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À partir d’avant-hierCraig Murray

Assange Truth and UN Shenanigans

Par : craig

I spent the last week at the UN, trying to ram home some truths about the Assange case as input to the UN’s Periodic Review (every 7 years) of the UK’s human rights record, in terms of its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

I had a very short opportunity to address the UN Committee on Human Rights, which is a body of elected experts. In such a short time frame you have to go with just a couple of points. I am open to criticism of my selection, but I maintain that this was much plainer speaking than is generally heard. The reasons for this are interesting.

There are fora like this where registered NGOs can make their point. Human rights is quite an industry in Geneva, where literally hundreds of NGO reps live and roam the UN buildings. The favoured NGOs are those with ECOSOC registration status. The delegates of UNESCO status NGOs have blue passes and extremely free access throughout, at any time.

But UNESCO status is granted by a committee of member states – and is difficult to get. It is therefore unsurprising that a high proportion of NGOs are not real NGOs at all. They are astroturf; fake NGOs paid to whitewash the record of their governments. I did not understand this at first until I attended (as a dry run for the UK) the meetings of the Human Rights Committee for the Egyptian periodic review. Several Egyptian NGOs, one after the other, told us what a great respect for human rights the Egyptian dictatorship has. (It has, incidentally, just sentenced another group of opposition figures to death, after murdering Egypt’s only ever freely elected President.)

Even well-known western NGOs tend to pull their punches at the UN because, bluntly, almost all of them receive large amounts of funding from Western governments. While theoretically this is funding to attack the human rights record of the western governments’ designated enemies, it is a concomitant that the NGOs are reluctant seriously to bite the hand that feeds them.

Consider these facts: firstly, no important whistleblower has ever subsequently found employment with an established NGO. A great many have tried.

Secondly, had I not been there, nobody would have mentioned Julian Assange in the periodic review of the UK’s human rights record.

Money talks in the UN itself too. The US and Western powers contribute a very high proportion of the UN budget. There is a reason why I attended a commemoration ceremony in Geneva for UN staff killed in Gaza, where none of the senior UN staff dared to mention who killed them.

Also of course the NATO powers and allies are disproportionately represented in key staff positions.

The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, an Austrian, has been disgustingly pusillanimous on Gaza and has done nothing on Assange. I spoke with a member of his staff who regurgitated to me a number of detailed US prosecution talking points on Assange which are simply factually incorrect. They have been thoroughly briefed.

Staff are visibly afraid to take on the UK/US interest. I met a number of UN staff who were happy to chat away until I brought up Assange; then they quite literally physically recoiled, in some cases took an actual step back, and always discovered they had pressing business elsewhere.

After the Human Rights Committee meeting with NGOs, the committee then met with the UK government representatives to discuss their concerns. One member of the committee, Rodrigo Carasco of Costa Rica, decided he would raise the case of Julian Assange, based on the briefing which we had supplied. A full elected member of the committee, Carasco is also the former Costa Rican Ambassador to the United Nations.

Carasco was put on the speakers’ list and he informed the committee what he was going to raise. Come the meeting with the UK delegation, Amb. Carasco was astonished when the Chair simply skipped over him in the speaking list and did not call him. He caught the Chair’s eye several times as the meeting progressed but still was not called, then it wound up and the Chair went to the UK delegation to respond to the bland and generic points which had been raised.

In this short video, when it first cuts away from the Chair you can see the white-haired Amb. Carasco rising from his seat to remonstrate with her. She then disappears off the next shot while they had a pretty pointed exchange. I am sorry it is off camera; you will have to take my word for it.

My conclusion from this is that the UK and US are currently very sensitive to international criticism over Assange, and that rather than be discouraged we need to keep pushing. As both the US and UK are becoming international pariah states over Gaza, we need to remind the world of their long established crimes.

 

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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The post Assange Truth and UN Shenanigans appeared first on Craig Murray.

A Tour d’Horizon on Swiss Box

Par : craig

Assange, Gaza, the manipulation of “anti-semitism”, threats to civil liberties, Galloway, the forms of armed resistance available to the colonised: I enjoy the long-form interview as a chance to explore issues in depth. This one was very enjoyable, and we didn’t get through half of Antoine’s list of topics.

I do hope that you can find time at least to dip in to this discussion of what I am doing and thinking at the moment.

You can check out the Swiss Box’s excellent catalogue here.

 
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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 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:

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

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MURRAY CJ
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Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

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The post A Tour d’Horizon on Swiss Box appeared first on Craig Murray.

The Panic Of the Ruling Class

Par : craig

I have known George Galloway my entire adult life, although we largely lost touch in the middle bit while I was off diplomating. I know George too well to mistake him for Jesus Christ, but he has been on the right side against appalling wars which the entire political class has cheer-led. His natural gifts of mellifluence and loquacity are unsurpassed, with an added talent for punchy phrase making.

He can be fiercely pugnacious in debate and always refuses to let the media set the frame of discussion, which requires an appetite for confrontation that is harder than you might think; it is not a skill I share. But outwith the public gaze George is humorous, kind and self-aware. He has been deeply involved in politics his entire life, and is a great believer in the democratic process as the ultimate way by which the working classes will ultimately take control of the means of production. He is a very old-fashioned and courteous form of socialist.

I have to confess I have never shared the romantic view of the working classes, and have always found them in reality more likely to follow the doctrines of Nigel Farage than those of John MacLean. But George Galloway is imbued in a native democratic socialist tradition. He is a descendant of the Chartists. You cannot get more British nor more ardent a democrat than George Galloway.

Which is why I found surreal the panic at his election in Rochdale and the claim, by the Prime Minister no less, that this was an assault on “British values” and even on democracy itself.

The idea that democracy – i.e. voting for somebody – is an attack on, err, democracy was so crazy that, had we any kind of independent media, it would have been ridiculed to death.

That of course has not happened. We are sonorously told we are a nation in crisis. Ordinary forms of democratic activity – free assembly, free speech and free voting – all threaten our society.

The cause of all of this political panic is of course the genocide in Gaza. It is essential to join the dots here. We live in a situation where the wealth gap in society between the rich and the poor is expanding at its fastest ever rate. Where for the first time in centuries, young adults can expect to have lower life expectations in terms of employment, education, health and housing than their parents. Where the nexus of control by the ultra-wealthy of both the political and media classes is tighter than ever.

Where the Overton Window has shrunk to a letterbox.

Briefly, the chance of the kind of democratic triumph of the working people of which George Galloway dreams, became real with the popular uprising that led to Jeremy Corbyn being placed as Labour leader. Corbyn’s chances were destroyed by an entirely fake narrative of anti-semitism. Since the Holocaust, anti-semitism has understandably been the most potent charge that can be levelled against anybody in politics. A deliberate and calculated campaign to apply the term to any criticism of Israel was ultimately successful in destroying Corbyn and his supporters as a short term threat.

So the demonisation of criticism of Israel was not an incidental ploy of the ruling class. It was the most important tool, by which they managed to kill off the most potent threat to their political hegemony to arise in a major western country for decades.

They succeeded because bluntly most people were not paying attention. Many ordinary people saw Israel as they had been taught to see Israel, as a victim nation and therefore criticism of it as generally reprehensible and plausibly anti-semitic. On top of which the defence of the idea of Israel allies with the Islamophobia which is closely correlated with the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that remains a strong undercurrent in Western politics, and especially in England.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has collapsed this narrative. Too many people have seen the truth on social media. Despite every attempt by the mainstream media to hide, obfuscate or distort, the truth is now out there. The reflex hurling by the Establishment of the “anti-semitic” slur at everybody who opposes the Genocide – from the United Nations, The International Court of Justice and the Pope down – has finally killed off the power of that slur.

A critical mass of ordinary people have even learnt of the history of the slow genocide of the Palestinians this last 75 years.

The political Establishment, having established support for Israel as the fundamental measure of political respectability which could neatly be used to exclude radicals from political discourse, have been unable to shift ground and drop it.

They are clinging to Israel, not because they have a genuine belief Israel is a force for good, not because they believe in religious Zionism, not even because they believe it is a necessary colonialist project in the Middle East, but because it has been for decades their totem, the very badge of political respectability, the membership card for the political country club.

Israel is now toxic to the public and the entire history of ethnic cleansing, massacre and long genocide on which the very existence of Israel is based, is now laid bare. The political class are now in a panic, and lashing out everywhere. Police powers to limit free assembly were already hugely increased just last year by the Public Order Act 2023, where any demonstration which is noisy or causes inconvenience can be banned. Now we have calls from the responsible ministers for pro-Palestinian demonstrations to be banned because they offend their sensibilities in a way they are finding difficult to define.

The proscribed organisation model is being considered now to limit freedom of speech and assembly. They are looking at banning the Muslim Council of Britain and Palestine Action. But you cannot ban an idea, and defining anyone who disagrees with you as an “extremist” is unlikely to stand up in the courts. Indeed anyone currently not being branded as an extremist ought to be deeply ashamed.

So far as I can see, only active supporters of genocide are not in the official view “extremists”. As all the main UK-wide political parties do support genocide, that of course makes sense.

It is worth noting that all the big attacks on liberty this last couple of years – including The Public Order Act, The National Security Act, and (in process) the Rwanda Safety Bill – have the support of Keir Starmer. I fully expect that whatever form the government move to make opposing genocide illegal finally takes, Keir Starmer will approve that too. Remember Starmer claimed that it is legal for Israel to starve Gaza.

Our hearts and minds remain with the people of Gaza. Their suffering and their heroism not only shines in itself, but it has cast a much needed light on the complete failure of the model of western democracy.

 

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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The post The Panic Of the Ruling Class appeared first on Craig Murray.

Healthcare

Par : craig

I have a post on the political class’s frenetic attempts to criminalise dissent nearly finished, which I hope will be up tonight.

But as a lifelong supporter of the NHS, I wanted to share with you this.

I went to a village community health centre in Greece, feeling pretty rotten. I had to wait outside for the results of a covid test. Once cleared I was in and saw the doctor immediately, the Greek equivalent of a GP. He did the routine checks then took an ECG, and then took an X ray – none of this with an appointment and with no need to go off to a hospital. After an hour I was out again, with a prescription for four different drugs including antibiotics, a diagnosis of bronchitis and sinusitis, and firm orders to go to bed (which I did).

In the NHS I would have had to plead for a receptionist at all for an appointment to see a GP, and would have had to go to a hospital for the X-Ray and ECG. Then they would have probably decided to wait a week before giving antibiotics.

The Greek system was simply massively, massively a faster, more efficient and better experience. It was entirely free, except for 38 euros for the four prescriptions.

That’s it.

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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 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 Donations



 

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
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BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

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Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

 

The post Healthcare appeared first on Craig Murray.

Assange Final Appeal Day 2 – Your Man in the Public Gallery

Par : craig

I approached Day 2 with trepidation. It was not so much being accustomed to having hopes dashed, as having lived so long without hope that it was hard to know what to do with it. At 5:30am I stopped work for a while on writing up Day 1 and went out to walk down the Strand to the court. There was a slightly bigger crowd than had been there the day before at the same time, and happily it included the heroic volunteers saving my place.

A freezing Easterly wind was bustling down the Strand having come express from Siberia, driving before it what felt like a fair chunk of the North Sea, penetrating through layers of clothing with the ease of a ghost through the walls of St Paul’s. I gave the volunteers my opinion of the case so far and what I hoped was a rousing 6am pep talk. They were just astonishingly cheerful in the circumstances. There is a human goodness which can warm from within – I do wish I had some.

Having explained I wanted to publish as much as I could before returning to court, I went back to my Airbnb, where I needed to change all my clothing and even my shoes. I then got back to writing, and dashed off a good few more paragraphs before court, then pressed publish.

I was a little worried that this might be the day I was arrested – my appearance the first day might have thrown the authorities off guard, and I had always thought they would likely think about it a little before acting on the “terrorism investigation” nonsense. But in the event I had no problems at all, and police and court officials continued to be very friendly towards me.

Taking our position in the courtroom, there were still fewer seats available to the public. This is because there was a much larger presence of the “court media”, meaning those London-based journalists with permanent accreditation to the court. They had largely ignored Day 1 as that was Julian’s case; they had however turned up to report the US Government case on Day 2.

I had witnessed precisely the same behaviour at the ICJ Genocide Case in the Hague, where the Israeli arguments on the second day got massively more media coverage than South Africa on the first. The BBC even livestreamed the Israeli case but not the South African, which is a breathtaking level of bias.

So there were fewer spaces available. I was squashed up against the lady instructing the lawyer for the Home Secretary, who was actually extremely nice and kept feeding me mint humbugs as it became increasingly obvious I was struggling against cold symptoms.

James Lewis KC, who had previously led for the US government, was not present. This was unexplained; it is not usual to change the lead KC mid-way through an important case, and judges will generally bend over backwards to avoid diary clashes for them. I have to confess I had rather warmed to Lewis, as I think my reporting showed. I wondered if he had lost faith in his client; it may be of interest that his professional profile lists his most famous cases – but not this most famous case of all.

So his number 2, Clare Dobbin, today stepped up to the lead. She appeared to be on tenterhooks. For a full fifteen minutes before the appointed starting time at 10:30am, she stood ready to go, her papers carefully spread out around the rostrum. She continually looked up at the judges’ chair as though mentally rehearsing zinging her arguments in that direction. Or imagining becoming a judge; how do I know what she was thinking? Ignore me.

It particularly seemed futile that she was standing there all ready to go while we were sitting around her heedlessly chatting, given that we would all have to stand up too when the judges came in, before resuming our places with a fuss of coughing, turning off phones, knocking over files, squashing sandwiches etc. Anyway there she stood, staring earnestly at the bench. This gave me time to remark that she had notably longer hair than the last time she appeared in this case, and the long blond fibres fell completely straight and evenly spaced, ending in a line of hair across the back of her legal gown that was not only perfectly straight but also perfectly horizontal, and remained so no matter how she moved.

It was the most disciplined hair I ever witnessed. I suspect she had shouted it into submission. Ms Dobbin has an extremely strong accent. It is right out of those giant Belfast shipyards that only ever employed Protestants and which produced great liners that sank more efficiently, and in a more Hollywood-friendly manner, than any other ships in the world.

Someone in the shipyard had taken Ms Dobbin’s accent and riveted on a few elongated vowel sounds in an effort to make it posher, but sadly this had caused cracks of comprehension below the waterline.

However, something had happened to Ms Dobbin. She had been stentorian – I had previously described her as Ian Paisley in a wig. But now it took me several minutes to realise she had started speaking. This did not get better. The kindly Judge Dame Victoria Sharp came up with about eight different formulations in the course of the morning to ask her to speak up, like a school teacher encouraging a shy child at a carol concert. All to no avail.

One thing was very plain. Ms Dobbin had lost her faith in the case she was presenting. She hardly tried to argue it. That was not only in terms of volume. Ms Dobbin made very little effort at all to refute the arguments put by the Assange team the day before. Instead she merely read out large chunks of the affidavit provided by US Deputy Attorney General Kronberg in support of the second superseding indictment.

As judges Johnson and Sharp presumably can read, it was not plain what value this exercise added. Ms Dobbin is not so much in danger of being replaced by Artificial Intelligence, as being replaced by a Speak Your Weight machine. Which at least may have a more pleasant accent.

I should explain “Second Superseding Indictment”. The indictment, or raft of charges on which Julian Assange was first held for extradition, was an obvious load of nonsense flung together and scribbled on the back of Mike Pompeo’s laundry list. However, before the hearings started the US Government was allowed to scrap this and replace it with an entirely different set of charges, the “First Superseding Indictment”.

The rendition hearings started with five days of opening argument at Woolwich Crown Court, in the course of which the First Superseding Indictment was torn to shreds by the defence. Therefore – and please read this three times to overcome the disbelief you are about to feel – after the hearings had started and gone through the important opening argument phase, the United States Government was allowed to drop those charges, change them completely and present the Second Superseding Indictment with an entirely new bunch of charges based on Espionage and Hacking.

The Defence did not get to change their opening arguments to reflect the new charges, nor did they get the break of several months they requested to study the new charges and respond to them. Nor were they allowed to change their defence witness list, which consisted of witnesses called to rebut the charges now dropped, not the entirely different charges now faced.

Yes, you did read that all right. No, I can’t really believe it either. Now, let us continue. This is my very best effort to reconstruct, with occasional help from the kind lady from the Home Office, what Dobbin may have mumbled.

Dobbin opened by saying that the defence had made much of evidence being unchallenged. This was a mischaracterisation. All of the defence evidence was challenged.  None should be taken as accepted.

Judge Baraitser, said Dobbin, had shown very considerable leniency in allowing evidence to be heard of dubious relevance. Furthermore there was a nexus of relationships between several of the witnesses, and between some of the witnesses and Julian Assange. Some, including one lawyer, had been previously in his employ. The status and expertise of the witnesses individually and collectively is challenged. Their evidence was directly contradicted by the prior evidence which is contained in the witness affidavits of US Deputy Attorney Generals Dwyer and Kronberg.

This case is not about journalism. It is about the bulk disclosure of classified materials. It is about the indiscriminate publication of unredacted names. That is what distinguishes Wikileaks from the Guardian or New York Times. Judge Baraitser had rightly rejected outright that Assange is a journalist or akin to a journalist.

This is not a political prosecution. The US Administration had changed during these proceedings, but the prosecution continues because it is based upon law and evidence, not upon political motivation.

In Superseding Indictment 2 (which sounds like a very bad franchise movie) the hacking charge is added but the accusations in Superseding Indictment 1 are incorporated. What is alleged bears no relation to the Article X ECHR Freedom of Speech cases submitted by the defence. This case is about stolen and hacked documents, about a password hash hacked to allow Wikileaks and Manning to steal from the United States of America, and about the subsequent publication of unredacted names that had placed individuals at immediate risk of physical harm and arbitrary detention.

The indiscriminately published document files were massive. They included over 90,000 on Afghanistan, over 400,000 on Iraq and over 250,000 diplomatic cables. Assange had encouraged and caused Chelsea Manning to download the documents. The Wikileaks website actively solicits hacked material. “The suggestion Miss Manning is a whistleblower is unrealistic. A whistleblower reveals material legally obtained in the course of employment”. Manning however had illegally obtained material.

Assange cracking the password hash “goes far beyond the position of a journalist”. Judge Baraitser was therefore fully entitled to give full weight to that aspect of the case.

The United States had been obliged to go to great lengths to mitigate the danger that arose to its sources after their names were revealed, Many had been resettled, forced to move. The allegation is that the defendant knowingly and deliberately published the names of the informants.

As pointed out by Deputy Attorney General Kronberg, the charges had been approved by a Federal Grand Jury, after very careful independent consideration of the evidence.

Although this prosecution may indeed be unprecedented, it proceeded along long-established principles. There is no immunity of journalists to violate the criminal law. There is now a specific law against the intentional release of the names of intelligence officers and sources, and it has been ruled that this does not breach the First Amendment. The only material for which Assange is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act is that containing names. That is the difference between this and earlier instances which were or were not prosecuted.

Kronberg stated in his affidavit that there is evidence of people having to leave their homes or even their countries as a result of this disclosure. Several had been arrested or interrogated, and some had disappeared.

The material released by Wikileaks had been useful to hostile governments, to terrorist groups and to criminal organisations. Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban had requested and studied some of the disclosed material.

The judges at this stage were looking much more comfortable than they had the day before. They sat back in their chairs visibly relaxed and smiling. Yesterday they had been discomfited by members of their own class saying things about US war crimes to their faces, which they preferred not to hear. Today they were getting a simple recital of Daily Mail clichés and trigger words that reinforce the Establishment worldview. They were back in their milieu, like plump tropical fish in a tank whose heater had failed yesterday but just been replaced.

Dobbin continued that there was no question of any balance of public interest exercise being required. “The material that Assange published unredacted carries no public interest whatsoever. That is at the heart of the case.”

Judge Johnson asked whether Dobbin accepted the evidence given yesterday that others had published the unredacted material first. Dobbin replied that it was Assange who bore the responsibility for the material being available in the first place.

On the question of political extradition, the 2003 Act had transformed extradition law and had deliberately removed the prohibition on extradition for political offences which had been contained in Section 6 of the 1989 Extradition Act (shown here).

By contrast, Section 81 of the 2003 Extradition Act said this:

The phrase “political offence” had obviously been deliberately removed by parliament, said Dobbin.

Judge Johnson asked if there was any material published by government or anything said by ministers in Hansard which explained the omission. Dobbin replied that this was not needed: the excision was clear on the face of Section 81. If a Treaty contains a provision not incorporated in UK Domestic Law, it is not for the court to reinstate it. The political offence exclusion on extradition is not customary international law.

An unincorporated treaty can give rise to an obligation in domestic law, but cannot contradict the terms of a statute. Article 4 of the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2007 contradicts the terms of Section 81(a) of the Extradition Act of 2003. That Article of the Treaty therefore falls in the United Kingdom, even though enforced in the United States where it does not contradict domestic legislation. Whereas extradition treaties are supposed to be mutual and interpreted the same way by both sides, that does not preclude an extradition by one party in unilateral circumstances.

At this point Judge Johnson was looking at Ms Dobbin with some concern, like a home supporter at a soccer match which his team is unexpectedly losing 3-0, who cannot quite work out why they are performing this badly.


At this point I thought I might introduce a panel so the reader can isolate this vital argument. The question is this. Is this provision of the 2003 Extradition Act at Section 81 (A):

… incompatible with this section of the subsequent US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2007:

… so as to render the latter null and void? That is a fundamental question in this hearing and the assertion made by Dobbin.

If Judge Baraitser’s acceptance of this argument was correct, it of course means that the Home Office lawyers in 2007 drafted a treaty, approved by the FCO lawyers, which neither set of lawyers noticed was incompatible with the legislation the same lawyers had drafted just four years earlier.

It would also mean that the very substantive mechanisms for ensuring the compatibility of treaties with domestic legislation, involving a great round of formal written interdepartmental consultation, all failed too. I have personally worked those mechanisms when in the FCO, and I don’t see how they can fail.

Crucially, Dobbin’s argument depends on the notion that the Extradition Treaty gives a broader definition of what can be a politically motivated extradition, than the Act. So while Assange’s extradition would be barred by the Treaty, it is not by the Act.

But that is obviously nonsense. The entire purpose of the much longer provision in the Treaty is plainly to limit what counts as political under the very broad definition in the Act. It reduces the ground for denying extradition as political; it does not extend it. The fact that even this lengthy list of exclusions does not exclude Wikileaks’ activity is extremely telling.

OK, that’s the end of the panel. Let us return to the hearing.


Dobbin continued that Abuse of Process arguments do not enable the incorporation of unincorporated international treaties. As an example, alleged obligations of the UK under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child have been found by the courts not to be enforceable in domestic law. It is not accepted by the United States that this is a political offence. But even if it were, Swift and Baraitser are correct in law that there is no bar on extradition for political offences.

The defence had claimed the prosecution purported to be for a criminal offence but in reality was political. This argument must be treated with great caution, because any criminal could argue their offence was politically motivated.

The starting position must be the assumption of good faith on the part of the state with which the UK has treaty relations on extradition. The United States is one of the UK’s longest standing and closest international partners.

The Yahoo article was not fresh evidence. It had been properly considered and rejected by Swift and Baraitser. It was internally inconsistent and included official denials of the conduct alleged. The court must consider the nexus between those making allegations of impropriety and the appellant. Ecuador had rescinded his claim of political asylum and Assange was properly arrested by police invited into the Ecuadorean Embassy. There is simply no evidence that any harm would come to Assange were he to be extradited.

Even accepting the Yahoo article as evidence, that does not affect the objective basis of extradition proceedings. It states that kidnapping was rejected by US government lawyers as it would interfere with criminal proceedings.

It is not journalism to encourage people to break the Official Secrets Act or to steal information. Miss Manning is not a whistleblower but a hacker. Protected speech is therefore not engaged and that entire line of argument falls. Baraitser rightly distinguishes between Wikileaks and the concept of “responsible journalism”. No public interest could attach to the indiscriminate mass release of information.

There are many reasons why the title of whistleblower does not attach to Chelsea Manning. There is no evidence Manning had any specific information she wished to impart or any specific issues she wished to pursue.

Julian Assange did not have to disclose the unredacted material. It was not a necessary part of his publication. The New York Times had published some of the material responsibly and redacted. Assange by contrast arrogated to himself the role of deciding what was in the public interest.

The defence was mistaken in its approach to Article X on Freedom of Speech. The approach in England and Wales is not to consider whether a particular publication is compatible with Article X, but whether a particular criminal charge is compatible with Article X. Plainly the charge was compatible in this case with Article X restrictions on grounds of national security. There was no error in law. In this jurisdiction Assange could also be charged with conspiracy.

Johnson then asked a very careful question. If, in this country, a journalist had information on serious governmental wrongdoing and solicited classified material, and published that material in a serious and careful way, would that not engage Article X?

Dobbin replied that following the decision in the Shayler case, he should have pursued internal avenues.

Johnson pressed that he was not talking of the whistleblower but of the journalist. Would the journalist have Article X protection?

Dobbin replied no, but there would have to be a proportionality test before a prosecution was engaged. (You will recall Dobbin had stated earlier that in this case there was no need for any such balancing test as Manning was not a whistleblower and the material was not in the public interest.)

Dobbin said the USA was at pains to distinguish this unprecedented prosecution from ordinary journalism. This was indiscriminate publication of material. The Rosen case was important because, although in a lower court, it explains why you prosecute Wikileaks and not the New York Times. (This case has come up repeatedly throughout the hearings. Of current interest, it was about AIPAC receiving and using classified information.)

While it was the case that the United States could argue that Julian Assange was not entitled to First Amendment protection due to his nationality, it was not saying it would do that. This was merely noted as an option. This could not therefore be a block to extradition due to discrimination on grounds of nationality under Section 81a.

Johnson interjected that in the affidavit we have the prosecutor clearly saying that he might do this. Dobbin replied that this was “tenuous”. Even if the prosecutor did it, there was no way of telling how it might work out. The judge might reject it.  This argument could fall flat in court. This possibility did not offer sufficient foundation to exclude extradition on the basis of discrimination due to nationality. Further this would be about Convention rights that lie outwith the jurisdiction of this court.

At this point Judge Dame Victoria Sharp was looking at Dobbin with great concern, as Dobbin prattled on with a kind of stream of consciousness of meaningless phrases. Judge Johnson attempted to bring her back to reality. Do we have any evidence, he asked, that a foreign national does indeed have the same First Amendment rights as a US citizen?

Well, yes, replied Dobbin. Or perhaps, no. One of the two. She would find out.

With that, Dobbin sat down with a look of great relief. She had got to the end, and spoken so softly that not many people heard what she had said. So not too much damage done. The judges looked even more relieved that she had finished. Prof Alice Edwards, the redoubtable UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, was in court. I wanted to ask her whether listening to Dobbin for more than 15 minutes could in itself be construed as cruel and unusual punishment, but sadly she was seated too far away.

The next KC for the USA now stood up, a Mr Smith, who had been promoted from Number 3 to Number 2 in the absence of Lewis. Smith, from his manner, had no doubts at all about his client’s case, or at least he had no doubts about his fee, which amounts to the same thing. He also had no problem being heard. They heard him in Chelsea.

He said that he wished to address the mosaic of complaints brought by the applicant under Articles IV and VI of the ECHR, relating to fair trial, the rule of law and abuse of process. In the written submissions, the appellant had referred to the system of plea bargaining as enforcing guilty pleas by threatening disproportionate punishment, thus interfering with fair trial. But this argument had never been accepted in any extradition to the United States. In some matters, such as jury selection, the defendant had better rights than in the UK.

With regard to the system of sentencing enhancement with reference to other alleged offences not charged, this could not be abuse of process or denial of fair trial. It was “specialty or nothing”, specialty being the principle in international law that a person extradited could only be charged with the named offence.

As the appellant had noted, the US trial judge could enhance the sentence on the basis of whether the applicant was guilty of further offences, on a “balance of probability” judgment. But this does not mean the defendant is convicted of those further offences. The conviction is solely for the offence charged, enhanced by other conduct. The specialty argument then falls. This was not dissimilar to the UK, where aggravating or mitigating factors might be taken into account.

This could come nowhere near the threshold of a “flagrant” breach of the rule of law required to bring the ECHR into operation. Article 6 (2) would only be invoked if the procedure involved an additional conviction on a new charge. The appellant had also raised the possibility of sentencing enhancement from the information in classified material that would be shown to the judge but not to the defendant or his lawyers. But there was no evidence before the court that showed this would happen in this case.

We now come, said Smith, to the question of grossly disproportionate sentencing, which the defence first raised in relation to Article III of ECHR and they now relate also to Article X on Freedom of Speech. But it is not the norm to impose UK sentencing standards on foreign states. The test is whether a sentencing decision is “extreme”.

The defence had given the estimate of 175 years, as the maximum sentence for each charge, running consecutively. But the defence’s own expert witnesses had given different estimates, ranging from 30 to 40 years to 70 to 80 months.

In his affidavit the Deputy Attorney General had stated that avoiding disparity was a key factor in sentencing guidelines. Miss Manning had been sentenced to 35 years and was eligible for parole after one third of that sentence under military law. Kronberg had given other possible comparators ranging from 42 months to 63 months.

Assange stood accused of very serious conduct, for which sentence could be upped by significant aggravating factors. In the UK, Simon Finch had his sentence increased to 8 years for leaking a document which had put national security at risk. By comparison Assange’s alleged offence was not just grave but entirely unprecedented.

Assange and others at Wikileaks had recruited Chelsea Manning and other hackers, encouraged them to steal classified information, had published unredacted names thus putting lives in danger and causing relocation. So none of the range of sentences which had been placed before the court would be grossly disproportionate, from 60 months to 40 years.

Article X could only be applied in these circumstances to a flagrant breach of Freedom of Speech rights. That was not the case. This was neither a whistleblower case nor responsible journalism. It does not engage Article X at all.

Judge Johnson asked for a copy of the sentencing remarks of the court martial in the Manning case.

Ben Watson KC now stood up to address the court on behalf of the UK Home Secretary, although on recent form he could not be sure if that would still be the same person when he got back to the office. He stated that the Secretary of State has no role in supervising the extradition treaty, The substantive decision is for the judges.

He said that it was worth noting that the bar on political extradition had been removed from the European Framework Agreement between EU member states. It was a doctrine “on the wane”.

There was no basis for the court to infer that Parliament was not aware of the difference between section 81 of the 2003 Extradition Act and the bar on political extradition at section 6 of the 1989 Act. See for example the contribution of Prof Ross Cranston MP in the debate on the act (Cranston was both an MP and a former High Court judge).

I suspect that Watson threw this out with confidence that nobody actually would see the contribution of Prof Ross Cranston MP in the debate. But then Mr Watson has never met me. I did decide to see the contribution of Prof Ross Cranston MP in the debate, and this is what he had to say on the subject of political extradition, in the debate on 9 December 2002.

Clause 13 refers to extraneous circumstances. We shall not extradite people where they might be pursued for political or religious opinions. That is a good thing. There is, of course, the question of definition. In the Shayler case, the French court refused to extradite Shayler to this country on the ground that it was a political offence, so there can be disagreement about what extraneous circumstances might entail. However, there is a valuable barrier that will operate in our domestic law.

That rather conveys the opposite sense to what Watson claimed Professor Cranston was saying. Cranston says political offences will still be banned, and it will be for the courts to define them. That is plainly not the same as saying the Act is removing the bar on extradition for political offences.

Judge Johnson now asked Watson a question. The treaty bars extradition for a political offence. So does this mean that if the US receives a request for extradition for a political offence from the UK, it can refuse it, but if the UK receives an extradition request for an identical political offence from the US, it cannot refuse it, and the Secretary of State cannot block it even if they consider it contrary to Article IV?

Watson replied yes, that is the position. He seemed to find nothing troubling in that at all. Judge Johnson, however, seemed to find it a strange proposition.

Watson moved on to the death penalty. Chelsea Manning had not received the death penalty. There was nothing to suggest the applicant faced the serious threat of the death penalty. The fact that the United States had said that Assange could serve his sentence in Australia could be taken as an assurance against the death penalty. So there was no need for the Secretary of State to seek assurances. The United States had suggested Assange faced a maximum penalty of 30 to 40 years.

Judge Johnson then intervened again, and asked if there were anything to prevent the United States from adding offences of aiding and abetting treason or other counts of espionage which do attract the death penalty? Watson replied there was nothing to stop them, but that would be contrary to the assurance received on serving sentence in Australia. There must be a threshold of possibility of the death penalty before the Secretary of State was obliged to seek assurances against it.

Edward Fitzgerald then rose for rebuttal. He was in much more commanding form today, on the attack, scornful of the arguments he was dismissing with a broad sweep of rhetoric.

Edward Fitzgerald KC

The United States had failed to address the point of arbitrariness. Of course it was arbitrary to lock somebody up under an extradition treaty, while deliberately ignoring a major provision of that very treaty that specifically says they should not be locked up. Even if we did ignore this vital provision in the treaty, Assange was still being punished for his political opinions contrary to Section 81 of the Extradition Act.

It had been suggested that the removal of the phrase “political offence” from the 2003 Act was an “express omission”. But there was no evidence produced of that. “You are saying that silence provides by inference the provision of the Act, that disapplies a provision that plainly is actually in the subsequent Treaty”.

It is ludicrous to say the bar on political extradition is out of date. It is not out of date. The UK continues to sign extradition treaties containing this exact same provision. It is in all but 2 of the UK’s over 150 extradition treaties. It is in all US extradition treaties. It is in many major international instruments. Plainly this is abuse of process. As stated plainly by Bingham and Harper “it is abuse to disentitle someone to the protection of the treaty”.

The United States had come nowhere near to meeting the point on the discrimination by nationality, if Mr Assange were not given First Amendment protection because he is not a US citizen. For the US prosecutor to say we may or may not apply this discrimination was no answer, any more than if they said they reserved the right to torture somebody but may not do it.

On enhanced sentencing, this point also had not been met. There was a clear danger Assange would be sentenced for offences with which he was not charged.

Judge Sharp asked Fitzgerald if this point could not block every extradition to the USA. Fitzgerald said no, it should be judged on a case by case basis on the likelihood of this occurring. In this case the court had evidence that the prosecution had not been motivated by the offences charged, but by other alleged conduct. Judge Sharp asked if he meant the CIA Vault 7 leaks. Fitzgerald confirmed that he did.

Mark Summers KC then stood to continue the rebuttal. It was remarkable, he declared in a tone of barely suppressed rage, that counsel for the USA had spoken for hours and never once acknowledged the massive evidence of criminal state-level behaviour by the United States revealed in the leaked material. They never mentioned or acknowledged the war crimes revealed. There had never been any challenge in the court to the witnesses who testified for days that the material exposed state-level crimes.

Mark Summers KC

Summers said that a key United States argument seemed to turn on the notion that what constituted a political act and political persecution under section 81, and the standards of evidence required in judging them, were different in an extradition hearing than applied in consideration of political asylum cases. This was wrong, They were the same. The protected categories in Article 33 of the Refugee Convention of 1954

on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

… were in practice identical to the protected categories of the 2003 Extradition Act Section 81:

on account of his race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation or political opinions

There was a reason for this. The protection to be given under the Extradition Act and under the Refugee Convention is identical, and for identical reasons, and to be judged by the same standards.

When you prosecute for the act of publishing evidence of war crimes, the nexus that made this political persecution was entirely plain. Publication of information which exposes a state’s crime is protected speech. The state you exposed cannot prosecute you for that.

We had heard much about Deputy Attorney General Kronberg, but he was not the initiator. This was all ordered from way above his head. The prosecution had been decided at the very top. You cannot discuss the sheep and ignore the shepherd. The prosecution had noted that Trump had praised Wikileaks a couple of times as though that ruled out the possibility that agencies in the United States were plotting to kill Assange. That plainly did not follow.

We had clear evidence both from the Yahoo News article and from Protected Witness 2 that there were plans laid by US authorities to murder, kidnap or poison Assange. What does that tell us about the intentions of the US government, as opposed to the bland claims of Mr Kronberg?

The point of foreseeability had not been countered. There was no effort made to counter it. In 2010 it could not have been foreseen that publication would bring espionage charges against the publisher. It had never happened before. Encouraging a whistleblower to produce documents was definitely not unprecedented. That was an absurd claim. It was everyday journalistic activity, as witnesses had testified. No witnesses had been produced to say the opposite.

Of course it was illegal for journalists to commit criminal acts to obtain material. That had not happened here. But even in that case, it does not render the act of publication illegal.

The release of unredacted names was by no means unprecedented. Daniel Ellsberg had testified in these very hearings that the Pentagon Papers he released contained hundreds of unredacted names of sources and officers. The Philip Agee case also released unredacted names of sources and officers. Neither had resulted in an Espionage Act prosecution, or any prosecution aimed at a journalist or publisher.

The information released revealed war crimes. Article X is therefore unavoidably engaged by protected speech. The Shayler case was being misapplied by the prosecution. That judgment specifically excluded the press from liability for publication. It was about the position of the whistleblower. Assange is not the whistleblower here, Manning is. Assange is the publisher. There is no suggestion whatsoever, in any of the Strasbourg authorities, that the press are to be regarded the same way as the whistleblower. What Strasbourg does dictate is that there must be an Article X balancing exercise with the public interest in the disclosures. No such exercise was undertaken by Baraitser.

The prosecution refused to acknowledge the fact, backed up by extensive and unchallenged witness evidence, that Assange had undertaken a whole year of a major redaction exercise to avoid publication of names which might be put at risk. This year was followed by one of the media partners publishing the password to the unredacted material as the chapter heading in a book. Then Mr Assange made desperate efforts to mitigate the damage, including by phoning the White House. This did not accord at all with the prosecution narrative: “At best, Mr Assange was reckless in providing the key to Mr Leigh”.

Several others had then published the full, unredacted database first, including Cryptome. None had been prosecuted, yet more evidence that this prosecution was unforeseeable.

There was, however, no evidence given of harm to any individual from the disclosures. What had been created was a risk. You had to set against that risk the proposed sentence of 30 to 40 years in jail suggested by the prosecution. The guidelines say “rest of life”. Chelsea Manning was given 35 years. Evidence had been given that 30 years was a “floor not a ceiling”. A sentence like this for publication “shocks the conscience of every journalist around the world”.

For what? For revealing state-level crime including torture, rendition, waterboarding, drone strikes, murder, assassination, strappado. Strasbourg regards revelation of these state-level crimes as extremely important. The court has ruled revelations of such abuses as clearly covered by Article X. Leaks had the capacity to stop such abuses, and in some cases actually had. The exposure of major international criminal wrongdoing outweighs the risk created by revealing the names of some of those involved in it.

Dame Victoria interjected that some of the names were of people not involved in criminal wrongdoing. Summers accepted this but said “it is just not tenable to argue, as the prosecution does, that there is no public interest whatsoever in the publications”.

Turning to the issue of capital punishment, the Home Office contended that there was “no real risk”. But it was admitted that Assange could be charged with a capital offence. This exercise is not a risk assessment. The law says that in circumstances where the death penalty might be imposed, there must be an assurance sought against it. “We don’t understand why there is no routine assurance against the death penalty provided in this case. If there is no risk, then surely there is no difficulty in providing the assurance”.

Then, all of a sudden, the hearing was over. The judges stood and left through the door behind them. Five minutes later they were back and reserved their judgment, asking for various written materials to be provided, with a last deadline of March 4. Then they left and it was over.

I am conscious that this account flows less well and reads much more bittily than the account of day one. That is simply how it was. On the first day, Assange’s legal team set out a planned and detailed exposition of the case. On the second, the USA and Home Office responded, and did so in rather disjointed fashion, essentially just reiterating the accusations. There was little legal argument as to why Baraitser and Swift had been right to accept them. The rebuttal was thereafter a series of quickfire returns on individual points.

It was impossible not to note that the judges were distinctly unimpressed by some elements of the prosecution. The possibility of discrimination by nationality over applying the First Amendment appears to be an argument to which the judges were searching in vain for an adequate answer. They were also plainly dissatisfied with the lack of an assurance on the death penalty.

But the British security state is never going to accept that the publication of state secrets is justified where it reveals state crimes, and the judges were desperate to hang on to the ruse of avoiding that question by saying this is only about the publication of names of innocent sources. They are also never going to entertain the wider criticisms of the US system such as sentence enhancement.

So my prediction is that a further appeal will be allowed, but only on the narrow grounds of discrimination by nationality and the death penalty. If their hand is thus forced, the Americans will produce an assurance against the latter and the appeal will be on discrimination by nationality.

That appeal will be scheduled for the Autumn, and its result dragged out until after the US election to avoid embarrassment to Biden. That is my best guess of what happens next. Of course all the time the Establishment has achieved its objective by keeping Julian in a maximum security jail for longer.

The point in the whole proceedings which struck me most strongly, was that in the initial hearings the US was keen to downplay the possible sentence, continually emphasising 6 to 7 years as likely. Now an earlier decision has removed considerations of US prison conditions and Julian’s health from the case, they have radically changed tack and were emphasising repeatedly 30 to 40 years as the norm, which is in effect a rest-of-life sentence. That shift, together with the refusal so far to rule out the death penalty, gives a measure of the ruthlessness with which the CIA is pursuing this case.

My apologies for the delay in producing this report. I caught quite a serious chest infection, I think from the cold and wet in London those days, and was really very ill.

 
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The post Assange Final Appeal Day 2 – Your Man in the Public Gallery appeared first on Craig Murray.

Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery

Par : craig

Reporting on Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has become a vocation that has now stretched over five years. From the very first hearing, when Justice Snow called Assange “a narcissist” before Julian had said anything whatsoever other than to confirm his name, to the last, when Judge Swift had simply in 2.5 pages of glib double-spaced A4 dismissed a tightly worded 152-page appeal from some of the best lawyers on earth, it has been a travesty and charade marked by undisguised institutional hostility.

We were now on last orders in the last chance saloon, as we waited outside the Royal Courts of Justice for the appeal for a right of final appeal.

The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of grey and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power.

Court number 5 had been allocated for this hearing. It is one of the smallest courts in the building. Its largest dimension is its height. It is very high, and lit by heavy mock medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap from the gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of despair; below them you peer through the weak light to make out the participants.

A huge tiered walnut dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out, at one side housing journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoner or prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in medieval style is a Blair era introduction to the so-called process of law.

Rather incongruously, the clerks’ tier was replete with computer hardware, with one of the two clerks operating behind three different computer monitors and various bulky desktop computers, with heavy cables twisting in all directions like sea kraits making love. The computer system seems to bring the court into the 1980’s, and the clerk behind it looked uncannily like a member of a synthesiser group of that era, right down to the upwards pointing haircut.

In period keeping, this computer feed to an overflow room did not really work, which led to a number of halts in proceedings.

All the walls are lined with high bookcases, housing thousands of leather bound volumes of old cases. The stone floor peeks out for one yard between the judicial dais and the storied wooden pews, with six tiers of increasingly narrow seating. The barristers occupied the first tier and their instructing solicitors the second, with their respective clients on the third. Up to ten people per line could squeeze in, with no barriers on the bench between opposing parties, so the Assange family was squashed up against the CIA, State Department and UK Home Office representatives.

That left three tiers for media and public, about thirty people. There was however a wooden gallery above which housed perhaps twenty more. With little fuss and with genuine helpfulness and politeness, the court staff – who from the Clerk of Court down were magnificent – had sorted out the hundreds of those trying to get in, and we had the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, we had 16 Members of the European Parliament, we had MPs from several states, we had NGOs including Reporter Without Borders, we had the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and we had, (checks notes) me, all inside the Court.

I should say this was achieved despite the extreme of official unhelpfulness from the Ministry of Justice, who had refused official admission and recognition to all of the above, including the United Nations. It was pulled together on the day by the police, court staff and the magnificent Assange volunteers led by Jamie. I should also acknowledge Jim, who with others spared me the queue all night in the street which I had undertaken at the International Court of Justice, by volunteering to do it for me.

This sketch captures the tiny non-judicial portion of the court brilliantly. Paranoid and irrational regulations prevent publication of photos or screenshots.

My rough sketch while trying to listen on a difficult audio feed.

At front two Counsels for #Assange, to right behind them Gareth Perice, then from right John Shipton, @GabrielShipton, @Stella_Assange, behind them @ChrisLynnHedges. Also saw @CraigMurrayOrg and @suigenerisjen. pic.twitter.com/pNI2mHMRHW

— Matt Ó Branáin (@MattOBranain) February 20, 2024

The acoustics of the court are simply terrible. We are all behind the barristers as they stood addressing the judges, and their voices were at the same time muffled yet echoing from the bare stone walls.

I did not enter with a great deal of hope. As I have explained in How the Establishment Functions, judges do not have to be told what decision is expected by the Establishment. They inhabit the same social milieu as ministers, belong to the same institutions, attend the same schools, go to the same functions.

The United States’ appeal against the original blocking of Assange’s extradition was granted by a Lord Chief Justice who is the former room-mate, and still best friend, of the minister who organised the removal of Julian from the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The blocking of Assange’s appeal was done by Judge Swift, a judge who used to represent the security services, and said they were his favourite clients. In the subsequent Graham Phillips case, where Mr Phillips was suing the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for sanctions being imposed upon him without any legal case made against him, Swift actually met FCDO officials – one of the parties to the case – and discussed matters relating to it privately with them before giving judgment. He did not tell the defence he had done this. They found out, and Swift was forced to recuse himself.

Personally I am surprised Swift is not in jail, let alone still a High Court judge. But then what do I know of justice?

The Establishment politico-legal nexus was on even more flagrant display today. Presiding was Dame Victoria Sharp, whose brother Richard had arranged an £800,000 loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and immediately been appointed Chairman of the BBC, (the UK’s state propaganda organ). Assisting her was Justice Jeremy Johnson, another former barrister representing MI6.

By an amazing coincidence, Justice Johnson had been brought in seamlessly to replace his fellow ex-MI6 hiree Justice Swift, and find for the FCDO in the Graham Phillips case!

And here these two were now to judge Julian!

What a lovely, cosy club is the Establishment! How ordered and predictable! We must bow down in awe at its majesty and near divine operation. Or go to jail.

Well, Julian is in jail, and we stood ready for his final shot for an appeal. We all stood up and Dame Victoria took her place. In the murky permanent twilight of the courtroom, her face was illuminated from below by the comparatively bright light of a computer monitor. It gave her a grey, spectral appearance, and the texture and colour of her hair merged into the judicial wig seamlessly. She seems to hover over us as a disturbingly ethereal presence.

Her colleague, Justice Johnson, for some reason was positioned as far to her right as physically possible. When they wished to confer he had to get up and walk. The lighting arrangements did not appear to cater for his presence at all, and at times he merged into the wall behind him.

Dame Victoria opened by stating that the court had given Julian permission to attend in person or to follow on video, but he was too unwell to do either. After that disturbing news, Edward Fitzgerald KC rose to open the case for the defence to be allowed an appeal.

There is a crumpled magnificence about Mr Fitzgerald. He speaks with great authority and a moral certainty that compels belief. At the same time he appears so large and well-meaning, so absent of vanity or pretence, that it is like watching Paddington Bear in a legal gown. He is a walking caricature of Edward Fitzgerald.

Barristers’ wigs have tight rolls of horsehair stuck to a mesh that stretches over the head. In Mr Fitzgerald’s case, the mesh has to be stretched so far to cover his enormous brain, that the rolls are pulled apart, and dot his head like hair curlers on a landlady.

Fitzgerald opened with a brief headline summary of what the defence would argue, in identifying legal errors by Judge Swift and Magistrate Baraitser, that meant an appeal was viable and should be heard.

Firstly, extradition for a political offence was explicitly excluded under the UK/US Extradition Treaty which was the basis for the proposed extradition. The charge of espionage was a pure political offence, recognised as such by all legal authorities, and Wikileaks’ publications had been to a political end, and even resulted in political change, so were protected speech.

Baraitser and Swift were wrong to argue that the Extradition Treaty was not incorporated in UK domestic law and therefore “not justiciable”, because extradition against its terms engaged Article V of the European Convention (on Human Rights on Abuse of Process) and Article X (on Freedom of Speech).

The Wikileaks revelations had revealed serious state illegality by the government of the United States, up to and including war crimes. It was therefore protected speech.

Article III and Article VII of the ECHR were also engaged because in 2010 Assange could not possibly have predicted a prosecution under the Espionage Act, as this had never been done before despite a long history in the USA of reporters publishing classified information in national security journalism. The “offence” was therefore unforeseeable. Assange was being “Prosecuted for engaging in the normal journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information”.

The possible punishment in the United States was entirely disproportionate, with a total possible jail sentence of 175 years for those “offences” charged so far.

Assange faced discrimination on grounds of nationality, which would make extradition unlawful. US authorities had declared he would not be entitled to First Amendment protection in the United States because he is not a US citizen.

There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7 publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be invoked.

The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to authorities who could not be trusted not to take extrajudicial action against him.

Finally, the Home Secretary had failed to take into account all these due factors in approving the extradition.

Fitzgerald then moved into the unfolding of each of these arguments, opening with the fact that the US/UK Extradition Treaty specifically excludes extradition for political offences, at Article IV.

Fitzgerald said that espionage was the “quintessential” political offence, acknowledged as such in every textbook and precedent. The court did have jurisdiction over this point because ignoring the provisions of the treaty rendered the court liable to accusations of abuse of process.

He noted that neither Swift nor Baraitser had made any judgment on whether or not the offences charged were political, relying on the argument the treaty did not apply anyway.

But the entire extradition depended on the treaty. It was made under the treaty. “You cannot rely on the treaty, and then refute it”.

This point brought the first overt reaction from the judges, as they looked at each other to wordlessly communicate what they had made of it. It was a point of which they had felt the force.

Fitzgerald continued that when the 2003 Extradition Act, on which the Treaty depended, had been presented to Parliament, ministers had assured parliament that people would not be extradited for political offences. Baraitser and Swift had said that the 2003 Act had deliberately not had a clause forbidding extradition for political offences. Fitzgerald said you could not draw that inference from an absence. There was nothing in the text permitting extradition for political offences. It was silent on the point.

Nothing in the Act precluded the court from determining that an extradition contrary to the terms of the treaty under which the extradition was taking place, would be a breach of process. In the United States, there had been cases where extradition to the UK under the treaty had been prevented by the courts because of the ‘no political extradition’ clause. That must apply at both ends.

Of the UK’s 158 extradition treaties, 156 contained a ban on extradition for political offences. This was plainly systematic and entrenched policy. It could not be meaningless in all these treaties. Furthermore this was the opposite of a novel argument. There were a great many authoritative cases, stretching back centuries, in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Australia and many other countries in which “no political extradition” was firmly established jurisprudence. It could not suddenly be “not justiciable”.

It was not only justiciable, it had been very extensively adjudicated.

All of the offences charged were as “espionage” except for one. That “hacking” charge, of helping Chelsea Manning in receiving classified documents, even if it were true, was plainly a similar allegation of a form of espionage activity.

The indictment describes Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”. That was plainly an accusation of espionage. This is self-evidently a politically motivated prosecution for a political offence.

Julian Assange is a person in political conflict with the view of the United States, who seeks to affect the policies and operations of the US government.

Section 87 of the Extradition Act 2003 provides that a court must interpret it in the light of the defendant’s human rights as enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights. This definitely brings in the jurisdiction of the court. It means all the issues raised must be viewed through the prism of the ECHR and from no other angle.

To depend on the treaty yet ignore its terms is abuse of process and contrary to the ECHR. The obligation in UK law to respect the terms of the extradition treaty with the USA while administering an extradition under it, was comparable to the obligation courts had found to follow the Modern Slavery Convention and Refugee Convention.

Mark Summers KC then arose to continue the case for Assange. A dark and pugnacious character, he could be well cast as Heathcliff. Summers is as blunt and direct as Fitzgerald is courteous. His points are not so much hammered home, as piledriven.

This prosecution, Summers began, was “intended to prohibit and punish the exposure of state level crime”. The extradition hearing had heard unchallenged evidence of this from many witnesses. The speech in question was thus protected speech. This extradition was not only contrary to the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2007, it was also plainly contrary to Section 81 of the Extradition Act of 2003.

This prosecution was motivated by a desire to punish and suppress political opinion, contrary to the Act. It could be shown plainly to be a political prosecution. It had not been brought until years after the proposed offence; the initiation of the charges had been motivated by the International Criminal Court stating that they were using the Wikileaks publications as evidence of war crimes. That had been immediately followed by US government denunciation of Wikileaks and Assange, by the designation as a non-state hostile intelligence agency, and even by the official plot to kidnap, poison, rendition or assassinate Assange. That had all been sanctioned by President Trump.

This prosecution therefore plainly bore all of the hallmarks of political persecution.

The magistrates’ court had heard unchallenged evidence that the Wikileaks material from Chelsea Manning contained evidence of assassination, rendition, torture, dark prisons and drone killings by the United States. The leaked material had in fact been relied on with success in legal actions in many foreign courts and in Strasbourg itself.

The disclosures were political because the avowed intention was to effect political change. Indeed they had caused political change, for example in the Rules of Engagement for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and in ending drone killings in Pakistan. Assange had been highly politically acclaimed at the time of the publications. He had been invited to address both the EU and the UN.

The US government had made no response to any of the extensive evidence of United States state level criminality given in the hearing. Yet Judge Baraitser had totally ignored all of it in her ruling. She had not referred to United States criminality at all.

At this point Judge Sharp interrupted to ask where they would find references to these acts of criminality in the evidence, and Summers gave some very terse pointers, through clenched teeth.

Summers continued that in law it is axiomatic that the exposure of state level criminality is a political act. This was protected speech. There were an enormous number of cases across many jurisdictions which indicate this. The criminality presented in this appeal was tolerated and even approved by the very highest levels of the United States government. Publication of this evidence by Mr Assange, absent any financial motive for him to do so, was the very definition of a political act. He was involved, beyond dispute, in opposition to the machinery of government of the United States.

This extradition had to be barred under Section 81 of the Extradition Act because its entire purpose was to silence those political opinions. Again, there were numerous cases on record of how courts should deal, under the European Convention, with states reacting to people who had revealed official criminality.

In the judgment being appealed Judge Baraitser did not address the protected nature of speech exposing state criminality at all. That was plainly an error in law.

Baraitser had also been in error of fact in stating that it was “Purely conjecture and speculation” that the revelation of US war crimes had led to this prosecution. This ignored almost all of the evidence before the court.

The court had been given evidence of United States interference with judicial procedure over US war crimes in Spain, Poland, Germany and Italy. The United States had insulated its own officials from ICC jurisdiction. It had actively threatened both the institutions and employees, of the ICC and of official bodies of other states. All of this had been explained in detail in expert evidence and had been unchallenged. All of it had been ignored by Baraitser.

Following the publication of the Manning material, there had been six years of non-prosecution of Assange. Why was there then a prosecution after six years? What had changed?

Following the declaration by the International Criminal Court that it would use Wikileaks material to investigate US government officials for war crimes, US officials described Assange as “a political actor”. This period saw the origin of the phrase “non-state hostile intelligence agency”. Assange had been accused of “working with Russia” and “trying to take down the USA”.

Baraitser had acknowledged in her judgment the hostility from the CIA but stated that “the CIA does not speak on behalf of the US administration”.

It was important to note that it was after the Baraitser judgment that Yahoo News had published its investigation into the US government plot against Assange.

The court had heard of CIA action against Assange from Protected Witness No.2, but that had only gone to unlawful surveillance at the Ecuadorean Embassy and elsewhere. He did not know of the kidnap and kill plot. This was very real, and it was chilling. Indeed, the prosecution and extradition request was only initiated in order to provide a framework for the rendition attempt.

Political persecution was also apparent in the highly selective prosecution of the appellant. Numerous newspapers had also published the exact same information, as had other websites. Yet only Assange was being prosecuted. Baraitser had simply ignored numerous facts which were key to the case, and therefore her judgment was plainly wrong.

The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that, under Article 7 of the Convention, a prosecution must be foreseeable, for the act committed to be criminal. This prosecution failed the foreseeability test because no journalist had ever before been prosecuted under the US Espionage Act. Baraitser was obliged to rule on this but instead had simply said it would be a matter for the US court.

Publication of leaks was routine. National security journalism is a thing. It was a well established aspect of the profession in the USA. Encouraging those in possession of classified material to reveal it, is routine journalistic practice. Whistleblowers themselves had been frequently prosecuted. But no publisher or journalist had ever been prosecuted for obtaining or publishing classified state material.

Baraitser had heard much unchallenged evidence on this point. A prosecution which has never happened before is not foreseeable.

At this point, Judge Johnson intervened to ask whether the publication of so many unredacted names of informants had not also been unprecedented, and if this may have been expected to trigger an unprecedented response?

Summers replied there had indeed been other examples of publication of names.

At this point, the court broke up for lunch.

It had been a strong start to the case by the defence. The judges had appeared to pay increasing attention as the case went on, and at times seemed surprised by some of the assertions made. The first substantive question from the judges, coming just on the lunch break, was however plainly intended to be hostile to Assange.

We left the courtroom and headed for the canteen. This has no frills and a very limited menu, designed to shove the food out quick. I was with John Shipton and German MP Sevim Dagdelen, who kindly paid for lunch, thus immediately distinguishing herself from all the British MPs I have known.

I asked for a baked potato with cheese, but it turned out that baked beans and cheese were not a choice but a pre-mix, and the potato came covered in this bright orange mess. I accidentally got some on my thumb, which despite the passage of 48 hours and frequent washing, remains the colour of Donald Trump’s face.

After lunch, Mark Summers was able to return to the question raised about the release of names of agents and informants.

He said there were many examples in the past of such names being published, including en masse, and it had never resulted in the Espionage Act or any other charges being brought against a publisher. In the case of Philip Agee, the publication of names had led to revocation of the article but no prosecution of the publisher. Daniel Ellsberg had in fact given evidence in this very case that publication of the Pentagon Papers had revealed numerous names, for which there had been no prosecution of the New York Times.

He suggested it was also worth noting there is currently no prosecution of Cryptome, which published the unredacted Manning material before Wikileaks, and still carries it. There has, since these events, been a law passed in the United States specifically outlawing the publishing of the names of secret service officers and sources, but this legislation is specifically limited to officers of the state only and specifically does not include publishers or journalists.

This prosecution therefore remains unprecedented and unforeseeable. No American case has ever sought to prosecute publishers who publish state secrets. The governing principle remained as famously defined by Justice Stewart “The autonomous press may publish what it knows and seek to learn what it can”.

Against this great raft of practice and jurisprudence, continued Summers, all the US government had managed to produce was a court of first instance case named Rosen, in which the court had “entertained the possibility” that the receipt and passing of classified information, not by the whistleblower, might be an offence. But that case was about corporate lobbyists and not about journalism or publishing, it had anyway never concluded and it was from a court with a comparative authority to Truro Magistrates Court.

That was literally the only argument the US government had to offer. Yet Baraitser had found in their favour.

Judge Johnson now interrupted to ask how this related to the theft of information aspect of the charges against Assange, and assisting Manning to crack a hashtag? Taken at its highest, was this not conspiracy to get hold illegally of state material?

Summers responded that it was standard journalistic practice to encourage and assist whistleblowers to obtain material for the press. There were a very large number of such instances, but in 2010 there had never been a prosecution. The US government had asserted two examples of such prosecutions, but there were from 2012 and 2016, and they were not relevant to whether such a prosecution could have been foreseeable to Julian Assange in 2010.

At this point Summers appeared very exasperated indeed. He addressed the judges as though he were a leading astrophysicist who, for some reason, found himself teaching elementary mathematics to an unruly remedial class at a young offenders’ institution. His jaw was set and his hands clenched and unclenched. I would not have bet any significant sum against his next words being “listen, you bloody fool”. Every now and then there was a menacing pause while he lent forward and rested his weight on fists bearing down on the desk in front of him, which seemed to help control his anger.

Gathering himself, he continued:

It was the duty of Judge Baraitser to ensure that the extradition did not breach the ECHR Article VII on the rule of law. If the prosecution were unforeseeable – as it was – that was a breach. Baraitser’s ruling left the decision on this point to be decided by the court in the United states. But she could not abdicate responsibility in this way. She had an explicit duty to offer ECHR protection and consider the point herself. By not doing this, she had erred in law. The Court cannot be absolved of its duty to deal with Convention rights.

Summers continued: the Court had a duty to consider the case the way that Strasbourg would judge the case, applying “European values”. Justice Johnson asked whether that applied to all the charges of the indictment. Summers answered simply “all of them”. Dame Victoria then asked whether it made a difference whether Ms Manning had come across the information in the ordinary course of her employment, or had actively sought it out.

Summers replied that what the court at Strasbourg would say on this is that there was a “proportionality balance”.

Manning had revealed massive state level criminality going to the very heart and purpose of the organisation for which she worked. Of course she was entitled actively to look for evidence of it. Manning’s exposures were conscience driven and from no other motive. There was plainly enormous public interest in the publication.

On the question of public interest the Strasbourg jurisprudence differs radically from English domestic legislation on official secrets, but in considering Convention rights the court is obliged to look at it through the Strasbourg lens.

The question was this: “Is the public interest in the disclosure sufficient to outweigh the duty of confidentiality of the employee?”

Strasbourg judgments made plain it was not enough just to say “national security”. The actions of governments, especially when it came to state crime, must be subject to scrutiny by the public.

Justice Johnson then intervened to ask how this related to the harm caused to human sources whose names were revealed in the publication?

Summers again controlled himself, and then said there had been no evidence presented, at these hearings or at the trial of Chelsea Manning, that any harm had actually occurred to any named individual. There was no allegation, in all the United States case, that any individual had actually come to harm. The allegation was they were put at risk.

What had been exposed was state-level crime on a massive scale, including very grave war crimes. Set against that was a potential risk to individuals involved in those crimes. In considering the balance, Strasbourg would consider that they themselves as a court had made use of the Manning material in several very important legal cases. The International Criminal Court has similarly used the material.

Manning was a whistleblower and her material was of enormous, the greatest, public interest. That would weigh very heavily in the balance of proportionality, compared to the disproportionate American sentencing for disclosure.

More fundamentally, Manning was a whistleblower who had revealed state level serious criminality. The publications were therefore protected speech and Strasbourg would rule there should be no prosecution at all. And the answer to Dame Victoria’s question, Summer concluded, is this:

“If the speech is protected, then helping it cannot be criminal”.

Assange’s intention was political and the effects were political. These had included an end to drone killing in Pakistan, changes to the Rules of Engagement for US forces in Afghanistan and even arguably they had helped bring an end to the war in Iraq. There was no doubt the public interest in this eclipses all the other arguments.

While, unlike Manning, Assange had been under no duty of secrecy to the US government of any kind.

Dame Victoria interrupted to say that Judge Baraitser had dealt with all of these arguments at para 110 of her judgment.

Summers looked at her pityingly. “No, she doesn’t,” he said “she just looks at the Official Secrets Act plus Shayler. Nowhere does she ever acknowledge the public interest in the disclosures. She just recognises everything in the other side of the balance. She does not do the required balancing exercise at all. She never understands the test she has to apply and to judge public interest on the facts of the case.”

Plainly in the lunch period the judges had returned to their corner stools, where they had been given smelling salts, splashed with water and instructed to come out swinging. Judge Johnson asked with extra sarcasm: “So, revealing the identities of informants. How do you balance that?”

Dame Victoria said that Judge Baraitser had noted that this was a matter of “indiscriminate disclosure” that had been condemned by the New York Times, the Guardian and Mr Assange’s other media partners.

Summers replied that the risk to those people named simply formed a part of the balancing exercise which Judge Baraitser had failed to carry out. It had to be set against the value of disclosing ongoing war crimes. And you are talking about a potential risk to US informants who might come to harm, against actual war crimes which really had happened. Thousands of people who had been assassinated, tortured, renditioned etc.

Baraitser’s failure to carry out the balancing exercise on public interest and the rule of law under Article 7 of the Convention was blatant, but even more so was that she had failed to engage at all with Article X – Freedom of Speech. She had stated that whether Assange was entitled to First Amendment protection in the United States was for the American judge to decide, but had ignored her own duty to consider the same freedom of speech arguments under Article X of the Convention.

There was established Strasbourg jurisprudence that showed that news gathering activity was as much a part of the act of protected speech as the publication of the information. The allegation in the indictment ftom the USA that Assange helped Manning with hashtag hacking could bear two interpretations. It was either news gathering, or providing the source with protection. Both were legitimate.

The court had also to consider the enormity of the sentence Assange could face. This was so disproportionate, at up to 175 years as currently charged, that it should itself fall foul of Article III of ECHR. There was also the question of the sheer chilling effect of this kind of prosecution and sentence, on other journalists and publishers. That too had to be considered in the balance of public interest.

Summers now finished and sat down. We looked around, and were rather relieved to find that it appeared that he had got through his performance without any actual physical harm coming to anybody.

But Summers very definitely had an effect. The attitude and the body language of the judges had changed. It was perfectly plain that he had presented them with facts about the case that they had never heard before, and arguments that they found cogent. Their interchange of glances with each other became more frequent, and at times Johnson had walked over to confer. They looked things up and moved papers and furrowed brows. It was obvious they had a great deal of respect for Summers, even though, if it were mutual, he hid that fact very well.

Edward Fitzgerald stood up again and the whole court relaxed. Everybody’s shoulders lowered an inch. Both judges looked at him fondly, as at a beloved uncle getting to his feet after an excellent Christmas lunch, who is now going to do conjuring tricks for the family, which everyone knows will go hilariously wrong in the middle but be spectacularly successful in the end.

For some reason, Fitzgerald was carrying the desktop lectern in the crook of his elbow as he started to address the judges, gradually sorting out this and his boxes of papers as he went along. He said that the extradition must be blocked because Assange faced discrimination on grounds of nationality. In his affidavit for the prosecution, Deputy Attorney General Kronberg stated that it may be held that Assange was not entitled to First Amendment rights and protections for free speech, as he was a foreign national. This had also been stated by Mike Pompeo, a senior administration official.

Judge Baraitser had said that the USAID case on this point was not relevant as it only applied to companies outside the United States. But the very affidavit setting out the indictment stated that the US might apply this to Assange, and so had Pompeo. So Baraitser was plainly wrong.

Dame Victoria interjected that Judge Baraitser had also said that the US government position is that this case is not really a First Amendment case at all. Fitzgerald replied that it most certainly is at least arguably a First Amendment case on freedom of speech; that the defence wished to argue the First Amendment. The prosecution themselves said there was at the least an option to deny this defence to Julian Assange on discriminatory grounds of nationality.

If the defendant’s preferred defence were blocked on the grounds of nationality, that was enough to deny the extradition. The notion of an unfair process was not dependent on its result.

The point had been extensively raised and the United States had given no assurances that they would not treat Assange in this discriminatory way.

This was another point where the judges looked at each other, clearly perplexed. This case was not as simple to dismiss as they had expected.

Fitzgerald then said that, contrary to Articles VI and VII of ECHR, it was possible in the USA to be sentenced for conduct with which you have not been charged or of which you have even been acquitted. This could occur at “sentencing enhancement”, where a judge could bring in other alleged conduct which had not been in the trial, to affect the sentence. As this was done on a “balance of probabilities” basis, there were even many cases where the judge had sentenced people for offences of which they had been acquitted by the jury on the measure of “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Fitzgerald gave the example of a person accused of dealing cannabis who had been sentenced for a second degree murder which had never been prosecuted. He said that in the Assange case, this was particularly likely to happen. None of the charges now before the court related to the Vault 7 leaks, but the defence believed these had motivated the prosecution. It was following the Vault 7 publication that Pompeo designated Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”. It was very likely Assange could be sentenced for the Vault 7 leaks with which he had never been charged. Joshua Schulte, the supposed Vault 7 leaker, had just been sentenced to 40 years in jail.

These kind of arrangements certainly reached the bar of a “flagrant denial of justice” which the courts had set as necessary to prevent an extradition on grounds of lack of due process.

Dame Victoria asked whether this would extend so far as to put aside extradition in every US criminal case? Fitzgerald replied no, you would have to look at each individual case and assess how great the risk. She asked whether the Vault 7 disclosures created the risk in this case, and Fitzgerald replied yes, though there were also other factors.

Fitzgerald then moved to the evidence of Protected Witness 2 and the issue of illegal surveillance of Assange in the Embassy, including of his legal consultations, and the plot to kidnap and even kill him, by the authorities of the state that was seeking his extradition. Baraitser’s answer to this was not to take it into account because it was the subject of criminal proceedings in Spain, but (said Fitzgerald) “that cannot be a reason not to look at it”.

In considering real danger to life when issues of human rights and political motivation are concerned, the strict rules of legal evidence, as in a criminal court case, do not apply. The Yahoo News article would be considered acceptable evidence in weighing an asylum application under the Refugee Convention, and it should be given the same weight now. Pompeo had himself confirmed that some of it is true.

If removed to the USA there is a real danger that Assange’s life could be targeted by US intelligence organisations. The CIA also has a major role in prison allocation and the imposition of Special Administrative Measures, defined by the UN as tantamount to torture.

Dame Sharp said that the US prosecution had said Assange could be transferred to prison in Australia. Fitzgerald said that was a highly conditional suggestion. Assange would be in any event liable for two years or more pre-trial detention in the USA, then years more if an appeal was to be heard. The conditions of transfer between the USA and Australia would be subject to diplomatic negotiation. All the time Assange would be subject to the “real possibility of extrajudicial attack”, while being held in the USA.

Finally, Fitzgerald turned away from the grounds on which appeal should be allowed against Baraitser’s judgment, to the grounds where the Home Secretary (Priti Patel I think – they come and go so fast) had failed in her duty by authorising the extradition.

Fitzgerald said the Home Secretary had a separate obligation to enforce Article 4 of the Extradition Treaty, as she was executing an instrument under the Treaty. She had failed to do so. She had also not exercised her own judgment, as she ought to have done on the Gary McKinnon precedent. The Secretary of State must also act in conformity at all times with the ECHR.

Separately, the Secretary of State had failed in her specific duty to obtain assurances that the death penalty would not be implemented, before agreeing an extradition. The United States could add further charges at any time were Assange in the US, including aiding and abetting treason or other Espionage Act charges which attract the death penalty. It was routine in these circumstances to obtain assurances against the death penalty, and it was sinister they had not been obtained.

The law on this point was very clear; in the absence of assurances against the death penalty, the extradition must be stopped by the Home Secretary and the defendant discharged.

On this rather sombre point, Judge Sharp called the end of the day, and we staggered out into a wet London evening. It was a huge amount to pack into our heads in a day for those of us with brains smaller than Mr Fitzgerald, and the large crowd that roared its approval as we emerged hardly registered with me at all.

It had gone better than I expected.

For the first time in the five years of these extradition hearings, I felt that the judges were genuinely listening and engaged. It was obvious that they had been briefed by the security services beforehand, that the only issue in this case was the placing at risk of US informants whose names had been revealed. It was also plain that they had read very little of the documentation, as they continually asked for references and seemed unacquainted with many basic facts of the case. But as the day went on, they had discovered that there was very much more to be considered, and they looked like they were considering it.

You may think this strange, but they also both came over as rather nice people. They were unfailingly polite, and it did not seem a pretence. They both found the odd moment amusing that was natural to be amusing, and engaged sympathetically with the defence team throughout. Of course, I do not pretend that any of that is more powerful than the Establishment desire to see Julian crushed, and I am well aware they both have truly Deep State backgrounds. But I left encouraged.

Julian remained in his tiny cold cell. The next day would be the US government response.

 

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The post Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery appeared first on Craig Murray.

Rethinking Ukraine: Putin and the Mystery of National Identity

Par : craig

The genocide in Gaza – or more precisely the major NATO powers’ active and practical support for the genocide in Gaza – has forced me to re-evaluate my views on Ukraine in a manner more sympathetic to the Russian narrative.

In particular, I was complacent in my dismissive attitude to the argument that the Western powers would back ethnic cleansing and massacre in the Donbass, by forces including some motivated by Nazi ideology. The same powers who are funding and arming Ukraine are funding and arming a genocide by racial supremacist Israeli forces in Gaza. It is beyond argument that my belief in some kind of inherent decency in the Western political Establishment was naive.

I apologise.

This does not mean that I was wrong to call the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian state illegal. I am afraid it was. You see, the law is the law. It has only a tenuous connection to either morality or justice. A thing can be justified and morally right, but still illegal.

The proof of this is that we have an entire legal structure governing transactions which is designed to achieve massive concentration of wealth. In consequence, the world is predicted to have its first trillionaires inside the next five years, while millions of children go hungry. That is plainly immoral. It is plainly unjust. But it is not only legal, it is the purpose of the system of law.

I am, however, content that the “Right to Protect” doctrine has not become accepted in international law, because it is in general application neo-imperialist. It was developed by the Blair government initially to justify NATO bombing of Serbia and the British re-occupation of Sierra Leone, and was used by Hillary Clinton to justify the destruction of Libya on the basis of lies about an imminent massacre in Benghazi. We should be wary of the doctrine.

(That is the major theme of my book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo).

The causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are plain. Alarm at NATO expansionism and forward positioning of aggressive military assets encircling Russia. The Ukrainian coup of 2014. Exasperation at Ukrainian bad faith and the ignoring of the Minsk accords. The continuing death toll from shelling of Russian speakers in the Donbass.

The suppression of the Russian language, of Russian Orthodox religion and of the main pro-Russian opposition political party in Ukraine are simple facts. These I have always acknowledged: until I saw the positive enthusiasm of leaders of the Western states for massacre in Gaza, I was not convinced they could not have been addressed by diplomacy and negotiation. I now have to reassess that view in the light of new information, and I now think Putin was justified in the invasion.

It is not that any of the arguments are new. It is simply that before I did not believe that the West would sponsor mass ethnic cleansing and genocidal attack on the Donbass by extreme Ukrainian nationalist-led, Western-armed forces. I thought the “West” was more civilised than that. I now have to face the fact that I was wrong about the character of the NATO powers.

The alternative to Putin’s action probably was indeed massacre and ethnic cleansing.

The urgent need now is for negotiation to put an end to the war. On that my position has not changed. The war is a disaster for the people of Europe. The American destruction of Nord Stream has devastated the German economy and resulted in huge energy price increases for consumers all across Europe, including the UK. There was a step jump in food inflation which has not been pulled back.

The continuation of the war will of course prime the pump of the military-industrial complex. Massive defence spending is the most efficient way to ensure kickbacks to the political class who control the flow of state funds, through both legal and illegal forms of corrupt reward to politicians.

As Julian Assange said, the object is not to win wars: the object is forever wars, to keep the funds flowing.

The truth is that the longer the war persists, the less generous Russia will be over returning occupied territory to Ukraine. The deal which was torpedoed by the West nearly two years ago (and in truth the US played more of a role than Boris Johnson – I was actually there in Turkey) ceded only the Crimea to Russia, with a Minsk plus deal for the Donbass which would have remained Ukrainian. That is unthinkable now. The major question is how large a coastal corridor Russia will insist on keeping westward from Crimea, and whether Putin can be persuaded to accept less than the historical dividing line of the Dnieper.

I do not share the Russian triumphalism at the dwindling manpower resources of the Ukraine. With the obscene billions the West is pumping into remote warfare in Ukraine, that is not the factor you might expect. But the political will of the West to continue to pump in these billions is plainly sapping, as it becomes obvious there will be no successful Ukrainian offensive. Put simply, Russia will outlast its opponents.

It has always been the case that the sooner Ukraine and the West settle, the better deal they will get, and that is more true every day. But prolonging the war is an end in itself to those who make money from it.

Putin’s historical disquisition to Tucker Carlson opened some Western eyes to another national perspective, and gave rise to widespread claims by Western media that Putin was factually wrong. In fact almost all of his facts were correct. The interpretation of them, and the position of other facts which were omitted or given less weight, is of course the art of history.

There is no question I find more fascinating in history than the formation and dissolution of national identities.

My own perspective on this – and there is no subject on which it is more important to understand the vantage point of the person writing – is governed by two factors in particular. Firstly, I am a Scot and come from one of Europe’s oldest nation states, which then lost its independence and struggles to regain it after being submerged in a new “British” national identity.

Secondly, as a former diplomat I lived and worked in the political field in a number of countries with differing histories of national identity.

These include Poland, a nation state which the historian Norman Davies brilliantly quipped “Has emerged from time to time through the mists of history – but never in the same place twice”.

It includes Ghana, a state with an extremely strong sense of national identity but which was an entirely artificial colonial creation.

It includes Nigeria, another entirely artificial colonial creation but which has struggled enormously to build national identity against deep and often violent ethnic and cultural differences.

It includes Uzbekistan, a country which also has entirely artificial colonial borders but which the western “left” fail to recognise as an ex-colony because they refuse to acknowledge the Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian Empire.

So I have seen all this, as someone with a training and interest as a historian, who has read a great deal of Eastern European history. I have also lived in Russia and was for a time both a fluent Russian and Polish speaker. I do not write this to claim I am right, but so that you know what has formed my view.

Putin argued at great length that there never was such a country as “Ukraine”. The BBC has run a “fact check” and claimed this is “Nonsense”.

There are several points to make about this. The first is that the BBC did not, as it claimed, go to “independent historians”. It went to Polish, Ukrainian and Armenian historians with their own very distinct agenda.

The second is that these historians did not actually take issue with Putin’s facts. For a fact-check it does not really examine any of Putin’s historical facts at all. What the historians did was put forward other facts they felt deserve more weight, or different interpretations of the facts referenced by Putin. But none argued convincingly for the former existence of a Ukrainian national state or even the long term existence of Ukrainian national identity.

In fact their arguments were largely consistent with Putin. The BBC quote Prof Ronald Suny:

Mr Suny points out that the inhabitants of these lands when they were conquered by Russia were neither Russian nor Ukrainian, but Ottoman, Tatar or Cossacks – Slavic peasants who had fled to the frontiers.

Which is absolutely true: 18th century Russia did not conquer a territory called “Ukraine”. Much of the land of Ukraine was under Muslim rule when conquered by Catherine the Great, and nobody  called themselves “Ukrainian”.

The BBC then gives this quote:

But Anita Prazmowska, a professor emerita at the LSE, says that although a national consciousness emerged later among Ukrainians than other central European nations, there were Ukrainians during that period.

“[Vladimir Putin] is using a 20th Century concept of the state based on the protection of a defined nation, as something that goes back. It doesn’t.”

Which is hardly accusing Putin of speaking “nonsense” either. Prazmowska admits the development of Ukrainian national consciousness came “later than other Central European states”, which is very definitely true. Prazmowska herself has a very Central European take – the idea of the nation state in England, Scotland and France, for example, developed well ahead of the period of which she was speaking.

I should address the weakness in Putin’s narrative, around the origins of World War 2. Russian nationalists have great difficulty in accommodating the Stalin/Hitler pact into the narrative of the Great Patriotic War, and while Putin did briefly reference it, his attempt to blame World War 2 essentially on Poland was a low point. But even here, there was a historical truth that the standard Western narrative ignores.

The Rydz-Smigly–led military dictatorship in Poland after the death of Pilsudski was not a pleasant regime. Putin was actually correct about Munich: both the UK and France had asked Poland to allow the Soviet army to march through to bolster Czechoslovakia against Germany, and Poland refused (Ridz-Smigly did not trust Stalin, and frankly I don’t blame him). But this is an example of part of Putin’s narrative that countered the received Western tradition, that most well-informed people in the West have no idea happened, and is perfectly true.

The fusing back then of Ukrainian nationalism with Nazism, and the atrocities of Ukrainian nationalists in WW2 against not just Jews but also Poles and other minorities, were also perfectly true.

It is a simple and stark truth there never was a Ukrainian state before 1991. There just was not. Lands currently comprising Ukraine were at various times under the rule of Muslim Khans, of the Ottomans, of Cossack Hetmans (possibly the closest thing to proto-Ukrainians), the Polish-Lithuanian confederation and Russian Tsars.

As I have stated on this blog before, the boundary between Polish/Lithuanian and Russian influence became settled on the Dnieper. I have also published this map before, showing that history resonates through the current conflict.

There is also the case of third-party recognition of the Ukrainian nationality. I have read, for example, the letters and memoirs, both published and unpublished, of scores of British soldiers and civil servants involved in the Imperial rivalry with Russia in Asia. Many had contact with Russian officers or diplomats. They did clearly recognise different ethnic identities within the Russian Empire. The Russian diplomat Jan Witkiewicz was described repeatedly by British officers as “Polish”, for example. “Cossack” and “Tartar” were frequently used. I cannot recall any of these British sources ever using the description “Ukrainian”.

Nor did British officers who actually passed through Ukraine, like Fred Burnaby and Arthur Connolly, describe it as such in their memoirs. Now I am not claiming that if British imperialists did not notice something, it did not exist. But if there were a centuries-old recognition by the rival Empire of the existence of a Ukrainian national identity, that would definitely mean something. There does not appear to be such.

I should be interested to know where Ukrainian nationalists claim their cultural heritage lies as proof of early national identity. What is the Ukrainian equivalent of Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt speech, of Scotland’s Blind Harry, or even of Poland’s Pan Tadeusz? (This is a genuine question. There may be areas of Ukrainian historic identity of which I am unaware).

Putin was not wrong about history (apart from the dodgy bit about origins of the second world war). But the correct question is whether any of this matters.

It is not whether Putin’s historical analysis is broadly correct, it is whether this matters. I am inclined to the view that Putin is correct that there is little evidence that the people living in Ukraine, hundreds of years ago, ever considered themselves a distinct national entity.

But they are all dead, so they don’t get a vote. The only thing that matters is the opinion of those living there now.

It seems to me beyond dispute that there is now a Ukrainian national identity. I know several Ukrainians who consider themselves joyously and patriotically Ukrainian, just as I know patriotic Ghanaians and even patriotic Uzbeks. The question of how this identity was forged and how recently is not the point.

I should add there are undoubtedly a great many Ukrainians whose sense of national identity is not linked to Nazism. There is a historical and a current strain of Nazism in Ukrainian nationalism, and it is far too tolerated by the Ukrainian state; that is certainly true. But to claim all Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis is a nonsense.

The formation of national identity is a very curious thing. Ivory Coast has just won the African Cup of Nations at soccer, beating Nigeria in the final. The competition arouses huge patriotic fervour throughout the continent of Africa. But the boundaries of all the African nations, except arguably Ethiopia, are entirely artificial colonial constructs. They cut right across ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Much of modern Ghana was the old Ashanti kingdom, but that extended much further into now Ivory Coast. The coastal areas were never Ashanti. In the east, the Ewe people’s lands are cut by a completely artificial boundary with Togo. To the north, largely Muslim populations live a much more rural lifestyle. Yet Ghanaians are fiercely proud of this imposed state of Ghana. They are proud it was the first African state to attain Independence, they are proud of its heritage of supporting African liberation movements including the ANC, they are proud of its education system. They have a real sense of national identity that goes far beyond the passionate support of its sporting teams.

Ghanaian identity is modern, ahistoric, within entirely colonial boundaries. But it is real and valid.

In Central Asia, the boundaries of the “stans” are again colonial boundaries that cut right across the pre-existing Khanates. The boundaries of these ex-Soviet republics were carefully designated by Stalin not to be ethnically or culturally coherent, to guard against the development of national opposition. So the greatest Tajik cities, Bokhara and Samarkand, are not in Tajikistan but Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan has important similarities to Ukraine. Both are states with boundaries of Soviet republics, which have no relationship to any pre-existing state or nation. In both – and this may be a legacy of Soviet authoritarianism – the state has attempted to force national identity by compulsory homogeneity. So Russian language medium in education was first banned in Uzbekistan, and then Tajik. Ukraine has similarly banned the Russian language. This of course is nothing new in state behaviour, as Highland Scots well know.

Yet even in Uzbekistan, a passionate national identity has been created, even among Kazakhs, Tajiks etc who reside there. The alchemy by which this happens is mystifying; partly it seems to depend on a natural loyalty to whatever authority exists, which is a rather troubling thought. For Central Asia, Olivier Roy’s The New Central Asia, the Creation of Nations has some thoughts on the sociology of the process.

I am aware I need to read more on the creation of national identity, because most of my thought is based on simple observation. It is however entirely plain that national identity can appear, and can be genuine, and can do so in a period of merely decades. There is now a Ukrainian national identity, and those who subscribe to it have the right to their state.

That they have a right to the former boundaries of Soviet Ukraine is a different proposition. Given the reality that it is plain a significant minority of the population do not subscribe to Ukrainian national identity, that civil war broke out, and that this relates to historic geographic fracture lines, it seems that division of territory is now not only inevitable but desirable.

All people of good will should therefore wish to see an end to fighting and a peace settlement, of which the territorial elements are somewhere close to the current lines between the forces, with Russia giving back some territory in return for recognition of its gains. The alternative is more death, human misery and economic malaise.

 
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The post Rethinking Ukraine: Putin and the Mystery of National Identity appeared first on Craig Murray.

Life

Par : craig

I do apologise for the break in articles. Exacerbating the problems of leading an itinerant life, I have suffered a series of remarkable thefts, including of phone, wallet, money and passport, which have caused me a huge amount of disruption.

The post Life appeared first on Craig Murray.

State Secrecy and Public Hearings Part One

Par : craig

At the Assange extradition hearings in Woolwich Crown Court and the Old Bailey, the public gallery was limited to five and sometimes two. The excuse was Covid. But online access was denied to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and numerous other groups and individuals, including journalists. The mainstream media was anyway complicit in leaving the entire hearing virtually unreported – less than one percent of the coverage given to Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard.

The International Court of Justice met at the Hague to consider Israeli genocide, and the entire proceedings were open to anybody in the world with a decent video connection, through an open link and no password. Like the crucial Assange appeal hearings coming in the High Court on 21 and 21 February, the ICJ is a public court. Yet the judges of the London High Court have passed a series of Kafkaesque regulations to limit who can see the trial, under the pretext of open access.

Here is the Stalinist nonsense in its entirety. I promise your mind is going to boggle:

Remember, as that document says, this is a “public hearing”. You have to apply for permission to watch it and state WHY you want to watch it. Presumably “It is a public hearing. By law it has to be public” is not a sufficient reason. There is no guarantee at all that you will be given permission.

You have to be in England or Wales to watch. Applications from Scotland and Northern Ireland will “not normally be granted”. Despite the fact it is the UK government which is extraditing Julian under a UK–USA extradition treaty, not an England and Wales–USA extradition treaty.

Julian is an Australian citizen. But you are not “normally” permitted to watch in Australia. It is the United States government which is seeking to extradite Julian. But citizens of the United States will not “normally” be permitted to view online.

Scots and Irish will not be permitted to view, presumably because their loyalty to the security state is known to be dubious! I have no idea what is the position for the Channel Islands or Isle of Man.

Not only does the Big Brother state want to know your identity and where you are, nobody else is allowed to watch the hearing with you. Why? What harm is it if your mum looks at it? It is a public f***ing hearing.

Who are they scared is going to watch? Why does that scare them? What do they think these naughty people watching are going to do? Are they worried Putin and Xi will be secretly watching and will do some terrible internet magic that collapses the western world? Just what is this crazy restriction about?

Why is nobody outside the state and billionaire media allowed to give live information about what is happening in the Court? Why is it OK if CNN does give live information, but not OK if a concerned citizen does it?

Why does everybody have to be threatened with two years’ imprisonment if they break these crazy rules?

I urge everybody reading this post to contact the court as specified at listoffice@administrativecourtoffice.justice.gov.uk, and apply to watch online, following the rules in para 4 of the court order above. If you are outside the UK, please include in your reasons that the United States is making explicitly in this case a claim of universal jurisdiction for its Espionage Act over the whole world, so everybody is affected including you.

Please then put out on social media that you have applied, and encourage others to apply. Please post updates when you hear back from the court including stating regularly if they don’t reply. Post any answer you get. And go back to them and argue.

Officially this is a “public hearing”. Officially these judges are committed to “open justice”. What a farce. What are they hiding?

 

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Quality and Propaganda

Par : craig

On 10 October I called out a viral video as fake. It featured pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Sydney, Australia, with a soundtrack of people appearing to chant “Gas the Jews”. The video not only went viral online, it was featured worldwide by mainstream media.

The New South Wales Prime Minister attacked a parliamentarian for daring to say that the incident was dubious

Antoinette Lattouf, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio journalist who investigated the incident and found that it did not happen, received enormous abuse. She was later sacked when she shared online a report on Israeli atrocities in Gaza by Human Rights Watch.

Finally, 100 days later, an exhaustive investigation by New South Wales police, which involved forensic investigation of many different videos of the incident (including professional video from inter alia Consortium News), has definitively concluded that it did not happen. It was a fake.

Now here is the important point. I saw it was a fake after about twenty seconds, not 100 days. It was an extremely clear and obvious fake. There was not a shadow of a doubt that it was a fake. No serious observer could believe it was genuine. I posted the simple empirical observation immediately on Twitter.

A lesson in Israeli propaganda. The video is a jump of many cuts but the soundtrack simply continues over the cuts.

Not a single person shown has lips moving in any kind of chant.

A large number of educated people, who must see and understand this, are deliberately tweeting out… https://t.co/OuRw1Pl8y1

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) October 10, 2023

It is stark. The soundtrack simply runs continuously over several big cuts in the video. It is obviously an overlain soundtrack. Plus many people are shown very clearly in the video, and not a single one is moving their lips as if they are making a chant like that in the soundtrack. It is not just a matter of being out of sync. Nobody seems to be doing this sort of rhythmic chanting at all.

It is not just propaganda. It is a fake of the lowest quality, which any amateur can see the problem with, instantly. So why did hundreds of mainstream media journalists all over the globe report it as genuine and even retail it on MSM platforms. Why did politicians refer to it? Why were those who queried it attacked and ridiculed?

Here is a key point I have not seen anywhere else, shared with me by Consortium News who shared their footage of the same event with the police. The representatives of the Australian Jewish Association, who produced the fake footage, refused to hand over the original footage to the police investigation. Yet it does not appear they face any criminal charges, and they have the massive front to still be pushing their lies in the state and billionaire owned media.

The point is that Israeli propaganda can be of extremely low quality and obviously fake. It does not matter. The politicians will buy it and retail it because they are in the pocket of the zionist lobby. The mainstream media will promulgate it, because they work either for billionaires who share the zionist creed of the ruling classes, or, like those in the BBC, for states controlled by politicians in the pockets of the zionist lobby. All Israel has to do is chuck the propaganda out there. It will be massively amplified no matter how poor it is.

Let me give another example. You may recall seeing, on all broadcast media, the entrance to the “Hamas tunnel network” at Sheikh Hamad hospital, as evidence of why Israel has to target hospitals because they are essential nodes in Hamas “eight hundred mile” tunnel network. I believe it was also among the images Israel flashed up at the ICJ, though these were displayed so briefly it is difficult to be certain.

Well, now the IDF have totally destroyed the hospital and rendered it inoperable, they have moved on. We can now see it is a water tank. I cannot find a single example of any mainstream media issuing a correction or even saying it is a water tank.

Yeah remember when israel showed footage pointing to this “tunnel” next to Sheikh Hamad hospital and ran with this propaganda for weeks? While we’ve been saying that this is a water tank, here are reporters finally entering. pic.twitter.com/9QItVTM1Oc

— Hebh Jamal (@hebh_jamal) February 3, 2024

The point is that the propaganda does not have to be good. It can be rubbish. You show a picture of a hatch, say it is an entrance to a secret tunnel network, and the poodle media and massive hasbara online operation will amplify it massively. While the truth not only does not make mainstream media, it has to force its way through massive suppression of social media. My posts on X/twitter currently have less reach per repost than zionist accounts by a factor averaging around 50.

The extreme suppression manifests in strange ways. When I tried to find my tweet calling out the fake soundtrack, I could not find it at all. It had disappeared from my timeline completely. I appreciate this is too small to read properly, but this is my timeline from 10 October to show what I mean.

Nor could any search I tried bring it up. Yet the tweet was still extant, and someone kindly sent me a link to it. It had just been cloaked from me, and possibly some others, but not from the person who sent it on to me.

And as for Antoinette:

Well, being the only reporter in the whole of mainstream media to have told the truth does not get your job back if you have committed the greatest sin and contradicted the zionist narrative. I fear she will wait a very long time for any apologies from the Establishment.

The thing you have to recall is that every single one of them – the Israeli propagandists, the politicians, the mainstream media journalists and the hasbara operatives on social media – know that they are lying. They just believe that the lies are not important in pursuit of the greater good – or rather in pursuit of Greater Israel.

 

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Has International Law Survived, or Has the Western Political Class Killed It?

Par : craig

In finding there is a plausible case against Israel, the International Court of Justice treated with contempt the argument from Israel that the case should be dismissed as it is exercising its right of self-defence. This argument took up over half of Israel’s pleadings. Not only did the court find there is a plausible case of genocide, the court only mentioned self-defence once in its interim ruling – and that was merely to note that Israel had claimed it. Para 41:

That the ICJ has not affirmed Israel’s right to self-defence is perhaps the most important point in this interim order. It is the dog that did not bark. The argument which every western leader has been using is spurned by the ICJ.

Now the ICJ did not repeat that an occupying power has no right of self-defence. It did not need to. It simply ignored Israel’s specious assertion.

It could do that because what it went on to iterate went way beyond any plausible assertion of self-defence. What struck me most about the ICJ ruling was that the Order went into far more detail about the evidence of genocide than it needed to. Its description was stark.

Here Para 46 is crucial

The reason this is so crucial, is that the Court is not saying that South Africa asserts this. The Court is saying these are the facts. It is a finding of fact by the Court. I cannot emphasise too strongly the importance of that description by the court of the state of affairs in Gaza.

The Court then goes on to detail accounts by the United Nations of the factual situation, quoting three different senior officials at length, including Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of UNRWA:

This of course explains why the immediate response to the ICJ ruling was a coordinated attack by Israel and the combined imperialist powers on UNRWA, designed to accelerate the genocide by stopping aid, to provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court.

The Court works very closely with the UN and is very much an entrenched part of the UN system. It has a particularly close relationship with the UN General Assembly – many of the Court’s cases are based on requests from the UN General Assembly. In a fortnight’s time the Court will be starting its substantive hearings on the legal position in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, at the request of the UNGA. There are five specific references to the UNGA in the Order.

The Court spent a great deal of time outlining the facts of the unfolding genocide in the Gaza Strip. It did not have to do so in nearly so much detail, and far too little attention has been paid to this. I was equally surprised by how much detail the court gave on the evidence of genocidal intent by Israel.

It is especially humiliating for Israel that the Court quoted the Israeli Head of State, the President of Israel himself, as giving clear evidence of genocidal intent, along with two other government ministers.

Again, this is not the Court saying that South Africa has alleged this. It is a finding of fact by the Court. The ICJ has already found to be untrue Israel’s denial in court of incitement to genocide.

Now think of this: the very next day after President Herzog made a genocidal statement, as determined by the International Court of Justice, he was met and offered “full support” by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.

When you take the detail of what the Court has found to be the actual facts of the case, in death and destruction and in intent, I have no doubt that this is a court which is currently minded to find Israel guilty of genocide once the substantive case comes before the Court.

All of Israel’s arguments were lost. Every one. The substantial effort Israel put into having the case dismissed on procedural grounds was brushed aside. So was self-defence. And in its findings of the facts, the Court plainly found to be untrue the Israeli lies about avoidance of civilian casualties, the responsibility of Hamas for the damage to infrastructure, and the access of relief aid to Gaza.

Those are the facts of what happened.

Do not be confused by the absence of the word “ceasefire” from the Court order. What the Court has ordered is very close to that. It has explicitly ordered the Israeli military to stop killing Palestinians.


That is absolutely clear. And while I accept it is tautologous, in the sense it is ordering Israel to obey a Convention which Israel is already bound to follow, there could be no clearer indication that the Court believes that Israel is not currently obeying it.

So what happens now?

Well, Israel has responded by killing over 180 Palestinian civilians since the Order was given from the International Court of Justice. If that continues, South Africa may return to the Court for more urgent measures even before the ordered monthly report from Israel is due. Algeria has announced it will take the Order to the UN Security Council for enforcement.

I doubt the United States will veto. There has been a schizophrenic reaction from Israel and its supporters to the ICJ Order. On the one hand, the ICJ has been denounced as antisemitic. On the other hand the official narrative has been (incredibly) to claim Israel actually won the case, while minimising the coverage in mainstream media. This has been reinforced by the massive and coordinated attack on UNRWA, to create alternative headlines.

It is difficult to both claim that Israel somehow won, and at the same time seek to block UNSC enforcement of the Order. My suspicion is that there will be a continuing dual track: pretending that there is no genocide and Israel is obeying the “unnecessary” order, while at the same time attacking and ridiculing the ICJ and the wider UN.

No matter what the ICJ said, Israel would not have stopped the genocide; that is the simple truth. The immediate reaction of the US and allies to the Order has been to try to accelerate the genocide by crippling the UN’s aid relief work. I confess I did not expect anything quite that vicious and blatant.

The wheels of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The ICJ having flagged up a potential genocide so strongly, it may well fall to judges in individual nations to restrain international support for the genocide. As I explained in detail, the Genocide Convention has been incorporated into UK law by the International Criminal Court Act of 2001.

There will, beyond any doubt, have been minutes issued by FCDO legal advisers warning of ministers being at risk of personal liability in UK law for complicity in genocide now, should arms shipments and other military and intelligence cooperation with the Israeli genocide continue. In the US, hearings started already in California on a genocide complicity suit brought against Joe Biden.

Of course I wish this would all work faster. It will not. The UN General Assembly may suspend Israel from the UN. There are other useful actions to be taken. But this is a long slog, not a quick fix, and people like you and I continue to have a vital role, as everybody does, in using the power of the people to wrest control from a vicious political class of killers.

This was a good win. I am pleased that this course for which I advocated and lobbied has worked and increased pressure on the Zionists, and that my judgment that the International Court of Justice is not just a NATO tool like the corrupt International Criminal Court, has been vindicated.

It cannot help the infants killed and maimed last night or those to die in the coming few days. But it is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

 
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Armed Conflict and the ICJ

Par : craig

Tomorrow the International Court of Justice will give its decision on the South African interim request for provisional measures to prevent genocide in Gaza. Many are holding their breath for something that will help. How will this go?

You can read my views on some of the arguments in play in my article for Middle East Eye. There is no comment section on MEE, so feel free to discuss that article here.

You will recall that my observation of the demeanour of the judges at the Hague left me not too hopeful. They definitely appeared very uncomfortable to be taking a case which effectively puts the actions of the entire western political establishment on trial, not just Israel. Yet it was impossible to say that South Africa had not presented a strong prima facie case of genocide, including plentiful evidence of intent, which at this stage was all South Africa needed to do.

As I reported the judges got most visibly interested by the procedural arguments that South Africa could not bring the case because it was not in a dispute with Israel at the time of filing. But I don’t think that will stand. Firstly, it doesn’t pass the commonsense test; there is no doubt there is a dispute between South Africa and Israel over whether Israel is committing genocide. While the procedural problem does not in fact arise from the text of the Genocide Convention, but merely from previous jurisprudence from the court that indicates parties should aim to achieve a resolution before going to the court.

None of that previous jurisprudence relates to genocide. In any case of alleged genocide, there is obvious urgency. If Israel’s procedural argument is accepted, then any country committing genocide would only need not to respond to correspondence on the subject and nobody could take them to court for it, until after a “reasonable period” to reply, during which the genocide could continue. What is a “reasonable period” where scores of children are being killed every day? I don’t think the court is going to fall for that one, much as they visibly gasped to be let off the hook.

Judges are of course themselves highly privileged members of the ruling elite. The extent to which that elite is bought up by the Zionist cause has never been clearer to the world. But I retain some hope still because the ICJ has a truly strong record. If tomorrow we learn it has failed, we will know the notion of international law has been finally abandoned.

Both Israel and South Africa’s legal teams will by now probably have been given, in strictest confidence, an indication of the result by the President. This is done to head off any unexpected spontaneous eventuality in court. If they haven’t yet, they will first thing tomorrow morning.

But where there are seventeen judges of different nationalities, including one South African and one Israeli, and several of them are open to influence and discussion with their national governments, you would have to be extremely foolish to believe that the decision has not already leaked out to senior official circles. Which leaves me rather heartened by the fact that South Africa’s foreign minister is flying to The Hague for the decision. That would not be done if the result is a humiliation.

Where there is humiliation is in the willingness of the Western political class to abase themselves utterly in acknowledging the plain truth of Israel crimes. On a macro scale they state it is nonsense to claim that 15,000 dead children so far might indicate a genocidal intent. On a micro scale, in the past 24 hours Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and the spokesman for the US State Department have all refused to say, point blank, that it is a crime to shoot an unarmed civilian carrying a white flag.

I expect tomorrow will be a fudge. The court will say it will decide on the case in due course, and in the meantime Israel should be careful to take all steps to comply with international humanitarian law and to take all necessary actions to crack down on incitement to genocide. Then nothing would change.

If, however, the court does order a ceasefire on the grounds of a prima facie case for genocide, then I do think you will see a serious moderation of the actions of western politicians, including a reduction in armaments to Israel. That will of course not stop Israel.

Israel has been engaged in the genocide of the Palestinians for 75 years. All we have since October 7 is a more intensive phase again. In the year to October 7 2023, Israel killed over 350 Palestinians. Israel will continue its genocidal policies until the Apartheid State of Israel is abolished. That is the fundamental truth that the ICJ will not address tomorrow.

 
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The post Armed Conflict and the ICJ appeared first on Craig Murray.

In Conversation With Stella Assange

Par : craig

Stella produced these two videos of us as part of her “in conversation” series. Topics include campaigning for Julian with Generation Z, spying and diplomacy, Margaret Thatcher, and state action against whistleblowers.

I love these because they are so relaxed, natural and really not very different to the ordinary conversations we have when not being filmed. They are part of a series and I hope you will subscribe to Stella on Youtube or Substack.

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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The post In Conversation With Stella Assange appeared first on Craig Murray.

Your Man in the Hague (In a Good Way) Part 2

Par : craig

There was a very good feel at the end of the South African presentation on day one. Everyone felt it had gone extremely well, and left very little room for the court to wriggle away from provisional measures. We left the public gallery, and I went with Corbyn and Mélenchon to meet the South African delegation. This caused some concern to the security officials, who told us that members of the public had to leave immediately and not meet delegates or speak to the media, who were grouped outside the court but still within the precincts.

This was fairly impractical as the media very much wanted to speak with Corbyn and Mélenchon. There was a lot of flapping of arms and waving. All my friends of the queue had left, while I stayed sticking close to Jeremy, partly because I didn’t like to leave him unsupported, but mostly because his wife Laura was somewhere looking after my phone. The ICJ staff seemed scared to tell off Corbyn and Mélenchon, so kept getting pretty shirty with me as a proxy, saying we must leave.

It was quite strange. The situation was very friendly; there was no tension. There were about sixty delegates and about the same number of journalists, who were all supposed to be there. Then there were Corbyn, Mélenchon and me, who were apparently supposed to have left, but whose presence made no actual difference to events. People being in slightly the wrong place entirely peacefully after proceedings had finished, seemed to me an unnecessary source of anger. But a succession of female officials arrived, getting increasingly cross.

At this stage the South African delegation returned to their allocated office inside the building to finalise the formal press statement. We went with them. I was chatting to Amaar Hijazi, Palestine’s Deputy Foreign Minister, who I know a bit. One of the ICJ ladies came in with a clipboard, asked for silence, and then asked the assembled group in the manner of a public proclamation: “is this a legal meeting or a political meeting?”

Nobody seemed inclined to answer. So I replied “That’s rather a philosophical question. I am not sure if you can make that simple binary distinction”. Rather more usefully, Varsha [Gandikota-Nellutla of Progressive International] assured her it was a legal meeting, and the official said “good, political meetings off the premises”, waving her clipboard for no apparent reason. After a bit of a conflab we went out again.

I was enjoying Mélenchon enormously; he seemed to have unlimited stores of bonhomie and was unstoppably voluble with everyone. Whether the security guards wanted a lecture on workers’ cooperatives I am not sure, but they certainly got one.

We wandered back out the front door again and back into interviews. Two ladies came up to me looking very stern and said I must leave. Jeremy was giving an interview to Israeli TV and Mélenchon had bustled back into the building. One of the ladies said to me, “I am asking you to leave and you are refusing to do what I say”. I replied, “Oh no, certainly not. Of course I am doing what you say. Just very slowly”.

By now I had three enormous security officers with me, as I tried to keep an eye on Jeremy as he drifted through the milling journalists, while I kept running in to people I knew. I have to say the security people were very friendly, and seemed unsure why they were shadowing me too. Shortly a fourth turned up, a mountain of a man with a bald head and beard, who said, “Here you are; we’ve been looking for you everywhere”, which seemed strange. Possibly they couldn’t see me surrounded by their massive bouncers.

Laura had somehow got in, and gave me back my phone. Jeremy was slowly heading for the gates, but he is incapable of being impolite and not having a friendly word with anybody who addresses him, whoever they are. Once we were outside the gates he showed no sign of stopping with the much larger crowd outside, so I said my farewells and headed back to the hotel. My toes had gone very painful again and I was keen for another warm bath.

After the bath I went down to look for some food. I felt exhausted and drained. It was not just the cold night standing in the queue with no sleep, it was the immediately preceding 40 hour, four economy-flight journey from Bali, with virtually no sleep either, to get here. I hadn’t been in a bed, I calculated, for 85 hours.

I was also feeling a bit unappreciated. I had in fact played a role in this happening at all. Copies of my initial articles on invoking the Genocide Convention had been physically in front of South African cabinet ministers when they took the initial decision on 8 December to ask their excellent legal services to prepare a case. It was not me that arranged that and I cannot break confidence by telling you how it came about. I didn’t expect any acknowledgement, but it seemed an unfair twist of fate that had me standing all night in the cold trying to get in.

I was, dear reader, simply wallowing in exhaustion and self-pity, and in a kind of ridiculous teenage sulk. My tired brain was fogged and I was seriously worried about finding the energy to write up day one, which I had to do immediately. I wasn’t sure that my body was physically capable of another night of no sleep and standing in the freezing cold. I was fed up with being in exile over this laughable terrorism investigation, and I was missing my children.

I made up my mind – I could not do another night. I would have to explain to readers that I had done what I could. A great feeling of relief came over me, and I decided to go to bed.

That very second, out of the lift walked the eminent British lawyer Tayab Ali, with a short, unassuming bearded Arab gentleman.
“Hello Craig, how’s it going”, he asked, but they were evidently in a hurry, going somewhere: “This is Ghassan”.
We shook hands briefly and then the realisation struck me.
“Are you the surgeon?”
Ghassan looked diffident, slightly abashed.
“The surgeon from Gaza?”.
“Yes, I am Ghassan Abu SItta.”
“I am honoured, sir. Greatly honoured”.
He looked slightly embarrassed, and they dashed off to their meeting.

I felt even more embarrassed. I had just met the man who had stayed operating in Shifa hospital while Israel bombs and missiles struck it and Israeli snipers fired through the windows. He had continued to operate with no electricity, with no bandages, with no antiseptic, with no anaesthetic. He had worked 20 hours a day, amputating the limbs of children or trying to piece them back together. He stayed and stayed and stayed through weeks under fire. He did this for love: he is a top British plastic surgeon and could have been in the UK making millions.

I felt deeply ashamed. This man had endured so much, and done so much, and seen so much suffering. Here was I giving up over sore toes and lack of sleep, and over wanting to be important. I had an epiphany; I realised I can be a dreadful egoist, and I hated myself for it. Nothing stopped hurting, but I had a new surge of adrenaline and decided to get on with it. Perhaps nothing I did would help prevent genocide, but we all have to do that which is within our power to try.

I accept you may wish to scoff, but for me that encounter with Mr Abu Sitta revealed an important element of greatness – the ability to inspire others to do more that they believed they could, to transmit will. Even without actually saying anything.

I did, however, retain the sense to know that I had to prepare, so I got a taxi to a camping shop. There I bought the warmest sleeping bag I could afford, a reflective groundsheet, thermal socks and a flask.

I then took a taxi back, went straight to my room and started to write. The first three paragraphs flowed very easily. Then suddenly I was opening my very groggy eyes with my head on the keyboard, not sideways but leaning on my forehead. I had been asleep like that for three hours.

After that it was like wading through treacle. The phrases still rushed into my head as always, but there was a strange disconnect to my fingers and what they typed, which often was a phrase that sounded a bit like the one I was trying to get down. I recall typing “to assist them” as “his big cyst hen”. It was slow going.

At 11pm I went to see if there was a queue yet for the public gallery the next day. Nobody was there. I was worried that after the arguments at the gate the previous morning, with many people disappointed, the queue would start to form much earlier for Day 2. I decided to just publish what I had written so far, with an explanatory first paragraph, and check the queue regularly. The cold walk woke me up. It was notably warmer than the previous night – plus 2 rather than minus 5 – but the ground was all wet with a heavy dew and there was a lot more wind chill.

I checked again at 1.30am, still nobody had come. But at 3am there were eight people in the queue. I rushed back to the hotel, picked up my sleeping bag and groundsheet and published the now almost finished Day 1 article. I joined the queue as number 9 of the 14 who would be let in. I met a wonderful Dutch lady who had joined the queue with the intention of giving me her place if I arrived too late. I am ashamed to say I forget her name.

I was disappointed that not one of my new friends from the previous night’s queue was there again. I felt we had bonded through a pretty tough experience and a mutual cause. Almost all had said they intended to do both nights, and I presume the cold and exhaustion just got to people. This second night was much more jolly, I think because it was not quite so cold.

The reflective groundsheet was a big success, dry and surprisingly effective at stopping the cold seeping up. The mummy sleeping bag proved more of a problem. I am not as slender as I used to be, and with several layers of clothing and my ski jacket all on, it was a very tight fit. I got the zip up pretty well, but I couldn’t do the last bit that would bring the cowl over my head, not least because by that stage the bag had immobilised my arms.

Thankfully several wonderful young ladies came to help and zipped me up tight. This involved a lot of laughing. We could have invented a whole new genre of internet porn, in which fully clothed old men get zipped into bags. Although it probably already exists. I am not going to google for it, given the frequency with which the security services seize or steal my electronic devices. It might be misunderstood.

So at 3.30am I lay down my head, and did in fact sleep until about 5.30am. It was not comfortable, but it was not cold. I then wandered off to find a bush for a pee. When I returned, three women had taken over my groundsheet and were using my sleeping bag as a blanket. They joked that they had occupied my sleeping bag. I said I perfectly understood – surely their ancestors had a sleeping bag there 3,000 years ago. It was not brilliant repartee, but this kind of thing kept us going. The 14 of us who made the public gallery took group pictures.

There were some changes from the day before. We are to be allowed pens. But in view of “people wandering around” the day before, they said huffily, we were to be escorted in via a back door and leave the same way, and strictly forbidden from talking or interacting with anybody not in our group. So we entered the tiny public gallery. It has only two rows, and I now discovered that if you sit in the second row you cannot see anything. From the hall you can’t even tell there is a second row to the gallery. Once again, I marveled at the lack of attention to the dreadful design of the courtroom.

Luckily for me, a young man who apparently should not have been there was ejected from a front row seat, and finally I got to watch the Israeli presentation.

As with the South African case, according to court procedure the Israeli case was introduced by their “agent”, permanently accredited to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He opened with the standard formula “it is an honour to appear before you again on behalf of the state of Israel”, managing to imply purely through phrasing and tone of voice that the honour lay in representing Israel, not in appearing before the judges.

Becker opened by going straight to the Holocaust, saying that nobody knew more than Israel why the Genocide Convention existed. 6 million Jewish people had been killed. The Convention was not to be used to cover the normal brutality of war.

The South African case aimed at the delegitimisation of the state of Israel. On 7 October Hamas had committed massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction. 1,200 had been killed and 5,500 maimed. He related several hideous individual atrocity stories and played a recording he stated to be a Hamas fighter boasting on WhatsApp to his parents about committing mass murder, rape and mutilation.

The only genocide in this case was being committed against Israel. Hamas continued to attack Israel, and for the court to take provisional measures would be to deny Israel the right to self-defence. Provisional measures should rather be taken against South Africa and its attempt by legal means to further genocide by its relationship with Hamas. Gaza was not under occupation: Israel had left it with great potential to be a political and economic success. Instead Hamas had chosen to make it a terrorist base.

Hamas was embedded in the civilian population and therefore responsible for the civilian deaths. Hamas had tunnels under schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities and tunnel entrances within them. It commandeered medical vehicles for military use.

South Africa had talked of civilian buildings destroyed, but did not tell you they had been destroyed by Hamas booby traps and Hamas missile misfires.

The casualty figures South Africa gave were from Hamas sources and not reliable. They did not say how many were fighters? How many of the children were child soldiers? The application by South Africa was ill-founded and ill-motivated. It was a libel.

This certainly was a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the 7 October self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he talked of Hamas operating from ambulances and UN facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.

Next up was Professor Malcolm Shaw KC. Shaw is regarded as an authority on the procedure of international law and is editor of the standard tome on the subject. This is an interesting facet of the legal profession, where standard reference books on particular topics are regularly updated to include key extracts from recent judges, and passages added or amended to explain the impact of these judgments. Being an editor in this field provides a route to prominence for the plodding and pedantic.

I had come across Shaw in his capacity as a co-founder of the Centre for Human Rights at Essex University. I had given a couple of talks there some twenty years ago on the attacks on human rights of the “War on Terror” and my own whistleblower experience over torture and extraordinary rendition. For an alleged human rights expert, Shaw seemed extraordinarily prone to support the national security interests of the state over individual liberty.

I do not pretend I gave it a great deal of thought. I did not know at that time of Shaw’s commitment as an extreme Zionist and in particular his long term interest in suppressing the rights of the Palestinian people. After 139 states have recognised Palestine as a state, Shaw led for Israel the legal opposition to Palestine’s membership of international institutions, including the International Criminal Court. Shaw’s rather uninspired reliance on the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is hardly a legal tour de force, and it didn’t work.

Every criminal deserves a defence, and nobody should hold it against a barrister that they defend a murderer or rapist, as it is important that guilt or innocence is tested by a court. But I think it is fair to state that defence lawyers do not in general defend those accused of murder because they agree with murder and want a murderer to go on murdering. That however is the case here: Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.

That is the difference between this and other cases, including at the ICJ. Generally the lead lawyers would happily swap sides, if the other side had hired them first. But this is entirely different. Here the lawyers (with the possible exception of Staker) believe profoundly in the case they are supporting and would never appear for the other side. That is just one more way that this is such an extraordinary case, with so much drama and such vital consequences, not least for the future of international law.

For the reason I have just explained, Shaw’s role here is not that of a simple barrister plying his trade. His attempt to extend the killing should see him viewed as a pariah by decent people everywhere, for the rest of his doubtless highly-paid existence.

Shaw opened up by saying that the South African case continually spoke of context. They talked of the 75 years of the existence of the state of Israel. Why stop there? Why not go back to the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate over Palestine? No, the context of these events was the massacre of 7 October, and Israel’s subsequent right of self-defence. He produced and read a long quote from mid-October by European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen, stating that Israel had suffered a terrorist atrocity and had the right of self-defence.

The truth is that this is not genocide but armed conflict, which state has existed since 7 October. That was brutal, and urban warfare always involved terrible civilian casualties, but it was not genocide.

He then turned to the question of genocide. He argued that South Africa could not bring this case and the ICJ had no jurisdiction, because there was no dispute between Israel and South Africa on which the ICJ could rule, at the time the case was filed. South Africa had communicated its views to Israel, but Israel had given no substantial reply. Therefore a dispute did not yet exist at time of filing. A dispute must involve interaction between parties and the argument had been on one side only.

This very much interested the judges. As I noted on day one, this got them more active than anything else when Professor John Dugard addressed the same point for South Africa. As I reported:

The judges particularly enjoyed Dugard’s points, enthusiastically rustling through documents and underlining things. Dealing with thousands of dead children was a bit difficult for them, but give them a nice jurisdictional point and they were in their element.

They were even more excited when Shaw tackled the same point. This gave them a way out! The case could be technically invalid, and then they would neither have to upset the major Western powers nor make fools of themselves by pretending that a genocide the whole world had seen was not happening. For a while, they looked visibly relieved.

Shaw should have given up while he was ahead, but he ploughed on for an hour, with some relief when he continually muddled his notes. A senior KC with zero ability to extemporise and recover was an interesting sight, as he kept stopping and shuffling paper.

Shaw argued that the bar for judging whether South Africa had a prima facie case must be significantly higher because of the high military and political cost to Israel if the court adopted provisional measures. It was also necessary to show genocidal intent even at this stage. Otherwise the genocide was a “car without an engine”. If any illegal actions had taken place within Israel’s carefully targeted military action, Israel’s own military courts would investigate and act on them.

Random Israeli ministers and officials making emotional statements was not important. Official policy to protect civilians would be found in the minutes of the Israeli war cabinet and national security council. Israel’s strenuous attempts to move civilians out of harm’s way was an accepted measure in international human law and should not be viewed as mass displacement.

It was South Africa which was guilty of complicity in genocide in cooperation with Hamas. South Africa’s allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous”.

Israel’s next lawyer was a lady called Galit Raguan from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. She said the reality on the ground was that Israel had done everything possible to minimise civilian deaths and to aid humanitarian relief. Urban warfare always resulted in civilian deaths. It was Hamas who were responsible for destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

There was overwhelming evidence of Hamas’ military use of hospitals. In every single hospital in Gaza that IDF had evidence of military use by Hamas. Mass evacuation of civilians was a humanitarian and legal measure. Israel had supplied food, water and medicine into Gaza but supplies had come under Hamas fire. Hamas steals the aid for its fighters.

Next up was lawyer Omri Sender. He stated that more food trucks per day now entered Gaza than before October 7. The number had increased from 70 food trucks to 109 food trucks per day. Fuel, gas and electricity were all being supplied and Israel had repaired the sewage systems.

At this stage Israel had again lost the judges. One or two were looking at this man in a highly quizzical manner. A couple had definitely fallen asleep – there are only so many lies you can absorb, I suppose. Nobody was making notes about this guff. The judges may find a way not to condemn Israel, but could not be expected to go along with this extraordinary nonsense. Sender continued that the scope and intensity of the fighting was now decreasing as the operation entered a new phase.

Perhaps noting that nobody believed him, Sender stated that the court could not institute provisional measures but rather was obliged to accept the word of Israel on its good intentions because of the Law of the Unilateral Declarations of States.

Now I have to confess that was a bit of international law I did not know existed. But it does, specifically in relation to ICJ proceedings. On first reading, it makes a unilateral declaration of intent to the ICJ binding on the state that makes it. I cannot see that it forces the ICJ to accept it as sufficient or to believe in its sincerity. It seems rather a reach, and I wondered if Israel was running out of things to say.

That appeared to be true, because the next speaker, Christopher Staker KC, now took the floor and just ran through all the same Hamas stuff yet again, only with added theatrical indignation. Staker is the lawyer I suspect would happily have appeared for either side, because he was plainly just acting anyway. And not very well.

Staker said that it was astounding this case could be brought. It was intended to stop Israel from defending itself while Israel would still be subject to Hamas attacks. Hamas has said it will continue attacks.

If you look at the operation as a whole including relief efforts, it was plain there was no genocidal intent. Israel was in incredible danger. The proposed provisional measures were out of proportion to their effect. Can you imagine if in the Second World War, a court had ordered the Allies to stop fighting because of civilian deaths, and allowed the Axis powers to keep on killing?

The final speaker was Gilad Noam, Israel’s deputy attorney-general. He said that the bulk of the proposed provisional measures should be refused because they exposed Israel to further Hamas attack. Three more should be refused because they referred to Palestine outside Gaza. There was no genocidal intent in Israel. Ministerial and official statements made in the heat of the moment were rather examples of the tradition of democracy and freedom of speech. Prosecutions for incitement to genocide were under consideration.

The court must not conflate genocide and self-defence. The South African case devalues genocide and encourages terrorism. The Holocaust illustrated why Israel was always under existential threat. It was Hamas who were committing genocide.

And that was it. Israel had in the end not been allowed to show its contentious atrocity video, and it felt like their presentation had become repetitive and was padded to fill the time.

It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.

In the UK, the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.

While the court was in session, Germany has announced it will intervene in the substantial case to support Israel. They argue explicitly that, as the world’s greatest perpetrator of genocide, they are uniquely placed to judge. It is in effect a copyright claim. They are protecting Germany’s intellectual property in the art of genocide. Perhaps they might in future license genocide, or allow Israel to continue genocide on a franchise basis.

I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…

What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the court Donoghoe already.

I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.

 

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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The post Your Man in the Hague (In a Good Way) Part 2 appeared first on Craig Murray.

Your Man in the Hague (in a Good Way).

Par : craig

I attended the hearing on Thursday of South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice. I was able to sit in the public gallery and watch all the proceedings. I was, however, handicapped in reporting by the fact that we were not allowed pens or pencils (though we were allowed paper). I asked the Head of Security at the ICJ why pens were not allowed in the public gallery. He told me, with a perfectly straight face, that they could be used as a weapon. So bereft of my deadly ballpoint, this account is less detailed and more impressionistic than I would wish to give you.

I had arrived at the Hague early Wednesday morning on 10 January, having flown in from Indonesia. This had involved four flights, to Singapore, Milan, Copenhagen and finally Schiphol. Wednesday was spent in a frantic search of the charity shops of the Hague for warm clothing, as I had only beach clothes with me apart from a friends’ old ski jacket. I called first at the ICJ to get information on how to attend Thursday morning’s session.

A young lady informed me that I had to queue outside the small arched gate in the wall. It would open at 6am and the first 15 members of the public would be admitted to the gallery. I asked where I should queue exactly. She said she doubted it was necessary, it should be fine to arrive at 6am on Thursday.

I am staying in a hotel just five minutes’ walk away, so at 10pm on Wednesday evening, with the temperature already at -4°C, I went to check if a queue had formed. Nobody was there. I returned to the hotel, but every hour went to check for a queue I should join. Nobody was there at midnight or 1am, but at 2am there were already 8 people, sat around in three very cold little groups. Everybody looked extremely cold, but everybody was friendly and talkative.

The first group, right next to the gate, consisted of three young Dutch women, who sat on a blanket and were well provided with flasks of hot coffee and boxes of baklava. The second group were three young students of international law, all of them Arabs, who had attended other cases and knew the ropes here. The third group were two young women, one Dutch and one Arab, sitting on a bench, looking cold and miserable.

We were soon all talking together and it was plain that every one of us was motivated by support for the Palestinians in their struggle against the relentless occupation. Shortly afterwards, another Arab gentleman arrived, older and authoritative, who rather incongruously had been schooled in Scotland at Gordonstoun. A tall Tunisian man kept walking back and forth making phone calls; he appeared pre-occupied and rather shy.

We had all been given similar information about the number of people who would be admitted, though some had been told 15, some 14 and some 13. Our numbers were stable at 12 for several hours. Then about 4.30am a car drew up and out jumped Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla of Progressive International. She had come as a place-keeper for Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Others of her organisation arrived bit by bit. Then as 6am approached, there started a small flood of people arriving, many with Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs.

It really was seriously cold. After four hours my toes had gone from very painful to having no feeling, and my fingers were becoming unresponsive. As so often, from 5am the cold grew more and more invasive. Mélenchon and Corbyn had arrived at 5.30am to take their places in the queue, Mélenchon as voluble as ever, wide awake, delighted to meet everybody, and lecturing on economics and the organisation of society to anybody who would listen. As my brain had by now frozen, that did not really include me. Jeremy was equally typically Jeremy, concerned that he did not want to take anybody’s position in the queue.

Then as preparations to open the gate began on the other side, things took an unpleasant turn. Those of us who had been there all night knew our order of arrival, but we began to be swamped by latecomers pushing past and around us to get to the gate. I had to be assertive and try to marshal the queue. Activists in the crowd challenged this, suggesting that the criterion for entry should not be time of arrival, but that Palestinians should be given the places.

It all became distressing. One Palestinian lady from Sweden who was just behind 14th in the queue became deeply distressed at the idea of not being admitted, and a couple of Palestinian gentlemen who had arrived after 6am started to determinedly push past the queue. I made a little counter speech explaining that we were all here to help the Palestinians, but none of us knew each other’s stories, and the question of what use someone’s attendance would be to the Palestinian cause was as important as gratifying individual feelings of the terribly aggrieved.

The diffident Tunisian was replaced in the queue by the former Tunisian President whose place he had been keeping – a really pleasant and diffident man, but the timing did not help the situation. In the end we were admitted in groups of five and processed. One of the Dutch ladies who had been the very first to arrive gave up her place to a Palestinian. I left clutching my pass, number 9, and returned to the hotel and straight into a hot bath. The pain from my toes and fingers as they thawed was really unpleasant.

Then it was quickly back for 9am and a lot of excessive security hassle and removal of deadly wallets and pens. Then we were escorted into the public gallery.

The Palace of Peace was built by Andrew Carnegie, the extraordinarily morally complex Fifer, a vicious and incredibly successful capitalist monopolist who also wished to end all war and to improve the lives of the poor everywhere. Its fairytale appearance, with its folly of a tower perched on a tower, belies its steel frame and concrete construction, and inside it could be any grand City Chambers in Scotland, with majolica tiling and solid Armitage Shanks in the toilets. Extraordinarily, the building is still owned and managed by the Carnegie Foundation.

For a building that was built as a world court, strangely it does not appear to contain a court room. The Grand Chamber is just a large empty hall, taking up one side-wing of the building. A comparatively modern, simple and gently curved dais has been inserted across the length of the hall and held a long table and seventeen chairs for the judges, but this structure looked temporary, as if it gets taken away and the building used for weddings. The parties to the case were seated on simple stacking chairs arranged in the body of the hall beneath the dais, again looking more like a wedding than a court. Above the judges spread a mighty stained-glass window, of garish colours and rather dubious quality.

I have written of my faith in the International Court of Justice, in its history of impartial judgment and in its system of election by the UN General Assembly. The ICJ has rather unfairly been tarnished by the reputation of its much younger sister the International Criminal Court. The ICC is rightly derided as a Western tool, but that really is not true of the ICJ. On Palestine alone, it has ruled that the Israeli “wall” in the West Bank is illegal and that Israel has no right of self-defence in the territory of which it is the occupying power. It ruled that the UK must decolonise the Chagos Islands, a cause close to my own heart.

There was every reason for those of us opposing the genocide to have travelled hopefully to the Hague.

In addition to the normal fifteen judges of the court, each of the parties to the dispute – South Africa and Israel – had exercised their right to nominate an additional judge. After the judges filed in to the court, proceedings started with these two judges taking an oath of impartiality, which gave us the first Israeli lie of the case before it had even started.

The nomination of Aharon Barak as the Israeli judge on the International Court of Justice is extraordinary, given that as President of Israel’s Supreme Court he refused to implement the ICJ judgment on the illegality of the wall, stating that he knew the facts of the matter better than the ICJ.

Barak has an extremely long history of accepting all forms of repression of Palestinians by the Israeli Defence Force as legal for “national security”, and in particular has repeatedly refused to rule against the longstanding Israeli programme of demolitions of Palestinian homes as collective punishment. That reads across directly to the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza now.

Barak is viewed as a “liberal” in Israel in the constitutional struggle between the judiciary and executive. But that is about the ability of Netanyahu’s corruption to go unchallenged, not about Palestinian rights. By appointing his apparent opponent Barak to the ICJ, Netanyahu has exhibited typical cunning. If Barak rules against Israel, Netanyahu can claim his domestic opponents are traitors to national security. If Barak rules in favour of Israel, Netanyahu can claim Israeli liberals support the destruction of Gaza.

I expect it is the latter claim we shall be seeing.

I was seated in the public gallery, and watching the seventeen judges occupied much of my time throughout the hearing. Acres have been written about which way who will jump. There is a too-easy assumption they will be swayed by their domestic governments. That varies from judge to judge.

The President of the court, Joan Donoghue, is a US State Department, Clinton hack who has never formed an original idea in her life, and I should be astonished if she starts now. I half-expected her strings to actually be visible, emerging from holes in the hall’s magnificent deep relief-panelled wooden ceiling. But others are more puzzling.

There has been no more rabidly anti-Palestinian national elite than that of Germany. Rather than channel feelings of inherited guilt into opposition to genocide in general, they seem to have concluded that they need to promote alternative genocides to make amends. Added to which, the German judge on the ICJ, Nolte, does not come preceded by a liberal reputation. But friends in Munich tell me that Nolte has a particular interest in the law of armed conflict, and is a stickler for intellectual rigour. Their view is that his professional self-esteem will be the key factor, and that only points one way with regard to what the Israeli Defence Force has done so blatantly to the civilian population in Gaza.

On the other hand, there is a Ugandan judge on the ICJ who you might assume would align with South Africa. But Uganda, for reasons which frankly I do not fathom, joined the United States and Israel in opposing Palestine’s membership of the International Criminal Court, on the grounds Palestine is not a real state. Similarly India you might expect to support South Africa as a key member of BRICS. But India also has a Hindu Nationalist government prone to hideous Islamophobia. I haven’t found any evidence of Judge Bhandari’s domestic record on inter-communal issues.

But it has been suggested to me that in this case before the World Court now, the UN General Assembly may have shot itself in the foot in replacing a particular British judge with the Indian, an election viewed at the time as a triumph in the UN for the developing world. My point is this: that these questions are very complicated, and much of the analysis I have seen, including from some dear colleagues, has been simplistic mince.

Not only is the Great Hall of Justice not fitted out as a courtroom, for a World Court the public gallery is minuscule. Running along one side of the hall, high enough to kill you if you fell over the balcony edge, it is just two seats deep. Furthermore the fitted theatre-style seats are a hundred years old and in a state of near collapse. Your arse is eight inches off the ground and the seats now tilt so your thighs are four inches off the ground and the whole contraption is throwing you forward and over the edge. Rather than fix the seats, the Carnegie Foundation have fixed a strong cable from wall to wall above the balcony rail, acting in effect as a second rail giving six inches more protection.

With one third of the public gallery screened off to house the audio-visual projection and webcasting facility, there were just 24 available seats in the public gallery. There were us 14 from the queue and the rest were for representatives of key NGOs and UN organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and the World Health Organisation. They were allowed pens, obviously being judged respectable enough not to kill anybody with them. I may in fact have acquired a pen from one of them at some stage, purely of course to assist them. Or I may not – it is very difficult to know what counts as terrorism these days.

South Africa opened with statements from their Ambassador and their Minister of Justice Ronald Lamola, and they opened with a bang. I rather expected South Africa to start with some soft soap about how much they had condemned Hamas and sympathised with Israel over 7 October, but no. Within the first thirty seconds South Africa had launched both the word “Nakba” and the phrase “apartheid state” at Israel. We had to hang on to our collapsing seats. This was going to be something.

Minister of Justice Lamola came out with the first memorable phrase of the case. Palestinians had suffered “75 years of apartheid, 56 years of occupation, 13 years of blockade”. It was very well done. Before handing over to the legal team, the “agents” of the South African state, in terms of the Court’s statute, were framing the argument. This injustice, and history itself, did not start on October 7.

There was a second important point of framing. South Africa stressed that in order for the request for “provisional measures” to be granted, it did not need at this stage to be proven that Israel was committing genocide. It only had to be shown that actions of Israel were prima facie capable of falling as genocide within the terms of the Genocide Convention.

The legal team then led off with Dr. Adila Hassim. She outlined that Israel was in breach of the Genocide Convention Article II a), b), c) and d).

On a), killing of Palestinians, she outlined the simple facts without embellishment. 23,200 Palestinians were killed, 70% of them women and children. Over 7,000 were missing presumed dead under the rubble. Over 200 times, Israel had dropped 2,000lb bombs into the very residential areas in southern Gaza into which Palestinians had been ordered to evacuate.

60,000 people were seriously wounded. 355,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed. What could be observed was a substantial pattern of conduct indicating a genocidal intent.

Dr Hassim was notably calm and measured in her words and delivery. But on occasion when detailing atrocities, particularly against children, her voice trembled a little with emotion. The judges, who were generally fidgety (on which much more to follow), looked up and paid closer attention at that.

The next lawyer, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi (only South Africa spoke today) addressed the question of genocidal intent. He had perhaps the easiest task, because he could relate numerous instances of senior Israeli ministers, senior officials and military officers referring to Palestinians as “animals” and calling for their complete destruction and that of Gaza itself, emphasising that there are no innocent Palestinian civilians.

What Ngcukaitobi did particularly well was emphasise the effective transmission of these genocidal ideas from senior government to the troops on the ground, who quoted the same phrases and genocidal ideas in filming themselves committing and justifying atrocities. He emphasises that the Israeli government had ignored its obligation to prevent and act against incitement to genocide in both official and popular culture.

He concentrated particularly on Netanyahu’s invocation of the fate of Amalek and the demonstrable effect of that move on the opinions and actions of Israeli soldiers. Israeli ministers, he said, could not now deny the genocidal intent of their plain words. If they did not mean it, they should not have said it.

The venerable and eminent Professor John Dugard, a striking figure in his bright scarlet gown, then addressed questions of jurisdiction of the court and of the status of South Africa to bring the case – it is likely that Israel will rely heavily on technical argument to try to give the judges an escape route. Dugard pointed out the obligations of all state parties under the Genocide Convention to act to prevent Genocide, and the judgment of the court.

Dugard quoted Article VIII of the Genocide Convention and read out in full Paragraph 431 of the court’s judgment in Bosnia vs Serbia,

This obviously does not mean that the obligation to prevent genocide only comes into being when perpetration of genocide commences ; that would be absurd, since the whole point of the obligation is to prevent, or attempt to prevent, the occurrence of the act. In fact, a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent (dolus specialis), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit.

I must confess I was very gratified. Dugard’s argument was precisely the same, and quoted the exact same passages and paragraphs, as my article of 7 December explaining why the Genocide Convention should be invoked.

The judges particularly enjoyed Dugard’s points, enthusiastically rustling through documents and underlining things. Dealing with thousands of dead children was a bit difficult for them, but give them a nice jurisdictional point and they were in their element.

Next was Professor Max du Plessis, whose particularly straightforward manner and plainness of speech brought a new energy to proceedings. He said that Palestinians were asking the court to protect the most basic of their rights – they had the right to exist.

Palestinians had suffered 50 years of oppression, and Israel had for decades considered itself above and beyond the reach of the law, ignoring both ICJ judgments and security council resolutions. That context is important. Palestinian individuals have rights to exist protected as members of a group in terms of the Genocide Convention.

South Africa’s case was founded on respect for international law and was based on law and on fact. They had taken the decision not to show the court atrocity videos and photos, of which there were many thousands. Their case was of law and fact, they did not need to introduce shock and emotion and turn the court into a theatre.

This was a shrewd blow by Du Plessis. The hearings were originally scheduled for two hours each side. The South Africans had been told, very late, that was increased to three because the Israelis insist on showing their hour long October 7 atrocity video. But in fact the court’s guidelines reflect a longstanding resistance to this sort of material which must be used “sparsely”. If 23,000 people are dead it does not add intellectual force to show the bodies, and the same is true of the 1,000 dead from 7 October.

Du Plessis concluded that the destruction of Palestine’s infrastructure that supports human life, the displacement of 85% of residents into ever smaller areas where they were still bombed – all were plain examples of genocidal intent.

But undoubtedly the highlight of the entire morning was the astonishing presentation by Irish KC Blinne Ni Ghràlaigh. Her job was to demonstrate that if the Court did not order “provisional measures”, then irreparable damage would be done.

There are times when a writer must admit defeat. I cannot adequately convey to you the impression she made in that courtroom. Like the rest of the team she eschewed atrocity porn and set out the simple facts plainly but elegantly. She adopted the ploy used by all the South African team, of not using emotional language herself but quoting at length deeply emotional language from senior UN officials. Her outline of daily deaths by type was devastating.

I simply urge you to listen to her. “Each day over ten Palestinians will have one or more limbs amputated, many without anaesthetic …”

I should write more now about the court. The South African delegation sat beside their lawyers on the right of the court, the Israeli delegation on their left, each of about 40 people. The South Africans were colourful with South African flag scarves and keffiyehs draped over shoulders. There was a mixture of South Africans and Palestinians, with Deputy Foreign Minister of the Palestinian Authority Amaar Hijazi prominent, which I was glad to see.

The South African delegation was buoyant and mutually supporting, with a lot of inclusive body language and comparative animation. The Israeli delegation was the opposite of animated. It appeared severe and disdainful – it was as though the members were all under instruction to get on with some work and not particularly notice the proceedings were happening at all. They were generally youthful, and I think cocksure would be a fair description. When Blinne was speaking they seemed particularly keen to ensure everyone could see they were not listening.

You would not think from the body language it was Israel that stands accused. In fact the only people in the court whose demeanour was particularly dodgy and guilty were the judges. They absolutely looked like they really did not want to be there. They seemed deeply uncomfortable, fidgeted and fumbled papers a lot, and seldom looked directly at the lawyers speaking.

It occurred to me that the people who really did not want to be in the Court at all were the judges, because it is in fact the judges and the Court itself on trial. The fact of genocide is incontrovertible and had been plainly set out. But several of the judges are desperate to find a way to please the USA and Israel and avoid countering the current Zionist narrative, the adoption of which is necessary to keep your feet comfortably under the table of the elite.

What counts more for them, personal comfort, the urgings of NATO, future wealthy sinecures? Are they prepared to ditch any real notion of international law for those things?

That is the real question before the court. The International Court of Justice is on trial.

During Blinne’s talk, the President of the court suddenly took an intense interest in her startling red iPad, the colour of a particularly bright nail varnish. This came out several times during the hearing, and I could never put these iPad appearances together with what had just been discussed – it was not that cases or documents had just been cited to look up, for example.

The final speaker for the South African legal team was Vaughn Lowe, and he had the delicate task of countering Israel’s defence, which they have kept secret from the court until it is made. Countering arguments you have not seen yet is a tricky proposition, and for me this was the legal tour de force of the entire morning. Vaughn Lowe’s performance was outstanding.

He started by asserting that South Africa did have standing to bring the case, repeating Durand’s points about the duty of states to act to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention. He said there was a dispute in the terms of the Convention, over whether or not genocide had occurred. South Africa had framed this dispute in a series of Diplomatic Notes Verbale sent to the Israeli government and not satisfactorily replied to.

Lowe said it was acknowledged that a series of individual incidents were being investigated by the International Criminal Court as war crimes, but the existence of other crimes did not preclude their being part of a wider genocide. Genocide was a crime which by its nature tends to come along with other war crimes committed in furtherance of the Genocide.

Finally Lowe said that genocide is never justified. It is absolute, a crime in itself. No matter how appalling the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israel or Israeli citizens, a genocidal response was not appropriate and never could be.

Vaughn Lowe stated that South Africa asked for action against Israel and not against Hamas, simply because Hamas was not a state and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the court. But the fact that the court could not act against Hamas must not prevent it from acting against Israel to prevent the current urgent danger of genocide. Nor must the court be swayed by Israeli offers of voluntary restraint. Israel’s failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing whatsoever in its actions in “grinding Gaza into the dust” showed Israel could not be trusted in any assurances to adjust behaviour, as it believed it had done no wrong.

The session ended with the South African Ambassador reiterating the provisional measures South Africa now wished the court to impose. These are:

(1) The State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.

(2) The State of Israel shall ensure that any military or irregular armed units which may be directed, supported or influenced by it, as well as any organisations and persons which may be subject to its control, direction or influence, take no steps in furtherance of the military operations referred to point (1) above.

(3) The Republic of South Africa and the State of Israel shall each, in accordance with their obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to the Palestinian people, take all reasonable measures within their power to prevent genocide.

(4) The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to the Palestinian people as group protected by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, desist from the commission of any and all acts within the scope of Article II of the Convention, in particular:
 (a) killing members of the group;
 (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to the members of the group;
 (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
 (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

(5) The State of Israel shall, pursuant to point (4)(c) above, in relation to Palestinians, desist from, and take all measures within its power including the rescinding of relevant orders, of restrictions and/or of prohibitions to prevent:
 (a) the expulsion and forced displacement from their homes;
 (b) the deprivation of:
  (i) access to adequate food and water;
  (ii) access to humanitarian assistance, including access to adequate fuel, shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation;
  (iii) medical supplies and assistance; and
 (c) the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.

(6) The State of Israel shall, in relation to Palestinians, ensure that its military, as well as any irregular armed units or individuals which may be directed, supported or otherwise influenced by it and any organizations and persons which may be subject to its control, direction or influence, do not commit any acts described in (4) and (5) above, or engage in direct and public incitement to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, or complicity in genocide, and insofar as they do engage therein, that steps are taken towards their punishment pursuant to Articles I, II, III and IV of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

(7) The State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; to that end, the State of Israel shall not act to deny or otherwise restrict access by fact-finding missions, international mandates and other bodies to Gaza to assist in ensuring the preservation and retention of said evidence.

(8) The State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one week, as from the date of this Order, and thereafter at such regular intervals as the Court shall order, until a final decision on the case is rendered by the Court.

(9) The State of Israel shall refrain from any action and shall ensure that no action is taken which might aggravate or extend the dispute before the Court or make it more difficult to resolve it.

With that, we closed the argument. Next, Israel responds.

 

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The post Your Man in the Hague (in a Good Way). appeared first on Craig Murray.

The Meaning of Epstein

Par : craig

The fascinating thing about what social media calls the Epstein “client list” is that not one of the people on it appears to be a client. I have seen nobody say “I knew Epstein because he managed my funds”. Nor does there seem to be any allegation that people paid him for his services.

So what was happening?

We often fall into the trap of attempting to provide a description of what really happened, and then defending every lacuna, when all we really have to do is point out how completely nuts the official story really is. The maddest and most extreme conspiracy theory in the Skripal saga is the official story. I don’t know precisely what was going down, but I know that it wasn’t that.

Similarly with Epstein. He is described as a “financier” but what did he ever finance? What was the source of his wealth?

Epstein’s assets were worth about US$600 million. They included not one but two separate Caribbean Islands and the very substantial properties built on them. They included very real mansions in New York and Palm Springs.

But you do not only have to look at the capital he accumulated – he did this while spending also at a colossal rate, with a lifestyle more usual in a billionaire than a millionaire. He had a very substantial executive staff, and his residences were fully staffed. He had bodyguards. He ran a private jet. He treated friends lavishly with hospitality and gifts, and maintained sex slaves. How did all this money come pouring in?

If you look at other such figures, like the highly entertaining Allen Stanford or the larger scale Bernie Madoff, you can see where the money came in. There is a bank or investment house situated in physical buildings, with real staff and lots of computers. There are very real aggrieved investors. Who are Epstein’s investors?

The standard answer appears to be Leslie Wexner of Victoria’s Secret, whose finances Epstein did manage at one stage and who reportedly once handed Epstein a limited power of attorney. But unless Epstein robbed Wexner of fully 10% of his net worth, that does not explain Epstein’s magic accession of wealth. Not until 2019, 32 years after Epstein started managing funds for Wexner and 11 years after he stopped, was any claim made by Wexner that Epstein had stolen funds, and then it appears very much a distancing move rather than a serious allegation. It is also worth noting that Wexner sold Epstein the New York mansion, he did not gift it as I have seen falsely reported.

A typical wealth management fee is 1%, generally substantially less when the sums managed for an individual account are very large. If we assess the annual costs of Epstein’s staff and lavish lifestyle at around $20,000,000 – which is very conservative – Epstein would have needed to be managing billions of dollars just to keep going, let alone accrue his own substantial capital.

There just is no evidence that Epstein did have a company managing those kind of funds. Where is the company? Where are the records? Who are the clients?

In the Assange case, we know that the CIA turned to gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson to organise and fund the spying on Julian in the Embassy through UC Global, a very dodgy Spanish-based security company which was also engaged in illegal activities in South America for the CIA (which are currently legally barred from disclosure).

Security services do operate through the world of shady businessmen. This is not conjecture: it is simple fact.

That Epstein was able, simply by lavish hospitality spending, to tempt many on his “client list” to enjoy his hospitality is hardly surprising. That the offer included sex with notably young girls appears inarguable. This obviously would increase Epstein’s influence on those who accepted the sex. I think it is wrong to consider this a blackmail scam – it is something more subtle than that: a shared bond of complicity, with an underlying frisson of danger.

The risk of exposure in such a relationship is of course mutual. It does not have to be discussed. If what Epstein was doing was as unsubtle as spoken blackmail, he would have been killed much earlier than he was, given some of those involved. Those who seriously threatened the reputations of the Clintons, for example, have been extraordinarily accident- and suicide-prone.

That the security services of both Israel and the United States assisted in funding this activity seems to me entirely likely, and a very simple explanation of the spending way beyond the apparent source of income. Epstein appears to have been an excellent “agent of influence”, well worth the money in the eyes of these states.

Here is a very simple question. How many of those powerful figures on the Epstein lists have ever tried to exert any influence to alleviate the tragic plight of the Palestinians, or acted against the interests of Israel?

Sometimes the greatest insight comes from the simplest of questions.

 

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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 every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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The post The Meaning of Epstein appeared first on Craig Murray.

Sunak, Cleverly and Shapps Could Be in the Old Bailey Dock for Genocide

Par : craig

Expect the UK to intervene on Israel’s side in the South African case against Israel for Genocide at the International Court of Justice. If Israel loses, British ministers, civil servants and military personnal could end up in the dock for genocide – not only in the Hague, but in the UK.

Infamously, UK courts give no force to international treaties even when the UK has ratified them, unless they are specifically incorporated in UK domestic legislation. The Genocide Convention was explicitly incorporated into UK law in 1969 by the Genocide Act. However the Genocide Act was repealed in 2001 and replaced by Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act.

That is perfectly clear. Article 53 makes plain that this includes ancillary offences, eg aiding and abetting genocide.

What has the UK government done to aid and abet the genocide? It has:

1) Actively encouraged and incited genocide, including by the systematic obstruction of ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council;
2) Provided military equipment to Israel, with dozens of flights from RAF Akrotiri to Israel during the course of the genocide itself;
3) Provided communications intelligence to Israel to assist in genocide;
4) Provided aerial surveillance to Israel to assist in genocide.

These are for certain. It is also widely rumoured that UK Special Forces have participated directly in the genocide. That is something the prosecution will have to determine.

There has been a great sense of impunity among the zionist-controlled political classes: they have believed that they were in no danger of any personal retribution for their part in the brutal destruction of thousands and thousands of young children. In fact they felt able to turn the power of the state against anybody protesting that destruction.

There has been no legal jeopardy to anybody supplying, inciting or cheering on Israel’s monstrous atrocities. The jeopardy has all been felt by those opposing the atrocities.

That all changed with South Africa’s reference to the International Court of Justice. A determination of genocide by the International Court of Justice must be respected by the International Criminal Court and it will be impossible even for the odious Karim Khan to avoid bringing prosecutions against the perpetrators. Similarly in the UK, the fact of genocide being legally established, a police investigation will be obliged simply to focus on whether the UK aided and abetted it.

Quite simply, if you ask the police to investigate Sunak for aiding and abetting genocide today, they will laugh at you and say there is no genocide. After an ICJ judgment they can no longer do that.

Now I am not naive. Just as our rulers believe their backs are covered by Karim Khan KC at the International Criminal Court, they believe that their backs are covered in the UK by the provision that any prosecution must be with the consent of the Attorney General. A government therefore has to agree to the prosecution.

I gave evidence at great length to the police inquiry into UK complicity in CIA torture and extraordinary rendition, in which Tony Blair and Jack Straw had so much blood on their hands it would fill swimming pools. There were of course never any prosecutions.

But the world changes over time, and it feels like something has seriously shifted in both the international and domestic order from the open espousal by our ruling classes of the most extreme atrocities, happening again and again and again in plain sight.

Our ruling classes may find they are less fixed in power than they believe. I would not bet on their impunity being permanent. There is a good precedent of participants in the Holocaust being brought to justice many decades later. We may yet see justice, and I believe a good deal sooner than that.

 
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The post Sunak, Cleverly and Shapps Could Be in the Old Bailey Dock for Genocide appeared first on Craig Murray.

Farewell to John Pilger

Par : craig

Simply the greatest documentary maker of all time, and a rock of support for the Assange family.

Goodbye, John. We shall all miss you greatly.

The post Farewell to John Pilger appeared first on Craig Murray.

Palestine Over Latte (Warning Contains Satire).

Par : craig

In 18 years of existence this blog has only twice hosted guest posts. However in view of the current Middle East Crisis I thought I should give space to Guardian columnists Jonathan Freedland, Gaby Hinsliff, Hadley Freeman, Lucy Mangan, and Marina Hyde, assisted by Stephen Fry, to collaborate and give us their perspective.

Here is their article:

It is easy for people, particularly young people, to be misled by social media into a malformed and warped view of the current conflict in the Middle East.

Of course, we fully understand that it is natural that pictures of thousands of dead Palestinian children, strewn across Twitter, give rise to feelings of hate and disgust.

But step back a little and consider this: are hate and disgust solid bases for building a rational assessment of Middle East Policy? Are those dead Palestinian children obscuring, in your mind, the calculation of something altogether more fundamental and important?

On 7 October Hamas beheaded forty babies, burned babies in ovens before their grieving parents, and carried out a systematic programme of mass rape, particularly of innocent young partygoers. They incinerated people with high explosives so their bodies became unrecognisable.

History started on October 7 2023 and started with an extreme excrescence of the worst abuses of classic patriarchy.

This is the existential threat which Israel faces. Israel is the only Jewish homeland and therefore Hamas is an existential threat to all Jews, everywhere. We saw this before, of course, with the Holocaust. Jewish people have had to live with existential threat for millennia.

The Palestinian people however do not face existential threat. It may appear a paradox that 1,000 dead Israelis is an existential threat to Israel but 20,000 dead Palestinians is not an existential threat to Palestine, but that is the point: it only seems a paradox to you.

You are again being blinded by numbers, your mind is again perplexed by all those images of dead Palestinian children. But you must understand this situation cannot be reduced to a simple numbers game.

It is not the number of dead children that counts: it is their quality.

Palestinians cannot face existential threat because there are now massively more Palestinians living in Gaza than lived there before the Nakba, when they all chose to move there and set up refugee camps.

In Gaza, Palestinians had a chance to set up a second Singapore with all the aid money they received from the EU and Qatar.

In fact Gaza could have been better than Singapore. Because of the physical constraints placed by Israel, including not permitting a port or an airport and controlling the entry of all people and materiel, the Palestinians had a glorious opportunity to go further than Singapore. They could have abandoned the physical world and set up a state that did not involve any movement either of goods or people.

Gaza divorced in this way from the physical world could have been an ultra-wealthy modern leader in pure intelligence-driven economy, not even dependent on computers as they were pretty restricted too.

Instead Hamas chose to ignore this glorious opportunity and focus instead on saving people from being killed, beaten, raped or detained by Israeli soldiers who were merely exercising the entirely necessary right of self-defence from the existential threat I think we mentioned before.

Hamas built command and control centres under hospitals, as proven by photos of Israeli soldiers carrying small amounts of incriminating-looking stuff into these hospitals. Hamas made terrorist bases of schools, forcing Israel to kill literally thousands of people crammed into them for refuge. Hamas stored weapons in churches and mosques, probably including the only high-explosive weapon Hamas ever possessed, which it obviously used to attack its own hospital.

Hamas also recruited hundreds of United Nations staff and journalists, forcing Israel to kill them too. This was all a ruse to increase hatred of Israel and thus reinforce the existential threat to Israel which I think we mentioned already.

That is of course a proper understanding of what has happened in the Middle East, where hundreds of babies were definitely beheaded by Hamas as part of an existential threat.

In return, in exercising Israel’s right to self-defence, an unverifiable number of Palestinians may have been killed or wounded, but figures are from the Hamas-run health ministry so are probably invented to increase the level of the existential threat to Israel.

Remember, if Hamas surrendered, the Middle East would be entirely peaceful and Israel could restore its apartheid state and only kill about 400 Palestinians every year, while systematically stealing more and more of their land, destroying their crops and bulldozing their lands. That is after a few thousand more immediate revenge killings, of course.

But if Israel surrendered, every single Jewish person in the world would be killed, exactly like every single Afrikaaner and Dutch person in the world was killed after the fall of apartheid South Africa. That is the existential threat to Israel.

But we have to look outside the Middle East and consider the effect on the wider Jewish diaspora, but not including those liberal Jews and Orthodox Jews who don’t support Israel at all (better cut this it complicates things – ed.).

I was in my local coffee shop on Tuesday, where you order at the counter and your coffee is delivered to your table by bicycle in a wicker basket with interwoven sprigs of lavender. I was eagerly awaiting my non-binary oatmeal latte with Peruvian single-estate caramel syrup, when I overheard an aggressive-looking man at the next table say:

“What do you think Janet? It’s a bit rum all these nippers being killed in Gaza isn’t it?”.

My entire world crashed around me. I had always felt safe in the UK, never believing I could, as a Jew, face any threat or danger. But here I was staring actual anti-semitism in its moustachioed face above a mustard-yellow scarf that had a distinct coffee stain!

I suddenly realised that every Jew faces an existential threat everywhere, and that Israel is entirely necessary to our very survival, no matter how many Palestinians are killed and displaced over decades!

It certainly put those thousands of dead Palestinian children into perspective, for me anyway!

Indeed I realised that to claim there were any dead Palestinian children at all was just to repeat the ancient medieval internet blood libel meme and therefore was itself a part of the existential threat to Israel.

That is the true understanding of the dead Palestinian children! They are actually part of the existential threat to Israel itself! Dead Palestinian children are just an anti-semitic meme!

Keeping an eye on the rampant anti-semite in the mustard scarf, I left, realising that as a Jew I was now unable to visit my own favourite coffee shop. I immediately withdrew young Tristan from nursery because of this coffee shop anti-semitism, and phoned the Community Security Trust, who said they would get back to me once they had fabricated a few hundred more incidents.

Forget those dead Palestinian children, Stephen Fry and I are the real victims in all this.

Signed

Jonathan Freedland, Gaby Hinsliff, Lucy Mangan, Marina Hyde, Hadley Freeman, Stephen Fry, etc. etc. etc. (Can you ask MI6 if I should sign this? – LH)

The above—and I would hope I did not have to say this, but experience proves otherwise—is satire.

A great many of the bravest opponents of the war in Gaza are Jewish. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews who are not Zionists. The large majority of Zionists are not Jews. It is important never to conflate the two.

I have no quarrel whatsoever with Jewish people. I view supporters of the racist, aggressive and genocidal political programme that is Zionism with the deepest hostility and indeed contempt.

It is however undoubtedly the case that some of the subset of Jews who are Zionists have been especially active in the British media in justifying the current vicious genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. In doing so they have often chosen to foreground their own Jewishness, to emphasise Israel’s role as the “Jewish state”, and to make claims of facing anti-Jewish discrimination or hostility in the UK.

It is impossible to reply in a way that makes plain that none of those things justify thousands of dead Palestinian children (and scores or hundreds more still every day) without addressing the Jewishness on which they themselves depend.

And their arguments are so callous, so self-serving and so prejudiced that they are overripe for satire. I appreciate it will be impossible to do this without myself attracting totally bogus accusations of an anti-semitism I do not entertain for a second.

Mentioning the Holocaust in a satirical piece caused me great consideration and is not done lightly. I have written here before of how my political duties in the British Embassy in Poland took me frequently to the sites of the concentration camps, and how it had a serious emotional impact on me. But using that dreadful event to justify another act of genocide simply has to be called out.

But I think the anti-semitism scam lost its force 20,000 dead Palestinians ago. So here we go.

I have chosen a random bunch of Guardian journalists (and ex journalists) as that “newspaper” is the epicentre of much of this guff. The names are pretty random and make no implication of ethnicity.

 
 
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The post Palestine Over Latte (Warning Contains Satire). appeared first on Craig Murray.

What We Have Learned

Par : craig

We have learnt this year that there is no crime so startling, so obvious and so visible to the whole world that the United States and Israel are not willing to commit it brazenly and openly. The massacre of 20,000 people includes the killing of babies and infants, the deliberate shooting of pregnant women and toddlers, the murder of old ladies in church and the execution of prisoners stripped naked.

This is all justified as “Israel’s right of self-defence”.

We have also seen the increasing rise of fascism as western governments crack down on their publics in order to curtail political resistance to the genocide. Tony Greenstein, Mick Napier and I have all been harassed under the Terrorism Act. I have left the country because I fear I am officially “under investigation” under the Terrorism Act and I fear I shall be arrested and placed in jail for two years awaiting trial. Numerous people have been arrested for expressing their horror at the massacre through placards, words or even songs that the police judge “offensive”. Police action is often prompted by instruction from self-appointed Zionist vigilante organisations.

We are also seeing, exactly as I predicted, a replay of the “War on Terror” state Islamophobic propaganda. Do you remember the famous “ricin plot” where the ricin found was the trace level to be found in every kitchen? The British government kept it Top Secret for two years that there was in fact no ricin. Or the non-existent Easter Bomb Plot where the “ingredient of improvised explosives” found turned out to be a bag of sugar?

In Germany they have a great deal of work to do to justify the world’s most extreme anti-Palestinian governmental racism, so they have invented a “Hamas terror plot” and arrested four young Muslims. No evidence at all that been produced to justify this.

Hamas has never, ever conducted any violent attack outside of Palestine and it has always been their policy not to do so – and it still is. The notion is ludicrous that at this time Hamas have decided to suddenly lose the propaganda war which they are winning worldwide, by attacking Germany.

Germany’s governments have form of course, not only for genocide, but also for enthusiastic creation of fake terrorism. The German government was heavily implicated both in false flag terrorist attacks in Tashkent, which I was able to investigate and report to the UK government in real time, and in the creation of a whole fake terrorist organisation, “The Islamic Jihad Union of Uzbekistan”, which was entirely the work of the CIA and the German security services. The aim at that time was to justify the German military airbase at Termez in Uzbekistan, operating into Afghanistan. People forget German participation on the losing side in the last Afghan war.

I have no doubt we are in for a period of more propaganda, fake terrorist plots, false flag actual terrorism and agent provocateur led terrorism. It is the only way the Establishment can hope to regain the propaganda narrative.

I have not quite got used yet to my new position as an itinerant terrorist, so I apologise that posting has been a bit scarce due to a lot of organisational bother and a general sense of discombobulation. This is being dashed off at Milan airport. I am very happy on a personal note to say that my family are joining me at an exotic venue for Christmas and New Year, so you may not hear much from me till mid-January as I owe my children a great deal of my attention.

I do wish you a safe and very happy festive season wherever you are, and hope you can be together with those you love. For all those living in fear and danger, particularly but not only those in Gaza, my thoughts along with those of millions around the world are with you now and always.

Shortly before the first Iraq War, between the invasion of Kuwait and the outbreak of real hostilities, I sent a minute in reply to one from John Major. I was working in a the Embargo Surveillance Centre, a Top Secret establishment operating from an underground NATO HQ in central London. We were among the recipients of a Christmas message from the Prime Minister which combined Christian wishes with a bellicose message. I replied in a formal minute with this verse from the carol It Came Upon the Midnight Clear:

But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!

Whomever the angels are to you, I hope you hear them sing.

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The post What We Have Learned appeared first on Craig Murray.

Murder

Par : craig

Al Jazeera are leading their news with the execution of Palestinian civilians, including women and toddlers, inside the school in Jabalia where they were sheltering. They were all shot at point blank range, with no signs of a bomb or missile strike.

On the BBC, the Daily Politics show – which consists of discussion between senior British MPs – does not discuss Palestine at all, because the British political class supports the genocide, so for them there is nothing to discuss.

Also in Jabalia, the Israelis today destroyed the last remaining bakery.

It is worth stating why this is plainly a genocide in Gaza:

1) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure which supports the civilian population, including water treatment, electricity, sewerage systems, bakeries and fishing boats;

2) Deliberate destruction of almost all medical facilities;

3) Deliberate destruction of educational facilities, from universities to primary schools;

4) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of civil society, including Supreme Court, Parliament, Ministries and Council buildings and deliberate destruction of administrative records;

5) Deliberate blocking of food aid inducing mass starvation;

6) Massive and indiscriminate bombardment. In wars the general percentage of children among those killed varies from 6 to 8%. In Ukraine it is 6%. In Gaza it is 42%. This is indiscriminate destruction of an ethnic group;

7) Mass executions of civilians;

8) Acts of dehumanisation of the Palestinians, including parading prisoners naked for public and media show and humiliation, beating and sexually abusing them;

9) Forced mass movement of population;

10) Deliberate targeting of religious and cultural heritage buildings;

11) Deliberate targeting of intellectual leadership, including journalists, doctors, poets, university lecturers and senior administrators;

12) Numerous declarations of open genocidal intent from the President and Prime Minister down through almost the entire fabric of both civilian and military establishment.

This is the official definition of Genocide in international law, from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Yesterday I attended a session called by Palestine at the United Nations in Geneva. Over 120 states attended. While the formal session consisted of statements of national position with few surprises, I was able to discuss with a large number of delegates in the corridors why the Genocide Convention has not been activated triggering a reference to the International Court of Justice.

The answer is now clear to me. It is not that people are worried that a claim of genocide will not be successful at the International Court of Justice. It is that everybody is quite sure it will succeed. There is no respectable argument that this is not a genocide in the terms outlined above.

The problem is that once the ICJ has determined that this is a genocide, it follows that not only are Netanyahu and hundreds of senior Israeli officials and military personally liable, but it is absolutely plain that “Genocide Joe” Biden, Sunak and members of their administrations are also criminally liable for complicity, having provided military support for the genocide.

The International Criminal Court cannot ignore a judgment of genocide from the International Court of Justice and will have no choice but to issue arrest warrants.

A genocide is the worst of crimes. Just how appalling this one is has been shown to the world like never before, through the power of social media.

But to the global 1% whose interests rule the world, no number of dead Palestinians makes any real difference to their interests. On the other hand, the ramifications for the international system of wealth concentration, if western political elites start to be held accountable for their crimes, are uncertain and therefore carry more risk. This is particularly the concern of ruling classes of both Western and Arab states.

It may sound astonishing, but to the world’s diplomats the enormity of a genocide appears less troubling than the enormity of doing something about it.

 
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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.

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The post Murder appeared first on Craig Murray.

Attacking Journalists as Terrorists

Par : craig

We have made two formal complaints to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, one over my incarceration for Contempt of Court, and one over continuing police harassment including the investigation for “terrorism” of which I am now the subject.

In a meeting with UN staff, we promised to follow up with details of a few of the many others who have been detained, questioned and had their electronics seized under Article 7 of the Terrorism Act. In each case there was no suggestion of any kind – including by the Police – that they have any connection to terrorism.

It is plain that in fact people are being persecuted for political dissident opinion.

In the modern world, access to your electronics – and it is a criminal offence under the Terrorism Act not to hand over access codes to the police when your electronics are confiscated – allows the police to trawl through your entire private life. Most of us access over 90% of our correspondence, all of our financial information, and much of our social relationships, online.

Just think personally for one moment: if the police had full access to everything in your laptop or tablet and phone, including all the history, how would you feel about that?

It leaves the victims, myself included, feeling violated. It is an incredibly intrusive thing for the state to do.

The case of Dr John Laughland is particularly interesting. In his case, judges ruled explicitly that the police had every right to access all his electronics, and to retain all the data, precisely because there was no suggestion of him committing any offence. This extraordinary passage justifying the fascist approach to Dr Laughland’s data comes from Lord Menzies, one of the judges who sent me to jail.

The reference in Mr Laughland’s representations to respecting the presumption of innocence is therefore misplaced – nobody has accused him of anything, far less found him guilty of anything. His reputation is not tarnished by the decision to retain the copied material, and this decision should not be taken as a conclusion that he poses a risk or threat to national security. No such finding is to be implied in this decision.

It is of course quite mad to argue that the police should have access to all your most private information, precisely because you have done nothing wrong. It is the ultimate development of the “if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear” argument beloved by proponents of maximum state surveillance.

The idea that the state has a right to see everything, and you have no right to private affairs, of course lies also behind the government move just this week to promulgate a law in the UK that allows the state full access to the bank accounts of anyone in receipt of any state benefit, including old age pension and child benefit – over half the population.

Incidentally, whether you or I agree with Dr Laughland’s politics is irrelevant. Freedom is not only important for people with whom you happen to agree.

I do not expect any instant results from the UN. The human rights mechanisms are swamped by the genocide in Gaza. There is already cognitive dissonance among UN officials who do not know how to react to Western government support for that genocide. A complaint against the UK always faces resistance, as the narrative of British support for human rights has strong roots in the history of the UN as an institution; even though that is a false or, at best, very partial picture of historical British behaviour.

But we keep chipping away at the marble façade.

 
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The post Attacking Journalists as Terrorists appeared first on Craig Murray.

Still Throwing Punches

Par : craig

Obviously fighting against the crushing power of the state is hard work, but we can still land a few (metaphorical) blows. This is one of the most feisty letters from a lawyer you will ever see, directly confronting Police Scotland over responsibility for the hacking of my Twitter account.

I am quite sure the contents of my phone and laptop were shared with UK intelligence services, and very probably with other intelligence services as well. Which one hacked my Twitter account we may never know, but the responsibility lies with Police Scotland who seized my devices and initially downloaded the contents. The letter covers all eventualities.

The lawyer’s letter previously sent to X (or Twitter) has resulted in some progress being made in regaining my Twitter account. I can now post to it again, but reach is extremely suppressed and I cannot load my profile photo or regain my blue tick. This is in contrast to the hack, when all the further changes that ought to have been disabled by Twitter after the password was changed, were enabled by somebody inside Twitter.

That I am blocked from making the changes the hackers were freed to make really says a great deal. There is no indication how long the account will be “under review”, and other than an automated invitation to change my password and regain control, Twitter are still not in contact.

Gordon MacMillan, the British Army 77th Brigade “information warfare” officer who was previously in charge of Middle East content at Twitter, is now openly supporting the genocidal Israeli regime. Which tells you a lot about both Twitter and the British army.

On the larger question of precisely what “terrorism” the police are investigating me for, there is still no sign of any answer.

I am very sorry, but all this legal activity comes at a very real cost, and it would be very helpful if more readers could subscribe. If you think you already are subscribing, please check if your subscription is still active. Over 40% of subscriptions through PayPal are no longer active, because if a single payment is missed PayPal suspends the subscription.

Over 40% of subscriptions are suspended in this way, usually because the debit card expired. People do not know their subscription has been suspended.

 
 
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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.

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The post Still Throwing Punches appeared first on Craig Murray.

Stopping Genocide

Par : craig

Every single state in the world has a positive duty to intervene to prevent the Genocide in Gaza now, not after a court has reached a determination of genocide. This is made crystal clear in para 431 of the International Court of Justice judgment in Bosnia vs Serbia:

This obviously does not mean that the obligation to prevent genocide only comes into being when perpetration of genocide commences ; that would be absurd, since the whole point of the obligation is to prevent, or attempt to prevent, the occurrence of the act. In fact, a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent (dolus specialis), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit.

This case was specifically on the application of the Genocide Convention. That the ICJ has ruled there is a positive duty on states to act to prevent genocide makes it even more astonishing to me that no state has invoked the Genocide Convention over the blatant genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza. Not least is it puzzling that this action has not been undertaken by Palestine itself, which is a party to the Convention and does have the ability to invoke it.

On Monday, I attended a surreal event at the United Nations in Geneva. It was part of the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the Genocide Convention. It had been organised before the start of the current phase of the genocide of the Palestinians, and the subject was the suppression of incitement to genocide in the media and social media. It was formally a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council, but other states were also entitled to attend and to speak.

Delegates came and went, but over the course of the day approximately 60 nation states were present in the hall. Not all spoke, but enough did to give a feeling for the diplomatic dynamics.

I think this is best summed up by recounting the tale of two striking-looking women who spoke. The first was the delegate of Palestine, with notable long black hair, who spoke movingly of the current genocide in Gaza and the terrible destruction wrought upon tens of thousands of entirely innocent people, chiefly women and children.

Palestine was followed by the delegate representing Denmark, with equally notable long hair only this time very blonde, who said the government of Denmark was taking important concrete measures to prevent the incitement of genocide, including legislation to combat anti-semitism in social media. Two nations speaking entirely past each other.

And that was how the discussion went. Arab, African and South American states stressed the urgent need to stop the current genocide; developed nations stressed the need for states to control social media and counter “disinformation” and anti-semitism. The experts invited to join the discussion very much focused on Palestine – indeed that is where I got the reference to the precise passage from the ICJ judgment above.

None of which still explains why none of the pro-Palestinian states has fulfilled their duty and reported Israel under the Genocide Convention, thus triggering a determination by the International Court of Justice. This is particularly strange as several states have referred Israel to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Yet I have not found a single diplomat from any nation who disagrees with me when I say that this is a waste of time as the ICC is a western tool and will do nothing. I have not found a single diplomat who disagrees with me when I say that the ICJ is much better and a reference under the Genocide Convention is a far better route.

Yet still no political leader has taken it.

Fatah is influenced by two negative factors. The first is that it has become so immersed in the running of the Palestinian Authority it feels crippled by responsibility. Israel has already cut off the flow of funds to the Palestinian Authority which go to Gaza to pay 60,000 public sector workers there. The PA is worried about the potential to cut funding to the West Bank as well.

The ICJ already has a Palestinian case before it. On 19 February there are oral hearings on an advisory opinion for the UN General Assembly on the status of the Occupied Territories. Arguments are being made that it would not be helpful to introduce another case.

It is always possible to find arguments for not rocking the status quo. There is no doubt that there will be heavy pressure from the USA on the PA not to activate the Genocide Convention – not least because of the stark fact that “Genocide Joe” Biden should, on any rational view, be himself indicted for conspiracy or at least complicity.

I do not myself think that the Fatah leadership is consciously willing the destruction by Israel of Hamas, and certainly not at the cost of so much civilian life. But old resentments – and remember Hamas killed many Fatah people – may feed in to the process whereby frankly spurious arguments against activating the Genocide Convention are given undue weight. Many other nations which support Palestine supporters are not acting because it appears Abbas does not want them to act.

But there is something much more profound than that. This feels like a moment so shocking that the entire world is stupefied, not quite knowing how to act. An enormous rift has been exposed in international affairs. Previously, the developed nations had given lip service to the values of international organisations and to the basic concepts that move the UN, such as decolonisation, human rights and conflict resolution.

Suddenly, not only is genocide occurring with a scale and rapidity that is simply stunning – in six weeks in Gaza ten times the number of children have been killed as in two years of war in Ukraine – but the western nations are roaring on a racial extermination that dehumanises its victims. The western political class are systematically silencing internal opposition, and promoting blatant White Power marches thinly disguised as against anti-semitism.

Every developing and Arab state who spoke at the UN session on Monday described Israel in terms of colonial occupation. That is a real shift to plain speaking.

The world has been jolted, suddenly. Masks have been ripped off. Almost the entire political Establishment of the West have outed themselves as enthusiastic proponents of a racial supremacism, prepared to give active assistance to a genocide of indigenous people.

There really is no way to face up to the Genocide in Gaza without facing up to the active support of Biden, von der Leyen, Sunak and most western political leaderships – including both Labour and Conservatives in the UK. We also have to face the complicity of Karim Khan and a number of other western stooges operating at senior levels within international institutions. Where the World goes from here, in the face of the raw racial hatred and enthusiasm for the killing of babies that has been revealed by those in power, is very difficult for people to come to reckon.

I know we have been here before, with the invasion of Iraq and numerous other instances of brutal abuse of power on the world stage. But this has a different feel. I am trying to understand why. Possibly because the balance of power in the world has swung considerably. Possibly because social media enables more people, particularly the young, to see the truth. I do not fully understand why; but this feels very different, momentous.

Almost all of the nations that have been utterly appalled by the actions of the US, UK and EU over Gaza, are to some extent dependent on “aid” flows from those sources. It is also worth noting, at this crucial time, the failure of China to provide any kind of leadership. I have previously praised China’s singular lack of interest in expansion or in meddling overseas, as compared to the fading and ultra-aggressive US hegemon. But China’s narrow definition of its interests is not helpful where there is an overwhelming need for China to throw its weight into the balance for the sake of humanity.

Everybody is failing the Palestinians. Even you and me. None of us are doing enough. I have struggled to get this article right, and there are perhaps six hours of work in it, in addition probably to another eighteen hours in various meetings on the subject trying to get things moving diplomatically. In those hours, 140 Palestinian children will have been killed by Israel and 300 maimed. Is there anybody reading this who really is doing enough to halt so great an evil? How do we avoid feeling trapped by frustration, helplessness and overwhelming sorrow?

“It’s quite clear to anyone with half a brain that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as we speak.”

—Roger Waters

🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸pic.twitter.com/c23OPhmrHI

— sarah (@sahouraxo) December 5, 2023

I am sorry I cannot immediately find more answers. But let us all work harder, wherever we are, to do our little bit for peace.

 
 
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The post Stopping Genocide appeared first on Craig Murray.

Dystopia

Par : craig

Yesterday I scanned the MSM news. The UK openly boasted of running aerial surveillance over Gaza to identify targets for Israel, and it was revealed the USA has provided over 12,000 bombs and 57,000 shells to Israel. Israel killed over 300 more civilians, including over 100 more dead children. At the same time, Kamala Harris had been sobered up long enough to make a speech claiming that the US wished Israel to avoid casualties, in a desperate attempt to mask the blood on the hands of Genocide Joe.

I read that Germany is in budget crisis. I looked thorugh numerous articles, and not a single one mentioned the actual cause of the crisis, the war in Ukraine and in particular the destruction of Nordstream. None of the MSM has ever apologised for their coordinated and unanimous “big lie” that Russia blew up its own pipeline, even though they have all now quietly abandoned this in favour of a fallback lie that it was a heroic “Dad’s Army” attack by a few Ukrainians on a little boat.

I saw the media reporting without criticism, as indeed heroic, a speech by Zelensky in which he claimed as a victory that Ukraine had not actually lost significant territory during its counter-offensive. I found nothing explaining the causes of the war and very little on the inevitable need for a negotiated solution.

I read articles about immigrants drowning while trying to reach Spain, about an EU/Switzerland agreement being stymied over fears of immigration, about immigrants on the Russia/Finland border and about the causes of anti-immigration riots in Ireland. Not one of these articles mentioned that the great wave of immigration to Europe these past twenty years has been directly caused by the destruction of whole societies, economies and national infrastructures by Western invasions and direct or proxy attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.

I saw the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court shuttled around Israel and the West Bank in a fleet of armored Toyotas, looking like the most arrogant of VIPs, while refusing to act against Israel and seeking to “bothsides” the genocide unfolding before our eyes.

I realised that Karim Khan KC, brother of an ex Tory MP, himself should by rights be charged with complicity in war crimes.

The evil of the times in which we live has been clear for a very long time. In “developed” countries we have seen a massive growth in disparity of wealth and increasing numbers of people unable to lead a standard of life which makes them a part of society, in consequence of destruction of worker rights and institutional protections. We have seen an increasingly unapologetic tendency of Western neo-imperialism to unleash the devastating power of modern weaponry upon less developed nations, generally of the Islamic faith, with no care for civilian casualties.

We saw it in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and now we see its apotheosis in Gaza.

Here the two strands of dystopian western and domestic policy intertwine, because there is massive popular opposition to the genocide in Gaza, and it is crystal plain that the people of the “democracies” have no actual influence on the war machine. The war machine controls the people, they do not control the war machine. If you want to look for a sign of hope – and we all need hope – it is that a whole new generation of young people has come to understand that.

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The post Dystopia appeared first on Craig Murray.

The Twitter Hack

Par : craig

The hack of my X Twitter account was definitely intended to reduce my reach on Palestine, it took place while the security services have possession of my electronics and access to my account, and it involved either complicity by Twitter or a security service backdoor.

I have now had to involve lawyers and prepare for legal action against X to get my Twitter account back. It took me 15 years to build up 138,000 followers despite continual suppression and shadow banning. Some of my individual tweets on Palestine were gaining over 10,000 likes. Subscriptions to this blog were increasing.

I understand why action has been taken to destroy all that, just as I understand why a laughable “terrorism” investigation against me has been launched to disrupt my work and try to put me back in jail. I must be achieving something, or they wouldn’t take all this trouble. I intend therefore to bash on.

When my account was hacked, the first thing that was done, immediately, was to change the password and then put out a tweet in support of Hitler and the Holocaust in my name. That is how I know that the motivation was related to the current genocide in Palestine.

I know that either Twitter complicity was involved or a security service backdoor into Twitter because the “hacker” was able, within ten minutes, to change the password, email and the very name and identity of the account, from @craigmurray.org to @matthuag. Twitter automatically blocks you from making all those changes at the same time, for obvious reasons. Also the identity of the account was changed while still retaining the blue verified tick, which is also not normally possible.

It is also consistent with Twitter complicity that despite my reporting the hack to X support within five minutes of the password being changed, and reminding them repeatedly ever since, there has been no response other than automated ones from X Support. Furthermore another victim of this crime, the real @matthuang, has also reported to Twitter the appearance of the fake @matthuag account from the renaming of @craigmurrayorg, impersonating him. Matt Huang also, a person of some note, has been unable to obtain any response from Twitter.

It is a matter of simple fact that X or Twitter employs numerous ex members of the US, UK and Israeli security services. The only thing in doubt about that statement is the “ex”.

It seems to me entirely possible that this action was undertaken by, or at the behest of, the police or security services, in order to bolster the “terrorism” accusation against me by the crazy pro-Hitler tweet. At the time of the tweet they held – and still do – my seized mobile phone. They seized my laptop and cloned it before returning it to me. They had direct access to my Twitter account at the time this was done.

Furthermore my solicitors reported the hack, and the pro-Hitler tweet, to Police Scotland at the time it happened. Police Scotland have shown no interest at all. I would remind you that this is the police force that prosecuted a man for training his dog to give a Nazi salute online. But they have no interest in discovering who sent out a tweet supporting Hitler and the Holocaust?

A final thought. After the hack and the pro-Hitler tweet, it is my strong suspicion that the account was offloaded or sold to other people entirely, who made the change to @matthuag for the purpose of perpetrating some kind of identity fraud on Matt Huang. This appears an entirely different kind of crime and motivation. Otherwise the original hackers could have simply done it to hide their tracks and motivation. Whoever now controls the account appears to lack either the ability or the motivation to disconnect the Twitter API which posts notification of new articles here direct to the account.

I have now asked the lawyers to consider action against the police.

I am sorry to say all this continues to come with a large financial cost, which is of course not an accident. The imposition of constant financial drain through legal and other attacks is a fundamental part of the state system of suppressing dissent. Our only defence against that is horizontal solidarity which shares the cost among hundreds of us. I do plead with the 98% of readers of this blog who still do not subscribe to see if you can afford a small amount – it can be less than a cup of coffee a month. But please do not contribute if it causes you any financial hardship at all.

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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.

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The post The Twitter Hack appeared first on Craig Murray.

Banned Books

Par : craig

At Saturday’s great march in support of Palestine in London, police arrested members of the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist (CPGBML) for having a pamphlet on sale on their stall.

The “illegal” pamphlet is entitled Zionism: A Racist, Anti-Semitic and Reactionary Tool of Imperialism.

Just what is illegal about it, I do not know. The authorship is ascribed to the CPGBML. I have looked through it and it is scrupulous in distinguishing between zionism and judaism. Criticism of Israel and of the zionist movement is not anti-semitic.

I suspect what may have upset the authorities are the passages on collaboration between some leaders of the zionist movement and the Nazis.

This is a difficult subject. My own view, which I have discussed both in several articles on this blog and in person with many friends who take a different view, (including Tony Greenstein who has written an entire book on the subject), is that it serves no useful purpose to keep bringing this up. Aberrations of history at a time of great world convulsion, including the events leading up to the Holocaust and that genocide itself, throw up many horrors it is often not helpful to try to tie in to contemporary events.

I see this in Scotland. It appears true that unfortunately a few Scottish nationalists momentarily considered Nazi Germany a possible ally against a common enemy in London. But efforts are made constantly on social media to use that as a meme to portray modern Scottish nationalists as Nazis, which is utter nonsense. Furthermore bringing the Nazis into political debate, especially in anything relating to the Holocaust, immediately causes all kinds of nutters to come out of the woodwork.

Truth is important and true history should always be acknowledged and faced. But I believe my fellow supporters of Palestine do not help today’s debate or the Palestinian cause by dredging up 90-year-old marginal stories.

This particular truth certainly has a place in the history books, but most of the attempts to insert it into current debate are not, in my view, justified.

That, however, is a very different view to saying that books addressing the subject should be banned and people arrested for possessing them. This is a simply appalling attack on freedom of speech. I condemn it unreservedly.

It is also not in the least plain to me where the offence lies.

Is it an offence simply to possess this pamphlet? Does the offence lie rather in displaying it, or in offering to sell it? Is it only an offence to try to sell it at a demonstration? Would it be an offence to sell it in a bookshop? Would it be an offence if it were in a university library for the study of Marxist-Leninist thought?

The pamphlet was published in 2015. Was that an offence at the time? Did anybody who displayed or sold a copy of the pamphlet over the last eight years commit an offence? Is everybody today in possession of a copy committing an offence, including me who has one for the purposes of journalism?

And what offence is it precisely?

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has put out a very strong statement on the use of the current attacks on Gaza to damage freedom of expression worldwide:

GENEVA (23 November 2023) – UN experts* today expressed alarm at the worldwide wave of attacks, reprisals, criminalisation and sanctions against those who publicly express solidarity with the victims of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

“Calls for an end to the violence and attacks in Gaza, or for a humanitarian ceasefire, or criticism of Israeli government’s policies and actions, have in too many contexts been misleadingly equated with support for terrorism or antisemitism. This stifles free expression, including artistic expression, and creates an atmosphere of fear to participate in public life,” the experts said…

“People have the right to express solidarity with victims of grave human rights violations and demand justice, whether from one side or the other or both,” the experts said.

They noted with deep concern that several artists around the world have been targeted because of their art or political messaging, pressured to change topics of artistic expression, and labelled either as troublemakers or as indifferent to the suffering of one side or the other. “Some artists have been deprogrammed and censored for calling for peace, others have lost their jobs, and some artists have been silenced or side-lined by their own cultural organisations and artistic communities,” they said.

Journalists and media outlets in Israel and Western countries reporting critically about Israeli policies and operations in the occupied territories or expressing pro-Palestinian views have been the target of threats, intimidation, discrimination and retaliation, which have increased the risk of self-censorship, undermining the diversity and plurality of news that is essential for press freedom and the right of the public to be informed. At least one media outlet in Israel has been threatened reportedly with closure for perceived “bias” towards Palestine. They also criticised the disproportionate and wrongful removal of pro-Palestinian content by social media platforms.

The experts raised concerns about suspensions and expulsions of students from universities, dismissal of academics, calls for their deportation, threats to dissolve student unions and associations, and restrictions on campus meetings to express solidarity with the suffering civilians in Gaza and denounce the ongoing Israeli military response. Students have also been blacklisted in some universities as supporters of terrorism, with accompanying threats to their prospects for future employment…

The experts noted a highly disturbing trend to criminalise and label pro-Palestinian protests as “hate protests” and to pre-emptively ban them, often citing risks to national security, including risks related to incitement to hatred, without providing evidence-based justification. “Such actions not only violate the right to protest guaranteed by Article 21 of the ICCPR, but are also detrimental to democracy and any peace-building efforts,” they said.

The experts recalled that any restriction on human rights must meet the conditions of legality, necessity and proportionality. “Furthermore, advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to violence, hostility or discrimination is prohibited under international law,” they said, calling on individuals in official positions in particular to desist from hate speech and inflammatory statements…

Alexandra Xanthaki, Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights; Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education; Clément Nyaletsossi Voule, Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association; Irene Khan, Special Rapporteur on the protection and promotion of freedom of opinion and expression.

The attack on freedom of speech and association is across the western world. Little incidents like this arrest of CPGBML activists, or my own investigation for “terrorism”, are all signs of a real slide towards fascism. Fascism is being enabled by zionism.

As you know, I am not myself a communist. But society is losing touch with the idea that freedom of speech is not freedom for those who agree either with the government, or with you.

The activists have been released on police bail.

On the surface of it, the first bail condition is ludicrous to impose on avowed Marxists, but this appears to be another manifestation of the desire to criminalise any attempt to refer to Nazi genocide in association with the Gaza genocide. The restriction on distributing leaflets at protests is straight from the handbook of a totalitarian state.

Which is a much scarier handbook than a political pamphlet.

————————————————

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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.

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The post Banned Books appeared first on Craig Murray.

No Ceasefire in the Propaganda War

Par : craig

I have had BBC News on in the background for the last two hours. In that time there have been three lengthy interviews with different relatives of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. There has not been a single interview with a Palestinian relative of a Palestinian prisoner held by Israel.

Today 13 Israeli prisoners and 39 Palestinian prisoners are due to be released. 90% of the BBC mentions of prisoner releases do not include the Palestinians at all. Just finished is a ten minute interview of a Professor in Kent on the psychological effects on Israeli hostages. Earlier there was an expert from Tel Aviv on the psychological impact on Israeli hostages’ families. There has been no report whatsoever of the impact on Palestinian prisoners and their families.

The BBC simply does not treat the Palestinians as human, whereas the emphasis on Israeli personal victimhood is incessant and unrelenting.

Of the 300 Palestinian women and children prisoners on the list possibly to be released during the ceasefire, 252 have never been charged with any crime. 23 were charged with stone throwing.

Since October 8 over 200 Palestinian children have been taken prisoner, none of whom had anything to do with the October 7 attacks. That rather puts the possible release of 33 children and six women today into perspective. But it is not a perspective the BBC would ever give you.

Over 2,000 Palestinians are held by Israel in “administrative detention”, without charge or trial. Some for over twenty years.

Since 1967 Israel has made over 1 million arrests of Palestinians. This “justice” system is an essential part of the imposition of apartheid and the slow genocide, which did not just start this autumn. The BBC won’t tell you that either, and appears to have no problem with permanently showcasing its Israel based correspondents churning out the Israeli propaganda narrative, with no attempt at either perspective or balance.

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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.

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The Supreme Court, Rwanda and Assange

Par : craig

The judgment of the Supreme Court on the illegality of deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda was given massive publicity in connection with the sacking of Suella Braverman, but in fact it is a decision of much wider significance. It also has great relevance to the coming High Court hearing on Julian Assange, both in terms of the arguments, some of which are common to both cases, and the stance of the judges, some of whom are also common to both cases.

Let me start with the point on which the Supreme Court decision turned – whether or not the court should independently determine whether Rwanda is a safe country, or whether the Home Secretary is entitled to make that decision without possibility of judicial interference, provided correct procedures are followed.

The original Divisional Court determination, by Justices Swift and Lewis, was that the Home Secretary’s decision was “irrebuttable”: that the Executive was best placed to make the decision and there was no room for interference by the courts. This view was overturned by a majority of the Appeal Court, although there in a minority judgment Lord Chief Justice of England Burnett supported the original decision on rather incoherent grounds that this wasn’t the question at issue.

The Supreme Court has said, unanimously, that judges have a positive duty to determine whether a country is safe for deportation, rather than simply take the word of ministers for it. This is a very strong piece of judicial activism.

The correct test, derived from Soering, requires the
court to decide for itself whether there are substantial grounds for believing that the
removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill treatment,
as a consequence of refoulement to another country. The assessment is one which must
be made by the court. The majority of the Court of Appeal considered that the
Divisional Court had mistakenly dealt with the issue on the basis that the court’s role
was confined to deciding whether the Secretary of State had been entitled to form the
view that there was no such risk…

After reviewing the evidence, the court judged that Rwanda’s general human rights record, its past treatment of refugees and the state of its asylum system make it an unsafe country for deportation. It does not become a safe country either because Pritti Patel and Suella Braverman say so, or – and this is crucial for the Assange case – because its government makes promises about future behaviour.

This is a crucial passage with obvious relevance to the Assange case which I shall go on to explain:

46. The Secretary of State relies on the assurances provided by the Rwandan
government in the MEDP as meeting any concerns arising from the evidence about the
past and present operation of the Rwandan asylum system. In essence, the Secretary of
State submits that, notwithstanding any problems that there may have been in the past or
that may remain at present, the MEDP sets out arrangements for the future which
provide adequate safeguards against refoulement, and the Rwandan government can be
relied on to fulfil its undertaking to process the claims in accordance with those
arrangements…

As authority for its view that it is for the court to decide on the safety of the deportee, they quote with approval the European Court of Human Rights decision in the Othman case:

“There is an obligation to examine whether assurances
provide, in their practical application, a sufficient guarantee
that the applicant will be protected against the risk of ill-
treatment. The weight to be given to assurances from the
receiving state depends, in each case, on the circumstances
prevailing at the material time.”

This is interesting because the decision in the Othman case forms part of the legal arguments for Julian’s appeal.

There is a massive academic literature, right across the world, on the weight to be given (or not) to diplomatic assurances of good treatment by the receiving government, in extradition or deportation cases. The issue has generated countless PhDs and employed the time of numerous officials of governments, international institutions and NGO’s. This is just from the first page of a Google search on the issue:

Governments like the UK which wish to deport people are keen to argue that deportation to assorted dictatorial hellholes is fine, if the torturing dictatorship sends a Diplomatic Note promising not to torture or persecute (or send to torture and persecution). International institutions and judges tend to argue that facts on the ground are worth more than pieces of paper. In practice, the UK’s system of deportations relies heavily on “diplomatic assurances”.

The UK government gets away with this by carefully not monitoring what happens to the deportee at the other end. In the only Uzbek case in which my intervention ever failed to prevent a deportation, the couple concerned simply vanished on arrival back in Tashkent. The position of the FCDO is that, as they were Uzbek nationals, the British government had no responsibility to monitor what happened to them in their home country, after deportation from the UK.

In the present Rwanda case, the Supreme Court notes that the UK government plans to operate the Rwanda policy through the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP) which in practice consists of a Memorandum of Understanding and two diplomatic notes from the government of Rwanda entitled “the asylum process of transferred individuals” and “the reception and accommodation of transferred individuals”.

These are simply “Diplomatic assurances” in their classic form, and the Supreme Court treats them as such.

The Home Secretary’s appeal against the Appeal Court judgment explicitly argued that the court should defer to the executive’s judgment of the value of these assurances, which the Supreme Court summarises as the Home Secretary criticising the Appeal Court for:

giving
insufficient weight to HM Government’s assessment of the likelihood of the
government of Rwanda abiding by its assurances

The Supreme Court rejects the notion that diplomatic assurances provided to the executive outweigh an assessment by the court itself of the true situation. The Supreme Court states:

The government’s assessment of whether there is such a risk is an important
element of that evidence, but the court is bound to consider the question in the light of
the evidence as a whole and to reach its own conclusion.

This is a definitive position, and a very strong one, in the debate about the role of diplomatic assurances in deportation proceedings.

The reason this is so vital to the Assange case, is that the court of first instance decided against Assange’s extradition, due to the combination of his health and the appalling maximum security conditions to which he would be subjected in the United States. On Appeal by the government of the USA, Lord Chief Justice Burnett rejected this argument, primarily on the basis of diplomatic assurances as to Assange’s treatment, received in Diplomatic Notes submitted at the appeal stage.

Because they were not submitted to the original hearing but only at Appeal, Assange’s team had no opportunity to question these diplomatic assurances or cross-examine on their value. Lord Chief Justice Burnett rejected this as having any weight, on the grounds that it was for the executive to decide the value of diplomatic assurances.

Note this: Lord Chief Justice Burnett was also the dissenting judge who found for the government at appeal in the Rwanda case, where again he argued that the diplomatic assurances from the Rwanda government should simply be accepted on the executive’s evaluation. That is the classic executive position in the whole diplomatic assurances debate – and the Supreme Court has just unanimously and fizzingly rejected Burnett’s argument.

If it is for the court and not the executive to investigate and determine the value of diplomatic assurances in the Rwanda case, then it must also be for the court to examine and determine the value of diplomatic assurances in the Assange case. At no point in the Assange process has any court undertaken this duty, or the defence been offered any opportunity to challenge the veracity of the diplomatic assurances.

That must now play a crucial role in consideration of the Assange case going forward.

It is Burnett who granted the US appeal against the refusal to extradite Assange. As detailed in past articles, Burnett  is the best friend and former college flatmate of Tory Minister Alan Duncan, who called Julian “a worm” in parliament and who was in direct charge of the operation to remove Julian from the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The other judge whose arguments were resoundingly rejected by the Supreme Court is Jonathan Swift, who found for the Home Secretary at first instance in the Rwanda case. Swift is also the judge who dismissed Assange’s 150-page appeal in three double-spaced pages and attempted to limit any future hearing to half an hour. Again as previously explained here, Swift is a former barrister for the security services, which he said were his favourite clients.

Swift’s judgments in both the Assange and Rwanda cases smack of the alt-right in their contemptuous dismissal of argument and contrary evidence. The Supreme Court, however, is crushing about Swift’s simple assertion in the Divisional Court that the United Nations Commission for Human Rights is not a body whose views should be given particular weight. The Supreme Court tramples all over Swift’s trite approach, in hobnailed boots, for a significant period of time:

The Divisional Court was dismissive of this evidence, and did not attempt to
engage with it. It stated at para 71 that the evidence of UNHCR “carries no special
weight”…

64. …The Divisional Court’s view that the evidence of UNHCR carried no special
weight was a further error. Of course, the weight to be attached to evidence is always a
matter for the court, and will depend on the circumstances. However, a number of
factors combined in the present case to render the evidence of UNHCR of particular
significance.

65. The first relevant factor is the status and role of UNHCR. It is entrusted by the
United Nations General Assembly with supervision of the interpretation and application
of the Refugee Convention: see the Statute of the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, annexed to UN General Assembly Resolution 428(V), 14
December 1950. Under article 35 of the Refugee Convention, states parties undertake to
co-operate with UNHCR in the exercise of its functions, and to facilitate its duty of
supervising the application of the provisions of the Convention. Reflecting those
circumstances, it is well established that UNHCR’s guidance concerning the
interpretation and application of the Refugee Convention “should be accorded
considerable weight”: Al-Sirri v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012]
UKSC 54; [2013] 1 AC 745, para 36. In IA (Iran) v Secretary of State for the Home
Department [2014] UKSC 6; [2014] 1 WLR 384, para 44, this court stated that “the
accumulated and unrivalled expertise of this organisation, its experience in working
with governments throughout the world, the development, promotion and enforcement
of procedures of high standard and consistent decision-making in the field of refugee
status determinations must invest its decisions with considerable authority”.

66. The second factor, mentioned in that dictum, is UNHCR’s expertise and
experience. That factor was also emphasised by this court in R (EM (Eritrea)) v
Secretary of State for the Home Department [2014] UKSC 12; [2014] AC 1321, when
considering the approach which should be adopted to evidence provided by UNHCR in
relation to the risks involved in removing asylum seekers to another country. Lord Kerr
of Tonaghmore, with whose judgment the other members of the court agreed, referred
(para 72) to “the unique and unrivalled expertise of UNHCR in the field of asylum and
refugee law”, and expressed agreement with the observations of Sir Stephen Sedley in
the court below [2013] 1 WLR 576, para 41, which he quoted at para 71:
“It seems to us that there was a reason for [the European
Court in MSS v Belgium and Greece] according the UNHCR a
special status in this context. The finding of facts by a court of
law on the scale involved here is necessarily a problematical
exercise, prone to influence by accidental factors such as the
date of a report, or its sources, or the quality of its authorship,
and conducted in a single intensive session. The High
Commissioner for Refugees, by contrast, is today the holder
of an internationally respected office with an expert staff
(numbering 7,190 in 120 different states, according to its
website), able to assemble and monitor information from year
to year and to apply to it standards of knowledge and
judgment which are ordinarily beyond the reach of a court. In
doing this, and in reaching his conclusions, he has the
authority of the General Assembly of the United Nations, by
whom he is appointed and to whom he reports. It is
intelligible in this situation that a supranational court should
pay special regard both to the facts which the High
Commissioner reports and to the value judgments he arrives at
within his remit.”

67. As was mentioned in that passage, considerable weight is given to the evidence
of UNHCR by the European Court. In MSS v Belgium and Greece, for example, the
court attached “critical importance” (para 349) to UNHCR’s concerns about the
treatment of asylum seekers in Greece. In Ilias v Hungary, UNHCR’s reports were
described as “authoritative” (para 141, quoted at para 45 above). For the reasons we
have explained, it is unsurprising that that should be so; and it is a factor which is
relevant to the approach of domestic courts when considering asylum questions under
the ECHR.

68. UNHCR’s evidence will naturally be of greatest weight when it relates to matters
within its particular remit or where it has special expertise in the subject matter. Its
evidence in the present case concerns matters falling within its remit and about which it
has undoubted expertise. As the Lord Chief Justice observed in the present case,
UNHCR “has unrivalled practical experience of the working of the asylum system in
Rwanda through long years of engagement” (para 467). It has been operating
permanently in Rwanda since 1993, and had 332 staff there at the time of its evidence in
these proceedings. Its role in Rwanda includes assisting asylum seekers and refugees,
funding and training non-governmental organisations working with the Rwandan
asylum system, dealing with officials responsible for asylum decision-making, and
engaging with the relevant department of the Rwandan government over the
management of refugee camps. Although UNHCR has no official role in Rwanda’s
asylum system, the Rwandan authorities have, albeit intermittently, sent it copies of
asylum decisions, and UNHCR receives information from asylum-seekers and NGOs,
and through communications with relevant officials. UNHCR is therefore able to collate
data and gain insight into the practical realities of Rwanda’s asylum system. Its
experience was recognised by Home Office officials. They reported that the Rwandan
government depended heavily on UNHCR and other non-governmental organisations
for delivering its asylum and refugee processes, and that UNHCR had undoubted
expertise and experience of managing part of the refugee process, as well as knowledge
of the Rwandan system more generally.

69. As the Lord Chief Justice noted at para 467, UNHCR can be said to have an
institutional interest in the outcome of these proceedings, since it has adopted the
position (set out in its Guidance Note on bilateral and/or multilateral arrangements of
asylum-seekers) that asylum seekers and refugees should ordinarily be processed in the
territory of the state where they arrive or which otherwise has jurisdiction over them.
The fact that UNHCR has adopted that position is a factor to be taken into account when
assessing its evidence. However, its evidence and submissions were presented with
moderation, and did not appear to reflect a partisan assessment. It has also to be borne in
mind that, as a responsible United Nations agency accountable to the General
Assembly, UNHCR will not lightly make statements critical of any state in which it
operates.

70. Drawing these threads together, it is apparent from the factors which we have
mentioned and the authorities which we have cited that particular importance should
have been attached to the evidence of UNHCR in the present case. That is not to say
that its evidence should necessarily be decisive or pre-eminent. In the circumstances of
the present case, however, its evidence on significant matters of fact is essentially
uncontradicted by any cogent evidence to the contrary, as the Court of Appeal explained
(eg at para 136). It should not have been treated as dismissively as it was by the
Divisional Court.

I think it is fair to say that the Supreme Court’s extensive comments on Swift’s one-sentence dismissal of the evidence of the United Nations, is not incompatible with the view that the Supreme Court has twigged Swift for a glib little wanker. I wonder whether they would take the same view over Swift’s equally glib and dismissive approach to Assange’s entire appeal?

A further hot legal point which has relevance for the Assange case relates to the extent to which the UK is bound by international law.

I have attended a number of meetings at the UN in Geneva this last fortnight, including country reviews of the human rights records of a number of nations. These NGO and expert meetings are held under Chatham House rules, so I am not able to tell you precise details. But I saw developing nations specifically criticised for failures of judicial decisions to take into account the obligations in international law of the state to follow treaties they have ratified.

Extraordinarily, the UK openly takes the view that no international law, including treaties it has signed, is ever legally binding on the UK unless it has been explicitly incorporated in UK domestic legislation. The UK does not consider itself bound by treaties it has ratified.

This is absolutely crucial in the Assange case, where the US/UK Extradition Treaty of 2003, under which the extradition is taking place, specifically forbids political extradition. The courts have accepted the argument that this is irrelevant as the treaty has no legal force, this text not having been incorporated in any UK domestic legislation.

The Supreme Court judgment on Rwanda, however, appears to take the UK’s obligations in international law very seriously. The Supreme Court does not appear to be treating the UK’s international treaty obligations as governing the conduct of the UK Government, only insofar as they are incorporated in domestic law. After talking about the prohibition of refoulement under the Refugee Convention, the Supreme Court states:

As we shall explain, refoulement is also prohibited
under a number of other international conventions which the United Kingdom has
ratified. There are also several Acts of Parliament which protect refugees against
refoulement.

It is very difficult to read that in a way that makes the applicability of the international treaties valid only insofar as they have been incorporated in the Acts of Parliament. The second use of the word “also” is here a specific indicator that the international conventions are sufficient; the Acts of Parliament are reinforcement, not necessary condition.

That perhaps is not immediately apparent. Let me show you without the second “also”:

As we shall explain, refoulement is also prohibited
under a number of other international conventions which the United Kingdom has
ratified. There are several Acts of Parliament which protect refugees against
refoulement.

In that formulation it is possible to argue that the Acts of Parliament are necessary to give effect in law to the international conventions, even though that is not stated. But insert the second “also”:

As we shall explain, refoulement is also prohibited
under a number of other international conventions which the United Kingdom has
ratified. There are also several Acts of Parliament which protect refugees against
refoulement.

The “also” makes it impossible to argue that the international conventions have no weight without the Acts of Parliament. Do you see it now?

The Supreme Court then does go on to discuss the several areas of UK domestic law that do establish the principle of non-refoulement, but I thought the initial approach was very interesting. There is an unresolved tension over the status of international law inside the UK, and the Supreme Court rather leaves it floating. Should the Assange case reach the Supreme Court, it does not appear to me impossible they may take a different view on the applicability of the “no political extradition” clause of the Treaty under which the extradition is taking place.

I am of course delighted about the spoke in the wheel of the appalling Rwanda deportation project. Anyone paying attention to social media is bound to have noticed the correlation between support for the Rwanda proposal and support for Israel’s genocidal actions. I suppose it is all a part of a general racism and Islamophobia.

One further question left hanging by the Supreme Court is the “Flat Earth” question. This is likely to arise fairly soon, if the Tories carry through their promise to specifically legislate for the legality of deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda.

The question is this.

The Supreme Court has ruled it did not have to accept the Patel/Braverman assessment of the safety of Rwanda, but had the duty to make its own determination. But if parliament were to pass a law stating that Rwanda is safe, rather than that the Secretary of State can designate it safe, would the court still have the right to exercise its own judgment in face of what would be a strange but extant statute ?

If Parliament passed a law stating that the Earth is flat, would that mean that in UK law the Earth is flat, or could judges make their own assessment? How do you square the answer to that question with the ruling doctrine of the sovereignty of the King in Parliament?

We may be going to find out, if the Tories are determined to push ahead with legislation on the safety of Rwanda, as they propose. We find ourselves asking ludicrous questions with a straight face, but that is where crazed Tory rule has taken us.

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Palestine Can Reunite and Reinvigorate Scottish Independence

Par : craig

The UK government is actively complicit in genocide in Gaza – indeed with its supply of weapons to Israel, provision of communications intelligence and aerial surveillance and participation of UK special services, I would argue it is more than complicit. The UK government is a part of committing genocide in Gaza. This is vile to many people in the UK, but it is especially anathema to a large majority of people in Scotland.

This YouGov survey of November 2 shows that a strong majority of people in Scotland say that their sympathies lie on the Palestinian side, whereas both in England and in Wales majority support is on the Israeli side by a small margin.

Furthermore this survey attempts to measure strength of feeling, and Scottish support for Palestine is the most strongly held opinion in any constituent part of the UK and on any side of the question, by a wide margin, with 43% of Palestinian sympathising Scots holding that view “a great deal”.

Earlier YouGov surveys gave the same result, with Scotland being the only UK nation with majority Palestinian support. This one is for 24 October.

Across the UK as whole, there is a massive difference in age group, with support for Palestine very high among young people, who sympathise with Palestine by 46% to just 9% for Israel. Support for Israel is highest amongst over 65s, by 30% to 10%. I suspect it is related both to closeness of birth to the Second World War, and to propensity to use mainstream media for news.

I would stress that none of this is new: polls have always shown much higher support for Palestine in Scotland than in England. The same is also true of Ireland, and I have no doubt that in both Scotland and Ireland this instinctive support for the Palestinians is in part related to folk memory of dispossession from the land and colonial occupation.

14/10/2023. Pic sof a pro-Palestine / anti-Israel demonstration at the steps on Buchanan Street, Glasgow.

It is important to remember that the extraordinary rise of the SNP and support for Scottish Independence in the first decades of this century was, in part, fuelled by revulsion at the heavy UK involvement at the attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Those imperialist wars resulted in millions of dead and maimed and tens of millions of displaced, and the complete destruction of infrastructure in those countries.

The urge to be free from a state that continually engaged in aggressive war motivated a great many Scots to support Independence. It can do so again now over UK support for Gaza. Blair’s rampant neo-imperialism also did much to break Scotland’s support for the Labour Party. We might now realistically hope for a similar reaction to Starmer’s Zionism.

That revulsion is now felt again. Every citizen of the UK is tainted by the support of the British state for genocide. We all bear a drop of responsibility for each drop of child’s blood spilt in Gaza. Because like it or not, the UK government represents us. The military support it gives to Israel is paid for with our taxes. None of us did enough to prevent being ruled by callous enablers of murder. There are degrees of complicity, but everybody is tainted.

All three major England-based parties – the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats – openly support Israel and oppose efforts to halt the genocide.

I hear a number of the wonderful people who marched through London for peace last weekend, and in many other English cities, groaning at me. Of course there is a strong movement for Palestine in England, and a great many of my friends are in it. But here in Scotland we are operating in a fundamentally different political culture, that values community and horizontal solidarity.

We Scots deserve the right to allow that culture to flourish away from the imposition of an alien political culture by a much larger neighbouring nation.

Suella Braverman’s far-right bully boys were only the tip of the iceberg of racism which has been enabled in Europe by the support of conservative political elites for the genocidal attack on Gaza. The morass of online Islamophobic and anti-immigrant abuse which accompanies the pro-Israeli rhetoric is frightening. This “war of civilisations” undercurrent is there right across Europe. Where there have been pro-Israeli demonstrations, they have been remarkably white.

Here in Scotland I have been impressed by Humza Yousaf, the Scottish First Minister, for his calm and serious reaction to the Gaza genocide and his unequivocal call for a ceasefire. Yousaf has subsequently been treated to an insane barrage of racist and Islamophobic abuse online. This should be a rallying point for all decent Scottish people to defend their First Minister from racism, whatever smaller disagreements they may have.

MPs had the chance to put humanity before politics.

To say the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza must stop. And it must stop now.

MPs who voted against @theSNP calls for an immediate ceasefire are on the wrong side of history.

This cannot continue. Humanity must prevail. pic.twitter.com/5iDCfwPcQI

— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) November 15, 2023

This points the way to a reinvigoration of the Independence movement. I can find no statistics on it, but it is evident from social media that there is a very strong correlation between unionism and support for Israel, and between Independence support and support for Palestine.

For Independence to be achieved in the short term, Independence supporters need to rally round a cause, and Palestine is it. There is clear blue water between Scottish and English opinion, and there is clear blue water between Scottish and London political parties. There is also clear blue water within Scotland between nationalist and unionist opinion.

The Palestinian cause is popular in Scotland and in fighting it, we also fight racism. This is the moment to focus on working together on Palestine and putting any divisive issues less acute than genocide (and all issues are less acute than genocide) firmly on the back burner, or perhaps in the fridge.

SNP and Alba party MPs walked together through the Westminster lobby to support a ceasefire in Gaza, while the leadership of Tory, Labour and Liberal parties all voted for more killing. Let us build on that.

Nothing is more fundamental than genocide, nothing is more urgent to prevent than genocide. Let us work together to prevent it.

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Activating the Genocide Convention

Par : craig

There are 149 states party to the Genocide Convention. Every one of them has the right to call out the genocide in progress in Gaza and report it to the United Nations. In the event that another state party disputes the claim of genocide – and Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom are all states party – then the International Court of Justice is required to adjudicate on “the responsibility of a State for genocide”.

These are the relevant articles of the genocide convention:

Article VIII
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
 
Article IX
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.

Note that here “parties to the dispute” means the states disputing the facts of genocide, not the parties to the genocide/conflict. Any single state party is able to invoke the Convention.

There is no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. Numerous international law experts have said so and genocidal intent has been directly expressed by numerous Israeli ministers, generals and public officials.

This is the definition of genocide in international law, from the Genocide Convention:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

I can see no room to doubt whatsoever that Israel’s current campaign of bombing of civilians and of the deprivation of food, water and other necessities of life to Palestinians amounts to genocide under articles II a), b) and c).

It is also worth considering Articles III and IV:

Article III
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
 
Article IV
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

There is, at the very least, a strong prima facie case that the actions of the United States and United Kingdom and others, in openly providing direct military support to be used in genocide, are complicity in genocide. The point of Article IV is that individuals are responsible, not just states. So Netanyahu, Biden and Sunak bear individual responsibility. So, indeed, do all those who have been calling for the destruction of the Palestinians.

It is very definitely worth activating the Genocide Convention. A judgement of the International Court of Justice that Israel is guilty of genocide would have an extraordinary diplomatic effect and would cause domestic difficulties in the UK and even in the US in continuing to subsidise and arm Israel. The International Court of Justice is the most respected of international institutions; while the United States has repudiated its compulsory jurisdiction, the United Kingdom has not and the EU positively accepts it.

If the International Court of Justice makes a determination of genocide, then the International Criminal Court does not have to determine that genocide has happened. This is important because unlike the august and independent ICJ, the ICC is very much a western government puppet institution which will wiggle out of action if it can. But a determination of the ICJ of genocide and of complicity in genocide would reduce the ICC’s task to determining which individuals bear the responsibility. That is a prospect which can indeed alter the calculations of politicians.

It is also the fact that a reference for genocide would force the western media to address the issue and use the term, rather than just pump out propaganda about Hamas fighting bases in hospitals. Furthermore a judgement from the ICJ would automatically trigger a reference to the United Nations General Assembly – crucially not to the western-vetoed Security Council.

All this begs the question of why no state has yet invoked the Genocide Convention. This is especially remarkable as Palestine is one of the 149 states party to the Genocide Convention, and for this purpose would have standing before both the UN and the ICJ.

I am afraid the question of why Palestine has not invoked the Genocide Convention takes us somewhere very dark. Anyone who, like George Galloway and myself, cut their political teeth in left-wing politics of Dundee of the 1970s has (long story) their experience and contacts with Fatah, and my sympathies have always very much lain with Fatah rather than Hamas. They still do, with the aspiration for a democratic, secular Palestine. It is Fatah who occupy the Palestinian seat at the United Nations, and the decision for Palestine to call into play the Genocide Convention lies with Mahmoud Abbas.

It is more and more difficult daily to support Abbas. He seems extraordinarily passive, and the suspicion that he is more concerned with refighting the Palestinian civil war than with resisting the genocide is impossible to shake. By invoking the Genocide Convention he could put himself and Fatah back at the centre of the narrative. But he does nothing. I do not want to believe that corruption and a Blinken promise of inheriting Gaza are Mahmoud’s motivators. But at the moment, I cannot grab on to any other explanation to believe in.

Any one of the 139 states party could invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel and its co-conspirators. Those states include Iran, Russia, Libya, Malaysia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Afghanistan, Cuba, Ireland, Iceland, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and Qatar. But not one of these states has called out the genocide. Why?

It is not because the Genocide Convention is a dead letter. It is not. It was invoked against Serbia by Bosnia and Herzegovina and the ICJ ruled against Serbia with regard to the massacre at Srebrenica. This fed directly through to ICC prosecutions.

Some states may simply not have thought of it. For Arab states in particular, the fact that Palestine itself has not invoked the Genocide Convention may provide an excuse. EU states can hide behind bloc unanimity.

But I am afraid that the truth is that no state cares sufficiently about the thousands of Palestinian children already killed and thousands more who will shortly be killed, to introduce another factor of hostility in their relationship with the United States. Just as at this weekend’s summit in Saudi Arabia, where Islamic countries could not agree an oil and gas boycott of Israel, the truth is that those in power really do not care about a genocide in Gaza. They care about their own interests.

It just needs one state to invoke the Genocide Convention and change the narrative and the international dynamic. That will only happen through the power of the people in pressing the idea on their governments. This is where everybody can do a little something to add to the pressure. Please do what you can.

Hat tip to the indefatigable Sam Husseini who has been pressing the Genocide Convention on the White House.

————————————————

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The post Activating the Genocide Convention appeared first on Craig Murray.

Fighting Back Against the State

Par : craig

It may seem hopeless, but we have to continue to hold back the tide of fascism with all our might. This letter is self-explanatory, and I think its staid legal argument brings out the absurdity of deeming me a terrorist danger to the UK.

I honestly believe that I am fighting not for myself – my life is turned upside down – but for important principles. For freedom of speech and the right of the public to information, as exemplified in the case of Julian Assange. For universal human rights, as exemplified by the struggle of the Palestinians. For the right of citizen journalists to write without persecution, as exemplified by my own case and others. I am afraid this all costs money. I am grateful for the unfailing generosity of people in what is a continuing struggle.

But I do very much need contributions to the defence fund:




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The Curious Hacking of @craigmurrayorg

Par : craig

This post may generate a tweet on @matthuag (which the hacked @craigmurrayorg has been renamed) because the autoposting programme interacts differently with Twitter (called a Twitter API).

When my account was hacked yesterday the hacker changed the password, email address, telephone number and username. They quickly tweeted out a post in praise of Hitler in my original username before changing it, which indicates that the primary motivation was defamation. They then subsequently changed the user id to @MattHuag, apparently to create an account stealing the identity of @MattHuang, which seems like a ruse to disguise the motivation.

But here is the rub. Twitter does not let you change the password, email address, phone number and username of an account all at once, for obvious reasons. The email I received from Twitter that alerted me to the hack makes plain that once you change the password, your ability to make some other changes is suspended.

Three people have now tried to replicate making all these changes on a Twitter account and nobody has succeeded (see for example comments below). So it appears that whoever did this hack was within Twitter or has a backdoor into Twitter to overcome these safeguards. That obviously points towards a security service rather than a random hacker. My twitter following had grown to over 136,000 and some individual tweets on Gaza were gaining 10,000 likes.

It is of course the case that all my electronics were confiscated by the state less than a month ago, and while they cloned and returned my laptop, they still have my phone. I was always confident there is nothing criminal on them, so I wonder whether this is just an attempt to bolster some kind of case with an outrageous tweet.

Subject to an “anti-terrorism investigation”, I do not view it as safe currently to return to the UK. Whether the investigation relates to my support for Wikileaks or to my support for Palestine, or to both, I do not know, as the police have not said why I am being investigated.

I honestly believe I am not fighting for me, but against encroaching fascism in Western societies. It is for freedom from an ever-encroaching police state and from a political class trying to enforce a monopoly of information to the public. The fight can only happen at all with financial support from the amazing readers of this blog. You have seen me through so much, and I am very grateful.




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Twitter Account Hacked

Par : craig

My twitter account has been hacked.

The post Twitter Account Hacked appeared first on Craig Murray.

The Right of Self-Defence

Par : craig

Israel does have the right of self-defence, but only in precisely the same way other countries do. In fact, the only unique factor about Israel here is that it is the only country to have been found by the International Court of Justice specifically to have abused and exceeded the concept of right of self-defence, in its treatment of the Palestinians.

In 2004 the International Court of Justice, in an advisory Opinion to the UN General Assembly, ruled illegal Israel’s construction of its great Wall, which is a fundamental part of the Israeli Apartheid system. The court considered Israel’s argument of self-defence and ruled that this did not justify the numerous breaches of international law represented by the Wall:

While Israel has the right, and indeed the duty to respond to the numerous and
deadly acts of violence directed against its civilian population, in order to protect the life of its
citizens, the measures taken are bound to remain in conformity with applicable international law.
Israel cannot rely on a right of self-defence or on a state of necessity in order to preclude the
wrongfulness of the construction of the wall. The Court accordingly finds that the construction of
the wall, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law.

It flows from this that Israel cannot use “self-defence” as a trump card to tear up international law in the current situation in Palestine. The use of collective punishment against a civilian population—including via starvation, thirst and deprivation of medicine, the carpet bombing, the use of white phosphorus, the attacks on medical facilities, the attacks on medical staff, the execution of prisoners, the clearly genocidal attempt—none of these war crimes is excusable as “self-defence”.

The military cooperation of the US, UK and Australian governments—in an attack which they know is engaged in committing egregious war crimes—also opens those responsible to war crimes charges for their active complicity and indeed conspiracy.

Furthermore, there is in fact a positive legal duty on states to be acting against Israel in view of Israel’s refusal to dismantle the Wall and the Apartheid system in the occupied territories—including the widespread criminal settling and stealing of land which that system embodies. This is the International Court of Justice judgment on the obligations of other states:

Given the character and the importance of the rights and obligations involved, the Court is of the view that all States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction. It is also for all States, while respecting the United Nations Charter and international law, to see to it that any impediment, resulting from the construction of the wall, to the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end. In addition, all the States parties to the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 are under an obligation, while respecting the United Nations Charter and international law, to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention.

Read that paragraph very carefully. Israel has not undertaken any of the actions specified by the ICJ and has indeed built more settlements and imposed more restrictions. It is absolutely plain that the UK, US and European Union are not only not fulfilling their duty in international law as set out by the International Court of Justice,—

The US, UK and EU are acting directly opposite to their obligation in international law under the ICJ ruling.

The BDS movement is acting precisely in line with the obligations set out by the International Court of Justice, while the states attempting to ban the BDS movement are acting precisely against the obligations imposed on them by the International Court of Justice.

Finally, the ruling must imply the Palestinians do indeed have the right of self-defence. Because you cannot have the “right of self-determination”, which the court acknowledges, without the right of self-defence. Because it is impossible to exercise self-determination if somebody else can remove your bodily integrity at whim. That right of self-defence must perforce be exercised by whoever has de facto control of Palestinian territory at the time.

I am indebted to a number of staff and national delegates at the United Nations in Geneva for pointing out to me the importance of the 2004 ICJ ruling in the current context. I hope it helps you understand why the lies of Biden, von der Leyen, Sunak, Starmer, Macron etc. are indeed lies.

Subject to an “anti-terrorism investigation”, I do not view it as safe currently to return to the UK. Whether the investigation relates to my support for Wikileaks or to my support for Palestine, or to both, I do not know, as the police have not said why I am being investigated.

I honestly believe I am not fighting for me, but against encroaching fascism in Western societies. It is for freedom from an ever-encroaching police state and from a political class trying to enforce a monopoly of information to the public. The fight can only happen at all with financial support from the amazing readers of this blog. You have seen me through so much, and I am very grateful.




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“A Textbook Case of Genocide”.

Par : craig

The resignation letter of Craig Mokhiber, Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has gone viral on social media but most posts only show page one. Here is the full four page letter.

This needs no gloss from me. Craig is one of the world’s leading international lawyers.

I am writing this in Geneva where I am tomorrow meeting UN officials to pursue my own case: both my unprecedented in modern times jailing for contempt of court, and the current surreal persecution under the terrorism act. I shall also be raising the case of other journalists subjected to persecution under the terrorism act, including Kit Klarenberg, Vanessa Beeley and Johanna Ross.

This account from John Laughland is interesting in how precisely it accords with my own experience, particularly in being held for exactly an hour with no right to remain silent and no right to a lawyer.

By one of those astonishing coincidences in life, tomorrow is the United Nations International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists.

I am not making it up, that really is a thing.

And the major theme of the keynote meeting is

“to bring visibility to a new Study on the impact of counter-terrorism and other criminal laws on media freedom and safety of journalists. Panellists will explore legal challenges faced by journalists and the increasing practice of resorting to restrictive legal frameworks to unduly interfere with the work of journalists.”

So I could hardly have walked in at a more auspicious moment.

Subject to an “anti-terrorism investigation”, I do not view it as safe currently to return to the UK. Whether the investigation relates to my support for Wikileaks or to my support for Palestine, or to both, I do not know as the police have not said why I am being investigated.

I honestly believe I am not fighting for me, but against encroaching fascism in western societies. It is for freedom from an ever encroaching police state and from a political class trying to enforce a monopoly of information to the public. The fight can only happen at all with financial support from the amazing readers of this blog. You have seen me through so much, and I am very grateful.




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Zionism Is Bullshit

Par : craig

In 2009 I spoke to a demonstration of 300,000 in London against another Israeli massacre in Gaza, which coincidentally killed just over 1400 people, the same number claimed killed during the recent Hamas attacks. Strangely Western politicians did not shout out about Palestine’s right to self-defence. A lesson for those who think history began on 7 October 2023.

I am rather proud of this speech. Sadly, every word applicable today.

————————————————

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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.

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Cold Blooded Killers and their Cheerleaders

Par : craig

The Guardian’s main headline today is the Israeli propaganda framing of last night’s huge massacre.

The Zionist grip on the political and media class is stark. Ordinary citizens are left with feelings ranging from rage to deep sorrow, but with a feeling of helplessness at having no power and no genuine voice in the country where they live. The bought-and-paid-for politicians intone “Israel’s right to self-defence” as justifying the slaughter of any number of Palestinian children.

They pretend they do not see the obvious genocide which is happening before their eyes. The Guardian’s framing of the death of hundreds, probably thousands, of young children last night, as destruction of Hamas tunnels, ought to be astonishing. Sadly it is entirely unsurprising.

Here is a reminder of how it works. Joan Ryan MP secretly filmed talking to Shai Masot of the Israeli Embassy in London.

Labour MP Joan Ryan discussing a £1M "donation" from the Israeli Embassy with Shai Masot, an Israeli agent plotting to "take down" MPs hostile to Israel.

No biggie. It's not as if Joan helped "take down" Jeremy Corbyn or anything.

Oh, hang on. She did.pic.twitter.com/5doWEquCri

— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) September 8, 2023

Last night, well after the latest extreme massacre phase had started, the BBC 10 o’clock evening news presented a single volley of Hamas no-warhead popgun missiles – which as usual killed nobody – as equivalent to the massive Israeli high explosive bombardment. They then featured a lengthy interview with a “heroic” clean-cut Israeli soldier who fought a Hamas attack on a military base on 7 October despite being wounded, and who explained that the attacks on Gaza are justified as they will free Israel from terrorism.

All this while the massive massacre was in progress in Gaza. The strange thing is, the BBC and the Guardian, and nearly the entire rest of the MSM, pump out their propaganda as though we have no other access to information or understanding of what is happening.

More than that, there seems to be a presumption that the general population harbour the same Zionist assumptions which the journalists are paid to promote. Well, we don’t. It feels like something has snapped, not only in Palestine but in the UK and much of Europe, where the process of alienation between the governed and the ruling classes has been accelerated.

Democracy has been failing in the West for a while – to take the UK as an example, the idea that a “choice” between Sunak and Starmer offers any kind of democratic alternative is risible. There are key moments in societal breakdown, and this is one.

————————————————

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Fighting the British Police State – Somebody Has To

Par : craig

I didn’t really volunteer to fight the British police state, it came after me. But here we are, and here I am, in Switzerland, seeking the protection of the United Nations. I still don’t actually know whether the terrorism investigation into me is focused on Palestine or on Wikileaks. It seems to be both and anything else they can get. My legal team is now active in Scotland seeking some kind of clarification and explanation, which will probably require a judicial review.

My experience of British airports being discouraging recently, I went by public transport from Edinburgh to Belfast. Arriving very late in Belfast due to the storm, I missed the last train to Dublin. Not wanting to stay in Belfast, I flagged down a taxi in the street and asked the driver to take me to Dublin. He did not wish to, so late at night. Then we realised we had worked in the same bar in Aviemore 45 years ago! I have always believed life is governed by forces we do not know.

We have sent a formal complaint to the UN about this bogus terrorism persecution, to add to the complaint about my imprisonment which is already under review.

Two quick points to add.

This is the third time since my imprisonment on an outrageous contempt of court finding, that I have been harassed and interviewed by the police. The first was over the leaking of Peter Murrell’s WhatsApp message to Sue Ruddick instructing her to put pressure on the police to act against Alex Salmond. The second was over Stewart MacDonald’s leaked emails. In neither of these incidents was I charged with any crime, nor could the police even tell me what offence they were investigating. And now this “terrorism” utter nonsense.

The second point is that the abuse of special anti-terrorism powers at ports in order to seize all papers and communications of journalists is becoming commonplace. Three other journalists I know personally – Vanessa Beeley, Kit Klarenberg and Johanna Ross – have suffered this. There are many other examples, most notably David Miranda. This really is police state stuff, yet there is an extraordinary lack of outrage from human rights organisations and the mainstream media.

So I now have this new fight. Or I should say we now have this new fight, because the fight can only happen at all with financial support from the amazing readers of this blog. You have seen me through so much, and I am very grateful.

But I honestly do believe that the fight is not for me, it is for freedom from an ever encroaching police state and from a political class trying to enforce a monopoly of information to the public.




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Incredibly, I Face Investigation for Terrorism – Defence Funds Appeal

Par : craig

My phone is not being returned to me by police as, astonishingly, I am now formally under investigation for terrorism. Whether this relates to support for Palestine or for Wikileaks has currently not been made clear.

What follows is, unspun and unvarnished, my account of my interview under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act as given to my lawyers:

I arrived from Keflavik airport, Iceland to Glasgow airport at about 10am on Monday 16 October. After passport control I was stopped by three police officers, two male and one female, who asked me to accompany them to a detention room.

They seated me in the room and told me:

I was detained under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act

I was not arrested but detained, and therefore had no right to a lawyer.

I had no right to remain silent. I had to give full and accurate information in response to questions. It was a criminal offence to withhold any relevant information.

I had to give up any passwords to my devices. It was a criminal offence not to do this.

They searched my baggage and my coat, going through my documents and taking my phone and laptop. They did not look at one document from Julian Assange’s lawyers that I told them was privileged.

They asked me about boarding cards for Brussels and Dublin they found and what I had been doing there. I replied I was at a debate at Trinity College in Dublin, while in Brussels I had attended a human rights meeting focused on the case of Julian Assange.

They asked me to identify the individuals from some visiting cards I had from the Brussels meeting (one was a German MP).

They asked me the purpose of my visit to Iceland. I told them that I was attending a coordinating meeting of the campaign to free Julian Assange. I said I had also attended a pro-Palestinian rally outside the Icelandic parliament, but that had not been a prior intention.

They asked how I earnt my living. I said from two sources: voluntary subscriptions to my blog, and my civil service pension.

They asked what organisations I am a member of. I said the Alba party. I said I worked with Wikileaks and the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign, but was not formally a “member” of either. I was a life member of the FDA union. No other organisations.

They asked if I received any money from Wikileaks, from Don’t Extradite Assange or from the Assange family (separate questions). I replied no, except occasional travel expenses from Don’t Extradite Assange. In December I had done a tour of Germany and received a fee from the Wau Holland Foundation, a German free speech charity.

They asked what other campaigns I had been involved in. I said many, from the Anti-Nazi League and Anti-Apartheid movement on. I had campaigned for Guantanamo inmates alongside Caged Prisoners.

They asked why I had attended the pro-Palestine demo in Iceland. I said one of the speakers had invited me, Ögmundur Jónasson. He was a former Icelandic Interior Minister. I said I did not know what the speeches said as they were all in Icelandic.

They asked whether I intended to attend any pro-Palestinian rallies in the UK. I said I had no plans but probably would.

They asked how I judged whether to speak alongside others on the same platform. I replied I depended on organisers I trusted, like the Palestine Solidarity Committee or Stop the War. It was impossible to know who everyone was at a big rally.

They asked if anyone else posted to my twitter or blog. I replied no, it was all me.

They asked how considered my tweets were. I replied that those which were links to my blog posts were my considered writing. Others were more ephemeral, and like everyone else I sometimes made mistakes and sometimes apologised. They asked if I deleted tweets and I said very seldom.

I volunteered that I thought I understood the tweet that worried them and agreed it could have been more nuanced. This was the limitation of twitter. It was intended to refer only to the current situation within Gaza and the Palestinian people’s right of self-defence from genocide.

That was more or less it. The interview was kept to exactly an hour and at one point one said to another “18 minutes left”. They did not tell me why. At one point they did mention protected journalistic material on my laptop but I was too dazed to take advantage of this and specify anything.

They took my bank account details and copies of all my bank cards.

ENDS

This is an enormous abuse of human rights. The abuse of process in refusing both a lawyer and the right to remain silent, the inquiry into perfectly legal campaigning which is in no way terrorism-associated, the political questioning, the financial snooping and the seizure of material related to my private life, were all based on an utterly fake claim that I am associated with terrorism.

I have to date not been arrested and not charged. Contempt of court is therefore not in play and you are free to comment on the case (although in the current atmosphere any kind of free thought is liable to vicious state action). I am safe and currently in Dublin. I intend next to travel to Switzerland to take this up with the United Nations.

My legal team have already made a submission against this outrage to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and are looking at the possibility of judicial review in the UK. We also have to prepare the defence against possible terrorism charges, ludicrous as that sounds.

I am afraid this all costs money. I am grateful for the unfailing generosity of people in what seems a continual history of persecution.




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Genocide Unfolding

Par : craig

Tonight has been the most violent bombardment of Gaza so far, notably concentrated on precisely the areas into which Israel ordered the population to evacuate. I find it almost impossible to believe that this genocide is under way with the active support of almost all western governments.

 

I want to look at two questions – what will happen internationally, and what is happening in western societies.

Israel plainly is on the course of further escalation and intends to kill many thousands more Palestinians. More than 2,000 Palestinian children alone have now been killed by Israeli aerial attack in the last fortnight.

Gaza has no defence from bombs and missiles, and there is no military reason why Israel cannot keep this up for months and simply rely upon aerial massacre. We are perhaps within a week of thirst, starvation and disease killing even more people per day than bombardment.

The population of Gaza are simply defenceless. Only international intervention can stop Israel from doing whatever it wishes, and those countries which have influence with Israel are actively abetting and encouraging the genocide.

The question is, what is Israel’s aim? Do they intend to reduce the Gaza Strip still further, annexing half or more of it? Will starvation and horror enable the international community to force Egypt to accept the expulsion of the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert as a “humanitarian” move?

That appears to be the end game: expulsion of population and territorial expansion into Gaza. That would require a ground invasion, but probably not until after even more intense aerial bombardment to eliminate all resistance. This territorial ambition of course accords with the violent expansion of illegal settlement in the West Bank which is currently under way, with the world paying almost no attention.  It is very hard indeed to comprehend the passivity of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas at the moment.

Netanyahu’s political stock within Israel is so low, that the only way he can recover is by making a major step towards the complete genocide of the Palestinian people and the achievement of Greater Israel.  Netanyahu now knows that there is no violence against Palestinians so extreme that the western political elite will not support it under the mantra of “Israel’s right to self-defence”.

I do not see any salvation for Gaza coming from Hezbollah. If Hezbollah were to employ their vaunted missile strike capabilities, the moment to do it would be now when the Israeli armour is drawn up in massive parks outside Gaza, a perfect target even for longer range missiles of limited accuracy. Once dispersed into Gaza the armour would be far harder for Hezbollah to hit at range.

Hezbollah is even better equipped now to fight a defensive war in Lebanon than it was when it defeated the Israeli advance in 2006. But it is not configured or equipped to fight an aggressive ground war into Israel, which would be a disaster. It also has to worry about hostile militias in its rear. If Hezbollah can provoke an Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, that would enable it to inflict substantial casualties, but Israel is not going to do that in a way that detracts from its capabilities in Gaza.

Iran has greatly improved its diplomatic position in the last year. The Chinese-brokered lessening of hostility with Saudi Arabia has potential to revolutionise Middle Eastern politics, and the benefits of this will not lightly be laid aside by Tehran. Iran had also made real progress with the Biden administration in overcoming the blind hostility of the Trump years.

Iran has no desire to throw away these gains.  That is why it seems to me extremely improbable that Iran had endorsed the 7 October attacks by Hamas. Iran is now restraining Hezbollah. But there are limits to the patience of Iran. The extraordinary truth is that Iran is probably the only state under discussion here with a genuine humanitarian concern for the lives of Palestinians. If the genocide unfolds as horribly as I anticipate, Iran can be pushed too far.

That said, I offer just a cautionary footnote that Saudi Arabia is not, under MBS, quite the reliable US/Israeli puppet it has historically been. I do not have much time for MBS, as you know, but his high opinion of the importance of the Al Saud and their leadership role among arabs, makes him a different proposition to his predecessor.

Saudi Arabia has leverage. The Biden administration has gone all in on regional domination, sending two aircraft carrier groups into a situation which should it escalate, could send oil prices to highest-ever levels, with Russia blocked from the market. Biden is risking a huge gas price hike in an election year.

Biden’s calculation, or that of his security services, is that nobody can or will intervene to save the Palestinians. They judge the genocide as containable. That is an extraordinary gamble.

There has been an extraordinary amount of vitriol aimed at Qatar by pro-Israel commentators, for hosting the Hamas office and leadership. This is extraordinarily ignorant.

Qatar hosts Hamas, just as Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office, at the direct request of the United States. It provides a means of dialogue between the United States and Hamas (exactly as it did with the Taliban) both at deniable level, and through third parties, including of course the government of Qatar. Thus when Blinken arrived in Qatar one day and the Iranian foreign minister the next, these were in fact “proximity talks” involving Hamas.

How do I know? Well, at Julian’s request, I visited Qatar about five years ago to discuss whether Julian, and Wikileaks, might potentially relocate to Qatar, which Julian had described as “the new Switzerland” in terms of being a neutral diplomatic venue.

It was explained to me by the Qataris, at a very senior level, that Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office and Hamas because the United States government had asked them to do so. Qatar hosted a major US military base and depended on US support against a Saudi takeover. If I could generate a request from then President Trump for Qatar to host Wikileaks, then they would do so. Otherwise, no.

So I know what I am talking about.

One tiny but good result of this brokering in Qatar was the release of two American national hostages. British diplomats have told me that discussions in Qatar have so far held back the Israeli ground offensive, but I am not convinced that Israel really wished to do this yet. They are having sadistic fun shooting children in a barrel.

Qatar has also been the origin of deals allowing in a tiny amount of aid to Gaza, but this is so small as to be almost irrelevant. It is performative humanitarianism by the West.

I have frequently praised China for the fact that their economic dominance has been unaccompanied by any aggressive desire for world hegemony, but this also has its downside. China sees no benefit in assisting the Palestinians in practice. Hopeful reports of China sending warships refer simply to pre-planned exercises, largely in the Gulf. That China is carrying out such joint exercises with Gulf states is indeed part of a long term increasing of influence, but is not relevant to the immediate reality.

Russia of course has its hands full in Ukraine. It is allowing its Syrian bases to be used as a conduit following increased Israeli bombing of Syrian airports, but there is not a great deal more that it can do. Erdoğan is genuinely furious at what is happening in Gaza, but Turkey is struggling to find any way to apply pressure, barring linkage to Ukraine shipping issues (which Erdoğan is considering).

That is a very rough and ready tour d’horizon, but the net effect is that I see no current hope for averting the atrocity which is unfolding before our horrified eyes.

Most of our eyes are indeed horrified. The gap between the western political and media elites and their people on this issue is simply enormous. Western leaders have not only failed to restrain Israel, they have almost unanimously egged Netanyahu on, with the continued repetition of the phrase “Israel’s right to self-defence” as justification for the mass bombing, removal and starvation of an entire civilian population.

The western leadership glee in vetoing every attempt at a ceasefire resolution at the UN is astonishing.

Massive demonstrations have been taking place across Europe against this unspeakable massacre, and the knee-jerk reaction of politicians at their isolation from public opinion has been to try to make such shows of dissent illegal. In the UK people have been arrested for displaying Palestinian flags. In Germany pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been entirely banned. Something similar has been attempted in France, with predictable failure.

I have myself attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations in three different countries, and the most striking thing on each occasion was the strong support of passers-by, and the number of people spontaneously coming out to join the demo as it passed.

A wave of racism has been unleashed in the UK and elsewhere. I am astonished by the Islamophobia and racial hatred released online, with no apparent comeback. UK Ministers claim to be alarmed at the “terrorist sympathies” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, yet it is perfectly legal to call for Palestinians to be exterminated, to compare them to different types of animal and vermin, and suggest they should be driven into the sea. That does not horrify ministers at all.

I am personally now subject to a police investigation for “terrorism” merely for suggesting that the Palestinians too have a right to self-defence and may offer armed resistance to genocide – a right they enjoy beyond doubt in international law. Remember, Israel has formally declared war. Is it the position in British law that the only belief it is legal to hold and express, is that in this war the Palestinians must simply line up quietly to be killed?

The step change in western authoritarianism is likely to be met by blowback.

After 20 years, we had finally come through the vicious cycle of the “War on Terror”, where terrorism, repression and institutionalised Islamophobia all boosted each other across the western world. Outrage at the appalling genocide in Gaza is very likely to result in isolated incidences of, also appalling, Islamist-inspired violence in Western countries, including the UK, particularly because of the UK’s military support of Israel.

That consequential terrorism in itself will be cited by the political elite as justifying their stance. And so the vicious cycle will restart. This will of course be welcome to the agents of the security state, whose power, budgets and prestige will be boosted. Once again we have to be on the lookout for radicalisation and real terrorism, but also for agent-provocateur-led terrorism and for false flag terrorism.

If we descend back into that nightmare again, the direct cause will be elite support for the genocide of the Palestinian people and the Islamophobic narrative. The major cause of terrorism here is Israel, the terrorist apartheid state.

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The post Genocide Unfolding appeared first on Craig Murray.

Fascism in the West to Enable Genocide in Palestine

Par : craig

The UK and the US are both sending military assistance to Israel to commit a calculated and deliberate act of genocide, which is already underway.

Over 500 children have been killed in Gaza in the last week and over 2,000 maimed, many with life changing injuries. Nobody can claim they do not know what is already happening or what is about to unfold. The cutting off of food and water to Gaza is a major international crime, which the western proponents of the “rules based order” universally refuse to condemn.

In both the UK and the US there can be no more stark illustration of the lack of any kind of meaningful democracy, than the fact that there is no major political party that opposes the genocide – despite massive public opposition.

The bought and paid for media and political class in the west are extremely nervous, throughout the western world. Now they have come to the final genocide for which zionism has always aimed, they face a good deal of popular resistance.

Throughout Europe there is a massive gap between the zionist unanimity of the politicians and the much greater understanding of the Palestinian situation among the general public. Tellingly the response by the zionist political class has been a wave of outright fascist suppression.

In France, Macron has made all pro-Palestinian demonstrations illegal, but as so often the French people are not standing for that kind of authoritarianism.

In the UK, the police have adopted the cowardly tactic of arresting a couple of individuals, one in Brighton and one in Manchester, for pro-Palestinian demonstration. Under Tony Blair’s notorious draconian “anti-terror” legislation, they could face up to 14 years in prison.

The young man in Manchester was arrested on the precise site of the famous “Peterloo massacre”, which generations of British people were taught at school was a terrible crime in breach of the rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Let the irony of that set in.

You can go out in the streets of the UK with an Israeli flag and yell that you want every Palestinian to be cleansed from Gaza. That is not illegal. If you say the Palestinians have a right to resist their genocide, that is illegal.

That appears to be a genuine analysis of the law in the UK, France and many other western countries.

That is intended to terrify all of us. It will not work.

The European Commission has been ferociously zionist and gung-ho for this Palestinian genocide. It displayed the Israeli flag on its Berlaymont headquarters. It has taken a side in the most ferocious way.

It is therefore deeply sinister that the European Commission is actively working to shut down pro-Palestinian information and comment on social media. The European Commission has written to all major social media organisations and is able to threaten them with massive fines if they do not remove information of which the European Union disapproves.

Following the terrorist attacks by Hamas against 🇮🇱, we have indications of X/Twitter being used to disseminate illegal content & disinformation in the EU.

Urgent letter to @elonmusk on #DSA obligations ⤵ pic.twitter.com/avMm1LHq54

— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) October 10, 2023

The notion is plainly nonsense that through the fog of war the European Commission – which is 100% parti pris – is qualified to say what information is true and what information is false, and what comment is legitimate.

Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner in charge of this operation, is a former chief executive of electronic companies – and defence contractors – Atos and Thomson. He has no genuine interest in freedom of speech, and is engaged in a process of silencing dissent for military aims, which is quite simply fascist.

We are witnessing almost all western governments deliberately facilitating massacre, ethnic cleansing and genocide. We are witnessing almost all western governments turning on their own people to crush dissent at that complicity in genocide.

This feels not so much like the week that western democracy died, as the week it was impossible any longer to deny that western democracy died some time ago.

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The post Fascism in the West to Enable Genocide in Palestine appeared first on Craig Murray.

Now We Have Your Attention

Par : craig

There have been decades of photos of dead Palestinian women and children, and kids being beaten, humilated and imprisoned by Israeli soldiers. The historic killing rate in this “conflict” has been fairly consistent at about 40:1.

None of this ever caused more than a raised eyebrow and a mild tut-tut from the western “liberal” Establishment. I can’t recall camera crews ever pursuing any zionist politicians down the street demanding that they use the word “condemn” of the latest Israeli atrocity.

The paroxysm of hatred in the political and media class, unleashed by a single day of the boot being on the other foot is instructive. It is particularly instructive in their near complete unanimity – what percentage of the discussion on broadcast TV or radio have you heard this last 48 hours given over to Palestinian or pro-Palestinian voices?

Yet it is very plain from social media that the public is by no means as unanimous in their support of Israel as are the political and media class.

But then the public are not bought and paid for.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Thus the “Indian Mutiny” became a Victorian tale of rape and murder of British women and of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Thus the Mau Mau were evil butchers, and the IRA were terrorists, which is the modern term of art for those resisting evil and foreign rule.

The Israeli Ambassador to the UN yesterday described the Hamas fighters as “animal like”. This of course is not true. They are people, but people who have been crazed by unbearable levels of injustice and oppression.

I am extremely sorry for all those who die, as in all wars. I am sorry even for the deaths of individual Israeli soldiers, and more so for all the innocents who died and are now dying.

But I will not condemn Hamas.

For this I do not even need to delve into the backstory of Hamas’ initial sponsoring by Israel to split Fatah. They have grown well past that. I do not condemn Hamas because the resistance of the Palestinian people is a reflex response to their slow genocide.

Yes it is an inchoate and violent response. Of course I wish it did not have innocent victims.

The people I do condemn are the political class internationally who, with one voice, put out statements supporting “Israel’s right to self-defence”. A right they grant to the oppressor but deny to the oppressed.

Those are the people who need to be condemned.

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The post Now We Have Your Attention appeared first on Craig Murray.

Death Wish 2023

Par : craig

There can be few safer indicators of the views of the globalist “liberal” Establishment than reports of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which prefers to be known as Chatham House.

Chatham House’s principal funding comes from the UK, US, Canadian, German, Swiss, Japanese, Swedish and Norwegian governments, the World Bank and the EU, and from corporate “philanthropists” including IKEA, Bill Gates, George Soros, Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, BP, Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil. I could go on.

In other words, Chatham House is absolutely rolling in the dosh controlled by states and the super wealthy. It is headquartered in the palatial residence of the imperial expansionist Prime Minister William Pitt, and has expanded out over time into two great adjoining mansions.

(In 2022 it also, despite all the petroleum bungs, received its largest grant from the MAVA Foundation, a Swiss environmental charity, which was that year closing down and disbursing all its funds).

So Chatham House is a pretty infallible guide as to what those who control western “democracies” are thinking. And when it comes to Ukraine, what they are thinking is terrifying.

Chatham House has released a report which “makes the case for dramatically increased Western military assistance to Ukraine, and argues against concessions to Russia”.

The report is organised as a list of nine “fallacies” which the authors are concerned that Russian propagandists have successfully insinuated into Western thinking, and sets out to refute each of them.

This is rather a high risk approach as, taken together, the nine “fallacies” on the face of it make a cogent and convincing argument against the escalation of the war.

But, convinced of the protection of their amulets of invincible self-righteousness, the authors plunge right in to their refutations.

I do not intend to go through them all. I merely seek to illustrate the intellectual paucity of this lavishly funded enterprise.

The task of debunking the first “fallacy”, that all wars end in negotiation, is given to James Sherr OBE, an American careerist Russophobe who is currently Head of Vilification at the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute (I definitely got the Institute right but I may have mistranslated his title a bit).

Estonia has of course much in common with Ukraine. It gained its national freedom on the collapse of the Soviet Union and it has subsequently put state resources into honouring Nazi Holocaust participants.

Two of the three Estonian Waffen SS officers in this photo have had official plaques to them unveiled in modern Estonia, reported with approval and no sense of controversy in the state media.

I thought I might mention this in case anyone thinks it unfair that Ukrainian Nazis were spotlighted by another Waffen SS member being given a standing ovation by the Canadian parliament. It is only fair to point out that a lot of Ukraine’s closest supporters are riddled with Nazi sympathy also.

Anyway, what does Estonian state employee and US citizen Dr James Sherr, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, former Fellow of the UK Defence Academy, have to tell us about the “fallacy” that all wars end in negotiation?

The first problem is that they don’t. It is true that the majority of wars do not end in absolute victory. Ceasefire, armistice and stalemate terminate most conflicts, even if the ‘peace’ is infirm or short-lived. But where the stakes are absolute, as they were in the Napoleonic wars, the US Civil War and the Second World War, armed conflict usually ends in the victory of one side and the defeat of the other. Negotiation, compromise and reconciliation are undertaken with new regimes only after old regimes are defeated and removed. The Franco-German reconciliation invoked by Emmanuel Macron would have been inconceivable had the Nazis remained in power.

Sherr goes on to argue that the stakes in this war are absolute. It is an existential war for Ukraine because Russia seeks to destroy it entirely, and it is an existential war for Russia because, he argues, Putin believes that Kiev is the cradle of the Russian soul.

Having defined it as an existential war, he says that it follows that it must be escalated up to total war and total victory.

It is very plainly an argument to escalate the war to achieve regime change in Russia:

Negotiation, compromise and reconciliation are undertaken with new regimes only after old regimes are defeated and removed.

Sherr is perfectly happy to contemplate millions of deaths. Look at his comparisons; the Napoleonic Wars entailed 3 million combat deaths, the US civil war about 700,000 combat deaths and the Second World War about 15 million. In each case you can probably more than double that for total civilian deaths caused by those wars.

Let me be absolutely plain: Sherr is saying this is the kind of total war he wants against Russia, rather than a more limited one.

Strangely enough Sherr does not reference those more recent great western wars for regime change, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which also resulted in the deaths of millions. Possibly even he realises the end results have not been entirely desirable.

But is this war really existential for either Ukraine or Russia? The truth is that ever since Ukraine became independent in 1991 it has been unstable, deeply divided over whether to look west to the EU or look east to Russia. The political and linguistic division broadly at the Dnieper runs deep into history.

Truce of Andrusovo 1667.PNG

Modern Ukraine is a failed state that collapsed into civil war in 2014 after twenty years of political tension between openly pro-Western and pro-Russian political forces which were remarkably evenly balanced.

Up to and including 2014, both the Western powers and Russia engaged in all forms of political interference, espionage and chicanery to try to win Ukraine. Back in 1996 when I was First Secretary in the British Embassy in Warsaw, I helped author a paper for the Cabinet Office which said that Poland was now secured to the West, but the hinge of history would be the Ukraine. I discussed it with George Soros in person (he bought me a pizza).

I cannot share the outrage of many on the left at the “colour revolution” of 2014. Both Russia and the West had been playing a dirty game. Yanukovych was more or less kidnapped by Moscow to disavow the EU Association agreement. The ensuing 2014 coup was just the US being more adept at winning the dirty game, of which I as a former player well know the rules, or lack of them.

The subsequent annexation of Crimea and reinforcement of the Donbass was the Russian counter-move. That ended the hope that a united Ukraine would ever be pro-Russian. The civil war rumbled on ever since until the larger Russian invasion. The extreme discriminatory measures against the Russian speaking population post-2014 ended the hope that a united Ukraine would ever be possible.

Chatham House itself illustrates that Ukraine was nothing but this East/West conflict playground. In 2023 the “Chatham House Prize” for international relations was awarded to Ukrainian President Zelensky. In 2005 the inaugural “Chatham House Prize” had been awarded to President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine, openly for turning Ukraine from a pro-Russian to a pro-EU foreign policy.

A country where it is a prize-winning achievement to win a narrow majority for pro-western policies, against the wishes of the other half of the country which wants a pro-Russian foreign policy, is not a viable long term political entity.

At no stage in this post-Soviet story did Ukraine ever become a viable state. It was a poor, undeveloped and undeveloping, east-west power game venue.  Both sides were rigging elections and the oligarchs and their pet politicians oversaw massive corruption, on a mind boggling scale.

Which corruption has no way lessened, and has battened on vast flows of “assistance” from the west.

There has never been a Ukraine under the rule of law and proper democratic government, to which to now return. What does Sherr think will be the attitude of the Russian speaking half of the Ukrainian population if his massive, blood-drenched, total war does bring about the total defeat of Russia?

Ukraine has now banned Russian as an official language, banned all Russian speaking newspapers, banned the pro-Russian political parties, banned teaching in Russian in schools, banned Russian books in libraries and banned the Russian Orthodox Church. Yet Russian is the first language of about 40% of the population.

Is the plan that the total war will result in such genocide that Russian speakers in Ukraine will be no more? Will they all be ethnically cleansed? Or after so much death and destruction, will they just quietly live as second class citizens, and abandon resistance? Is that the plan?

In truth, the best opportunity for a functioning and more efficient Ukrainian state is, now we are in this hot war, for it to lose the Russia-leaning areas and become a more homogeneous and unified entity, with a much greater chance of being at peace with itself and of sorting out its colossal governance problems.

A smaller, better, Ukraine that quickly finds its way into the EU would benefit the great majority of pro-Ukrainians and provide a more stable future for Eastern Europe. In time, it would come to be seen as a blessing.

A negotiated land-for-peace deal, with genuinely free referenda conducted under UN supervision to determine borders, has always been possible and is now essential.

That is what diplomacy is. Yes, mankind can conduct its affairs through total war, inflicting death, maiming, rape, hunger, disease and long term poverty on a massive scale. Or compromise can be reached. That there are those who argue for the former over Eastern Ukraine is sickening to me.

The other problem with a total war is of course that it might be your side which loses. If Sherr wants total war and no negotiation, he is of course accepting the possibility that Russia will conquer all of Ukraine – and would have no right at all to complain of that outcome.

In which case what would become of the Ukrainians? One thing is for certain, a massive wave of refugees would be launched right across Europe.

The practical problem with Sherr’s call for total war is that Ukraine really does not have the population numbers to sustain to victory a total war against Russia. It is just going to run out of people, as indeed the much trumpeted counteroffensive appears to have done.

The extreme escalation of western weaponry which Chatham House proposes, might indeed get round the population problem and tip the balance by inflicting simply massive casualties on Russia, but it is an incredible gamble to believe that so much hurt could be inflicted on Russia without risking nuclear annihilation.

It is improbable that China will permit these lunatic western warhawks to risk the entire future of humankind. Sherr is not of course alone – each section of the report has a different author, and some of them are even more unhinged. Please feel free to discuss further in the comments.

A diplomatic settlement to the Ukraine war terrifies western power structures because it will underline the decline of western hegemony and the increasing influence of BRICS and other non-western voices.

The actual destruction of Russia as an independent power has become essential to the apostles of empire, as a means of maintaining a psychological ascendancy for a few more years. They really do not care how many die for that. Do we really want to follow Dr Sherrangelove and his fellow Chatham House ideologues down this path?

Remember that list above of who pays for Chatham House and who wants all this death. I can see how it benefits them. But, dear reader, how does it benefit you?

An independent Ukraine, shorn of the Eastern provinces that have never wished to look westward, is in the long term much more feasible and viable than some kind of military Valhalla created by an epic war of conquest.

A negotiated and equitable end to this conflict is perfectly viable. It always has been so. The people of Europe have to reject the military industrial complex, the war profiteers and the blazing-eyed ideologues – and look for a fair peace.

————————————————

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The post Death Wish 2023 appeared first on Craig Murray.

Meanwhile, Back in Scotland

Par : craig

I flew back from Amsterdam yesterday after a month spent campaigning for Julian Assange, much of it organisational rather than public. Seeing Scotland with perspective after a month away really brings home the astonishing state of Scottish politics, particularly around the Independence movement.

Support for Independence is as consistently high as it has ever been. Polls this last six months have varied between Yes lead and No lead, but almost all have been in the 48‒52 region for either side, i.e. a tie within the margin of error.

The Unionist vote continues to be very heavily weighted by older people – in this YouGov poll the 65+ age group are 72‒28 Unionist, and that is very much in line with the 2014 referendum and all polling since.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the slow upward trend in the Independence vote since 2014 is a result of new 16- to 24-year-olds becoming eligible at 60% Independence support, replacing 72% Unionist voters who leave us.

It makes more sense that Unionism relates to a generation’s experience of the Second World War and its aftermath and the last days of Empire, rather than being a form of mental decline that awaits everybody as you get older – though the Project Fear pensions scare tactics of the unionists will have played a part.

I am fascinated by the volume of churn. According to this poll – and it is not an outlier in this respect – 20% of 2014 No voters have switched to Yes, but 17% of Yes voters have switched to No.

That is a remarkable level of volatility. The extraordinary campaign gain of 15 percentage points by Yes in 2014 is therefore certainly repeatable. I would argue that the overwhelmingly unionist ambient media, absent any Independence campaigning, means that a campaign by both sides could only lead to a swing in one direction.

But the paradox which is much more interesting is that there has been a very significant opinion poll swing of support away from the SNP, ostensibly the party of Independence, without any commensurate drop in support for Independence.

This has not been accompanied by any significant growth in support for other pro-Independence parties, including Alba.

The answer to this conundrum is fascinating. There remains massive support for Scottish Independence among Labour voters in Scotland.

I have this last ten years pointed out from time to time that, very consistently, opinion polls in Scotland show about a quarter of Labour Party voters in Scotland support Independence. The obvious explanation of the current surge in Labour support while support for Independence remains firm, is that this percentage has increased.

About one third of those intending to vote Labour in this recent YouGov poll, voted for Independence in 2014.

If I may be so presumptuous as to explain what you are looking at, in a sample of 1103 Scottish adults, approximately 440 both said they were intending to vote Labour at the UK General Election, and were prepared to say how they voted in the 2014 referendum.

Of these Labour voters, approximately 297 had voted No and approximately 143 had voted Yes. The Labour Party needs to accommodate itself to the Independence support in its own ranks.

In another specific question the poll shows that 40% of Labour voters in Scotland support a second referendum in the next five years. That will be difficult to manage for uber-conservative Starmer once the Establishment get him into Number 10.

The poll throws up some more interesting reflections on the complexities of Scottish politics. Only 78% of SNP voters would definitely vote for Independence, a factor which plainly looms large in the mind of their careerist MPs.

40% of Green voters oppose Independence. Independence is supported by a significantly higher proportion of Reform UK voters than Green voters. I still haven’t quite got my head round who Reform UK are, and why they feature in polls. Has anybody ever actually met one of them?

The SNP is now looking to move on from the Sturgeon debacle, with a leadership and party machine absolutely dedicated to denial that she did nothing to attempt to achieve Independence, while splitting the party by her extreme identity politics ideology.

It is interesting that the haemorrhage of party members from the SNP preceded the haemorrhage of public support – I suppose the members had a closer view of the abandonment of effort on Independence – but the public have now definitely caught up.

So the SNP are faced with an obvious strategic need to re-establish the connection between voting SNP and Independence. This has led to a very strange outcome. Firstly, the much vaunted special party convention in Dundee to debate the issue decided – nothing whatsoever. It didn’t really debate the issue, rather being a procession of leadership-directed drones.

The SNP is now sending out an entirely mixed message. It is doubling down on the Sturgeon identity politics agenda – pursuing gender recognition reform forlornly through the courts, and astonishingly pressing ahead with its crazed proposal to abolish jury trials in sexual assault cases. The rationale for this appears to be that all men are evil, so if you send some innocent ones to jail it’s all good anyway.

On top of which the SNP has suspended Angus Brendan MacNeil MP and Fergus Ewing MSP, for the crime of entering politics to further the cause of Independence, rather than to take some kind of continuous assessment programme in political correctness.

So Sturgeonite business as usual appears to be underway. Then suddenly Humza Yousaf pulled a six-foot rabbit named Harvey right out of the hat, by endorsing a plan that if the next Westminster general election returns a majority of SNP MPs, then the UK government would be invited to open negotiations on Independence.

Which is, on the face of it, quite a shock. A majority of MPs could be attained on 40% or even less of the popular vote. This linking of the inadequacies of First Past The Post elections with Independence potentially hoists the unionists with their own petard – but what does Yousaf really mean?

A fundamental question is how this is different to asking for an S30 order for a referendum. The SNP position is that, if Westminster refuses an S30, that just has to be accepted as Westminster is sovereign.

So the 600 billion dollar question is this: what does Yousaf do when Westminster simply says “no” to his request to open negotiations?

Because the truth is, without a threat of simply declaring independence and standing on Scotland’s right of self-determination, Yousaf’s new position simply amounts to stopping begging London on his knees for an S30 Order, and begging London on his knees for negotiations instead.

There is enormous distrust of Yousaf’s motives in the Independence movement. By making the criterion the election of SNP MP’s – as opposed to a majority of votes for Independence-supporting parties – Yousaf has provided, in theory, an answer to that burning question of how the SNP re-aligns the Independence vote to itself.

Not only does he provide a motive for those Independence supporting Labour voters to back the SNP, he also builds a powerful defence against other Independence supporting parties – Alba, ISP and in a lesser sense the Greens.

If Yousaf meant his new policy, this could obviously deter other Independence supporting parties from standing candidates against the SNP and splitting the vote, fatal under FPTP.

I have personally so far taken the view that Alba must stand against the SNP because the SNP has zero intention of progressing Independence, and Alba must ultimately supplant it. But if the SNP were saying a majority of SNP MPs would be taken as a mandate for Independence, I might feel compelled to support them and not split the vote; there are a number of key constituencies where even 2 or 3% to Alba could cost the SNP the seat.

But the difficulty here is that Yousaf does not seem to say an SNP majority would be a mandate for Independence: he seems to be saying that it would be a mandate for negotiations. That appears something of a straw man – hopefully the upcoming SNP conference might provide some clarity about what this means, but plainly the ambiguity to date is deliberate.

Yousaf is to be congratulated on tactical cunning. His posturing has put many of his radical pro-Independence opponents like me into a false position.

Having for years criticised the SNP for doing nothing to forward Independence, many now find themselves echoing unionist concerns that a majority of seats through FPTP is not a sufficient mandate and that the bar should be higher.

I however would be perfectly happy with the Yousaf formula – if I believed he meant it.

My conclusion from all this is that Alex Salmond is a far better political strategist than I am. That is of course obvious, but I am occasionally guilty of thinking myself more clever than I am.

While I have been pushing that genuine Independence supporters must commit to fighting the SNP everywhere, Salmond has kept his powder dry, refraining from standing in the coming by-election humiliation of the SNP in Rutherglen, and continuing to plug his proposal for an electoral alliance of pro-Independence parties, despite its contemptuous rejection by the SNP.

The advantage of this is that Salmond is not wrong-footed by Yousaf’s apparent conversion to radical pro-Independence action. He has his powder dry to move either way.

I confess I am wrong-footed. I don’t believe in Yousaf’s good faith; but it is not a convincing electoral position to tell people not to vote for the SNP as the established pro-Independence party in order to further Independence, when the SNP do actually for once take a radical Independence position.

It will be an interesting autumn.

I was talking yesterday to SNP MP Tommy Sheppard about an immigration case where I am helping one of his constituents. I found myself wishing that we were back in the halcyon days of 2014 when we were all working together in a good cause. Tommy features in the photo that is still atop my personal Facebook page.

I cannot understand what drives the SNP to expend all its energy on culture wars issues. If the SNP is serious about attaining Independence in the short term, can it not put its culture wars agenda on ice, as matters to be decided in an Independent Scotland?

But they plough on regardless. This is campaigning yesterday in the Rutherglen byelection.

📣 “We’ve got a real chance to send a shockwave in this community and send a message that we reject Brexit and Westminster austerity.”

The campaign hub in Rutherglen is absolutely packed as @KatyLoudonSNP and @HumzaYousaf join activists for the #SuperSaturday.#VoteSNP pic.twitter.com/95Rj3Dcefd

— Olaf Stando 🌻 (@OlafSNP) September 30, 2023

The flags are not saltires. The core message does not include Independence. The SNP is simply determined to make life impossible for those of us who dearly wish to bring the Independence movement together again.

I find it impossible to believe that the SNP is not under the control of the UK security services. No other explanation of the party’s bizarre and counterproductive behaviour makes any sense.

————————————————

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Grayzone Interview with Max Blumenthal

Par : craig

This covers a lot of ground – Assange, Ellsberg, Skripal, Salmond, Taiwan and more. My highlight was getting to point out that China cannot “invade” Taiwan. Taiwan is Chinese and you cannot invade your own territory. Even Taiwan accepts it is part of China, it merely thinks its side of the Chinese Civil War should be running all of it.

On social media there have been very many comments on the poor sound quality. This is an interesting reflection on expectations.

I hear no more than mild distortion. A decade ago this would have been normal internet sound quality. And for those of us who used to strain to listen in Africa to shortwave transmissions of the test match commentary, or indeed to get Radio Luxembourg in Scotland before the BBC did “pop”, it is magnificent.

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The Slow Motion Execution of Julian Assange

Par : craig

Thanks entirely to the brilliance of Chris Hedges in leading me through the material, I think this is the most clear outline of the Assange case which I have ever given.

I wish to address some social media attacks:

Nobody is paying me to be here to campaign for Julian, other than the subscribers to this blog who fund in a wider sense all of my activity. Where there have been paid ticket events, the money is not for me. I have received some contributions towards expense, totaling about $850, which doesn’t even meet my initial air ticket.

I realise I should not let malicious allegations get under my skin, but I do think it is important to contradict them with facts.

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Defend Assange US Tour

Par : craig

I am currently in Minnesota where I am speaking tonight and doing several media interviews. The primary purpose of the whole US visit is not the public appearances, but preparation for the campaign and defence in the USA should extradition go ahead.

That does not mean at all that the focus has in any way shifted from preventing extradition from the UK, and the legal defence remain fully engaged and optimistic about both the High Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

But I am also very buoyed by the extraordinary depth and quality of the support in the USA.

The profound resistance to the Espionage Act prosecution of a publisher is at the moment a sleeping giant, simply because nothing is visibly happening here in the USA. But in the event extradition happened, that would change overnight.

For Biden to go into the election, attempting both to jail his main political opponent, and simultaneously to jail the world’s most famous publisher, would ring some alarm bells with all but the very dimmest.

Plus while the diehard Democrats will never accept that Russiagate was a lie that has been comprehensively debunked, the diehard Democrat vote is not enough to get Biden re-elected. That fake narrative has lost its universal power, and the coverage that will inevitably result should Julian be extradited will lead to a wider understanding that the Espionage charges relate solely to the Chelsea Manning revelations.

We need to be ahead of the game. Should Julian arrive in the USA, it will be the biggest news story in the world on that day. We need the campaigning logistics all worked out in advance. We need to get ahead of the media story in ways we failed to do when Julian was removed from the Embassy.

We need to have events planned all round the States ready to go, that will provide alternative image messages from actions, for both local and national news, to counter the “perp” images.

I am extremely impressed by both the vibrant alternative media, and the highly media-experienced pool of campaigners and activists across the States on which we can draw to put up to the mainstream media for interview.

There are of course also the logistics of bringing the core crew over to get up and running in the US, at what could be very short notice.

So that is why I have disappeared. I am always incredibly grateful to the subscribers who support me even when I am off doing activism rather than writing.

Here am I at the New York lunch event, which was completely sold out and could have sold ten times over, though rather I think for Chris Hedges than me.

The sound is very bad for the first two minutes of my talk but improves radically thereafter so please stick with it. (If anyone knows how to edit out the bad sound sections and a couple of other distractions and make a new version, I should be grateful.)

Incidentally, because demand was so high we ended up using a second section of the restaurant which ended up in me speaking in two directions at once. Half of the audience are seated in a vault which was reputedly Rockefeller’s personal depository.

After Minnesota I shall be travelling to Washington DC. Organisers are panicking that nobody there is signing up to come and see me, and that everybody in DC hates me. So if you know anybody in DC who doesn’t yet hate me…

Wednesday DC pic.twitter.com/2KejUhJgVn

— Randy Credico Live On The Fly (@CredicoRandy) September 11, 2023

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Submission to the United Nations

Par : craig

The complaint to the United Nations against my imprisonment for contempt of court has now been submitted. This is the first time I have been able to state the case without the compulsory use of Scottish counsel, who were astonishingly timid of criticising Lady Dorrian or detailing Sturgeon’s conspiracy, its personnel, and how it worked.

Those who followed my earlier legal submissions will note a real change of tone and emphasis.

At this stage my legal team advise I can only make public the first six pages of the forty four page complaint. These are below. The complaint also has many attached documents. I hope to make more of it public later.

I apologise but I again need to ask for your help, as the appeal fund is currently £12,000 shy of what is now owed. It has been a long, bruising and very expensive fight. I have been jailed in extreme harsh conditions, including being locked in a small cell 23 hours a day for four months.

But I do believe there has gradually been a sea change in public understanding of what happened. The fact that the exact people I accused of criminal conspiracy to fit up an innocent man, have since been arrested by police on suspicion of embezzlement and other offences, has led many people to look at my work in a new light.

I believe that every day we are closer to ultimate vindication.

I could have done none of this without the unfailing support of those who have donated large or small sums to the defence fund, and I ask you, but only if you can without hardship, to help again at this last stage. I do realise times are hard.

You can contribute to my defence fund here. I am extremely grateful to those who have and I want to stress that I absolutely do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them even the slightest financial difficulty. I am afraid to say that the need to raise huge amounts is of course all part of suppression of dissent, by “lawfare”.




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The Scottish Gestapo

Par : craig

On 28 July a gender critical woman demonstrator, Julie Marshall, was “punched in the face” by a political opponent in Aberdeen. The man who struck her was questioned and issued with a police caution not to punch people.

He was neither arrested nor charged.

A month later, Scottish Government minister Patrick Harvie was giving a TV interview at the scene of the forthcoming Rutherglen byelection when a man heckled him, calling him a “deviant”. Harvie responded that the man was a “bigot”.

The heckler has now been arrested and charged, though when Stuart Campbell spoke with Police Scotland, they refused to confirm with what offence he had been charged.

Now we might conclude from this that Police Scotland believe it is not a serious criminal matter to punch a woman in the face in the street, but it is a serious matter to call someone a deviant in the street.

Or we might conclude that Police Scotland is very heavily politicised. That it is at the beck and call of ministers. That it has taken sides in the “culture wars” debate that poisons Scottish politics.

The latter explanation is obviously true. This is not an isolated incident;

  • The prosecution of Mark Hirst for saying that those who plotted to fit up Alex Salmond would “reap the whirlwind”.
  • The prosecution of David Llewellyn for a Facebook joke saying Angus Robertson should be dumped in the Water of Leith.
  • The prosecution of Marion Millar for gender critical tweets so inoffensive the Crown Office had to drop it after the case had started
  • My own jailing for “jigsaw identification clues” on the perjurers against Salmond, no greater than – and mostly identical to – many “clues” published by pro-Sturgeon journalists on much bigger platforms
  • The arrival of two senior detectives at my home just three hours after I stated that I have Stewart MacDonald MP’s leaked emails – which, as they acknowledged, is no crime
  • The three weeks warning given to SNP Ministers by Chief Constable Iain Livingstone of the progress of Operation Branchform, leading to Sturgeon’s resignation and giving ample time to dispose of evidence before the theatre of search tents

I could go on. Police Scotland, like the Crown Office, is thoroughly politicised. It is used as a personal tool against the perceived enemies of Scottish ministers. It has taken sides in the culture wars.

If you are on the “wrong” side, you will get prosecuted for an innocuous tweet or a remark in the street. If you are on the “right” side, you can punch women in the face or parade a sign calling for the decapitation of those who disagree with you, and face no legal jeopardy.

But, you say, surely it is wrong to call people “deviant”?

Well, I do not approve of yelling “deviant” at people in the street. It has unpleasant connotations. But I am absolutely opposed to the ever increasing encroachment of the power of the state into the lives of ordinary people.

The coercive power of the state is an awesome thing to set in motion, and terrifying to those it is used against. It is entirely disproportionate in a case like this.

Patrick Harvie is a government minister. He is used to the give and take. His robust reply of “Bigot” was an appropriate and sufficient response. That should have been an end to it.

Harvie is hardly a virgin in the rough and tumble of politics. Harvie was himself rebuked by Age Scotland only a week ago for dismissing the views of individuals on the grounds that they are old. Is ageism somehow a more acceptable prejudice than (alleged) homophobia?

Politicians should beware of ageism. Older people have a much higher propensity to vote.

With Scotland’s notorious Hate Crime Act due to come into force shortly and make this kind of prosecution much more common, I wish to reinforce the argument against over-use of the power of the state.

Modern discourse has lost sight of the fact that behaviour can be unpleasant and even morally wrong, without being illegal. It is thankfully impossible to involve the state in every social transgression, but its sphere is ever-widening.

Social sanction not involving the state is important. If a person is a routine adulterer, making the life of their partner a misery, they are likely to lose a number of friends and be socially shunned. We do not have them arrested for the bad behaviour.

Similarly if I come to a dinner party and make fun all evening of your big ears and bad cooking, you will presumably never invite me again and the other people present will be likely to follow suit. That is social sanction.

There is also the question of what is criminal and what is civil.

The defamation courts are open to Mr Harvie if he feels he was unfairly called a deviant. Interestingly, “vulgar abuse” has always been excluded from defamation. Just hurling silly abuse has not been taken as a legal matter, and I suspect that is how both sides of the “Deviant!”, “Bigot!” exchange would be viewed by a court.

I always turn to John Stuart Mill in these questions as a source of great wisdom, and to those who would scoff, I would add that there is no doubt that were it not for the profound influence of the philosophy of Mill on British political society, homosexuality would never have been legalised in the first place, or at least not for many more years.

In On Liberty, Mill cautions heavily against over involvement of the state in correcting actions even when they are harmful to others:

“The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others, or wanting in due consideration for their welfare, without going to the length of violating any of their constituted rights. The offender may be justly punished by opinion, though not by law. As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects the interests of others society has jurisdiction over it, and the question of whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion…

…But disinterested benevolence can find other instruments to persuade people to their good, than whips and scourges, either of the literal or the metaphorical sort.”

 

Mill also argues that the effect of speech should be viewed in context. He gives the famous example that to argue that corn merchants are thieves who starve the poor is a perfectly legitimate expression of opinion. But to yell the same thing to a howling mob armed with torches outside a corn merchant’s house at midnight might be a different thing.

This I think is useful guidance in the Harvie case. As I said, I don’t really approve of calling people deviants, but to use it to a powerful politician in his pomp, surrounded by aides and police and giving a TV interview, is one thing.

If a gang of big blokes were following a gay person at night down a dark street yelling “deviant” at them, the situation and the perceived threat would be entirely different.

Mill is absolutely right to say that context is important. The word deviant in itself has very different nuances in different contexts, not all insulting.

What should be plain to any person with any instinct for freedom and democracy is that the greatest danger to society in this particular situation is the abuse of power, by or on behalf of a powerful minister, against a member of the public attempting to make his peaceful protest known, albeit not as perfectly as we might wish.

To leave the particular for the general, this is part of the Scottish Government’s reliance on culture wars as the wedge issue which firstly, removed the fundamentalist Independence supporters from the SNP, and secondly, they hope will keep them in power on a specifically generational political platform.

The claim of various minority personal identities by Scottish government politicians has become an intrinsic part of their political culture. There has in particular been a remarkable foregrounding of sexual identity as part of political life.

Now I am entirely tolerant and non-judgmental on different sexual identities, as long as neither children nor coercion are involved.

But to me politics is about the governance of society in a way that improves the lot of those masses living in poverty, with few economic or social opportunities for advancement, condemned to lives of insecurity and struggle.

Politics is not about how middle class people choose to sexually pleasure themselves or their fashion choices.

It is now generally understood that identity politics has been used to neuter class politics on the left. That instead of focusing on the need to redistribute wealth, political power and personal agency to the working class, energy has been diverted into ending discrimination for minority groups, to the extent that putting very wealthy women in power becomes a “victory” even when, once there, the very wealthy woman does nothing to eliminate child poverty.

Humza Yousaf writes in the Guardian, not about Scottish Independence or even wealth inequality, but about “toxic masculinity“.

I am not sure I understand this subject. Would, for example, having sex with a female assistant working directly to you, then accepting large cash donations from her father to pave her way to a lucrative job, be an example of “toxic masculinity”?

In the SNP this obsession with identity politics has become institutionalised, part of the very fabric of the organisation itself.

On the ruling body, the SNP National Executive, members elected by the entire membership are substantially outnumbered by members appointed by affiliated minority groups, sometimes with only a couple of hundred members.

Any notion of selection on merit through the party’s democratic processes has been dispensed with entirely. All women shortlists, which were initiated on a firm promise they would be for one election only, have become permanent. Most pernicious of all, the effects of preference for disabled candidates – self-declared as such – gave some truly bizarre results.

In possibly the worst of these, Emma Roddick received just 3% of the vote to be selected as the MSP candidate, but was promoted top of the list due to mental illness. There are many similar examples.

Now as a lifelong sufferer from bipolar myself, I don’t think anyone should be unfairly disadvantaged from mental illness, but to be made an MSP because of poor mental health is just strange.

When I was in the FCO I never thought I should be made Ambassador to the United Nations because I was bipolar.

It would have been most amusing if, when I came second to Mike Russell in election for President of the SNP, I had been declared the winner because I am bipolar!

The result of all this is that Scotland is governed by politicians whose primary political identity is their personal victimhood, be it through gender, race, sexual orientation or disability.

They continually wave the bloodied bandages of their personal victimhood at us – and they have their own Police Scotland Gestapo ready to arrest anyone who dares to impugn it.

————————————————

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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.

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