Wishing and hoping
I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of the National Union of Mineworkers in the Morning Star of 2 August 2002
‘It gave me enormous pleasure that, after the 1984-5 miners strike, the Tories threw out Thatcher as Prime Minister and the miners reelected Arthur as their president.’
I like that use of ‘after’ and its implied causality. So it was the miners’ strike which deposed Thatcher, five years later. But didn’t the Conservatives win an election in 1987?
Arthur Scargill turned up in the Peter Taylor series on BBC2 in October/ November devoted to Special Branch accounts of their work against British ‘subversives’ in the 1970s and 80s. There was a rich irony about the BBC broadcasting the first two episodes while David Shayler was on trial. A group of Special Branch officers – assisted by the BBC – broke the Official Secrets Act in a big way on television while an MI5 officer was on trial for the same offence. The programmes were dull, perfect examples of the way television takes a couple of pages of script and pads them out into an hour. There was a certain amusement in watching some of this country’s more serious-minded, would-be revolutionaries – Dave Nellist and Arthur Scargill, for example – denying the charge of subversion. ‘What me, guv? A subversive? Never.’ At this stage in the game wouldn’t it be nice to have someone of that ilk say, ‘Of course I was a bloody subversive. This state needs overthrowing.’
In the content I noticed only two interesting snippets. In the first episode a former Special Branch officer described how, during the Heath regime, he had warned MI5 of the looming miners’ strike but MI5 had not passed this on to the Prime Minister. Were MI5 already gunning for Heath at that point and trying to drop him in it?
In the second there were some comments of the former British Leyland boss Michael Edwardes who described going to the Cabinet Office to read the minutes of meetings between ‘the Communist Party and our [ Leyland’s] shop stewards……..It was absolutely clear – the intention was to break the company…….bring the company down, bring the country down.’
This didn’t sound too plausible to me so I looked in Edwardes’ memoir of this period, Back From the Brink (London: Pan, 1983) and we find this on p. 116.
‘..a copy of Minutes of what purported to be a meeting between Communist Party officials and BL shop stewards, came into our possession anonymously through the mail……the whole agenda was devoted to the Recovery Plan, and how best to thwart it……The Minutes listed a number of well-known shop stewards, and a handful of nationally known Communist Party leaders, and were quite explicit as to strategy – plant and equipment would not be allowed out of factories due for closure, and reference was made to emulating sit-ins that had been successfully enacted in other industries.’
This is more like it. The Edwardes ‘recovery plan’ involved closing chunks of Leyland and making redundant about 20,000 people. The shop stewards’ plan described by Edwardes was a basic defensive strategy to try and frustrate the closures. No reference is made to bringing company or country down. In the intervening twenty years Edwardes’ memory has gilded the lily.
Spook think
The Security Service mind is a wonderful thing. To it a potential risk is the same as an actual risk. Thus we discover that Lord Bethell, a Conservative Whip in the Heath government, was fired because he was….. not a risk per se but a risk of becoming a risk, as it were. Lord Jellicoe, then a Home Officer Minister, wrote of Bethell:
‘In my view the odds are a million to one against Bethell being a security risk in the sense that Maclean and Burgess and Philby were. But I think there may be a chance that he is a security risk in the sense that information, which he may pick up as a junior Minister, could filter back to friends or contacts against whom there is a legitimate question mark.’ (Heath fired ‘Soviet stooge’ Tory’, Peter Day, The Observer 26 May 2002)
In his comment on this Bethell resisted the temptation to point that it was Jellicoe who was the ‘risk’, resigning in 1973 when found to be, as they used to say, consorting with prostitutes.
Tell me lies about Iraq
The Iraq thing is about oil. If Iraq had no oil the US would not be interested. The US is going to buy or steal – mostly, I guess, steal – every last barrel of oil on earth to keep its cars and its air-conditioning units running. Even though everyone – everyone bar Tony Blair, it seems – knows it’s about oil, throughout the summer and autumn the media was saturated with stories about about Saddam Hussein, Iraq, its weapons and its weapons potential. Some of these might have been true but there is so much disinformation and propaganda being generated by the US and UK intelligence services there is no way of telling with most of it. Three spectacular examples of fakery are worth noting.On 27 September, in ‘Agency Disavows Report on Iraq Arms’, the Washington Times pointed out:
‘The International Atomic Energy Agency says that a report [of theirs] cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was “six months away” from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist.’
The best British-generated fake I saw was a piece sent to me from the News of the World 18 August 2002, ‘Fallout: Saddam’s nuclear dust condemns thousands of Iraqi children to death’. This began:
‘Thousands of Iraqi children are dying from birth deformities caused by depleted uranium leaking into the atmosphere. It is tragic evidence that Saddam Hussein is stockpiling the material to make his own nuclear weapons. MI6 intelligence agents estimate 316 tons of radioactive dust seeped from a factory in Al Hillah, 100 miles south of Baghdad, 12 months ago.’
When depleted uranium was said to cause death and illness among UK and US service personnel serving in the first Gulf War, the idea was ridiculed. Now it’s a killer. And how would you estimate the weight of dust from a factory? This is astonishing baloney, even for the subservient British media. Take a bow, author Ian Kirby. I hope the lunch the MI6 Information Ops boys bought you was a good one. You earned it.
The News of the World seems to have become a favourite place to plant these stories. There was another belter in the 14 October issue, ‘Saddam’s blood lust is fuelled by heroin,’ which attributed to a defector called Haitham Rashid Whihaib the following:
- Saddam Hussein has ‘bedded hundreds of women and slaughters any who fail to satisfy him’.
- Fed a general of his to a pack of dogs.
- Snorts the ‘purest cocaine and smokes heroin’.
The reported death of Abu Nidal in August became the peg for two different pieces of disinformation. The first was in The Sunday Times 25 August 2002, ‘Gaddafi “plotted Lockerbie bombing with Abu Nidal”‘, in which a ‘former aide’ to Nidal who ‘declined to be named’ said that Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing and gave the contract to Nidal. In this version the two Libyan officials from Malta who were tried in The Hague under Scots law were involved.
Most reports described Nidal as committing suicide but this Sunday Times report said he was ‘killed on August 14 on the direct orders of Saddam Hussein after plotting with the Kuwaitis to topple the Iraqi leader and replace him with his half-brother Barzan’.
Another report, in the Australian Herald Sun, ‘Execution claim on Abu Nidal’, (1) had it that Nidal was executed by ‘by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s secret police for refusing to train al-Qaeda fighters’. This report came from ‘Iraqi dissidents’ and was supported by Con Coughlin, ‘a Middle East expert’. Couglin’s version, ‘Saddam killed Abu Nidal over al-Qaeda row’, appeared in The Sunday Telegraph 25 August 2002, and attributed to ‘Western diplomats’ – nudge, nudge – the idea that Nidal ‘refused to reactivate his international terrorist network’. Good to see that Coughlin has not been dismayed by having his Gaddafi-son-counterfeiting story, given to him by MI6, disintegrate in the High Court.(2) Resilient people, these MI6 assets in the media!
Coughlin’s own contribution to the rubbishing of Saddam Hussein in this period was an extract from his new biography of him in The Sunday Telegraph 13 October 2002. The highlight of this was Coughlin’s account of Saddam Hussein dumping someone in a bath of acid and watching ‘while his body dissolved’. Of course, it might but true but, given Coughlin’s track record as a disinformation outlet for the British spooks, it might all be nonsense; in which situation picking nonsense is the rational choice.
Men who would have been king
The echoes of empire take a long time to die away, as John Newsinger’s new account of British colonial wars since WW2, reviewed below, reminds us. Another echo returned recently as the name Ian Henderson arrived in an e-mail. Once upon a time, many years ago, when the New Statesman had more investigative journalism and fewer life-style features than it does now, it ran a story about a man called Ian Henderson, a former British colonial policeman, who was in charge of ‘security’ in Bahrain. Against Henderson the usual charges were being laid: torture, unlawful imprisonment etc. (I remember the story but have lost the cutting.) There is now a Website run by the Bahrain Freedom Movement with a huge amount of information on Mr Henderson and his efforts to maintain the British presence in the Middle East by inflicting pain on people: < http://vob.org/english/informat ion-db/hndrsn.htm >
An interesting companion piece to the Newsinger account of the struggle to hang on to the empire is a government Green Paper – i.e. a consultative document – Private Military Companies: Options for Regulation, (HC577, The Stationery Office, 12 February 2002) issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. As well as discussing various forms of private military companies, and some of their activities in recent years, it includes an appendix listing British private military activities in Africa from the 1950s to the present day, 89 in all. Some of the company names are familiar to me, many are not. This appendix is the outline of a hidden history of British military activity in Africa.
The smack of firm government?
In the Evening Standard of 26 September 2002 David Taylor reported that the UN Drug Control Programme estimated that Afghanistan’s opium production this year was up by 1,400% since the fall of the Taliban. This, said Taylor, ‘is a blow to Tony Blair who said last year that stopping the heroin trade was a key justification for fighting the Taliban.’
Vindication – in spades!
The most resounding ‘told you so’ of recent years has come from Terry Smith. In 1992 he wrote a book, Accounting for Growth, which described the various accounting tricks being used by companies to fake their accounts. This got him fired. One chapter was titled, ‘Capitalisation of Costs, Or how to make an expense account into an asset’ – the move made by Worldcom before it went down the pan. Smith was given a column in the Sunday Telegraph business section on 30 June to remind its readers that they had been warned.
Rice crispies
In ‘Relax, the Republicans’ days are numbered’ (Guardian 2 September 2002) Martin Kettle described hearing George Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, when she was still an academic, ‘dismiss a list of European, Arab and Asian nations as “the road-kill of history”‘. That from a descendent of slaves!
Beyond parody
A story in The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2002, ‘Bush Anti-Corruption Chief Accused of Account Fraud’ began:
‘President Bush’s efforts to clean up corporate America were dealt an embarrassing blow last night when the man charged with leading his new anti-corruption task force was sued for alleged fraud. Larry Thompson, who is also deputy attorney general, was accused of dubious accounting practices and insider trading while on the board of Providian, a credit card issuer that also operates in Britain.’
While on the subject of the last Gulf War Dr Doug Rokke, of the Traprock Peace Centre in Maryland put out an astonishing report on 30 September 2002. He pointed out that while the official US casualties in the immediate aftermath of the last Gulf War were 467 wounded in action, 148 killed in battle and 145 killed in accidents, a May 2002 report from The United States Department of Veterans Affairs’ shows that as of May 2002, the Gulf War casualties include 8,306 veterans dead and 159,705 veterans injured or ill. That is a casualty rate of 29.3% for combat related duties between 1990 and 1991! Details at
< http://traprockpeace.org/gulfcasualties.html >
Senator Robert C. Byrd (Democrat, West Virginia) pointed out in the Senate on 26 September:
‘We have a paper trail. We not only know that Iraq has biological weapons, we know the type, the strain, and the batch number of the germs that may have been used to fashion those weapons. We know the dates they were shipped and the addresses to which they were shipped. We have in our hands the equivalent of a Betty Crocker cookbook of ingredients that the U.S. allowed Iraq to obtain and that may well have been used to concoct biological weapons.’
Or, as the late, great Bill Hicks, used to say in his act before he died: ‘How do we know Saddam’s got all these weapons? Well, we just looked at the receipts!’
Notes
1 http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,4970876%255E401,00.html
2 See ‘Gadafy “sting” untrue paper admits’, The Guardian 19 April 2002 and
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