Craig Murray

The body of Farhad Usmanov, 42, who died in pre-trial
detention in June 1999. Usmanov, the son of a well-known
imam, was arrested for alleged possession of a single leaflet
of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The official cause of
death was given as heart failure, although marks on the
body and other evidence show Usmanov died from torture.

I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act a heavily censored copy of one of my telegrams from Tashkent protesting at the use by the UK government of intelligence obtained under torture.

Every British person should read this telegram and hang their head in the deepest of shame. This is the pitch blackness of New Labour's embrace of authoritarianism. Read it, and remember I was both smeared and sacked for this attempt to apply simply the most basic of humane standards. Page 1: Download file Page 2: Download file

The censored passages detail British ministers' receipt of the torture intelligence from the CIA, and point out that the purpose of the CIA intelligence is consistently to paint a false picture, exaggerating the strength of al-Qaida in Central Asia. Miliband approved the redactions from the telegrams "On grounds of national security". Those are precisely the grounds on which he unsuccesfully sought to suppress the evidence of UK collusion with torture in the Binyam Mohammed court cases.

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Ray McGovern

The omnipresent World War II-era poster with the words “Loose Lips Sink Ships” served as a warning to members of the U.S. military to take heed lest they divulge information that could tip off the enemy and result in defeat in battle.

I believe we need a new poster, because loose lips can also sink whole countries — including our own.

This is a lesson that members of Congress and Washington's media honchos should have learned from the disastrous invasion of Iraq; especially the ones whose lips helped President George W. Bush portray Saddam Hussein as a monster bristling with “weapons of mass destruction.”

In that time frame, of course, cooperating with Bush was “the smart play” for one’s career, even for many Democrats and liberal opinion leaders.

But those politicians and pundits now should share responsibility for having allowed Bush to mislead the nation into a war that has maimed and killed thousands of American soldiers, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, with millions more driven from their homes into fetid refugee camps.

The complicit lawmakers also helped sail the American ship of state into a vast iceberg of debt.

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Chris Floyd

Dante Alighieri, "THE VISION OF HELL", CANTO XXXII. (G. Doré)

"Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer...." ~ Brother Bob

Illness and other aggravations have hindered the blogivating of late, so below are some choice items from other quarters that are well worth your attention.

The Children's Crusade
Andy Worthington tells the truly horrendous story of Omar Khadr, who was taken captive as a child by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and has now spent eight years in the lower depths of the American gulag. He is now being "tried" in the kangaroo "tribunals" of the Bush-Obama Continuum, under arbitrarily concocted, illogical "laws" whose cruel absurdity would shame a Stalinist show trial, including this arbitary ruling by the Department of Defense: “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.” You must read the whole piece to see the abysmal depravity that now reigns supreme throughout the highest, most respectable reaches of the bipartisan American estabishment.

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