Charlie Bubbles
One of Lobster’s contributors had dinner a few years ago with Charlie Falconer, the current Lord Chancellor, and reported that he was a fount of information on the B-sides of pop singles of the 1960s. Well, pop-pickers, our civil liberties are safe in his hands then. Or not. As New Labour prepares to cut back on the already pretty limited freedom of information legislation in this country, Falconer came out with a classic in the New Labour’s Dodgy Excuses collection.
‘The Government approaches openness on the basis of improving how government operates, for the benefit of the public. Many sections of the press do not approach it in that way. Instead, many approach it on the basis of what gives them most information exclusive to their journalistic outlet. The job of the Government is not to provide page leads for the papers, but information for the citizen. Freedom of information was never considered to be, and for our part will never be considered to be, a research arm for the media.’
If we take that last sentence seriously, Falconer (or his advisors) are idiots: for the briefest acquaintance with the FOI schemes of other countries would show that they are always used by the media; and in even a minimalist version of liberal democracy the media plays a role as the primary informer of the citizen.
The ongoing Di show
The report of Operation Paget, the Metropolitan Police’s investigation of the Di conspiracy theories, available on the Net in PDF form (see Terry Hanstock’s ‘Re :’ in this issue), is worth looking at. For the student of the British state there are some interesting things in this. In particular there is the curious business of the Met team getting access to MI6’s data bases to research the various claims by former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson that MI6 were involved.
The nominated Operation Paget officers interviewed SIS personnel or examined databases and documentation for a total of 18 working days over a period of two months.’ (p.753)
This must be the first time that outsiders have been allowed to do this; and whether the process was real or managed by SIS, its existence is a measure of how seriously this refutation of the conspiracy theories was being taken. (Part of SIS’s interest in this process was, I presume, in seeing Richard Tomlinson rubbished, which chapter 16 of the Paget report does.)
Israeli lobby
In December 2006 a letter from James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota, about the Israeli lobby in the US, began circulating on the Net. Its most striking paragraph was this:
‘I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear – fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress – at least when I served there – have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out. ……In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby’s animosity by making their feelings public.’
9/11
To the irritation of some members of the 9/11 ‘truth movement’, I do not think it was ‘an inside job’. But this does not mean that there is nothing to be investigated. As with most official reports into events with sensitive intelligence and/ or political dimensions – and 9/11 had both, in spades – the report into 9/11 was concerned with establishing the official narrative (Al Qaeda attacks) while ignoring the anomalous or embarrassing material; and there is enough of that to keep us all busy for the rest of our lives, if we so choose.
A couple of notable recent articles in this field which do not ask us to believe the ‘inside job’ story are Sander Hicks’ ‘9/11: the case isn’t closed’(3) and ‘Christopher Ketcham’s ‘High-Fivers and Art Student Spies :What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?’(4)Ketcham has revived the curious tale of the Mossad ‘art students’ operation in the USA at the time of 9/11, some of whose members were seen celebrating as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers.
Matthiessen and the CIA
‘The Burgeoning Rebirth of a Bygone Literary Star’ by Celia McGee in The New York Times of 3 January 2007, is about a recent documentary film on the life of Harold L. Humes, founder (or co-founder) of The Paris Review. The article includes this paragraph about the novelist Peter Matthiessen:
‘In the film, Mr. Matthiessen, best known as a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first time that he was a young C.I.A. recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover.’
This confirms of one of the central claims of Richard Cummings in his ‘The CIA and The Paris Review’ in Lobster 50.
Home truths
In a written statement to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, commenting on the FCO White Paper ‘Active Diplomacy’, former British diplomat Carne Ross wrote:
‘In my career, which dealt with issues ranging from the Middle East peace process to the invasion of Afghanistan, I was not once interrogated or in any way scrutinised by the Foreign Affairs Committee. The committee’s series of reports on the Iraq war stand as acute evidence of this failure to scrutinise. Inside the FCO, the recommendations of the FAC are given little attention. The FCO will politely pretend otherwise, but it is in reality able to carry on its business without fear of significant intrusion. Parliamentary questions, foreign affairs debates and occasional single topic debates, are straightforward for officials and ministers to fob off with stock and bromidic answers, and thus form a kind of theatre – a sham of democratic accountability, when in reality there is none. This is not a criticism of the current government. It was always so.’
US military-industrial complex
In the last issue of Lobster (and in this one: see Books) there is discussion of the US military-industrial complex’s need for and ability to generate enemies. That requirement has just landed a big one: Africa. On 2 April President Bush announced the formation of a Unified Command for Africa. How this will play was shown by the Daily Telegraph’s report on 7 April: headlined ‘Africa becomes vital front in war on terror’, the story by the Telegraph’s diplomatic correspondent David Blair told us that ‘Meanwhile, a belt of countries in the Horn of Africa and on the southern fringe of the Sahara could, say US officials, become new breeding grounds for Islamist terrorism.’ (emphasis added)
We may assume that if anything is going to encourage Islamic terrorism it will be the arrival of the US armed forces. We may also assume that ‘Islamic terrorism’ will occur in countries which have oil, or some other resource sought by US interests.
An illustration of the current military-industrial complex in operation is in Richard Cummings’ ‘Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels’, which is a detailed account of the integration of Lockheed into the American state. Certainly where the MIC is concerned, America really is a kind of corporatist state; and the players are quite open about it, so confident are they that they face no challenge from the Democratic Party or wider civil society.
Bush and God
Depending on your viewpoint there is a terrifying or hilarious account of Dubya’s personal relationship with God in a piece by Robert Greenwald at Salon. com. recounting remarks made by Bush at a dinner given by a group of US neo-cons for British historian Andrew Roberts. (7)In his account of the event in The Guardian,(8) Roberts described Bush as ‘thoughtful, charming and widely read’. Oh yes! Remember the briefing by the White press office last summer that Dubya was off for a holiday with Albert Camus’ L’Étranger on his reading list?(9)
There is a group of new books out in the US trying to represent Ronald Reagan as a wise and intelligent leader and not the dummy he appeared to be.(10) There is section of the American political intelligentsia which is acutely discomfited by the fact that genuinely stupid people can get to be president in the land of the brave and home of the free.
Libya and Lockerbie
In ‘Lockerbie trial was a CIA fix, US intelligence insider claims’, The Glasgow Herald reported some comments by Michael Scharf, who was the counsel to the US State Department’s counter-terrorism bureau when the two Libyans were indicted for the bombing. Inter alia Scharf said: the intelligence agencies knew that their star witness was ‘a liar’; that the case was ‘a whitewash’; and ‘It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys.’
Conned again
Richard Tomlinson posted this on <http://mi6vtomlinson.blogspot.com/ > on 2 April 2007:
‘Deceived by the Treasury Solicitor
‘Welcome back…… I know that regular readers of my old blog have been searching around the internet wondering what has become of me. I’ll explain briefly here, and elaborate with follow up posts.’
‘Basically, I have unfortunately been tricked by the British authorities into believing that they were genuinely interested in mediation to settle the dispute I have with them concerning their refusal to allow me to seek the reasons for my dismissal from SIS, and their vitriolic campaign of retribution against me ever since I dared to challenge their authority.’
‘They contacted me many times privately assuring me that they genuinely wished to enter into mediation to seek a just solution to the grievance that I feel against their initial assault against me, and all the subsequent assaults over the past eleven years that they have subsequently carried out.’
‘As a sign of genuine and unilateral good faith on my part, I voluntarily and unilaterally deleted my entire blog.’
‘Unfortunately I now realise that I was entirely duped by them, and that their offers of mediation were all an elaborate ploy to buy themselves time in order to carry out underhand legal moves against me using their huge army of government lawyers, knowing that I have virtually no legal resources to defend myself against them.’
British state lies! Hold the front page!
US election fraud
A study of the last US congressional and senate elections has concluded:
‘A major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in U.S. House and Senate races across the country is indicated by an analysis of national exit polling data, by the Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a national election integrity organization …….’
The fix was misjudged is the conclusion of the study: Murphy’s Law…….
Notes
- Robert Verkaik, ‘The Freedom of Information Act misused’, The Independent, 22 March 2007.
- The complete text can be read at <www.uruknet.de/?p=m28769&hd=&size=1&l=e>
- <http://alternet.org/story/45726/>
- <www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03072007.html>. For a BBC version of the original ‘Israeli art students’ story from 2002 see <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2294487.stm>. Or, rather, don’t see that URL for it evoked a 404 when I tried ‘open location’ using it. However if you Google ‘Report details US intelligence failures’ + Rob Broomby + BBC, up the story pops. Why the 404, I have no idea.
- <www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmfaff/uc1720-i/1720m02.htm>
- <www.playboy.com/magazine/features/lockheed/> Indeed, they may not think they are doing anything wrong or unusual.
- <www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/14/roberts_luncheon/index.html>
- G2, 27 March, 2007.
- Did anyone in that press office know that the theme of the book is the meaningless murder of an Arab?
- Four of them were reviewed in The New York Review of Books 1 March 2007.
- <www.sundayherald.com/59005>
- <www.opednews.com/articles/genera_rob_kall_061117_clear_evidence_2006_.htm>The National Institute of Standards and Technology issued a report in December on electronic voting systems and concluded that they ‘cannot be made secure’. Will this deter the British government from introducing electronic voting? Of course not. <www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001637.html>