The Green Ribbon

The Democratic Republican Moment: a Blog Reader

The current fiasco over expenses at Westminster has created a major opportunity for political reform in Britain. You might not know it from the media's focus on celebrity populism, but there has actually been some useful thinking on the left over the past year which addresses the causes of the crisis quite precisely.

David Marquand's book Britain Since 1918 has started a conversation about democratic republicanism as a British political tradition, perhaps the only tradition that addresses the relationship between parliament and people in a way that is adequate to the current situation.

I've been collating some of that conversation for my own reference, and I thought it was worth sharing it here. Please feel free to suggest any other relevant links in the comments.

Audio David Marquand, Kenneth Morgan, Philip Stephens, The Strange Career of British Democracy, IPPR, 18/09/08

Tom Griffin, The democratic republican moment, OurKingdom, 19/09/08

Richard Reeves, The Dynamics of Power, New Statesman, 25/09/08

Giles Radice, Surveying the Left, Progress, 28/11/08

Anthony Barnett, Gerry Hassan, Britain's Neo-Liberal State, OurKingdom, 29/11/08

Pamphlet Anthony Barnett, Gerry Hassan, Breaking Out of Britain's Neo-Liberal State, Compass, 05/01/09

Sunder Katwala, Uneasy allies? Progressive dilemmas revisited, Liberal Conspiracy, 02/02/09

Sunder Katwala, Progressive dilemmas and the democratic republican tradition, Next Left, 3/02/09

Stuart White, What is democratic republicanism?, Next Left, 03/02/09

Tim Gore, Democratic republicanism... and the EU, Next Left, 07/02/09

Video Paul Lay, Quentin Skinner, Geoffrey Robertson, Melissa Lane, Liberty, Sovereignty and Republicanism, Convention on Modern Liberty, 28/02/09

David Marquand, How Free Are We? Liberty in Britain, History Today, 03/09

Stuart White, 'Progressive Conservatism' or democratic republicanism? Next Left,  03/03/09

Tom Griffin, Modern Liberty: The Levellers' republican legacy, OurKingdom, 04/03/09

Stuart White, Democratic republicanism and the economic crisis, Next Left, 06/03/09

Melissa Lane, Liberty as a Social Value - Lessons from the Levellers, OurKingdom, 11/03/09

Anthony Painter, Coming to Terms with Change, Progress, 31/03/09

Pamphlet Richard Reeves, Philip Collins, The Liberal Republic, Demos, 07/05/09

Stuart White, 'The Liberal Republic': How Liberal? How Republican? Next Left, 07/05/09

Anthony Barnett, Mulgan Says, "Sod em", OurKingdom, 11/05/09

Richard Reeves, A Republican Moment? Demos, 19/05/09

Richard Reeves, Is Cameron a republican liberal? Demos, 26/05/09

Stuart White, Cameron's Agenda: Populism not republicanism?, Next Left, 26/05/09

Breaking Up Britain

Today is the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. The indefatigable Mark Perryman is marking the occasion with the launch of a new anthology of essays Breaking Up Britain : Four Nations after a Union.

Perryman's opening chapter is available online:

Most Observer readers would probably feel a little uncomfortable holding up bits of paper to form a flag of St George at a gig. Kitty Empire, Observer

Billy Bragg opened the second half of his 2008 St George’s Day celebration at London’s Barbican theatre with Jerusalem. And, as Kitty Empire put it in her review, the audience responded ‘coyly’ when Billy invited them to join in by holding above their heads the carefully laid out sheets of red and white paper distributed on the auditorium’s seats to form one huge St George Cross. Hardly an exercise of Leni Riefenstahl proportions, but more than enough, apparently, to get Observer readers searching for any excuse not to join in.(A Jigsaw State (pdf))

In a previous collection of essays, 2008's Imagined Nation, Perryman explored the possibilities for English national identity in the wake of devolution. A session on English nationalism at last year's Compass conference provided the inspiration for the new volume, which broadens the debate to look at the prospects for all of the nations in the UK.

There is plenty of Irish interest with contributions from Arthur Aughey, Gerry Adams, Inez McCormack and Peadar Kirby. Adams' contribution is largely based on his speech to February's Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, but it's interesting to see it set in this context, not least because Sinn Féin has often been wary of drawing parallels with nationalist movements in the various nations of Britain. 

Kirby calls for a revival of the civil society activism that shaped modern Ireland, a suggestion that has interesting parellels with the emergence of civil society as a theme in post-credit crunch debates on both the left and the right in Britain.

Like Imagined Nation, Breaking up Britain includes some strong contributions on the implications of debates about national identity for ethnic minorities. Salma Yaqoob argues that the anti-war movement has done more to cement the place of Muslim communities in British society than official narratives of Britishness. Charlotte Williams worries that homogenous Scottish and Welsh nationalisms way simply replicate old problems.

Several contributions reflect on the challenges that the post-devolution UK presents for the democratic collectivism of the labour movement. Guy Lodge and Michael Kenny suggest that engaging with the English question may be an important starting-point for Labour Party renewal. John Harris looks at the prospects for an English realignment in the event of Scottish independence. 

The left must engage with the dynamic unleashed by devolution if it is to build the alliances with which to confront the prospect of a resurgent Conservatism at Westminster in the years ahead. This book is an important step in that process.

The Neocons on the Peace Process

A new piece based on some of my research for Neocon Europe.

Does the Irish peace process have lessons for the Middle East? Many of the key players in the Good Friday Agreement seem to think so. Tony Blair has cited the precedent as cause for optimism in his role as Quartet Envoy, while Gerry Adams called for inclusive negotiations during his visit to Gaza last week. The analogy isn't universally welcome, however.

Two recent articles reflect the parameters of the debate. In the New Statesman, Blair's former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, argues that the British government's engagement with Irish republicans provides a model for an Israeli approach to Hamas. In Standpoint, Douglas Murray reiterates a longstanding neoconservative critique of such suggestions, arguing that "the claims of the peace process in Northern Ireland itself are unproven - but they are also unhelpful to the point of uselessness."

This dispute is significant given the identity of some of the key actors now emerging on the Middle East stage. US envoy George Mitchell was a key mediator in the Good Friday Agreement, while Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is arguably more closely aligned with American and British neoconservatives than any other major figure in Israeli politics.

More over at OurKingdom.

Propaganda, the internet and the media: from CounterJihad to the Decent Left

Over at the Yorkshire Ranter, Alex Harrowell comments on the ongoing story of Glen Jenvey, who featured as an anti-terrorist 'expert' in a Sun story about threats, which it now appears he posted himself, against public figures on a Muslim web forum.

It's a very good question just how many terrorism stories (especially ones that have the "Internet" flag set - it means "stuff I don't understand" to a lot of editors) are the work of these people, whether the upscale, Decent version or Jenvey's Comedy Gladio.

That put me in mind of a quote from former Pentagon Neocon Abram Shulsky:

Soviet front groups might have been more effective, but Stalinist paranoia made impossible the operational autonomy needed to succeed. To the extent that future practitioners of this type of propaganda have learned lessons from the Soviet experience, we may expect that the nonstate groups will be controlled in a more sophisticated manner and their ties to a given state will be less obvious.

New methods of spreading propaganda (such as via Internet web sites of Non-governmental organizations [NGOs], or specialized email lists) allow a deceiver to reach target audiences via multiple channels. Many of these channels may remain relatively invisible to the public at large. (Elements of Strategic Denial and Deception by Abram Shulsky in Strategic Denial and Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge, edited by Roy Godson and James J. Wirtz, Transaction books, 2002, p23.)

Shulsky went on to note that "Despite the media's self-image of hardheaded cynicism, it is relatively vulnerable to this type of manipulation." (p24.)  The Sun's experience would seem to bear this out.

Republicanism in Dublin and London

Time once again to dust off the cobwebs on here and draw together a few threads from my writing over the last couple of weeks.

First of all my report for OurKingdom from the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis two weeks ago. It was a very interesting time to be in Dublin, with 120,000 people marching on the streets against the Government's swingeing austerity measures. Gerry Adams cannily tapped into the mood by calling for a left-wing alliance with the Labour Party.

The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known, by Craig Murray

Thanks to legal threats from mercenary Tim Spicer, former British diplomat Craig Murray has been unable to find a mainstream publisher for his new book, The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known. As a result Craig is publishing the book online today. The Green Ribbon is delighted to be one of the many blogs supporting Craig by hosting a copy of the file here.

You can also support Craig (and a range of charities) by picking up a privately-printed hard copy edition from Amazon.

The book includes an indispensable account of Murray's dealings with Spicer during the Arms to Africa Affair, as well as his views on Spicer's role in the Peter McBride case and his subsequent career in Iraq.

Policy Exchange, SANE and the 'vital importance of controlling the Arabs'

Here's an interesting postscript to Nick Clegg's attack on Policy Exchange for privately briefing against the Global Peace and Unity event in London.

One of the organisations cited by Policy Exchange, the Society of Americans for National Existence, has objected to my characterisation of them in a post at Spinwatch. On their blog a SANE staffer writes:

In this link the leftist Brits continue to blather on about SANE and its deep, secret powers. We continue to get many visitors from England trying to figure this out. In this blog and in the links, SANE is tied to IASPS (true, we are indeed closely linked to IASPS), but then we are both (IASPS and SANE) labeled "neocons"--which merely demonstrates these folks are either illiterate or fools or just don't read or are wholly disingenuous.

They then quote the following section of the Spinwatch piece:

One point worth making is that the Society of Americans for National Existence are not just some bunch of marginal crazies. SANE is actually a project of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. IASPS was where key neoconservatives like Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Doug Feith worked out the clean break strategy, which many believe formed the basis of the Iraq War agenda they went on to pursue in the Bush administration.

Neither the quote nor the full article labels either SANE or IASPS as 'neocon' institutions. Much of what the article does say is specifically accepted by SANE. Indeed, SANE goes on to provide two articles which elaborate on IASPS' role in formulating the Clean Break strategy.

The first of these, Israel: The Advanced Case of Western Affliction, states (my emphasis):

Anyone who studies that Institute document and the voluminous studies and analyses provided by IASPS over the years to policy makers and politicians in Israel and Washington, D.C., knows that IASPS does not advocate “democracy” as a tool of foreign policy. It doesn’t even advocate “democracy” as a tool of domestic policy. Indeed, the Institute’s founder, Loewenberg, has made clear that the drift in this country to “democracy” and away from a constitutional republic built on a federation of states, themselves layered on a bedrock of Judeo-Christian values, is very much a continuation of the decline of the West. Moreover, even a casual read of A Clean Break points to the vital importance of controlling Arabs by understanding and exploiting their tribal affiliations. Anyone who looks at Iraq or Jordan and doesn’t understand, not just the Shia-Sunni divide, but the important tribal ones that make claims going back to the terrorist founder/freedom fighter/nation builder of Islam, Mohammed, will never come to grips with the geo-strategic realities in that part of the world. The evidence of this claim is before us now in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Gaza.

The piece also alludes to the role of Wurmser, Perle et. al:

The Institute has of course gained enormous worldwide attention through its pre-Iraq war publication titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," in which it advocated a triangulated strategy between Israel, Turkey and Jordan to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and become the base of a tripartite power alliance to rule over and secure a strategic stability in the Middle East. Because the report's contributors included many of the policy professionals that took up important positions in the Bush administration, left-wing types, right-wing types, Arabs, and main stream media soon gravitated to this study as the blueprint for the “Jewish neocon war” in Iraq.

At this point, SANE would seem to have recapitulated most of my original argument. So what are they trying to establish with their rebuttal? I think there are two key points which also emerge in the second article Does Pat Buchanan Have a Flea Problem, a Blind Spot or Both?

First things first. As I have written in the past, the “Clean Break” document was not about America at all, but about a strategy those of us at the Institute (I was then a trustee and legal counsel) proposed to Netanyahu as the new Israeli prime minister (not written by him as Taki asserts)...

..Nothing in the Clean Break or in any of the other IASPS studies would suggest that America should become the Great Last Hope for building democracies among the ruthless and murderous Muslims of the Middle East. The point of the carefully researched and more closely analyzed studies of the Institute suggest that a regional strategic stability is possible in the Middle East given free market economic reforms and a regional power structure that would understand well and accept the Islamic and Arab realities that exist in that part of the world. There was none of the utopian democracy ideology that so dominates the Bush administration’s foreign policy initiatives.

So the Clean Break document was aimed at the Israeli government, not the US, and strategic security was the goal not spreading democracy.

It is worth comparing this with what some of the neoconservatives' critics have said. For example, Stephen. J Sniegoski has written:

It should be emphasised that the same people - Feith, Wurmser, Perle - who advised the Israeli government on issues issues of national security would later advise the George W. Bush administration to pursue virtually the same policy regarding the Middle East. (The Transparent Cabal, p.90)

Sniegoski went on to note the very same points SANE make about the differences between a Clean Break and the case for war presented in 2003:

While neocons present American policy in a very idealistic light, their policy prescriptions for Israel, which involved similar concrete policy objective, were devoid of such sentiment. Written in terms of Israeli interest, the study made little mention of the benefits to be accrued by Israel's neighbouring countries, such as the establishment of democracy. (The Transparent Cabal, p92)

The conclusion that SANE invites us to draw is that the aims of the Israeli geopoliticians of 1996, were unrelated to those of the American idealists of 2003, despite the minor coincidence of their being the same people. The more credible view is that a right-wing Likudist analysis of Israel's geopolitical interests was a key factor in the neoconservative drive to war.

The Clean Break document was not silent on the role of the United States:

To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.

The subsequent emphasis on bringing democracy to Iraq was consistent with this principle.

In the transition from A Clean Break to the US invasion of Iraq  the neocons presented a false identity between American and European interests, and a hard-line Likudist conception of Israel's interests. This is a habit that arguably did not end in 2003, and may explain episodes such as Policy Exchange's private briefing.

If Europeans oppose engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood at home, they are not likely to press for Israeli negotiations with Hamas. Likewise, If Europeans fear Muslim population growth at home, they are more likely to accept extreme responses to Palestinian population growth.

A Clean Break is not, incidentally, the only evidence that SANE and IASPS have neoconservative links. SANE president David Yerushalmi is general counsel and policy advisor to the Center for Security Policy, a think tank headed by the former Assistant Secretary of Defense, Frank Gaffney. Gaffney's neoconservative record has been documented by Jim Lobe, who also revealed earlier this year, that Gaffney's sister, Devon Gaffney Cross has been organising Pentagon-funded private briefings by fellow neoconservatives for reporters in London and Paris.

Nick Clegg on Policy Exchange

Well done to Nick Clegg for becoming the first major party leader to take on Policy Exchange over its unscrupulous approach to Islam. (hat-tip Sunny Hundal)

In a statement carried by the PoliticsHome website on Friday, Clegg criticised the think-tank over for a privately circulated briefing against the Sunday's Global Peace and Unity event in London.

The Policy Exchange briefing I have seen seeks to raise alarm over a number of the speakers planning to attend the conference. The accuracy of the allegations is variable, with a notable lack of evidence to support many of the claims.

 

In particular I was appalled to see ‘evidence’ quoted from the Society for American National Existence, an organisation which seeks to make the practice of Islam illegal, punishable by 20 years in prison. I need hardly point out how illogical it is to attempt to criticise one set of extreme views by citing another.

 

My concern is not limited to the facts in the document, however. Your attempt to raise a boycott of this event by privately briefing against it is bizarre, and underhand behaviour for a think-tank supposedly interested in open public debate. The information you are disseminating is extremely narrow in focus and as a result tars with the brush of extremism the tens of thousands of Muslims who will be in attendance.

This looks exactly like the kind of activity which led the Charity Commission to identify 'a need for greater transparency' from Policy Exchange earlier this year.

Censorship and Freedom of Speech

The following is a mirror of an original post from Craig Murray:

This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is unwilling to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel lawyers, acting on behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:

" Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed separately. Both Penfold and Spicer were interviewed under caution, as suspects for having broken the arms embargo.

Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without consulting the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold, Blair declared, was “a hero”. A dictatorship had been successfully overthrown and democracy restored. Penfold had “Done a superb job in trying to deal with the consequences of the military coup.” All this stuff about Security Council Resolutions and sanctions was “an overblown hoo-ha”.

I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the country was still starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of hindsight, this intervention points the way towards the disasters of his later years in office. It is extraordinarily wrong for a Prime Minister to declare that a man is a hero, when Customs had questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very matter the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair’s belief that his judgement stood above the law of the land, something that was to occur again on a much bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud Office investigation into British Aerospace’s foreign bribes. But of course Blair's contempt for UN security council resolutions on the arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy by invasion could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently ignoring the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in charge of little more than Freetown.

In the FCO we were astonished by Blair’s intervention, and deeply puzzled. Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin Cook’s views. Who was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect that the UN and the law were unimportant? For most of us, this was the very first indication we had of how deep a hold neo-con thinking and military interests had on the Blair circle. It was also my first encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy being dictated by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Inister’s Press Secretary, The military lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of their own.

A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their investigations. A thick dossier, including documentation from the FCO, from the raid on Sandline’s offices, and from elsewhere, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The Customs and Excise team who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation was that both Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo. The dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown Prosecution Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in effect, for no further action. There would be no prosecution. A customs officer told me bitterly that, given the time between the dossier leaving their offices and the time it was returned, allowing time for both deliveries, it could not have been in the CPS more than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not even have read it before turning it down.

I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer and Penfold. So were the customs officers investigating the case; at least two of them called me to commiserate. They had believed they had put together an extremely strong case, and they told me that their submission to the Crown Prosecution Service said so.

The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first major instance of the corruption of the legal process that was to be a hallmark of the Blair years. Customs and Excise were stunned by it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Spicer and Penfold had worked together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone in breach of UK law. Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British law by an Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told Spicer that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any side in the conflict. Penfold’s claim never to have seen an absolutely key Security Council Resolution about a country to which he was High Commissioner is truly extraordinary.

But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously no defence in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this sorry tale of greed, hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no doubt at all – and more importantly nor did the customs officers investigating the case – that there was enough there for a viable prosecution.

The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to prosecute was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected woman in New Labour circles. She is married to John Mills, a former Labour councillor in Camden. That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister with a penchant for taking out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying them off with cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the friend and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore companies for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and David Mills were also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close to Tony Blair. Blair is also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite the numerous criminal allegations against Berlusconi and his long history of political alliances with open fascists. Just to complete the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law of Barbara Mills and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to proceed with the case, and to take that decision in less time than it would have taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise sent them?

Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions later that year after being personally criticised in his judgement by a High Court judge who ruled against the Crown Prosecution Service for continually failing to prosecute over deaths in police custody. That has not stopped the extremely well connected Dame Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid public positions since then. "

It is infuriating that, Maxwell style, Spicer (who has made millions form the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of defending a libel case to intimidate my publisher. The result is that important information I received at first hand, and an account of events to which I am eye-witness, is being repressed, as is an important independent critique of early Blair foreign policy.

I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.

This blog is not dead...

..but it is pretty firmly in hibernation mode at the moment. In part this it has opened up a number of other opportunities for me that are now taking up most of my time.

One of these is an editing gig at openDemocracy's OurKingdom blog, which is involved in some very exciting thinking around the future of the UK.

My involvement with Spinwatch has also deepened to the point where an argument that started out as a response to a Slugger thread has led to me starting a Ph.D at the University of Strathclyde.

Both openDemocracy and Spinwatch have got some interesting new projects in the works over the next few months. In the meantime, I'd like to flag up some good posts elsewhere on the themes that I've been neglecting here lately..

If you had been following the coverage of Tim Spicer, Tony Buckingham and assorted mercenaries here, then you will want to look up Craig Murray's recent encounters with same.

If you're interested in the neocons, London bloggers have produced some great coverage of Policy Exchange's relationship with Boris Johnson in recent months. Notable examples can be found at Dave Hill, Liberal Conspiracy, Boris Watch and Tory Troll.

It's also worth noting Arun Kundnani's article earlier this month, and the Guardian's profile on Policy Exchange last Friday, which both picked up on Dean Godson's cold war background.

The hiatus here is likely to continue but do please keep an eye out my stuff at OurKingdom and Spinwatch.

Cancel the Aegis Contract ! Peter Mc Bride Anniversary Action Alert-Lobby Barack Obama

From the Pat Finucane Centre :

Last year a supporter of the PFC in the US contacted Senator Barack Obama regarding the controversial Pentagon contract with LT Col Spicer, the former Scots Guards officer whose troops murdered Peter Mc Bride - see excerpt below from Obama's response - today- September 4 is the anniversary of Peter's murder. We urge supporters to contact Senator Obama and call on the presidential candidate to keep his promise if elected and

Cancel the Aegis Contract!

"...As you know, the CEO of Aegis Defense Services Tim Spicer has been implicated in a variety of human rights abuses around the globe.  Given his history, I agree that the United States should consider rescinding its contract with his company."

Barack Obama
United States Senator

“If Irish America responds to this appeal we could make the cancelling of this contract Presidential policy. Please help! Please forward this email to friends and family. Don’t do business with those who justify murder. Cancel the Aegis contract!”

Jean Mc Bride (mother of Peter)

Senator Obama has appointed a high level advisory panel on Irish issues, comprised of seven well known Irish American politicans. The group is comprised of Senators George Mitchell (retired, Maine), Chris Dodd (Connecticut), Edward Kennedy (Massachusetts) and Pat Leahy (Vermont), Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland and Congressmen Joe Crowley (New York) and Richard Neal (Massachusetts). Again we would urge supporters to contact all or any of the above and call for the Aegis contract to be cancelled. Please cc responses to us.

See http://www.patfinucanecentre.org/pmcbride/mcbindex.html for extensive background on the Aegis private security contract in Iraq and Spicer’s role in the case of the murder of 18 year old teenager Peter Mc Bride who was murdered on September 4 1992 by soldiers under his command.

Spicer threatens to sue Craig Murray

It's about time that I broke radio silence on here, and this certainly merits it.

Former diplomat Craig Murray is having another run-in with Schillings, the lawyers who briefly managed to get his website taken down on behalf of Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov.

Now they are attempting to block the publication of my new book in the interests of mercenary commander Tim Spicer, one of those who has made a fortune from the Iraq War. It is sad but perhaps predictable that private profits from the illegal Iraq war, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died, are providing the funding to try to silence my book.

The Road to Samarkand sounds as if it will be very interesting.

Among the incidents I cover in my new book are the murder of Peter McBride, the Aegis Trophy Video, the Papua New Guinea coup, the Equatorial Guinea plot, Executive Outcomes' murder of civilians in Angola and the Arms to Africa affair. I do hope that other bloggers will generate another Streisand effect through blogging on these subjects.

Spinwatch on the Euston Manifesto

Spinwatch has just published my latest profile piece, on the Euston Manifesto group. I doubt the broad thrust of it will come as a huge surprise to anyone.

It looks at the group's connections with American social networks around the (apparently now defunct) Social Democrats USA and the National Endowment for Democracy, two organisations which played a part in the Iran-Contra Affair.

Some more strands in this particular web were highlighted in a recent post from the Yorkshire Ranter:

You may recall that the famous document that was meant to show Iraq buying uranium from Niger originated with the Italian secret service, and then appeared in yer dossier, just in time for the Americans to start using it in public speeches. It has long been suspected that the meeting in Rome was somehow involved in this exercise in policy-laundering, or rather bullshit-laundering. So how did the thing get from Italy to the UK? Well, there was Harold Rhode, also at the meeting, who made it to the December 2002 Iraqi opposition conference in London. That may give us some idea. Now that's what I call the exigencies of the service - you've got to meet gems like Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, Chalabi, and Nick bleeding Cohen, plus every other Decent out of hospital at the time. It's hell in the diplomatic, as Harry Flashman so wisely said. (Selling the Dummy)

Conning the neocons

David Habakkuk's latest piece brings us some interesting reflections on the neoconservatives and their various exile clients:

Much more could be said about the sheer oddity of a conceptions of a 'forward strategy' in which conmen like Chalabi or Berezovsky come to be seen as appropriate vehicles to make other societies 'liberal and democratic'.  What cannot be claimed, however, is that these conceptions are simply the fig-leaves of cunning Machiavellians.  In relation to their own societies, the neoconservatives and their British fellow-travellers may indeed be masterly manipulators.  But their propensity to see alien societies through thick ideological filters makes them easy prey for conmen in their dealings with the wider world -- so that the actual outcomes of the strategies they advocate are highly liable to be quite different from those they envisage. (European Tribune)

As it happens, the US Senate Intelligence committee released a report this week which neatly illustrates David's argument. It concerns a series of meetings which began in Rome in 2001:

The meeting included Larry Franklin (Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs), Harold Rhode (Office of Net Assessments), Michael Ledeen (former Office of the Secretary of Defense and National Security Council consultant), Manucher Ghorbanifar (Iranian exile), [Iranian #1] (Iranian living in exile in Morocco), [Iranian #2] (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Official), and an unidentified employee of [a foreign government]. Michael Ledeen arranged the meeting with the help of his contacts in Italy and [the foreign government] who provided the meeting place and the logistical support. (Partly redacted in original/links added).

A later passage in the report considers the counterintelligence implications:

The most significant matter raised in the Counterintelligence Field Activity's report was the possibility that Mr. "Ghorbanifar of his associates are being used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to leverage his continuing contact with Michael Ledeen and others to reach into and influence the highest leveles of the U.S. Government." The report noted that there were multiple occasions where information from Mr. Ghorbanifar entered U.S. Government channels via Mr. Ledeen. These channels included personnel from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CIA, DoD, the White House, and Congress. As a result, Mr. Ghorbanifar was able to communicate with US Government officials via Mr. Ledeen without having direct contact. While the report concluded that Mr. Ledeen was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar, their association was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know.

Exploiting opposition figures in this way would be a classic intelligence ploy.

A new encounter with an old standpoint

The website of Standpoint, the new magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, is now live. In his inaugural column, editor Daniel Johnson highlights the magazine's neoconservative credentials:

“When you have a good idea, start a magazine.” This, according to our board member Gertrude Himmelfarb, is the motto of her husband Irving Kristol. In a long and fruitful life, he has started three. (Their son Bill has started one, too.) The first was Encounter, which Kristol co-founded with the late Stephen Spender in 1953. It was a transatlantic monthly in which the intellectuals of the free world could debate with one another and their communist counterparts. To write for Encounter was a privilege.

Johnson doesn't mention it explicitly, but it is, of course, well-known that Encounter was founded and financed by the CIA as part of its psychological warfare strategy during the early cold war. According to historian Hugh Wilford, the magazine's "greatest achievement was in creating 'a certain kind of intellectual-cultural milieu' in which American and European interests came to appear as if they were identical."

Commies, Commies everywhere

Back in January I suggested that Martin Bright's knocking documentary on Ken Livingstone was connected to his relationship with Policy Exchange.

Well now Livingstone is gone and Boris Watch informs us that Policy Exchange is firmly ensconced at City Hall:

During the electoral campaign, Boris was aided by Dan Ritterband, a one-time director of Policy Exchange, and soon after his victory, Nicholas Boles, the founder of the organisation, was named as the mayor’s Chief of Staff. Boles was, the Observer reported, ‘asked to help the new mayor find the right staff’, and one of his first appointments was Munira Mirza - an employee of Policy Exchange - as Director of Policy, Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries. Ritterband, meanwhile, maintained his position among Boris’s advisers.

Given the way Livingstone was red-baited over his Socialist Action advisers, it is particularly ironic that Johnson should have appointed Mirza, who was formerly involved with the Manifesto Club, an organisation associated with the the Living Marxism/Revolutionary Communist Party network. Splintered Sunrise has some interesting thoughts on the parallels between Socialist Action and the RCP.

For my money, the classic example of an upwardly mobile Marxist or ex-Marxist clique is the Lovestoneite faction which started out in the American Communist Party and ended up working with James Angleton and the CIA. The key Lovestoneite figure in Britain was Roy Godson, father of Policy Exchange's Dean Godson.

The rise of neoconservatism marks to a significant extent, the emergence of a post-Marxist movement as a dominant strain on the right. It seems not everyone involved in promoting neoconservatism understands that.

The Al Yamamah oil fund

Very interesting thread on Sic Semper Tyrannis about the US investigation into BAE:

the biggest aspect of the BAE/"Al Yamamah" story is the offshore fund. To summarize: BAE delivered about $40 billion in arms and services to Saudi Arabia. BAE padded the bills substantially, up to nearly $80 billion. The pad was used, in part, to bribe Saudi officials who helped swing the deal, including Bandar and Prince Turki bin-Khaled, a top official of the Saudi Ministry of Defense. That part is fully detailed in the Guardian and other British coverage of the BAE scandal, going back three or four years. What is not covered in the British press is the fact that Saudi Arabia paid for the arms with oil. The oil was sold on the spot market, and this generated an estimated (in current dollars) $160 billion in cash. I am told by former U.S. Treasury Department officials that the funds generated from the oil sales, after BAE got their cut, went into offshore bank accounts.

As Jamie notes at Blood and Treasure there's not a lot of evidence offered, but the allegation about the oil fund has come up before. In his book In the Public Interest, the former chairman of Astra, Gerald James, highlights a partially blacked out memo that was sent to Jeff Rooker MP, which suggested some of the funds found their way to the Conservative Party.

"Cheap propaganda tricks" - The neocons on Obama

Tony Karon points us to a remarkable attack on Barack Obama by Edward Luttwak in the New York Times:

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive). (New York Times)

Luttwak reckons this would 'compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism.'

Pat Lang suggests that this argument doesn't pass the smell test:

The drumbeat against Iran

Spinwatch has a new blog by former US Air force Colonel Sam Gardiner. In his latest piece, Gardiner picks up on the recent Sunday Times article suggesting the US is planning to hit training camps in Iran.

Meanwhile at Sic Semper Tyrannis, Col Pat Lang picks up the same paper's report that Sir John Scarlett is due to meet with Mossad.

In the comments, londanium offers a word of caution:

It's called propaganda, it crops up whenever US aircraft carrier groups cross over during their rotation into and out of the fifth fleet area, and at sundry other points in the diplomatic schedule ( ie IAEA board meetings, EU-Iran sessions, UNSC P5 meetings to discuss the Iran dossier/further sanctions ).

The Friedman unit is truly the default measure of US historical and current affairs amnesia.

That might fit with the more hopeful interpretation offered recently by Jim Lobe:

some analysts believe that Petraeus' promotion to Centcom was actually engineered by Gates and Mullen not only because he is likely to enjoy exceptional influence with Bush, but also because, despite his championship by neoconservative hawks, they consider him a fellow-realist who shares the conviction that war with Iran would be a major strategic error.

Postscript: The optimistic scenario here doesn't exclude one worrying possibilty, a proxy conflict in Lebanon.

Wendy's u-turn

OurKingdom has my thoughts on Wendy Alexander's decison to come out in favour of a Scottish Independence referendum:

Her actions were widely seen as sidelining the Calman Commission, which was largely her creation. However, It now looks as if any referendum is likely to come after the Commission has reported. It’s proposals will be crucial to the unionist case. That is a powerful incentive to offer Scotland as much autonomy as possible, rather than risk losing the union altogether.

Alexander's move prompted some interesting exchanges at Holyrood today.