Exclusive Extracts From 'Dial M for Murdoch'

If this is anything to go by, then the book should be a good read.

Exclusive extracts from 'Dial M for Murdoch'
Tom Watson
20 April 2012

Few people have done so much to force the News International phone hacking scandal into the public eye as Tom Watson, the Labour MP. Here, in exclusive extracts from a sensational new book (written with The Independent's Martin Hickman), he reveals how he and other members of the Commons select committee were targeted by a media empire that, he claims, ruthlessly discouraged unwelcome attention




Watson told yesterday's launch of Dial M for Murdoch that the News of the World's former chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, had "targeted" MPs who were investigating News International's activities. The tale begins in July 2009...

Unbeknown to members of the Culture Committee, the NOTW established a team to investigate their private lives. For several days, as chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck would later tell Tom Watson, reporters searched for any secret lovers or extra-marital affairs that could be used as leverage against the MPs.
Thurlbeck said: "All I know is that, when the DCMS [Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee] was formed or rather when it got onto all the hacking stuff, there was an edict came down from the editor and it was find out every single thing you can about every single member: who was gay, who had affairs, anything we can use.
"Each reporter was given two members and there were six reporters that went on for around 10 days. I don't know who looked at you. It fell by the wayside; I think even Ian Edmondson [the news editor] realised there was something quite horrible about doing this."
Separately, a NOTW figure tasked with talking to Watson and other committee members to glean their question plan let them know that Rebekah Brooks believed Watson and [fellow MP Paul Farrelly] were the inquiry's "ringleaders". Watson was privately told by Downing Street insiders that Wapping was using its connections to persuade senior politicians to urge him to hold back.
Gordon Brown called Watson to tell him that Rupert Murdoch had phoned Tony Blair to tell him to call Watson off.
The book claims that Mr Blair has denied this, with Gordon Brown saying he cannot remember the phone call to Watson. Mr Blair's spin doctor Alastair Campbell remembered intimidation, however...
Speaking three years later, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former communications director, recalled the "bullying culture": "I recall Rebekah Wade telling me that so far as she was concerned, with Tom Watson it's personal, and we won't stop till we get him...."
As the committee continued its work, News International had another assignment for a surveillance expert who had worked for the NOTW since 2003, Derek Webb, whose firm was called Silent Shadow.
The former policeman had legally watched dozens of pop stars, footballers and royals. In 2005 he had followed Angelina Jolie, Delia Smith, Gordon Ramsay and the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke (whose responsibilities included the police); in 2006 George Michael and the comedian Rik Mayall; and in 2007, the Duke of Westminster. Typically, his work would involve tailing a target for five days and noting down where they had gone and who they had met.
From 28 September until 2 October 2009, at the last Labour Party conference before the general election, Webb was ordered to follow the every move of Tom Watson. He had difficulty tracking the MP down. Ironically, on the first night, 28 September, Webb would have been more successful had he phoned the NOTW's political editor, Ian Kirby, who had spent the night drinking with Watson, the Sunday Mirror's Vincent Moss and the Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire in the bar of Brighton's Grand Hotel, where they sang songs round the piano until the early hours.
Tight security because of the presence of the Cabinet made following Watson difficult, but Webb billed the paper £1,125 for seven and a half shifts. Before and after following Watson (who was unaware of the surveillance) he tailed Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary.
The MPs had no knowledge of what NI was doing behind their backs. In January 2010 the committee decided that it wanted to hear from Rebekah Brooks, who was by then chief executive of NI...
The MPs decided they should hear from Brooks herself and asked her to give evidence. In a letter to John Whittingdale on 4 January 2010, she contemptuously dismissed the invitation to answer questions about the "supposed incongruity" between the treatment of Clive Goodman and Matt Driscoll, the "For Neville" email and misbehaviour by News International journalists, which, she said, related to the News of the World, not to other News International newspapers "any more than they do to any other national newspapers".
She asked whether the committee intended to call chief executives of other newspaper groups, said that the News of the World's editor had outlined the measures to end improper behaviour and that as chief executive she would "ensure the proper journalistic standards continue to be applied across all our titles"...
Although the committee wanted Brooks to give evidence, its members, whose private lives News International had pored over, capitulated and decided not to summon her. On the day the committee met to discuss the issue, two Labour MPs close to Tony Blair, Janet Anderson and Rosemary McKenna, were absent. The gay Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price – who in September unexpectedly announced that he would leave Parliament at the next general election to take up a Fulbright scholarship in the US – claimed that the committee's members had been warned that if they had called Brooks, their private lives would be raked over.
Mr Price said later: "I was told by a senior Conservative member of the committee, who I knew was in direct contact with executives at News International, that if we went for her, they would go for us – effectively they would delve into our personal lives in order to punish [us]."
The mystery phone call that led to a hidden trove of email evidence
In 2008, Max Mosley, the former head of motorsport's world governing body, and the son of the 1930s British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, won a landmark privacy case against the 'News of the World'. A story had been published in the Sunday tabloid, written by Neville Thurlbeck, falsely accused him of taking part in a "sick Nazi orgy" which had been secretly photographed. The story appeared with pictures of Mr Mosley indulging in what was claimed to be a five-hour sadomasochistic sex session with prostitutes.
'Dial M for Murdoch' explains how Max Mosley's extraordinary next move – and a phone call from a stranger to Tom Watson – blew open the criminal wrongdoing at News International...
Two years after he had been turned over by the News of the World, Max Mosley was about to strike again. During the summer of 2010, from Monaco, he had been taking an ever closer interest in the phone hacking story and had become determined to ensure the police would not be able to cover up the Screws' seedy past.
He had started talking to Nick Davies at The Guardian and had also acquired a highly confidential source, Mr X, who had told him that Scotland Yard was holding extensive evidence about hacking at the NOTW. Mosley decided the best way to intensify the pressure was through cases in the civil courts which, through disclosure, would unlock the secrets of Mulcaire's files. But there was a problem: money. Under English law, litigants could be liable for costs, which could be crippling, and were often a severe deterrent to potential litigants.
Mosley agreed to underwrite the risk for several claimants, in both the emerging civil privacy cases against the News of the World and in the judicial review against Scotland Yard being coordinated by Tamsin Allen at Bindmans. If the cases were lost, his costs could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, but Mosley was a multimillionaire.
He had decided he would risk half his fortune, if necessary, to fight Rupert Murdoch; ordinarily that half would have gone to one of his two sons, Alexander, but he was a regular drug user and had died of cocaine intoxication in May 2009. By early 2008 Alexander had temporarily managed to come off drugs but the News of the World's exposure of his father's sado-masochism had devastated him and was, his father believed, a contributory factor in his death. On 12 September, five days before Mosley returned to London at the end of his presidency of the FIA, Allen began judicial review against the Met at the High Court on behalf of Chris Bryant, Brian Paddick and Brendan Montague; they were joined a week later by John Prescott.
Sitting in his London mews house in Kensington in 2011, Mosley said: "I saw it as a much bigger thing than giving the News of the World a bit of their own back, or privacy generally, because I feel the Murdoch empire is a really sinister presence undermining the whole of our democracy. They are capable of suborning the police, Parliament and the government." He suspected the police had been reluctant to inform the victims "because they knew damn well there would be writs flying down to the High Court and their friends in Wapping would be upset".
In a memo to the Home Affairs Committee that was sent in October 2010, the lawyer Mark Lewis suggested several reasons why the police might not have properly investigated hacking in 2006, including a lack of resources, high-priority terrorism cases – and the closeness of the relationship between senior officers and News of the World executives. With the benefit of legal privilege over parliamentary affairs, he speculated whether the two officers who had said there were few victims, Andy Hayman and John Yates – both of whose own phones had been hacked – had been fearful of press coverage.
Lewis wrote: at the relevant time, Mr Hayman had reason to fear that he was a target of Glenn Mulcaire and the News of the World. It became public knowledge that throughout the period of the investigation into voicemail hacking, Mr Hayman was involved in a controversial relationship with a woman who worked for the Independent Police Complaints Commission and was claiming expenses which were subsequently regarded as unusually high. The same, of course, is also true of John Yates who, we now know, at the time when he responded to The Guardian's stories about Gordon Taylor's settlement with News Group, was involved in a controversial relationship with a woman who worked for the Met press bureau.
Lewis offered no evidence that the officers' behaviour towards the News of the World had been unduly influenced by fear, and Yates and Hayman both later denied that their conduct had been compromised by their relationships. With pressure building on the Met, News International became ever more determined to marginalise those making its life uncomfortable.
On 27 December [2010], high up in the peaks of the Yorkshire and Derbyshire border, a phone call transformed Watson's mood. Over previous weeks, a new source had been tantalisingly close to revealing important information. The source, who had very detailed knowledge of the information technology architecture of News Corp around the world, contradicted Watson's belief that data had been lost irrevocably.
As they talked for over an hour, Watson frantically wrote notes on small pieces of paper in his pockets, taking the names of the senior IT people and those that had recently left. He probed the contact while trying not to betray his increasing sense of euphoria.
Back in 2005 when Mulcaire and Goodman were conspiring to hack phones, the company bosses felt they were untouchable. They had politicians and police in their pockets, and they had no "predators"; Watson's logic was that with that level of power you would feel invulnerable – and if you thought yourself invulnerable, you would become complacent and make mistakes. He already knew that Brooks was complacent with her digital fingerprints because of the text message about him which she had sent in April 2009 to someone close to the Prime Minister. If others shared her arrogance, there would be a rich source of information on that second server that the police could use to crack the case. He did not know at that point that data had been or was being destroyed. But just as he had been losing hope, this new discovery reinvigorated him.
How lawyer stumbled on Soham scandal
Under conditions of secrecy in a windowless room at Scotland Yard, victims could inspect the notes about them, though they were not allowed to photograph or copy them. As the actress Leslie Ash and her husband Lee Chapman read Glenn Mulcaire's references to them [early in 2011], they accidentally discovered the "News of the World" had targeted Leslie Chapman – who was not Leslie Ash using her husband's surname, but the father of one of the two children killed at Soham in 2002.
The abduction and murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, at the hands of school caretaker Ian Huntley, horrified the public.
Charlotte Harris, the couple's lawyer, recalled: "Leslie Chapman's papers were in front of us and the police were saying of the address: 'Yeah, well it's Fulham,' but it wasn't a Fulham postcode and I was looking at it, and being so familiar with Glenn Mulcaire's handwriting, I said: 'It doesn't say "Fulham", it says "Soham".'" Independent

A Journey Through a Remarkable Mind: Phil Hellenes

Although I have tried previously to put into words where we, the human ape, fit into the world and what we have managed to achieve as a species, it was only as a bi-line to another story, rather than, in the case of Phil Hellenes, a dedicated attempt to explain our place in the grand scheme of things.

Nevertheless, and not for the first time, Phil Hellenes has somehow managed to take my own jumbled thoughts and philosophy and present them in a far eloquent argument than I could ever do.

Unlike many of his other slick, professional offerings, it was on this occasion, the lowly webcam that caught my attention. But no less a message it must be said, than in other previous and more "professional" Phil Hellenes productions; examples posted below.

Perhaps I might ask you to read my half a page on the subject before listening to the Philosophy of Phil Hellenes, it would put the whole thing in context.




Some previous productions.









More philhellenes

Below, from a different uploader, is another short clip that hit the right spot in me.




Courtesy of Notinmyname

Don't Fuck With Our Fucking Village Signs You Fucking Fucks

We've F*****g had enough': Fed-up residents in Austrian village named Fucking to vote to change name

Village set to change name to Fuking or Fugging in bid to stop pranksters stealing signs and poking fun at residents
17 Apr 2012

Residents of a picture postcard Austrian village named Fucking are to vote this week about whether to change the name.

The final straw has been a growing number of calls by pranksters from abroad who ring up locals and ask in English "Is That Fucking" - before bursting into laughter and hanging up.




"The phone calls are really the final straw", said local Mayor Franz Meindl, who confirmed that the villages street signs were regularly stolen even though they had been welded on steel posts set in concrete in the ground.

Drivers heading into the village often disturbed naked couples romping in front of the signs, and local entrepreneurs made the situation worse by flogging off Fucking postcards - Fucking Christmas cards and even more recently a Fucking beer.

Residents last voted on the subject in 1996 when it decided to keep the name despite problems caused by American servicemen from across the border in Germany that drove to the region just to be photographed in front of signs. They then sent the snaps back home to their girlfriends and wives.

If the name change goes ahead, they will be following in the footsteps of stadium bosses in Switzerland who were forced to change their name from Wankdorf because red-faced stars were too embarrassed to play there.

The name of the venue - in Bern - was changed to Stade de Suisse after concert dates dried up. One of the few who did not cancel was Robbie Williams who played in front of 40,000 fans and asked the crowd: "Is this place really called ‘Wankdorf’? What kind of name is that?"

The name is taken from a neighbourhood in Bern and comes from the word 'Wank' meaning to sway or rock from side to side and 'Dorf' meaning village. But the Wankdorf shopping centre next door to the stadium kept it's name - and the Swiss village of Wank also kept its name. In fact two years ago Wank residents urged the Fucking residents to lighten up - open a few guests houses and sell souvenirs to cash in on their fame.

The Wank Guest House, they said, was full all year round.

But the suggestion failed to win any supporters among the 100 residents of the village of Fucking, who are so fed up that they are this week gathering in the village hall to decide whether to change the spelling of Fucking to either 'Fuking' or 'Fugging'.

Historians have found that in the 16th Century Fucking was spelled with g instead of ck and many want this to be reinstated.

Local mayor Franz Meindl added: "I always wanted the name to stay but it's just got too much now. The only problem is that we need all of the Fucking residents to agree to the name change, everyone needs to agree for it to happen.

"As you can imagine there are heated discussions about the name change."

If the name change does go ahead there will still be plenty to amuse the pranksters when Fucking vanishes.

Also available on the online Austrian telephone book are the villages of "Oberfucking" "Windpassing", "Wankham" and "Rottenegg". Mirror

Jack Straw to Face Civil Action Over Rendition

Jack Straw faces legal action over Libya rendition claims

Libyan commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj takes legal action against former foreign secretary, alleging complicity in his torture
Ian Cobain
18 April 2012

A former Libyan dissident who was abducted and flown to one of Muammar Gaddafi's prisons in a so-called rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 has started legal proceedings against Jack Straw, who was British foreign secretary at the time.

Lawyers representing Abdel Hakim Belhaj confirmed on Wednesday that they had served papers on Straw alleging his complicity in the torture that Belhaj subsequently suffered, as well as misfeasance in public office.

Straw is already facing the prospect of being questioned by Scotland Yard detectives after an announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service earlier this year that a criminal investigation was being launched into the rendition operation.

Belhaj and his wife are alleging that Straw was complicit in the "torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, batteries and assaults" that they say were perpetrated on them by Thai and US agents, as well as Libyan authorities.

They are seeking damages from Straw for the trauma they suffered.

Documents discovered in an abandoned Libyan government office last September outlined the role that MI6 – and in particular its head of counterterrorism, Mark Allen – played in providing the intelligence that allowed the CIA to detain Belhaj and his pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, in Bangkok in March 2004.

Last week Bouchar told the Guardian how how she was chained to a wall for five days in a secret prison in Bangkok before being taped from head to foot and secured to a stretcher for the 17-hour flight to Tripoli.

Significantly, MI6 did not deny involvement when the documents were discovered: instead, well-placed Whitehall sources insisted the agency's actions were part of "ministerially-authorised government policy".

There were reports at the weekend that MI6 confronted Straw with evidence that he was the minister who personally authorised the operation. This is said to have happened after Straw gave a radio interview last year in which he sought to distance himself from the affair, telling listeners that "no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time".

Those reports triggered the decision by Belhaj's lawyers to serve legal papers on the former foreign secretary. Those papers also demand that Straw disclose documents relating to the rendition of a second Libyan dissident, Sami al-Saadi, who was abducted and flown to Libya a few days after Belhaj, along with his wife and four children.

Although Belhaj's lawyers have already launched proceedings against the British government, the latest action is against Straw personally, and is thought to be the first time proceedings of this kind have been taken against a former foreign secretary.

Sapna Malik of the London law firm firm Leigh Day said: "We have said all along that liability must follow the chain of command. These latest revelations bring us closer to that goal. If the former foreign secretary does not now own up to his role in this extraordinary affair, he will need to face the prospect of trying to defend his position in court."

Cori Crider of the legal charity Reprieve, which is also representing the two men, said: "When scandals like this break, the political paymasters almost never face the music. For once, there's a chance things might be different.

"We've said from the start that the minister responsible for this mess needed to admit their role. Now that we seem to know who it was, it's time for Jack Straw to account – and atone – for what he did."

Contacted on Wednesday, Straw said he had nothing to add to comments he made during the radio interview.

MI6 regularly requests foreign secretaries to "disapply" UK law in order to protect its officers from being prosecuted or sued in the UK as a result of their operations overseas. The authorisations can be signed only by secretaries of state, and do not offer any protection for those politicians.

Last week Tony Blair also faced renewed questions about the abduction of Belhaj and his wife. He replied that he had "no recollection" of the matter. Gruniad

Previous on the rendition story: Rendition and Torture R Us: ‘We didn’t support rendition as far as I know.’ Tony Blair

And it's not as though Straw was any stranger to Libya. After weeks of denial that there no UK trade deals linked to the release of the Lockerbie, well guess what? Jack Straw: Porkies

Read through the London riots part to reach Straw's involvement in the invasion of Iraq. The UK Riots and the Criminality of Jack Straw

Tell The Truth About Islam by Pat Condell

I might easily have passed on posting this, Pat Condell's video that is, the rest of the post coming later. Passed on it I may well have but for Pat making mention, much unlike the BBC, that the perpetrators of crimes against women are generically tagged Asian rather than what they really are, Islamic males.

The video in question first, and then just one story of many, but further links, all courtesy of Pat Condell, below that.

BBC reveals huge scale of honour attacks in Britain, fails to mention the word “Islam”

At least 2,823 people, mainly vulnerable young women, were brutalised in Britain last year by members of their family. But BBC report censors out the key information
by Robin Shepherd
3 December 2011

All right. I’m not going to make this difficult. The families giving the orders, as well as the victims, are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, Muslim. Surprised? No, of course you’re not. Honour attacks ranging in brutality from beatings to murder are commonplace in many parts of the Muslim world.

Since Britain, like many other European countries, has imported sizeable Muslim communities, which are to a significant degree unassimilated, the cultural practices of the old country have survived the transition to the new.

Finally, the figure of 2,823 attacks is almost certainly a gross under-estimate since, apart from anything else, it is drawn from only 39 of 52 UK police forces.

Got it? In just over 150 words (including title and summary) you now know all the basic information, and as intelligent, informed citizens you can have a discussion on what to do about it. That’s what journalism is for.

Propaganda, on the other hand, is intended for something else. It is designed to present a politically charged narrative held to with a fanaticism that will allow no mention of facts that contradict it. It is thus deliberately intended to lower the quality of the discussion by erasing key pieces of information.

Enter the BBC, (Link fundamental to this story and post in general*) which reported on the matter in a lengthy, 700-plus word article and failed to mention the words “Muslim”, “Islamic” or “Islam” even once.

As I write this I am flicking back to the story itself so I can double check using the Find function. Could I be mistaken?

Here goes: “Islamic”? “No Matches”. “Muslim”? “No Matches”. “Islam”? “No Matches”. More

* I have previously featured the killing of Banaz Mahmod and Banaz's older sister Bekhal. Bekhal Mahmod: Living In Fear Tagged Women in Islam

Inquiry demanded into "anti-Islam press"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/23/inquiry-into-anti-islam-press

'Honour' attack numbers revealed by UK police forces
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16014368

(Story posted above) BBC reveals huge scale of honour attacks in Britain, fails to mention the word "Islam"
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/699/bbc_reveals_huge_scale_of_honour_at...

Muslim "men" filmed rape of schoolgirl
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/uk-england-leeds-17439129

Muslims blocking the street to pray
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096263/The-Mecca-city-In-London-stre...

Islamist stops university debate with threats of violence
http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2012/01/islamist-stops-university-debate-wi...

London School of Economics passes anti-blasphemy law
http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2802/london-school-of-economics-blasphemy

University campuses are 'hotbeds of Islamic extremism'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8478975/University-campuses-are-hotb...

Sharia law and middle class feminism
http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2012/03/sharia-law-and-middle-class-feminism

3500 girls at risk of genital mutilation in London
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/3500-girls-are-at-risk-of-mutilation-in-th...

British girls undergo horror of genital mutilation despite tough laws
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/25/female-circumcision-children-br...

Rise in female genital mutilation in London
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11053375

Muslim staff escaped NHS hygiene rule
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/7576357/Muslim-staff-escape-NHS-hygiene-rule....

Child abuse claims at UK madrassas 'tip of iceberg'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15256764

Thinktank issues new report on madrassas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/nov/28/madrasa-teachers-crb-check-sa...

Girls forced into marriage at the age of nine
http://www.islingtontribune.com/news/2012/jan/islington-girls-forced-marriage...

Asian communities hampering child sex inquiries
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8594004/Childrens-minister-Asian...

3 Muslims jailed for "death to gays" leaflets
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-16985147

Politically I think there might be a bit of a gap between Pat and myself, but there is absolutely nothing that I could disagree with in Condell's take on culture and the insane face of the atheist/far left.




And what Pat Condell post would be complete without a little burqa rant?




Faceless in the city [protest against burqas] Australia

American Civil War Pictorial

Cletis L Stump, he of Stump Holler fame, has a fascinating collection of American civil war photographs posted on his site, The Book of Cletis.

This series of thirty photographs, are made all the more viewable by being posted full size on his blog.

The CSS Stonewall was a 1,390-ton ironclad built in Bordeaux, France, for the Confederate Navy in 1864. After she crossed the Atlantic, reaching Havana, Cuba, it was already May, 1865, and the war had ended. Spanish Authorities took possession, soon handing it over to the U.S. government.

Part 1

Part 2

Links NFG invited readers only.

Julia Gillard You Are Some Piece of Work

....senior US officials subsequently asked to be “more closely consulted” on future (Australian) FOI releases.

Which I think, puts the whole thing in a nutshell.

Oh! and not forgetting the Greens in all this.

Australian government reinforces conspiracy against Assange
By Mike Head
12 April 2012

In the lead-up to the impending UK Supreme Court decision on the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Australian Labor government has taken several steps that underscore its close involvement in the global operation against him by the Obama administration. Far from protecting any of the basic legal rights of Assange—an Australian citizen—the Gillard government is doing everything it can to help Washington railroad him to jail and silence WikiLeaks.

According to WikiLeaks, Britain’s highest court is expected to hand down its decision next week. Assange has appealed against rulings by lower courts to extradite him to Sweden to be questioned by a prosecutor on concocted and baseless sexual assault charges. Despite not being charged with a single offence, he has now spent nearly 500 days under house arrest.

The UK court is Assange’s last legal avenue of appeal in Britain. If he loses the case he can be removed to Sweden within days, where he could be held in solitary confinement for months. From there, he is set to be extradited to the United States, where he was indicted by a secret Grand Jury in December 2010. Under the reactionary Espionage Act of 1917, Assange could face lengthy imprisonment or the death penalty.

Even if Assange succeeds in his UK appeal, the US authorities are likely to unseal the Grand Jury indictment and seek his extradition direct to the US—assisted by the Australian government.

Evidently acting at the behest of the US, the Gillard government has blocked a freedom of information (FOI) application for the release of diplomatic cables between Canberra and Washington that could reveal their intimate collaboration in the drive to frame-up Assange.

Late last month, the Australian Foreign Affairs Department delayed any release of the cables until at least late May—well after the UK appeal has been decided. In a letter to the FOI authorities, the department said some of the cables were “highly classified” and “working out precisely where the sensitivities lie” would be “an involved, complex task.”

The department stated that it had yet to finalise consultation with the prime minister’s department and had not begun discussions with US authorities, a process expected to take at least four to six weeks. Such “consultations” will veto the release of any information that could further shed light on the conspiracy against Assange.

Last December, Fairfax newspapers used FOI laws to obtain cables that showed Canberra was fully aware, in December 2010, that WikiLeaks was the target of an “unprecedented” investigation to determine whether Assange could be charged under US law.

Concerned by this politically damaging disclosure, Washington stepped in. According to Age and Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Philip Dorling, Australian government sources said senior US officials subsequently asked to be “more closely consulted” on future FOI releases.

At the end of February, also acting in concert with the White House, the Gillard government secured the passage of legislation that would cut off any attempt by Assange to avoid extradition to the US by returning to Australia if he wins the UK appeal.

With virtually no coverage in the media, the Extradition and Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation Amendment Act 2012 was rubberstamped in the Senate on February 28. The most critical provision allows the government to override restrictions on extraditing people accused of “political offences” against foreign governments.

Previously, extradition had to be refused if the alleged crime was political in nature. Now “terrorist”-related offences will no longer be exempt from extradition. This provision could well be used against Assange. US Vice President Joseph Biden has described Assange as a “high tech terrorist,” a charge repeated by others.

The amendments to the Australian Extradition Act further permit the government to introduce regulations, with little public scrutiny, to do likewise for other offences, such as espionage or sedition.

These changes were foreshadowed last November by Jeffrey Bleich, the US Ambassador to Australia. Asked by Sydney Morning Herald journalist Anne Davies whether the US would expect Australia to extradite him if he returned home, he replied: “We will have to see whether there is an offence against any person, and Australia will have to evaluate its own extradition obligations.”

The extradition changes are part of the Labor government’s broader attacks on basic legal and political rights. The amendments expedite the extradition process and make it easier for Canberra to authorise extraditions that could lead to torture, abuse or the death penalty. They also allow the government to domestically prosecute people, like Assange and former Guantánamo Bay detainee David Hicks, accused of crimes in the US.

It should be noted that the Greens, who provide the minority Gillard government with the votes it needs to remain in office, voted for the extradition legislation. Despite posturing in the past as defenders of Assange, Greens Senators raised no objection to the pivotal “political offences” changes that could be utilised against him.

In an attempt to justify its complicity in the Assange witch hunt, the government has reiterated Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s unsubstantiated and highly prejudicial allegations that Assange and WikiLeaks acted illegally in publishing thousands of secret diplomatic cables from the US and other countries.

Late last month, responding to a letter from a citizen challenging the government’s role, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon’s representative insisted that the government’s concern was the “reckless, irresponsible and potentially dangerous” practice of making “unauthorised disclosure of classified material.”

This accusation, which insinuates that Assange is guilty of espionage, follows the line firmly set by Gillard from the outset. Just as the Grand Jury was being secretly convened, Gillard branded the WikiLeaks publication of US cables as “illegal” and instigated an investigation by the intelligence and police agencies to unearth whatever material they could find for use against Assange.

The real source of the fury in Washington and Canberra is that the documents published by WikiLeaks have exposed the US-led war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other crimes, conspiracies and machinations perpetrated by governments around the world. Millions of people have been able to see how assassinations, invasions, wars, coups, renditions and other acts of aggression and repression are organised by the imperialist powers, including Australia. WSWS.org

Rendition and Torture R Us: ‘We didn’t support rendition as far as I know.’ Tony Blair

Nice, real nice, makes me proud to be British.

Special report: Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials

In 2004, Fatima Bouchar and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, were detained en route to the UK, and rendered to Libya. This is the story of their imprisonment, and the trail of evidence that reveals the involvement of the British government
Ian Cobain
8 April 2012

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn't stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. "My left eye was closed when the tape was applied," she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. "But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony." The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi's prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar's case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar's husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.

This year, the Crown Prosecution Service announced police had launched an investigation into the "alleged rendition and alleged ill-treatment" of Bouchar and Belhaj, and a second operation in which a Libyan family of six were flown to one of Gaddafi's prisons.

It appears inevitable that Scotland Yard's detectives will want to question the man who was foreign secretary at the time – Jack Straw.

Ten years before Bouchar's abduction and rendition, many of her husband's associates had been permitted to settle in Britain. These men were members of al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah fi-Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an organisation formed in the early 1990s and dedicated to Gaddafi's removal. The LIFG was not banned in the UK, and its members appear to have found the country a convenient place to gather and raise funds. There were even reports – officially denied – that MI6 encouraged the LIFG in an unsuccessful attempt on the dictator's life.

But from 2002 the UK ceased to be such a safe haven for the LIFG. The US and UK governments were beginning to repair their relations with Gaddafi, a rapprochement that would soon see him abandon his WMD programme and open his country's oil and gas reserves to western corporations.

Held by armed police

One Thursday evening in November that year, a 36-year-old LIFG member who was living in London was arrested by armed police as he attempted to board a flight at Heathrow. He was told he was being detained under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act, a piece of legislation that had been rushed on to the statute books within weeks of 9/11, and which allowed the British government to detain international terrorism suspects without trial. From that moment the man was anonymised, by court order – in part to protect his relatives in Libya – and could be referred to only as "M".

When M had arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker eight years earlier, he had readily told Special Branch detectives that he was a member of the LIFG. On his arrest at Heathrow he insisted that the organisation had no connection with international terrorism and was concerned only with the removal of Gaddafi. After being detained at Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London, M appealed to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), a tribunal that allows the government to give evidence in secret, unseen by the appellant or the appellant's lawyers.

In March 2004, M became the first and only person detained under the act to win an appeal at SIAC. The tribunal accepted that there were no links between LIFG and al-Qaida, and criticised the Home Office for its "consistent exaggeration" of M's alleged links with members of al-Qaida. As the law permitted only "international terrorists" to be detained without trial, and not domestic insurgents, M was set free. A few days after SIAC's decision, notice was passed to the Home Office and MI5, and Fatima Bouchar and her husband were detained in Bangkok.

Bouchar's husband made no secret of being a leading member of the LIFG. That year, the couple had left China, where they had been living in exile, and attempted to travel to the UK via Malaysia. When they were detained in Kuala Lumpur and questioned about Belhaj's false Iraqi passport, an acquaintance went to the British high commission to explain that the couple were attempting to reach London. Shortly after this, they were told that they would be permitted to travel to the UK on a BA flight, despite not having EU passports or UK visas. But when the aircraft stopped off at Bangkok, the pair were detained and taken to a US-run detention facility.

It was known that the CIA had been operating a secret prison in Thailand since 9/11, but its precise location was unknown. Bouchar and Belhaj arrived there within minutes of being detained, suggesting that it was located within the perimeter of Don Muang international airport. They were immediately separated.

Belhaj says he was blindfolded, hooded, forced to wear ear defenders, and hung from hooks in his cell wall for what seemed to be hours. He says he was severely beaten. The ear defenders were removed only for him to be blasted with loud music, he says, or when he was interrogated by his US captors.

Bouchar says that when she was dragged away from her husband she feared he was going to be killed. "I thought: 'This is it.' I thought I would never see my husband again ... They took me into a cell, and they chained my left wrist to the wall and both my ankles to the floor. I could sit down but I couldn't move. There was a camera in the room, and every time I tried to move they rushed in. But there was no real communication. I wasn't questioned." Bouchar found it difficult to comprehend how she could be treated in this way: she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. "They knew I was pregnant," she says. "It was obvious." She says she was given water while chained up, but no food whatsoever. She was chained to the wall for five days. At the end of this period she was taped to the stretcher and put aboard the aircraft, unaware of where she was going or whether her husband was on board. At one point the aircraft landed, remained on the ground for a short period and then took off again. Only when it landed a second time did she hear a man grunting with pain, and realise her husband was nearby.

Belhaj says he had been shackled to the floor of the plane, with his hands chained to his feet in a manner that made it impossible either to sit or lie down. Sometimes his grunts would be met with a kick; on other occasions, he says, a cushion would be placed under his elbows, giving him temporary respite before it was taken away again.

The plane touched down at Tripoli with its cargo still trussed up; a gift, apparently, to the regime they had hoped to overthrow. The pair were driven separately to Tajoura prison, east of the city, and Bouchar was led to a cell where she would spend the next four months. Initially, she was interrogated for around five hours a day. "At one point a cot was brought in the cell along with some baby clothes, nappies, a bed cover and a baby bath," she says. "I really thought I was going to have to have my baby there, and that we would both be held there.

Bouchar was released shortly before giving birth to a son, apparently because word of her husband's capture had reached the outside world. Belhaj was brought to her cell for a few moments, and then she was set free, though not permitted to leave the country.

Two weeks after the couple were rendered to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, embracing Gaddafi and declaring that Libya had recognised "a common cause, with us, in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism". At the same time, in London, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

Three days after that, a second leading LIFG member, Abu Munthir al-Saadi, was bundled aboard a plane in Hong Kong and taken to Tripoli in a joint British-Libyan rendition operation. Saadi's wife and four children were also kidnapped and taken to Libya. The youngest was a girl aged six. The family was incarcerated at Tajoura for more than two months before being released. Saadi and Belhaj were held for more than six years, however, and say they were subjected to torture throughout this time.

At one point, they say, early in their incarceration, they were interrogated by British intelligence officers after being tortured by the Libyan captors. These visitors wanted to learn more about LIFG members living in the UK. The two men say their torturers had made clear that their treatment would improve if they told the British that these LIFG activists were linked with al-Qaida: something that SIAC had ruled, just weeks earlier, was not the case.

The role that MI6 played in arranging the rendition of these two Libyan dissidents and their families is now well known, thanks to a discovery made last September by Peter Bouckaert, a director with Human Rights Watch, inside the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's foreign minister and former intelligence chief. Bouckaert found a file containing hundreds of secret letters and faxes that MI6 and the CIA had sent to Koussa during the early days of the rapprochement between Libya and the west. Among them were a series of documents detailing the 2004 rendition operations.

A close examination of those papers show that a great deal of planning went into the operations, withMI6 informing Koussa's office as early as November 2003 that they were seeking the assistance of Chinese intelligence officers in their attempt to deal with "the Islamic extremist target in China". When MI6 learned that Belhaj was being held in Malaysia under his nom de guerre, Abdullah al-Sadiq, along with his pregnant wife, they were quick to tip off Tripoli.

Notoriously, perhaps, one fax from Mark Allen, then head of counter-terrorism at MI6, congratulated Koussa on the "safe arrival" of Belhaj – "the least we could do for you and for Libya" – and referred to an "amusing" request by the CIA that anything the dissident said under interrogation should be passed first to them.

"I know I did not pay for the air cargo," Allen says: but after all, the intelligence that led to the couple's rendition was British.

Another fax, sent by the CIA two days before Blair's visit, with a cover sheet marked "rendition of Abu Munthir", shows the US to be eager to join and finance that operation after learning that MI6 and Gaddafi's government were about to embark upon it. Also buried away inside the secret document cache is a fax that shows MI6 felt itself not to be bound by the anonymity order imposed after M had been detained under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act in November 2002. The following January, the intelligence service sent Koussa what it described as an MI5 "intelligence resumé", detailing M's full name and date of birth and disclosing that he was an active member of the LIFG. The fax also listed the Libyan telephone numbers called by M. It was being sent, MI6 explained, "for research purposes and analysis purposes".

By piecing together records of air traffic control logs and matching them with a document found in the Tripoli cache, it is possible to trace the route taken by the aircraft that rendered Bouchar and Belhaj from Bangkok to Tripoli in March 2004. There are a couple of surprises along the way. The aircraft was a Boeing 737 with the tail number N313P, operated by a North Carolina company called Aero Contractors, which has been widely reported to be a CIA front.

N313P is now known to have been used in a great many rendition operations: it was one of the aircraft that carried a shackled and hooded Binyam Mohamed, for example.

According to the records of the European air traffic management agency, Eurocontrol, and the Federal Aviation Administration in the US, N313P took off from Dulles airport in Washington DC at 2.51am on 7 March 2004, landing at Misrata in Libya shortly after noon local time. When N313P departed from Misrata, it flew beyond Eurocontrol's area of responsibility, and disappears, temporarily, from its records.

But a flight plan had been prepared by the CIA the previous day, and faxed to Libya, where it was found among the secret cache of letters and faxes recovered from Koussa's office. This document shows that after leaving Libya, the rendition aircraft planned to stay overnight on the Seychelles before continuing to Bangkok. It was then due to leave Bangkok on the evening of 8 March, the date that Bouchar and Belhaj were forced on board an aircraft.The CIA flight plan shows that the aircraft was then due to fly to Tripoli via Diego Garcia, where it would refuel during the early hours of 9 March.

Any evidence that the rendition plane landed on Diego Garcia would be enormously damaging for the British government. Although the remote coral atoll in the Indian Ocean is operated as a US military outpost, it is a British Overseas Territory, and the UK is legally responsible for events there.

The last Labour government was highly sensitive to reports that Diego Garcia played a part in the global rendition programme. Both Blair and Straw insisted on a number of occasions that there was "no evidence" for this. Those assurances proved to be wrong: in February 2008, amid mounting evidence that rendition aircraft had landed on the atoll, David Miliband, one of Straw's successors at the Foreign Office, told the Commons that he was "very sorry indeed" to report that two rendition flights had refuelled there in 2002.

By way of reassurance, Miliband told MPs that no prisoners had been allowed to disembark while the aircraft were refuelled, and that "US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other overseas territory, or through the UK itself, since then".

Diego Garcia question

When the CIA flight plan was recovered from Koussa's office, the Guardian asked the Foreign Office whether the plane carrying Bouchar and Belhaj had indeed stopped off on Diego Garcia, despite Miliband's assurances. The department sought initially to imply that the aircraft had been refused permission to land, but would not answer the question directly. Asked for a yes-or-no answer, a spokeswoman declined.

In any case, by the evening of 9 March, N313P had reappeared on the radar of Eurocontrol. The agency's records show the aircraft landed once more at Misrata airport: the exact place that the CIA flight plan said it would be.

On board were Bouchar, taped to her stretcher, and Belhaj, still shackled in an excruciating stress position at the end of their 17 hour flight.

With its prisoners rendered and the Libyan mission accomplished, N313P left for Palma de Mallorca. Hotel records from the five-star Gran Melia Victoria, a favoured destination for rendition teams, show that the crew of 10 men and three women booked in for two nights of rest and recreation.

Curiously, however, when the aircraft left Palma on the evening of 11 March, it did not return to the US. Instead, it flew east to Baghdad. After less than two hours on the ground in Baghdad, it departed for Kabul. N313P remained in Kabul for 24 hours, then flew back to Washington via Larnaca on Cyprus and Shannon on the west coast of Ireland.

The flight to Kabul appears to coincide with another British-initiated operation, one that saw two more people being subjected to extraordinary rendition, this time from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Yunus Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali were two Pakistani men suspected of having travelled to Iraq to fight for al-Qaida. MI6 is understood to have tracked them as they travelled across Iran and into Iraq, and when they arrived at a house in southern Baghdad, a decision was taken to raid the building, a mission codenamed Operation Aston.

SAS troopers attacked the house in late February, shooting dead two men and capturing several others. After the detainees were handed over to the US military, Rahmatullah and Ali were held at a prison at Baghdad international airport, according to a British military source. Then they were flown to Afghanistan and taken to the US-run prison at Bagram, north of Kabul, a transfer that was in breach of the Geneva conventions. They remain at Bagram today, despite an attempt to secure the release of Rahmatullah by persuading the appeal court in London to grant a habeas corpus writ.

The SAS troops who took part in Operation Aston were members of a joint US-UK special forces task force that rounded up large numbers of people in Iraq, missions in which the US was, on every other occasion, deemed legally to be detaining authority. But former members of the taskforce say Operation Aston was an all-British affair, and they were never sure why.

The Guardian has asked the Foreign Office on several occasions whether N313P flew Rahmatullah and Ali to Afghanistan, but the department has always failed to answer.

The following year, 2005, the LIFG was banned in the UK, and a number of its members, including M, were arrested. The Home Office said it had taken this step because it had come to the conclusion that the group was "part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida". To what extent this assessment drew upon intelligence provided by Gaddafi's government – including statements made by LIFG prisoners under interrogation – remains unclear.

What is becoming clear, however, is that the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Abu Munthir al-Saadi had a number of unintended consequences.

By early 2005, the British government had been forced to conclude that the capture of the more moderate elements among the LIFG leadership, such as Belhaj and al-Saadi, had resulted in a power vacuum that was being filled by men with pan-Islamist ambitions. Among a number of documents found in a second Tripoli cache, at the British ambassador's abandoned residence, was a secret 58-page MI5 briefing paper that said "the extremists are now in the ascendancy," and that they were "pushing the group towards a more pan-Islamic agenda inspired by AQ [al-Qaida]".

The realisation that MI6 had passed M's name and information about his contacts to Gaddafi's notorious intelligence agencies, despite the existence of an order seeking to preserve his anonymity, provoked outrage among lawyers who work within the SIAC system.

There was also dismay at the manner in which the rendition operations were mounted shortly after SIAC had ruled that there were no links between the LIFG and al-Qaida. M's lawyer, Gareth Peirce, believes that to be one of the reasons the two men were taken to Libya. "The UK's complicity in the renditions of Belhaj and Abu Munthir is sickening," Peirce says. "Their synchronisation with the obtaining of perceived missing 'intelligence' for domestic proceedings damns both enterprises equally."

Last December, the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, wrote to the head of Scotland Yard, Bernard Hogan-Howe, drawing his attention to the two rendition operations. A few weeks later the Yard announced it was mounting a criminal investigation, which is continuing.

Meanwhile, no attempt is being made to deny MI6 involvement in the renditions: instead, well-placed sources say the operations were "ministerially authorised government policy". This has led to reports that police will need to interview Jack Straw.

The Guardian has repeatedly put a number of questions about the renditions to Straw, asking whether he authorised the operations and, if not, which minister was responsible; the former foreign secretary has repeatedly declined to answer.

A further consequence is that lawyers representing the rendition victims are suing MI6, MI5, the foreign office, and Mark (now Sir Mark) Allen. Belhaj – who was released from prison along with Saadi in 2010 – led the militia that drove Gaddafi's forces out of Tripoli last year, and is now settled in the city with Bouchar. They embarked on legal proceedings only after the UK government declined to offer them an apology.

Bouchar appears to remain deeply traumatised by her abduction and imprisonment, and that of her husband. "The time around the birth of a first child should be among the happiest in a couple's lives," she says, "but it is very difficult for me to look back at that time because I wanted to die rather than be going through what I did."

Happily, she is now pregnant with the couple's second child.

Asked whether it wished to say anything that would help explain the UK government's role in the rendition operations, the Foreign Office declined to comment.

The justice ministry, meanwhile, is pressing ahead with proposed legislation that would introduce SIAC-style secrecy to any civil trial or inquest in which a minister has decided that some evidence is too sensitive to be aired in public.

Bouchar's lawyers condemn not only her mistreatment, but the plans to force litigation on her behalf into secret court hearing.

Sapna Malik, of the law firm Leigh Day, says: "Fatima's utterly barbaric treatment, and Britain's role in it, must come under the full scrutiny of an open court and not be condemned to a secret chamber."

Cori Crider of the legal charity Reprieve, which is also representing her, added: "It is bad enough that MI6 and the CIA had Abdel Hakim Belhaj tortured, when his only opponent was Colonel Gaddafi, but it is impossible to see what they hoped to achieve by kidnapping his pregnant wife, taping her up and forcing her on a plane back to Libya.

"Instead of saying sorry, the security services are busily trying to shunt Fatima's case and those like it into secret. Make no mistake: when Ken Clarke says a 'tiny' category of national security cases will be heard in closed court, it is Fatima, taped to the stretcher, he and those behind him have in mind." Guardian

I was alerted to this story via Information Clearing House, you can read it from the American prospective here.

£1m hush money to hide Tony Blair and Jack Straw's collusion in yet more war crimes

Tony Blair channels Ronald Reagan, "doesn't remember" sending dissidents to Libya for torture

‘We didn’t support rendition as far as I know.’

Buh Bye Ricky

A few Ricky Santorum quotes below, courtesy of the Guardian, but firstly just two talking points taken from Alternet article, Did Religious Right Leaders Spike Santorum's Campaign?

It was after reading this passage that, not having watched Santorum's departure speech, I would have asked of you the reader, he didn't, did he?

....Meanwhile, Santorum's three-year-old daughter, Bella, who suffered from a debilitating chromosomic disorder, was hospitalized for a second time on Friday, leading Santorum to explain his exit from the race as a family matter. "Good Friday was a little bit of a passion play for us with our daughter, Bella," Santorum said.

To listen to Santorum on Tuesday, you'd think that Bella's health was the only determining factor for his exit, but there were likely others, not least of them a new poll.....

But rather than ask the question of you, I did spend fifteen minutes of my life that I will never get back, and the answer? Yes. I shall say no more.

And of the other talking point, I don't really need to say much more on that issue, one underline doing the job quite adequately.

To some in the religious right, their desire for control of the Republican Party trumps a desire to see a Republican win the presidency. Should a moderate win the White House, then control of the party falls into more moderate hands. Some would likely rather have Obama to kick around for another four years while they marshal their forces within the GOP for a wide-open contest in 2016. And while Romney's current slate of positions is anything but moderate, he is not deemed a trustworthy carrier of the cause by those who would like to turn America's clock back to the days when only the rights of white men were assured. Article

~ ~ ~

Rick Santorum: campaign in quotes

Republican bows out of race for presidential nomination after a fiery campaign that appealed to the party's right
Ben Quinn
10 April 2012

"You're not gonna use the pink ball. We're not gonna let you do that. Not on camera."

Santorum, as overheard by a Reuters journalist, intervening to stop a young Republican picking up a pink bowling ball.

"My concern is being in combat in that situation. Instead of being focused on the mission, they may be more concerned with protecting someone who may be in a vulnerable position, a woman in a vulnerable position."

On the reaction of male soldiers to women in combat roles.

"The reason was the British national health system. Since people have the dependency they are never ever really free again."

On why he believes Margaret Thatcher left office lamenting she had not matched the achievements of Ronald Reagan.

"Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's OK, contraception is OK. It's not OK. It's a licence to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

On birth control.

"All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they're not Palestinians. There is no 'Palestinian'. This is Israeli land."

On the Palestinians.

"Is anyone saying same-sex couples can't love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?"

On gay marriage.

"Would the potential attraction to Mormonism by simply having a Mormon in the White House threaten traditional Christianity by leading more Americans to a church that some Christians believe misleadingly calls itself Christian, is an active missionary church, and a dangerous cult?"

On the religion of the Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney

"The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs [US General Educational Development tests] move up the economic ladder is just wrong."

On unmarried mothers, taken from his book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good Gruniad

#OpLithChild: Peadophile Politicians and Judges

I read this article late last night as a result of a last trawl through Twitter. Although I rather wish I hadn't done at that time of night.

The only thing that comes anywhere near the horrors of this story is the blatant corruption of the Lithuanian judiciary and government.

Now I know it might be easy to dismiss this as something 'over there,' the backward Baltics, and something that couldn't happen in dear old Blighty, but it has and it does. The McCanns are walking the streets and Robert Green is in jail.

#OpLithChild: Pedophile politicians & judges, murder & a child to be returned to the mother who pimped her

This story envelopes a dysfunctional family living within in a devastatingly broken system — the mother accused of selling her daughter to a pedophile ring of high ranking authorities, including judges and politicians. The videos are unsettling, the transcripts of the investigation will make you angry. The murders will make your imagination go wild. The activism, will amaze you. Many factors played a role in uniting a country, demanding justice. Those cries for justice have gone unheard.

In a nutshell: A girl just three years old was pimped out by her own mother to three adult men; for 4,000 Euros per month. Those three men are high ranking members of the Lithuanian Government. Most of the key figures in this story are dead — murdered — with the exception of the mother, and the court is trying to force the child to live with her again — this child is the last breathing witness.

To turn this injustice around, we need your help; Welcome to #OpLithChild.

The story.

A daughter was born after the marriage of Drasius Kedys and Laima Stankunaite in 2004; years later they divorced. Mom got custody but neglected her child, so the father brought her to live with him, with the court’s approval.

The young girl began telling her father that she had been raped by several men, and that her mother would take her to a rented apartment, where she had to satisfy the sexual needs of three men, was molested, and sexually abused. Drasius called the police promptly – just after the investigation began it ended abruptly and illegally when it was found exactly which particular men were being accused of the pedophilia – judge/judges and politicians.

Jonas Furmanavicius, the Judge of the Kaunas Regional Court and politician Andrius Usas were both accused; another was only remembered as Aidas by the child.

Drasius Kedys, the father, was relentless, submitting over 200 statements to the Lithuanian law enforcement authorities asking to investigate the case of pedophilia thoroughly. Drasius suddenly went missing. On the day that this was announced, Judge Jonas Furmanavicius and Violeta Naruseviciene, the sister of Laima Stankunaite (the mother), who, according to Kedys, had also been an alleged accomplice in this procuration case, were all shot in Kaunas.

Drasius was charged with these crimes, although his fingerprints were not found on the firearms; no other evidence confirmed his alleged guilt — at this point, the demonization of the only protector the child has ever known began publicly – he was accused of drug abuse and as a member of a gang, although there was no evidence of such.

In April of 2010, Drasius was murdered. Gone — the only trusted person for the Lithuanian girl to go to, to love her and to protect her. Ripped from her life. A detailed investigation of his murder did not occur.

Drasius’s body was found near the Kaunas Lagoon. The story gets worse. The authorities deemed his death as the result of drinking, then choking on the contents of his stomach, however, an independent investigation by experts confirm that he was beaten, tortured, then drowned.

The young girl’s custody was given to the father’s sister, Neringa Venckiene. Like her brother, Neringa was relentless, pursuing justice in her niece’s case and the case of her allegedly murdered brother.

The prosecutor’s negligence prompted another committee to be formed to delve into this case in order to get to the truth. The committee found the girl’s allegations to be true after sifting through the evidence. This resolution was announced publicly and presented to the President — never disputed or appealed.

After two thorough psychiatric and psychological examinations, the girl was found to be truthful. The same cannot be said of the mother, or the other party accused, Andrius Usas. Lie detector tests did not result in their favor. They lied.

As far as we’ve gotten in this story, it should not surprise you that both defendants remain free. Although their guilt was found to be worthy of trial by prosecutors, it was up to the court to take action - official allegations have not been made against Jonas Furmanavicius, nor against potential procuress, the girl’s mother Laima Stankunaite.

The young Lithuanian girl suffered from two years of abuse, having to endure unconscionable things, such as oral and vaginal sex at three years old. Are you upset yet? It gets even worse. The court is forcing her to go back to her mother. The child is close to her aunt and feels secure, however, the court is ripping that bond from its very foundations, shattering the young child’s life — again. In 2010 DELPHI reported, “Audrone Skuciene, Aunt and godmother Kedys was shocked by the court decision and said that the relatives do not intend to enforce the order.” (that’s loosely translated).

After finding out she would have to return to her mother’s, the child suffered from shock. She became ill, vomiting, screaming and crying; an ambulance was called (see: video above). Since then, the court remains steadfast that the girl be forced to live with her mother — the mother who sold her to strangers for their perverted sexual satisfaction. The girl feels unsafe, sleeping in bed with her aunt every night. The mother has no stable residence, no income and no heart. Can this get worse? Yes, yes it can. When the child is returned to her mother, both will be sent to a foreign country. Both are witnesses to the clan of pedophiles; both are not victims however. Article with links, extras, clips and petition. (Slow server)

Going Postal: Gun Rage in The American Workplace

I wouldn't have expected to have spent the time I just did, reading about gun rampages in America. But I did spend time enough reading the works of Mark Ames, discovering along the way that Ames has in fact written a book on the subject of gun rages in the workplace and schools: Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond Resulting in the articles that I have read today, being informed, dispassionate and not in the least sensational.

I have no intention of parsing his latest article, or any of the articles for which I shall leave links at the bottom of the page. It becomes unnecessary for me do this, Ames writes well enough, that even though you and I have never been within an ocean passage of these places and situations he describes, it's not hard to imagine, quite vividly, the unattractiveness and despair that must permeate from these godforsaken places.

The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America

The cruelty, predation and concentration of wealth today has sparked a new type of murder that has more in common with insurgency violence than serial murder.
by Mark Ames
April 9, 2012

I was working on an article about last month’s rampage massacre in Afghanistan that left 17 villagers dead, when news hit of this past Monday’s massacre at an Oakland, California, religious college, leaving seven dead. In both cases, the shooters survived and face a possible death penalty — which is rare: Usually these rampage killings end with self-inflicted bullet in the mouth.

These “going postal” rampage killings like the one that just took place at the Oikos University campus happen so often and with such relentless rhythm, a lot of people might easily assume that these mass-shootings at American schools and workplaces have always been with us.

It’s not true, of course — as I wrote in my book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion — it’s an exclusively American phenomenon specific to our time. The first post office rampage killing took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Reagan Revolution’s war on the American worker.

Those post office massacres quickly migrated into private workplace massacres by the end of the 1980s, where they’ve become a regular rhythmic staple of our murder culture ever since – and from the adult workplace, the massacres migrated to our schools.

We’ve had mass-killings before; and every now and then, you’ll read about a rampage killing in some other country. But only in America, and only since the mid-1980s, do American employees attack their own workplaces and offices, and middle-class students attack their own schools, with such consistency, year after year.

It was only after the crash in 2008 that some Americans began to accept the obvious: That the cruelty, predation and concentration of wealth and power introduced by the Reagan Revolution sparked a new type of murder that has more in common with insurgency violence or rebellious peasant violence than, say, the psychopathology of a serial murder.

Like so many school rampage killers, last Monday’s alleged murderer, One L. Goh, was reportedly bullied and mistreated at his nursing school program at the small Korean Christian nursing program he enrolled in. Bullying also was blamed for the high school rampage killing a few weeks ago in suburban Cleveland that left three students dead and five wounded.

The gruesome details about the way Goh is said to have lined up and executed his victims, the way he apparently singled out women, make it hard not to caricature him as a monster, a demonic psychopath — and yet, without excusing Goh’s killings, one should try to make sense of what happened to him, the downward-trending bleakness, the slow water-torture of low-five-figure debts, the broken marriage, the $23,000 tax bill owed to the IRS.

Losing Hope

In the Naughts, One L. Goh helped run a construction company. But construction collapsed as an industry in 2006-7; and unless you were Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo, you’d have nothing to show for the few good years.

In late 2007, Goh moved into the Yorkview Apartments complex in Hayes, Virginia — a bleak, prefab looking structure in a rural corner of Virginia. By the following summer, One L. Goh found himself unable to cover his $575 rent payment two months in a row. He was evicted; and on the same day that they they evicted him, creditors took his car.

The future rampage-murderer took it all stoically, even politely, according to one of Goh’s apartment complex neighbors, Thomas Lumpkin: “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”

Here is how his neighbor described the scene of One L. Goh’s last day at the Yorkshire Apartments:

Lumpkin said he recalled the day when Goh was evicted and his Nissan pickup was repossessed. Goh left by cab that day.

“He was always neat, wore nice clothes,” Lumpkin recalled. “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”

So he lost his car the same day he was evicted from his apartment in bumfuck, Virginia—and he took it all stoically as he cabbed away to god knows where.

I tried to imagine what that cab ride felt like for One L. Goh, a pudgy 40-something Korean-American dweeb, stewing with resentment, in his nice neat clothes. How far did he go in that cab — and where to?

Eventually he wound up with his father on the West Coast. One L. Goh’s father lives in an Oakland housing project for senior citizens run by a Christian non-profit. Goh found work in a San Mateo warehouse; he moonlighted as a mover. Anything to get back on his feet.

It’s not a good place to be if you’re a middle-aged failure: San Francisco has so much obscene wealth, and smug beauty — to be a fat 40-something nerd working with your father in a grocery store in Daly City, in the shadow of San Francisco, is some kind of Hell, a Hell for failures.

Goh, who was born Su Nam Ko, had lived in the shadow of his more successful, celebrated war hero brother, Su Wan Ko. In 2002, he changed his name from birth name, Su Nam Ko, to One L. Goh, stating that he did “not like my current name because it sounds like a girl’s name.”

And then last year, Goh’s brother, an Iraq War veteran and Special Forces hero, died in a freak car accident when his Toyota slammed head-on at 70 mpg into a “multi-ton” boulder lying on a Virginia road. The photos of the accident scene look almost unreal, almost staged.

The news of the brother’s death destroyed One L. Goh’s mother: She died within months of her son’s funeral.

This is the backdrop to Goh’s fateful decision to pull himself out of a years-long rut, and to start a new career for himself as a nurse. It may have been the shock of the back-to-back deaths in the family — or maybe it was his father who encouraged him, or the experience of living with his father in a building for the elderly.

Whatever the case, his widower father supported his son with a $6,000 loan to pay for the vocational nursing school tuition. But after a few months, One L. Goh was out of the program, bitter and vengeful, dead set on murder; and his father was out $6,000, thanks to his son’s bad bet.

Ignition to a Massacre

What set Goh off? Why did he leave the nursing school so early? Most reports say he was teased by his classmates for his age, 43, and his accent. Which is odd, considering most of the students are foreigners and Koreans.

(Another Korean-American rampage-killer was teased over his voice: Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui. As another Virginia Tech student told reporters back in 2007, “As soon as [Cho] started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China.’”)

Goh enrolled in what must have been one of the very worst nursing programs in the entire state of California: the vocational nursing program at Oikos University, a fundamentalist Korean-American Christian school in Oakland.

The school’s nursing program is accredited, which is important of course if you want your for-profit school program to make money. To comply with the accreditation, Oikos U. had provide a “2010 Performance Sheet” summing up its students’ performances both on the national nursing exam and, once licensed, in the job market. Go to page three or read the complete article with photo's and links as one page.

Oh! and don't forget the comments.

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Workplace Massacre in Alabama: Did Endless Downsizing and Slashed Benefits Cause the Rampage?

If you keep squeezing workers to fatten filthy-rich executives' already-obscene bonuses, there can be very violent consequences.
March 13, 2009

The killing spree in Alabama fits a well-worn pattern of workplace-driven massacres that we've seen since the "going postal" phenomenon exploded in the middle of the Reagan revolution. Article

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Northern Ill. University: Was the Killer Crazy, or the Campus Hopeless?

Bracket this massacre as the work of a lunatic on drugs, and you miss the chance to consider the horrors of life in middle America.
February 16, 2008

Unlike Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui -- a sullen misfit who could barely look anyone in the eye, much less carry on a conversation -- Kazmierczak appeared to fit in just fine. -- Deanna Bellendi, Associated Press. Article

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Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?

Media: Cho Seung-Hui did it because he was crazy and "evil." History: Schoolyard massacres are rebellions against oppressive and bullying environments by students who can't take it anymore.
April 20, 2007

Another rampage massacre, this time the worst ever. Which means another fake attempt at trying to understand this uniquely American crime -- these interminable rage killing sprees in our workplaces and our schoolyards. Article