering influence of the middle classes by saying they were the modern equivalent of the barons who stood up to King John, in providing a bulwark against the power of the state. True in some case, but very wrong when the middle classes are in power, and the state functions as their servant.

Rees-Mogg has never, ever, remotely been a man of the people. He’s an aristo toff, who has made his money from investment banking. He holds deeply reactionary views on abortion and homosexuality, which are very much out of touch with those of the genuinely liberal middle and lower classes. And he has always represented the aristocracy and the rich against the poor, the sick, and the disabled. He began his political career in Scotland trying to folks of a declining fishing community that what this country really needed was to keep an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. In parliament, he has continued to promote the interests of the rich by demanding greater subsidies and tax cuts for them. For the poor, he has done nothing except demand greater tax increases on them, to subsidise the already very wealthy to whom he wants to give these tax cuts, and voted to cut welfare services and state funding for vital services. No doubt he genuinely believes all that Thatcherite bilge about making life as tough as possible for the poor in order to encourage them to work harder and do well for themselves.

Personally, he comes across as quiet-spoken, gentlemanly and polite. But he is not a man of the people. He hates them with a passion, but clearly thinks of himself as their champion and saviour against the dreaded welfare state.

Let’s prove him wrong and throw him out of parliament!

Chunky Mark on the Ex-MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove and the Resignation of Ian McNicol

Here’s another great piece from Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver, which he posted yesterday. He comments on the remarks in the Torygraph from the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove. Dearlove was speaking about Jeremy Corbyn’s meeting with a Czech spy, and declared that the Labour leader ‘has questions to answer’. This is part of the continuing attempt to create a ‘Red Scare’ about the Labour party and its leader, comparable to the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ that lost Labour an election in the 1920. The Zinoviev letter was an MI5 forgery, and this is a complete non-story and Tory libel.

Mike’s pointed out that the spy in question was a diplomat. Corbyn met him, just as he met other diplomats and no secrets were passed on. The Czechs, and the academic in charge of their Secret Services library has said they have categorically no evidence that Corbyn ever worked for them, or passed on any secrets at all. And in the week Andrew Neill, who is the former editor of the Sunday Times and the Economist, told his viewers precisely what a load of rubbish it this story is on the Daily Politics.

Corbyn is threatening to sue for libel. Gavin Williamson, the Tory apparatchik who repeated in a Tweet, is trying to backtrack without giving Corbyn the apology or money to charity that he demanded.

But the bug-eyed slander-merchants of the Torygraph are still carrying on with it.

Chunky Mark makes the point that Dearlove himself is hardly reliable, because he was involved in the concoction of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ that served to bring us into Blair’s illegal and murderous war in Iraq. And he’s repeating the libel that Corbyn handed secrets over to a Commie spy, simply because he hates and fears him.

He also comments on the resignation of Ian McNicol, the Labour Party chief, who presided over the massively unjust suspension and expulsion of tens of thousands of Labour members, because they had the audacity to vote for Corbyn rather than endorse the preferred Blairite Thatcherite entryists. Chunky Mark says that we shouldn’t celebrate his departure, because this is a man who poured his life and blood into the Labour party. Before going on to say precisely why we should. One of those he expelled was a trade unionist. She committed the terrible offence of saying that she ‘f***ing loved Dave Grohl’ in a post she put up about the Foo Fighters. This apparently brought her union and the Labour party into disrespect. Actually, considering the fruity language on the internet, I’m surprised anyone even noticed, let along took offence.

So McNicol’s walked, and hopefully we’ll get a better, fairer person in to do his job. Hopefully.

The redoubtable Tony Greenstein, anti-racist, anti-Fascist and very definitely not an anti-Semite, put up a post yesterday commenting on McNicol’s departure, with the restrained title ‘Rejoice – The Witch is Dead – Crooked McNicol Rides No More’. He gives further information on McNicol’s resignation. Apparently he was given his marching orders on Tuesday. Greenstein also points out that this is just the beginning of making the Labour party’s bureaucracy more just.

But this does give up to everyone libelled, smeared and unfairly expelled, simply for their opposition to the Blairites and their wretched neoliberalism.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/rejoice-witch-is-dead-crooked-mcnicol.html

Secular Talk: Huffington Post to Call Trump Liar and Racist in All Articles on Him

This is another piece from Secular Talk about Trump. The Huffington Post has lost its patience with the wannabe Dictator of America. From now on, in every article they run on him, they’re going to call him a ‘liar’ and ‘racist’. Because that is exactly what he is.

Kulinski discusses this notion as it would apply to other political figures. He states that he has long had the idea of putting signs up indicating they’re lying for the politicians on the Sunday morning politics shows, just like they do on the American sports programmes. He states that far more right-wing politicians would be caught out than left-wing politicos, for the simply reason that the right is far and away more mendacious. He notes that contemporary journalists don’t like to do much fact-checking when it comes to politicians, but when they do, even they have to admit that the right lies more. Even Politifacts. This organisation tries to make the amount of lies told by the Democrats and Republicans as close to 50:50 as they can, but even they have to admit and show that the Republicans like more.

Here’s the video.

I like the idea, but can you imagine it being used on British television? When Cameron, IDS, George Osborne, Thicky Nikki Morgan or any of the other human refuse currently infesting government like roaches in a fleapit motel appeared on the Andrew Marr show, that sign would never be off. You’d just see something like the image below constantly flashing as each new falsehood made its assault on the credulity of the British public.

It’d be pretty much the same for Andrew Neill’s The Sunday Politics, and the Dimblebore’s Question Time. Eventually it would get too much, and they’d have it discontinued, citing cost, BBC left-wing bias or ‘cultural Marxism’. They’ve already shown how much they lie, and how they don’t really want to answer questions in case too many of the British public realise they’re lying, by being extremely unwilling to answer anything like a straight question. Like Nikki Morgan refusing to answer the simple Maths question of what 7 x 8 is, or even how many academies had to be taken back into state management last year.
Which is one reason why it won’t happen, not on the Beeb. But I wouldn’t bet on someone not trying it on Youtube. To paraphrase the tech geek in the Firefly movie, It doesn’t matter what you try to block it, the signal will always get through. Just wait and see.

Secular Talk: Saudi Arabia Seeking to Get Nuclear Weapons

This video from the atheist news site, Secular Talk, comes from 20th May 2015. And it’s really scary. It’s about a report in the Sunday Times that the Saudis are so upset about the deal between America and Iran, allowing the Iranians to develop nuclear power, that they are approaching Pakistan to acquire nukes themselves. Saudi Arabia also bankrolled much of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb programme. The fear is that this will start an arms race in the Middle East, with Turkey and Egypt also racing to acquire the wretched things. And America looks the other way, because Saudi Arabia is ‘our oil buttbuddies’.

The show’s presenter, Kyle Kulinski, states very clearly why Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is a monumentally bad idea. As an atheist, he is mostly concerned about their religious fanaticism. Iran is another fundamentalist Muslim country, but they’re actually far more liberal than the Saudis. And many of them are secular. This is true. The shahs during their modernisation programme did try to create something like a Western-style civil society away from the religious establishment, while trying to retain their religious sanction as ‘the Shadow of God on Earth’. And the ubiquity of religion under the Islamic Regime has instead put many Iranians off. A few years ago, Private Eye published a piece from Iran in their ‘Letter from …’ foreign affairs column. This piece, by an anonymous Iranian, reported the widespread dissatisfaction with the mullahs’ corruption, and that only one per cent of the population actually bothered to go to the mosque. This is in contrast with the highly religious Saudi state, whose government includes people actively funding Islamist terrorism in the form of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Kulinski believes the Saudis are far more unstable than the former Soviet Union, which was an atheist state and so didn’t believe in an afterlife. And because of this, he considers that the Soviets were much less likely to start a nuclear war. And even if the Saudis don’t start one now, we can’t be sure of what their leaders would be like in the future. Not all of the secular leaders in the Middle East were entirely sane, like Colonel Gaddafy. And apart from the Saudis, there’s President Erdogan of Turkey, who is also an Islamist and unpredictable.

Kulinski makes it clear that he thinks even America having nukes is a bad idea. But it’s even worse for a country as unpredictable as Saudi Arabia to join the nuclear club. What if their government gets overthrown, he wonders, and we’re called in to combat the new regime? In the meantime, this story has not been reported anywhere else, which is also frightening as no-one’s doing anything about it. The Republicans are worried about Iran having nukes, while Obama’s deal has actually prevented them from getting them. The real danger, if this story is to be believed is Saudi Arabia.

I actually wonder how credible the story is. Lobster accused the Sunset Times under Andrew Neill of running propaganda for MI5 and British intelligence, though gave no examples. So it might be true. Or it could simply be a secret service scare story, for whatever reason. I hope it was the latter.

Private Eye on the Right-Wing Press’ Attacks on the European Court of Human Rights after the SAS Shooting of the IRA in Gibraltar

Looking for more information yesterday on Private Eye’s account of how Thames Television lost its broadcasting license due to Thatcher’s anger at its documentary, ‘Death on the Rock’, I came across a piece in its ‘Hackwatch’ column reporting the attacks by the Right-wing press on the European Court of Human Rights for their judgement on the actions of the SAS. It ran:

‘Hackwatch: Rock Bottom Revisited

In February 1989 the Eye published Rock Bottom, a pamphlet about the SAS shooting the previous March of three IRA bombers in Gibraltar. Its main conclusions were:

1. That the terrorists’ plan to set off a bomb in Gibraltar on 8 March had been well known to intelligence officers in Britain and in Spain, who closely followed the three from Malaga to Gibraltar and never once lost sight of them.

2. The Det Chief Inspector Joseph Ullger, head of Gibraltar special branch, had admitted at the inquest that the terrorists had been allowed on to the Rock without hindrance, though the authorities knew what they looked like, what passport aliases they were travelling under and what car they were driving.

3. That the failure to stop and arrest the terrorists before they got to Gibraltar was crucial to the entire operation. Either the authorities knew there was a bomb in the car and that the terrorists could detonate it, in which case they were putting a substantial section of the Gibraltar population at risk; or they thought or knew there was no bomb in the car (as there wasn’t) in which case there was no danger of a bomb being detonated.

4. That the only realistic conclusion from these facts was that the terrorists had been deliberately allowed into Gibraltar so they could be killed by the SAS – and that this was unacceptable lynch law.

5. That the lynching had been covered up by the British government, especially at the Gibraltar inquest.

6. That the government was supported to the full in its cover-up by its agents in the press, notably the Sun and the Sunday Times, which waged an hysterical campaign against one of the few attempts in the British media properly to report what went on Gibraltar: Thames TV’s Death on the Rock.

The majority verdict of the European court of human rights goes along with points one, two and three. The court refused to accept point four, the ‘execution plot’ theory, but could provide no other reason the terrorists were not arrested at the border.

One reason for the court’s failure to explain such an inexplicable lapse by the authorities was lack of information. Pre-planning by British intelligence about what it would do to the terrorists once they arrived at Gibraltar was specifically barred from the inquest by a flow of our old friends, “public interest immunity certificates” (gagging orders). The judges did not demand a lifting of the gagging orders, even if they were empowered to do so. Accordingly, without the necessary intelligence information, they were reluctant to jump to the “trap” conclusion reached by the Eye.

The European court of human rights was set up after the war, among others by Winston Churchill, as a “bulwark against fascism”. A majority verdict finding the British government guilty of breaching article two – the right to life – might be expected to be greeted in Britain by a moment of humility, even apology. Instead the air has been thick with the delicious noise of law ‘n’ order fanatics denouncing the due process of law and order.

The Sun launched into a vitriolic attack on the court (urging its readers to ring in and abuse any court official they could find who spoke English, which some of them did in racist language embarrassing even to the Sun editors).

The judges who voted with the majority were denounced one by one. In Lithuania, for instance, the Sun shrieked on 28 September, “three people had been sentenced to death for murder” (no doubt the Sun forgot its many angry campaigns for the return of capital punishment in Britain). Greece was savaged for imprisoning Jehovah’s Witnesses. In Luxembourg “five prisoners were held in solitary confinement over the legally allowed limit” and in Spain “prisoners were beaten with truncheons”. Civil liberties campaigners in Britain can look forward to future Sun campaigns against the imprisonment without trial of hundreds of people seeking asylum to Britain or the new “head-opener” truncheons so eagerly wielded by the British police.

Why had the judges done such a terrible thing? Alan Clark in the Mail opined: “We have never been forgiven for leaving the ERM.” But Peter Hitchens, political correspondent of the Daily Express, had discovered the real reason. “Could it be,” he asked, “partly because these judges are infected by the sort of ‘correctness’ which has spread into the governing class from the campus revolutionaries of the sixties”? (including even perhaps the vigorously correct York organiser for the International Socialists in the mid-1970s -a certain P. Hitchens).

But no one could touch the master. Andrew Neill filled his column in the Daily Mail (26 Sept) with a hymn of hate against the judges, and followed this up with an almost identical piece in the Sunday Times (29 Sept). Once again Neill singled out the Thames programme Death on the Rock for special abuse, especially for its use of witnesses. Among matters not mentioned in either article were

1. The huge sums in libel damages paid out by the Sunday Times for the hysterical abuse of honest witnesses to the programme. (Neill faces yet another action from Carmen Proetta for shooting his mouth off recently in the Irish media).

2. The payment by the Sunday Times of £2,000 to a convicted drugs smuggler for “information” to smear one of the Gibraltar witnesses. (The information never materialised and the prisoner hopped it with his loot to the Cost del Sol).

3. The denunciation of Neill and his Insight editor by at least three Sunday Times journalists who complained that their reports and assessments on the ground were twisted to feed the paper’s vendetta against Thames TV.

4. The fact that the award-winning Death on the Rock was subjected to one of the most thorough independent investigations in the history of the British media – and commended and cleared of all the serious charges. The investigation was headed by Lord Windlesham, a former Tory minister’.’

– Private Eye, 6 October 1995, p. 11.

The shooting of the IRA terrorists by the SAS was therefore the action of a death squad, rather than soldiers governed by the rule of law. The government covered this up using gagging orders, and when the European court of human rights nevertheless ruled against it, the Right-wing press subjected the court to a campaign of denunciation and abuse. The worst of these propaganda pieces was written by Andrew Neill, now appearing as the fair and balanced host of the BBC’s Daily Politics.