Blogoir

Craig Murray came out for the Lib Dems and so finds himself in the novel position of supporting a Conservative-led coalition:

I can say that I can broadly support this government and am convinced that it will be an improvement on the bunch of authoritarian war criminals who have been replaced.

You nailed that one, Craig. Welcome back on board, even if your army of fans seem somewhat divided on your good sense.

Another former FCO colleague turned diehard Labour blogger (and Long Sentence Champion of the Universe), Brian Barder, is less happy:

Mr Cameron can’t realistically expect a sober and constructive opposition if he constantly accuses Labour of responsibility for the financial mess we’re in, and misrepresents Labour’s 13 years in office as an uninterrupted chronicle of mismanagement and failure — as the irredeemably, jejunely tribal William Hague, our new foreign secretary, was doing without a shadow of embarrassment on the radio this morning.

We old dips have a phrase for it, Brian. It's called kick 'em when they are down - and richly deserve it.

Plus both you and Craig have long called for war crimes charges against key Labour leaders - whatever nano-sized successes they achieved in all those years surely pale into insignificance against that?

Guido shows himself to be a true man of principle. Having called lustily for the ConDem outcome, he is not wasting time pointing to some, hem, unsatisfactory aspects of new Ministerial postings.

So far so good for my old friend from the legendary St John's College conservative machine, Alistair Burt, who joins the FCO as a junior Minister.

Craig is at it again:

New Labour's Complicity in Torture - Truly Evil

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.

Sounds scary enough. What is this document?

It's a 'telegram' (ie a senior electronic FCO communication) from Craig as HM Ambassador in Tashkent to the FCO dated 22 January 2003. Some passages have been redacted - Craig tells us what they contained, as he remembers.

It concludes in the usual form of FCO telegrams, with the Ambassador's name, a spaceline and then the distribution list. Here it was sent only to William Ehrman, as FCO Director General for Defence and Intelligence

MURRAY
YYYY
Single Copies
DG DEFINT 1

Craig makes a silly if not dishonest noise about this limited distribution:

The final codes are significant. it means that this was considered so hot that only a single copy was made in the FCO - very unusual indeed - and given to the Director General Defence and Intelligence.

Drivel.

They are not significant in the slightest.

Why? Because Craig himself addressed this telegram only to William Ehrman, not to the FCO as a whole! So by sending it only to William the Communications Centre were doing precisely what Craig asked them to do!

Plus he gave the piece only a ROUTINE level of urgency, ie the lowest available for a telegram.

The core (and good) question Craig raised in this telegram was this:

I am worried about the legal position. I am not sure that a wilful blindness to how material is obtained would be found a valid defence in law to the accusation of having received material obtained under torture. My understanding is that receiving such material would be both a crime in UK domestic law and contrary to international law. Is this true? I would like a direct answer on this.

And in due course he received a full answer from Sir Michael Wood, the FCO Legal Adviser. Which was that Craig's understanding was wrong. A point of view subsequently upheld by the House of Lords in a landmark judgement Craig's own book praises!

Come on Craig. Be a man. More, be an honest Lib Dem. Accept that you were wrong.

In short, nothing new here folks. Move along.

But in moving along take care not to vote for New Labour tomorrow. They were and are indeed a disgrace, even if Craig's wild swirling fists often miss the right target and instead punch himself on the hooter.

It all reminds me of those timeless lines from Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit:

'Jeeves,' I said, 'you're talking rot.'

'Very good, sir.'

'Absolute drivel.'

'Very good, sir.'

'Pure mashed potatoes.'

'Very good, sir.'

'Very good, sir—I mean, very good, Jeeves, that will be all,' I said.

And I drank a modicum of tea, with a good deal of hauteur.

Over at Craig Murray's place I posted a modest little comment on his piece about Eugene Terreblanche:

Craig,

As you know, I was posted at the British Embassy in South Africa as apartheid ended. I attended a rally of Terreblanche's AWB movement once.

The worrying thing about Terreblanche's murder is that it seems to echo an insidious 'Kill the Boer' Africanist nationalist ethnic cleansing of the sort Mugabe has led in Zimbabwe, an achievement of sorts for African Pay-Back Time but at a cost which will leave most Zimbabweans unnecessarily impoverished for decades more to come.

If that is the sort of fate which faces South Africa too down the road as the generation of township youngsters schooled in ANC/Communist 1980s ultra-violence work their way up the country's demographic pyramid, prospects for the southern part of the continent are bleak indeed.

And lo!, Craig graciously replies:

Charles,

And an excellent job you did too, much though I hate to admit it!!!!

Posted by: Craig at April 5, 2010 7:35 PM

So far so unexceptionable.

Then along comes Roger Irrelevant, thinly disguised as a certain anno:

Charles Crawford

English aristocrats also did a good job of negotiating with Hitler not to invade the UK. Well done, Sir. When you pass GO, please don't forget to pick up £200.00.

Posted by: anno at April 5, 2010 9:08 PM

Maybe one day by pure chance I'll be walking down the street and someone seemingly normal brushes past.

It is anno.

But alas I'll never know.

While I was HM Ambassador in Poland I was accused of improper lobbying of Parliament.

(Slavist linguistics note: Polish has lifted the English word lobbying and incorporated it into Polish in a strange form - lobbing)

I forget now exactly what the issue was about. Maybe a complicated dispute between the then Polish government and a number of large international pharmaceutical companies over where exactly tax should be paid and how it should be calculated.

In my Ambassadorial zeal to be friendly and helpful, I wrote a letter to the then Speaker of the Polish Parliament describing the position in the UK. I copied the letter to various other prominent people with an interest.

In other words, whatever the merits or not of my letter there was 100% no attempt at concealment or behind-the-scenes manoeuvring.

Which of course did not stop some fatuous MP from lodging an official protest that I had been improperly lobbing to help a UK company.

So, what's wrong with lobbying?

On the face of it, not much.

Democracy is all about rival interests and points of view jostling for position. The closer they get to a decision or a decision-maker, the more intense the jostling comes.

Take our Embassies round the world. The US Embassy in Washington's main task is to lobby fast and furiously to head off US decisions which might harm UK interests. Ditto our Embassies in the EU are meant to press local governments to agree with UK views.

Where it goes wrong is when private interests attempt to influence decisions in murky, untransparent or even corrupt ways.

Where to draw the line?

Not easy. Ministers and senior officials need to get out and about and listen to different ideas. What's wrong with someone at a dinner party having 'a quiet word in the ear' of a Minister to argue for or against a specific policy line? Even if there is thought to be something wrong, it's impossible to stop or control it.

That said, the most odious aspect of the Byers scandal here in the UK (a former Labour Minister secretly filmed boasting about how with the right money he can get access to top Labour people to help press for specific outcomes) is not that he wanted to get paid for giving access.

See what I have written at Business and Politics:

The key issue here is not in fact the banal greed of the would-be lobbyists, horrible and squalid though that is.

Rather it is the fact that they expected to be successful. Which means that certain senior Ministers and/or officials currently in power were likely to be open – arguably improperly – to their furtive blandishments.

So a lot of the noise about transparency for lobbyists misses the point. It’s transparency for Ministerial and Departmental decisions which really counts. If lobbyists and their clients see that their lobbying gets few worthwhile results, they’ll do less of it.

It does not take much to see that if a lobbyist is paid a lot of money to influence a policy outcome, a Minister might do what is needed in return for a generous quiet cut.

That's how a lot of business is done round the world.

So I do not understand why the Guardian thinks that the answer is ... more regulation, this time of lobbying firms.

That will make no real difference to the way Ministers and Departments are accessed. If anything it will make the value of quiet encounters with Ministers away from the limelight even more prized - and expensive.

Nor is there much to be done about senior people cashing in after they leave office.

The fact is that the more senior an official or Minister, the less inclined s/he will be to take any notice of any rules. The rules about avoiding conflicts of interest after one leaves an official job for the private sector can be brought to bear only upon relatively junior people (such as me). See this magnificent shameless example.

In the end it all comes down to fiercely defending values - championing a sense of what is proper and honourable. Values of outcome, as well as values of process as an end in themselves.

For me, the main reason to vote against this wretched Labour government is that in so many areas they have dumbed down the very idea of honour and accountability for selfish, banal, trashy reasons.

Labour took Clintonism and turned it into something even worse: It's not what's right. It's what you can get away with.

Even born-again LibDem Craig Murray agrees with me (albeit in a somewhat confused way):

I cannot for the life of me conceive how anybody in their right mind, other than their corporate backers, can even consider voting New Labour, let alone the working people whose hopes they have betrayed.

Putting this right will be very difficult.

Always a pleasure to post a comment on Craig Murray’s site. His readers are so smart and droll in reply, giving excellent material for my rotating What The Critics Say box:

Having visited your blog i must say it doesnt surprise me. Your self-aggrandising careerist pomposity is quite breathtaking

I suspect Charles Crawford is arguing for an increase in pension or knighthood or both

You are a disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist. Your kind have destroyed the pride of the United Kingdom after Nazism was defeated by our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. You and your peers are incapable of any strategy except lying. You have shredded the international justice embedded in the Geneva Convention. If you had the slightest understanding of the implications of your snotty drivel, you would be looking for a new identity in South America like your Nazi predecessors

Charles Crawford...the shallow, self-interested man's coward and toady

In a posting about whether the British Government were ‘aware’ that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture, Craig linked to three FCO documents and said this:

The government knew the CIA was sending us intelligence from torture from at least November 2002, when I sent a diplomatic telegram to Jack Straw and others - including MI5 - informing them so. I repeated it in February 2003, and was called back to a meeting on March 7 2003 where I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.

My Comment on this posting:

You keep serving up these documents as if they prove your case. Read them. They don't.

Where in those records or otherwise are the statements supporting your claim that "...I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law"?

I can't see them. Can anyone else?

And (to repeat) when the specific issue you raised (namely that HMG's possession of material known or suspected to have come from torture ipso facto amounted to 'complicity' in torture under the Convention) went to the House of Lords, the Law Lords flatly rejected your view.

Craig himself takes up two points made by a sensible commenter:

I am not sure whether you are arguing:

1) HMG was not knowingly receiving any information obtained from torture, and these documents report a completely hypothetical discussion as whether it would be legal; or

2) HMG was knowingly receiving information obtained under torture, and it is not illegal under international law to do so.

Craig fairly asks me: 

What do you think those documents do show? Presumably they do have some point, or the various authors would not have created them. What do you think it was that Jack Straw was agreeing with?

Let’s look at the documents as linked to by Craig. They are well worth a look at top-end formal FCO work in action.

They report a record by senior FCO official Linda Duffield of her conversation with Craig (joined by top FCO Legal Adviser, Michael Wood) which looked at one specific point he had raised, namely “that it was also an offence under the Torture Convention to receive or possess information obtained under torture”.

Michael said at the meeting that he did not think that that was the case under international law. His subsequent minute formally confirmed that view.

The minute from Jack Straw’s office compliments Linda Duffield on how she handled her meeting with the turbulent Craig (and by implication endorses the policy line she and Michael Wood put forward, which of course was later upheld by the House of Lords). It says nothing whatever which might be held against the Foreign Secretary.

So, I win an easy technical knockout. Craig was not ‘told’ on that occasion or otherwise that ‘as a matter of policy’ we were using intelligence from torture.

That does not settle the substance of Craig’s wider point. That we were receiving material probably drawn from torture. And that these documents somehow ‘show’ a cynical if not unlawful approach by the government and endorsed by Jack Straw personally.

Where Craig seems to me to go wrong is that he over-stretches the concept of ‘complicity’ to suit his argument. Craig determinedly supports those jurists such as Professor Sands who argue that merely using or receiving material known or suspected to have been obtained under torture in itself amounts to complicity in that torture.

An eloquent argument in favour of a strong point is not enough. Courts (and politicians, and the public) look also at eloquent arguments in the other direction, particularly in highly complex public policy areas where the role of the Executive to protect the public comes into play. This explains the sense of the House of Lords landmark decision:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives) 
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals

So, to answer precisely (if long-windedly) the reasonable questions put by one of Craig’s readers:

I think it is fair to say that the British Government were receiving intelligence reports (via the CIA and maybe otherwise) some of which they reasonably could believe were based on information extracted from prisoners through abusive treatment which might well be deemed in a UK court to amount to torture. (Craig himself convincingly pressed the case that any report served up by the Uzbek intelligence agencies had to be suspect on this score.)

That is not in itself illegal under international law. ‘Complicity’ on the part of HMG requires a very close and direct link to the abusive treatment, which in the case of eg Uzbek intelligence was just not there.

Even if receiving such information is not illegal, is it ipso facto always immoral or wrong?

Craig I suspect says a loud Yes.

I won’t do that. I can not conclude that it would be right for Ministers to ignore an intelligence report which might cast light on a terrorist plot to murder British or other citizens - and perhaps allow us to prevent that or some other atrocity happening. I think that in this darkest of moral corners it is just not possible to give clear-cut winner-takes-all answers.

And I have Professor Sands on my side, to this extent (his comment to a Parliamentary Committee on Michael Wood’s minute):

What I say in my written evidence is that insofar as the letter seeks to address a very narrow question it is not formally inaccurate but it misses the bigger point which was addressed in the previous witness’s contribution, namely in what circumstances might the receipt of information obtained through torture constitute complicity within the meaning of article 4 of the convention

Exactly.

In some circumstances the mere receipt of information might (sic) amount to be complicity. In others it would not. In the middle are many grey areas.

And if thinking that makes me a self-aggrandising, careerist, disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist, shallow, self-interested coward and toady – so be it.

Via The Browser an excellent account by Stephen Levy at Wired on how Google just keeps getting better. By using Google itself:

Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group.

There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,”

As for my favourite subject - me - I do not make it into the top Google pages if you search merely for Crawford.

But if you search for Charles Crawford, on page one of the Search results I wipe the floor with the myriad other Charles Crawfords out there, although our old friend the Abandoned Bunny does also sneak in. Almost the same on Bing.

Still, if you search Google for controversial former ambassador Craig Murray sweeps home. Fair enough.

Anguished as he is by his belated discovery that FCO Legal Adviser Michael Wood had not 'stabbed him in the back' as per the foolish description in his book, Craig Murray slumps back into despair:

I felt that Michael had stabbed me in the back by refusing to back me in saying unequivocally that intelligence from torture was illegal.

I did not know that, exactly at that time, he was engaged in a heroic struggle to try to stop the war in Iraq on legal grounds, and that he had drawn the full fury of Blair and Straw. He could not afford to open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

I have been struggling ever since to come to terms with what I saw as his going along with torture. I misjudged him...

I am feeling so sad because different ways of trying to resist took us down different paths, and perhaps I am sad because I was harsher on some than they deserved.

Craig of course misjudged practically everyone else in the FCO too as he flailed against them in his book, but it may take him a while yet to grasp that his definition of honourable behaviour is not the only one out there.

Just to add that in his comment posted on my piece as linked above, Craig once again carefully avoids answering the question (my emphasis):

I don't understand the view that I am "misrepresenting" Michael when I have repeatedly published his letter in full and I recently published, as soon as the FCO released them, the minutes of the meeting at which he gave the advice.

HIs advice and what precisely it meant was discussed by me and by Prof Phillippe Sands before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in very careful and measured terms.

I was and remain disappointed that Michael did not give me more support on the torture issue. I now know, which I did not at the time, that at that precise time (March 7 to 14 2003) Michael was under incredible pressure over his attempts to prevent an illegal war. He couldn't open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

To which one says, piffle.

Since the whole point of Craig's fight with the FCO at that point, namely March 2003, was nothing to do with extraordinary rendition. Rather it was all about the way he had been publicly attacking the Uzbek regime over its human rights abuses. The extraordinary rendition issue appears in his book only much later, namely p 362.

The core of Craig's case as put by him to the FCO at that point (and described in his book) was that the Uzbek regime was breaking international law and that HMG were breaking international law by using intelligence information from Uzbekistan which they had good reason to think had been extracted under torture.

This was the argument he put in a Top Secret telegram sent in late 2002 (Murder in Samarkand, p 138), namely that by 'obtaining' this intelligence on a regular basis HMG were 'undoubtedly' in breach of Article 4 of the UN Convention on Torture which banned 'complicity' in torture.

And this was the issue which was tackled head-on in Craig's disastrous (for him) meeting at the FCO with Michael Wood. Michael said that he did not agree with Craig: possessing or indeed using information obtained under torture did not amount to complicity under the Convention. However, Article 15 did rule out the use of such material in any legal proceedings ("except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made").

Craig in MiS records his dismay. Shock! Michael was not agreeing with some of his human rights lawyer friends!

Michael then wrote a minute to confirm the position in writing. This is the famous document so often cited by Craig on his site as evidence for HMG's evil-doing.

And, as previously noted, Michael is a good enough lawyer to have judged this point accurately. The House of Lords later upheld his view in a landmark judgement. The fact that Philippe Sands QC and Craig happen to think that the law in this area ought to be something else does not mean anything that matters.

All of this is absurdly described in MiS thus: "Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal".

Simply. Not. True.

Craig now breezily brushes aside as 'casuistry' anything which spells out his obvious errors and inconsistencies, and keeps trying to cash in on his erstwhile junior Ambassador status to boost his claim to know what was 'really' going on.

Maybe his trivial failure not to let the truth stand in the way of a loud argument was one reason why he crashed from the FCO - and won no sympathy at all from senior colleagues who shared many of his reservations about the policy but maintained professional discipline.

Craig Murray's vanity knows no bounds. His 'story' is soon to be dramatised on the BBC! If I can bear to listen I'll do so and give you a full and fair review.

Meanwhile he launches another misguided missile at the role of the government's Law Officers.

He appears to understand nothing about how it all works in practice, a surprising failing in someone self-proclaimed to have had a 'brilliant career'.

What I strongly object to is his renewed propagandistic traducing in that posting of Michael Wood, former FCO Legal Adviser.

Here is what I have posted on Craig's site (note: correcting three typos which I overlooked when posting the comment - my bad):

Craig,

You write:

"Sir Michael Wood has perhaps been best known to a wider public as the man that the FCO wheeled in to tell me that it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

It may indeed be the case that Michael has become known to 'a wider public' through your book. What is more than unfortunate is that in the book and here on this website you shamelessly and repeatedly misrepresent what he actually said to you.

In MiS (pp 160-164 in my copy) you described the events leading up to your meeting with Michael and Linda Duffield. You argued the case to them that, based on your research, it was illegal under the Convention to use or even possess material based on torture.

Michael told you that this was not the legal position, a view he subsequently put in writing. And, since as you say he is a masterful international lawyer, he was right. His view was later upheld by the House of Lords in a key decision you praise in the book (p. 367).

In the book you characterised what Michael said to you as "So there we had it. Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal". This is a trivial misreading of Michael's minute and position, based on your complete misunderstanding of the law.

Now you repeat this nonsense again in the posting above:

"...it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

You time and again make great play of Michael's minute of 13 March 2003 as if it supports your position. It doesn't. Try reading it.

As for your wider point, you don't understand the way the AG's office works, as Jane18 patiently pointed out. It is reasonable for the government to have a central pool of top legal advice rather than rely solely on the legal advice from one department of state.

Craig is either dimmer than he claims to be or he is being dishonest. It is blindingly obvious that there are a great number of different questions (and answers) concerning the torture issue which he runs together as and when it suits him.

Thus, for example:

• is torture legal under international law?
• is it lawful for one government to act on information supplied by another government and suspected to have been extracted by torture?
• what sort of actions might fairly be described as being 'complicit in torture' committed by others?
• can evidence possibly extracted under torture be used in court? 

It is a great pity that anyone takes Craig seriously when he is unable to write accurately about these subjects.

To be clear. I do not think that the fact that he makes a number of strong policy points with considerable passion is enough.

Craig creates a considerable media noise and no doubt makes some money by claiming to derive validation from the fact that he lived up to the very highest professional ethics of senior civil servants and paid a price for doing so, unlike (he asserts) a large number of his former colleagues.

Fine. We all have to make tough choices, and reasonable people may come down on different sides.

But let's at least agree that those professional ethics are based on unrelenting accuracy and integrity, and an ability to identify (and act on) fine distinctions of logic and meaning.

In this new posting once again Craig falls well short of that simple standard. 

Update:  here is Michael Wood's statement to the Chilcot Inquiry which blows away everything Craig says about relations between the FCO and Attorney General - and describes in meticulous detail Michael's views on the (il)legality of the Iraq intervention. 

Former Ambassador Craig Murray and I do not always agree, although since he has wandered away from the idea of our having a public debate I can not identify where our views really do overlap, or not.

But now and again he nails down a basic policy point with verve and accuracy.

And now, a new UK enquiry into the history of the Iraq intervention.

Craig Murray is rude about the Chilcot enquiry team, including my former boss Rod Lyne. I myself find it hard to understand why an official who had a senior job in selling UK policy during this period has been given a prominent role in scrutinising it now.

But as Anne McElvoy points out (quoting some or other former Ambassador) the best potential evidence may lie in the memories of the private secretaries in Downing Street and the Foreign Office. "They knew everything," he says, "but strangely, they are never called to give an account."

Good point.

Unlike Craig or indeed myself Rod has served as Private Secretary at Number 10 and knows how things work at that level, so he can ask some penetrating questions if he wants to do so.

The Guardian live blog of the enquiry is well done. Have a look at this account of Sir C Meyer's evidence today.

Meyer being smart and studiously provocative adds some context, namely that 'regime change' in Iraq was not something dreamed up by President Bush but rather a clear policy inherited from President Clinton. He also gives a view that Mrs Thatcher would have driven a harder bargain with the Americans as a condition for UK support. Bracing stuff, and true.

Will Chilcot come to call victims of Saddam's torture chambers to testify on the moral case for the intervention? Craig Murray rails against what he says is the wickedness of Western 'complicity' in deal with torture-wielding despots, but never quite seems to offer a credible policy on what actually might be done to get rid of them and end the torture.

There are really only four questions this and any enquiry on the subject needs to answer:

Was the intervention legal?

Could it be justified in principle and practice under international law?

Was the intervention technically doable?

Were the right tools for the job available and how indeed was the job defined? (NB in Iraq's case the follow-up on the ground after the toppling of Saddam appears to be a major failing, as was the ill-judged focus on the WMD arguments at HMG's insistence)

Was the intervention - all things considered - wise?

Even if the intervention was done well and in principle doable, was it likely to bring about positive results? This question is really about timescale, and as Iraq gets into its stride as a free country again things may look more positive on this front. No doubt Tony Blair's main argument for his policy will be here.

Was the intervention in fact done well?

The global and domestic public can tolerate some ambiguity in the legal case and the planning of an intervention, plus may cut politicians some slack on the wisdom/timescale issue. But people are usually unforgiving when they sense that the job has been bungled for one reason or another. As already noted, the lack of detailed planning on how Iraq should be run after Saddam was toppled was a clear mistake emanating from the Bush team, and much of the ensuing controversy - and ghastly violence - stemmed from that.

To be continued...

A lively piece of work by Craig Murray looking at the prospects for Ghana getting rich and ruined by Oil Money.

Knowing nothing about Ghana or indeed about Oil Money, I leave it to you to work out whether his well-turned analysis makes sense. It is certainly interesting enough. 

But this caught my eye:

At the same time, revenue must urgently be directed to rural infrastructure, to increasing farm prices and developing agro-processing industry, on a scale not previously attempted. Ghana already has a major problem keeping young people in farming. Think how much this will worsen when oil starts to flow.

Why should young people stay on farms now that the country is going to get rich? Ghana as the anti-Nigeria, ie a new hi-tech Singapore-style place rather than a typical agriculture exporting African country?

Is not the point of acquiring such largesse that it gives a country the chance to look at quite different options, not merely ways to impose top-down solutions based on old ideas?

The latest developments on the Torture issue - the speech by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans and then the High Court decision in favour of release of secret US material concerning Binyam Mohamed - are (in their different ways) further important steps towards clarifying how if at all we deal with the problems arising from 'tainted' foreign material.

Anticant delivers a fierce analogy:

This egregious performance reminds me of Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’ who regales his sadistic sovereign’s ear with graphic descriptions of torture and execution and then, when it transpires that the hapless alleged victim was the Mikado’s son, pleads that he in fact wasn’t there, and had merely sought to add “a touch of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” . 

If torture is OK, let’s say so forthrightly and use it ourselves unblushingly. If it’s not, let’s do everything we can to stop it, whoever is doing it. What we shouldn’t be doing is to make humbugging prevarications along the lines of “We only practice the highest standards of food hygiene, but if some of our foreign suppliers send us tainted meat we have no option but to feed it to our customers”.

Craig Murray celebrates his birthday:

If you read the Guardian report of the High Court judgement, in any other age a Minister caught behaving as appallingly as Milliband has, would have resigned. I would love to be locked in a room with the little twerp for a couple of hours to teach him about the reliability of intelligence from torture. I would have him confessing to menbership of Al-Qaida before I severed his second testicle...

Which is of course the major point. Binyam Mohammed is an innocent man whom we gave over to torture for no reason. The thousands tortured in Uzbekistan into confessing to Al-Qaida links were almost all innocent. That is just one problem with the "Torture Works" argument put forward by Britain's highest paid thug Jonathan Evans.

'Innocent' is an interesting word to use to describe Binyam Mohamed. According to Craig 'almost all' the thousands tortured in Uzbekistan were innocent. How does he sift out the guilty ones?

Here is what the Americans thought Mr Mohamed was up to:

According to the U.S. government's allegations, Osama bin Laden visited the al Farouq camp "several times" after Mohamed arrived there in the summer of 2001. The terror master "lectured Binyam Mohamed and other trainees about the importance of conducting operations against the United States." Bin Laden explained that "something big is going to happen in the future" and the new recruits should get ready for an impending event.

From al Farouq, Mohamed allegedly received additional training at a "city warfare course" in Kabul and then moved to the front lines in Bagram "to experience fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance." He then returned to Kabul, where the government claims he attended an explosives training camp alongside Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber.

Mohamed was then reportedly introduced to top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. By early 2002, the two were traveling between al Qaeda safehouses. The U.S. government alleges that Mohamed then met Jose Padilla and two other plotters, both of whom are currently detained at Guantánamo, at a madrassa. Zubaydah and another top al Qaeda lieutenant, Abdul Hadi al Iraqi, allegedly directed the four of them "to receive training on building remote-controlled detonation devices for explosives."

At some point, Padilla and Mohamed traveled to a guesthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, where they "reviewed instructions on a computer ... on how to make an improvised 'dirty bomb.'" To the extent that the allegations against Mohamed have gotten any real press, it is this one that has garnered the attention. Media accounts have often highlighted the fact that Padilla and Mohamed were once thought to be plotting a "dirty bomb" attack, but that the allegation was dropped, making it seem as if they were not really planning a strike on American soil.

Indeed, all of the charges against Mohamed were dropped last year at Guantánamo. But this does not mean that he is innocent...

Innocence in this context might mean different things, such as:

• that the suspect in fact had nothing whatever to do with the terrorist conspiracies concerned but had been wrongly charged
• that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but for some or other reason the case could not go to court successfully
• that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but had been cleared by a court

Anyway, my point is rather this.

That on the one hand we are urged by progressive-thinking people to believe that the UN Human Rights Council vote against Israel this week somehow represents a serious moral position adopted by a majority of honourable countries.

And that on the other hand, if HMG were to accept secret intelligence material from almost any of the countries in the majority, and perhaps any member of the Council, the same progressive-minded people would howl with indignation that we were taking evidence probably tainted by torture in the countries concerned.

Look at the list of countries which voted for that Resolution:

Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia

From which of those states would secret intelligence drawn from local interrogation of terrorist suspects not be suspected of being extracted by torture or serious brutality (insofar as there is a difference) or otherwise illegitimate 'pressure'? 

Look at the other countries who abstained or opposed or found it All Too Difficult:

Opposing:  Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine, United States of America

Abstaining:  Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Uruguay

All Too Difficult:  France (plus UK)

Same question.

So, problem.

Do we close down all secret intelliegnce cooperation in the one area where we all really need it?

And if we do decide to take some risks in that sense by continuing cooperation, how to organise our procedures so that the secret sharing arrangements are not blown open by the oh-so-principled UK courts, risking the flow of inward material drying up and so putting UK lives at stake?

On this one, David Miliband made a clear and strong statement.

That it might be unpopular does not make it wrong.

This time a curious and very unastonishing piece in the Spectator by Martin Bright, which uses as some vital evidence Craig Murray's long-lost fleeting relationship with Kaminski in the mid-1990s.

I have posted a comment suggesting that media bunnies might like to ask David Miliband three questions:

• did No 10 host Mr Kaminski for lunch with a passing Polish leader following the Law and Justice election win in 2005? My own memory says yes, but I might be wrong! So let's check, please
• did No 10 and the FCO urge the Embassy in Warsaw to get alongside key PiS people such as Mr Kaminski to help secure the EU Budget deal in late 2005?
• did No 10 and the FCO congratulate themselves on a fine outcome for the UK at the 2007 Lisbon Treaty talks, achieved in good part because PM Tony Blair worked so closely with President Lech Kaczynski?

What is wrong with Labour? Is this the best they can do?

Burble on about close links between the Conservatives and PiS when they themselves have worked hard to get key PiS people onside to help achieve UK Objectives?

Not so much beyond contempt as beyond bizarre.

Craig Murray has a good posting on the important interview between Iain Dale and Michal Kaminski. It just shows where things now stand when a mere Blogger does what no so-called serious MSM journalist has done, and talks to the person at the centre of a controversy to hear what he might have to say.

Craig uses this interview to give some pertinent thoughts on Polish anti-semitism and other 'racist' phenomena in Poland, drawing on his own time in Poland in the 1990s:

... I should add that a young black British businessmen reported to me that being spat at was an almost daily occurence.

The strange thing is that I adore Poland, and Poles, and Polish culture. I was ever so happy in my time there. There are reasons for the development of this deep-seated racist strain which are historic. There is a limit to how far you can blame individuals for adopting attitudes which are widespread in their culture; and without understanding you cannot change attitudes. Which brings me back to Kaminski. Much as he tries to hide his past, for the present I do not think we should rule out that he really has changed his views, after being exposed to wider cultural influences (like Iain Dale!)

...

A key part of Poland coming to terms with its anti-semitism will be an acknowledgement of what Polish people did to Jews in or just after World War II. Iain Dale's questioning about the Jedwabne massacre is actually important. This was one of a number of massacres of Jews by Poles, but there were also hundreds of individual murders of Jewish survivors who inconveniently resurfaced, and perhaps tried to reclaim their property.

Poland must come to terms with all of its history, not just the heroic bits. Poland suffered terribly for three hundred years of near continuous foreign occupation. It was moved about physically on the map, sometimes disappearing, and emerged an artificially placed and artificially ethnically homogenous nation. Of course it was screwed up and nationalistic. Of course Kamnski is screwed up and nationalistic. Poland is slowly getting better. Who knows? Maybe Michal is too.

Not quite how I would have put it, but it's a free country.

Some wider thoughts.

'Anti-semitism' comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so when we talk about so-called 'Polish anti-semitism' we need to be a bit more precise.

At one extreme of the anti-semitism spectrum there is one of my favourites, Japanese Anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with any actual Jewish people as far as one can tell but rather spirals off into surreally kinky Asian occult fantasising.

The Polish case is quite different. For centuries as Poland's borders ebbed and flowed in central Europe large communities of Jews lived in Polish villages, towns and cities, often flourishing and achieving reknown. As and when surges of anti-Jewish feeling erupted elsewhere in Europe, Jews headed for Poland or Polish-dominated places.

For example, Jews were not even allowed to live in Moscow until about 1800. Their numbers grew there until some 30,000 Jews were expelled in 1892; they headed for Lodz and Warsaw.

A further disaster happened in 1914/15 when Germany attacked Russian territory and the Russians expelled up to  500,000 supposedly disloyal Jews at virtually no notice, 100,000 people dying in the process.

To cut a long and complex story short, the reality of anti-semitism in Poland does not spring from mystic nutty theories of Jewish conspiracy/supremacy, although that strain is now there (see below). It rather comes from a combination of centuries-long Catholic anti-Jewish teaching (the Jews being deemed responsible for the crucifixion of Christ) and what might be called 'normal' ethnic rivalry/tension of the sort seen today in plenty of other places, where different language/cultural communities are jostling for position precisely because they are so close and mutually entangled (see eg Bosnia).

Which explains why, yes, Poland between the Wars did take up its share of the sort of Nazi-backed pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish propaganda and legalised oppression which by then had a thriving tradition elsewhere in Europe, but also why Poland conspicuously did not rise up against its Jewish population when the Nazis invaded. The Nazis built several big death-camps in Poland once they embarked on the Final Solution because that's where so many Jews were (plus eg Auschwitz was a handy railway junction for trains from elsewhere in Europe).

So now (as Craig rightly says) there are different legacy issues in Poland.

Plenty of Jewish cultural activities go on. A huge new museum for the history of Polish Jews is being built in Warsaw. Many Poles are discovering unexpected Jewish roots in their own families. All serious political leaders emphasise their good relations with the Jewish community. Above all, John Paul II made a massive effort to lead the Catholic Church towards reconciliation with the Jewish faith, and that is percolating its way through the Church in Poland too.

On the other hand, there is a lumpen low-level anti-semitism around on a scale which is depressing. Newspaper kiosks in Warsaw carry weird little pamphlets about Jewish conspiracies, stickers against Jews appear inside buses, football fan graffiti attacks other clubs for their Jewish affinities, and so on.

As for wider racism, Poland looks to visitors from the UK like a stunningly 'white' place. Dark-skinned people are few and far between.

Is Poland an especially racist place? Not obviously. Once (prompted by an alarming report from our Embassy in Budapest describing how dark-skinned colleagues in Hungary were being jostled on public transport and constantly receiving racist slurs) I asked one Embassy colleague with Asian DNA if she had had problems in Warsaw. "Apart from some funny looks now and then, no."

So, praise the Lord, on this one I am basically with Craig Murray.

Racist/ethnic/religious/cultural and other aggressive forms of Fear of The Other have been a feature of life round the planet for much of human history, if not all of it. We are all working our way through it, some with more integrity and open-mindedness than others. 

Poland was the default refuge of choice in Europe for Jews for hundreds of years. Its huge and successful Jewish community was obliterated by the fathers and grandfathers of the Germans sitting primly in EU meetings now. It also saw a huge number of Poles being executed by the Nazis for trying to protect Jews from persecution.

In short, Poland is the last country on earth which needs to be lectured on the subject of anti-semitism.

And the noises in the UK from senior parts of the Labour Party spin-machine to try to smear the Conservative Party for their links with supposedly 'anti-semitic Poles' are beyond contempt.

Craig Murray is using an FOI bid to extract from the FCO a minute with then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's manuscript note on it, which Craig thinks will prove his case conclusively that Jack Straw is lying on key parts of the Torture story.

Craig's posting describing this bid is interesting. Have a look.

I myself think that Craig is misleading people, by claiming incessantly that if HMG accepted information known/suspected to have been extracted by overseas torture, we ipso facto are complicit (in a legal sense) in that torture.

This is not the law as laid down in the landmark 2005 House of Lords judgement.

I have posted a long comment on Craig's site, trying to find out what precisely Craig is claiming and what he thinks his FOI request will achieve even if successful. Here it is:

Craig,

In the spirit of friendly professional engagement (rather than quibbling or scattering red herrings), may I ask a couple of questions drawing on your interesting posting above?

What exactly are you claiming that Jack Straw did which was wrong as a matter of law? Options include:

• Deliberately inciting the use of foreign torture (“get them to extract that information for us, come what may”)
• Ordering British officials to use intelligence known to have extracted by torture
• Ordering British officials to use intelligence which they had good reason to think had been extracted by torture
• Ordering British officials to use intelligence which they thought might have been extracted under torture
• Ordering British officials not to ask searching questions about how the intelligence had been gained (“don’t ask, don’t tell") when they had suspicions 

Other permutations and sub-permutations could be listed:

·         The Foreign Secretary not giving specific instructions one way or the other, but somehow presiding over ‘informal understandings’ that torture-extracted information would not be challenged

·         The Foreign Secretary authorising the use of individual pieces of intelligence known/suspected to have come from torture if there was a pressing operational case to do so, but specifically disallowing others where that was not the case

·         The Foreign Secretary authorising the use of categories of intelligence (eg ‘intelligence from Country X’) where some reports could have come from torture but others not

·         Etc

The point is that the House of Lords judgement in 2005 (praised by you in your first book) looked carefully at distinctions of fact such as these. Various statements made by different Law Lords came down firmly in favour of the proposition that the ‘executive’ power (ie Government) could decide to use information which they thought or knew had come from torture if there was a pressing public policy reason to do so. In other words, they specifically did not accept that to do so amounted to ‘complicity in torture’. That, therefore, seems to be the best available UK law on the subject.

If therefore Jack Straw did what you say he did (ie “took the policy decision that the UK would receive intelligence obtained under torture by the CIA and other liaison intelligence services”) he arguably did nothing wrong under UK/international law as long as he was persuaded that there was a clear public policy benefit.

You make much play of the minute helpfully published on your website recording FCO Legal Adviser’s Michael Wood’s view:

“After my protests at our obtaining intelligence under torture, I was astonished to be called back to London for a meeting on 8 March 2003 at which I was told that torture intelligence was legal, and that Jack Straw and Sir Richard Dearlove, Head of MI6, had decided that in the "War on Terror" we should, as a matter of policy, obtain intelligence got by torture by foreign intelligence services.”

I suspect that you were not told that ‘torture intelligence was legal’. If you were, the sentence is largely meaningless. Michael Wood (being a smart fellow) carefully distinguished between receiving intelligence derived from torture (not an offence) and using it in evidence in judicial proceedings (not allowed). This view was later upheld by the House of Lords.

I therefore don’t see why you are in FOI pursuit of the minute recording your meeting with Linda Duffield. Jack Straw’s manuscript marginalia on it are highly unlikely to be relevant to the core issue. Indeed, even if he said disobliging things about you, so what? If he had agreed or ordered or accepted that HMG use evidence possibly derived from torture for solid reasons aimed at protecting the UK from terrorism, he would be comfortably within what the House of Lords said was lawful in these complex and circumstances.

It may be that you are right that Jack Straw has not been telling the truth or all the truth about what he did or did not authorise/order/encourage. But even if what you say is correct on that point, it does not seem to follow that what he did was illegal/improper under international and English law.

Much of your argument (and perhaps its appeal to many people) looks to be based on the idea that huge numbers of senior people dealing with these issues simultaneously were all incorrigibly corrupt, cynical and dishonest if not downright wicked. I just don’t find that credible, which is where you and I basically part company on the substance.

Don’t you think it possible that when the issue was raised (perhaps indeed by your own tough and commendable questions) Jack Straw took the best available legal and policy advice on what was and was not permissible (advice which perhaps was later upheld by the House of Lords looking at the whole issue with the utmost care) and acted accordingly?

And that when he says your account is “entirely untrue” he may be right, insofar as the claims you are making are just not accurate in that sense?

All that said, you might say that whatever the law might say, it is Just Wrong to accept any intelligence tainted by suspicions of torture and that Jack Straw falls squarely into that camp: that even if was lawful it was not acceptable.

But you then have to wave goodbye to President Clinton who made clear his view that if he himself had to order the use of extreme interrogation methods to try to thwart an imminent terrorist attack on American citizens, that’s what he would do – and live with the consequences.  

Regards, Charles

Craig Murray boldly affirms that the FCO and MI6 knew that al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber.

I have posted this typo-strewn question on his site:

On what basis do you 'affirm' (presuably (sic) on the basis of your former professional FCO experience) that "the FCO and MI6 knew that al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber"?

Your posting of 8 September referred to possible intelligence reports to this effect, which you say you did not read. Anything else?

Basically, this is a very serious claim for a former UK diplomat to make, and I wonder what hard evidence you have to back it up.

Disclaimer: I never had access to any secret or other FCO/MI6 papers on all this story, so I have nothing to offer myself on the substance as seen from the 'inside'.

Charles

Let's see what we get.

Previous evidence he cited on this one comprised intelligence reports he said he'd not read...

Here (h/t Skeptical Bureaucrat) is an interesting report about apparent self-censorship among US diplomats going back some years:

One diplomat told The Washington Times that he has decided to resign in part because of frustration with "rampant self-censorship" by Foreign Service officers and their superiors that has gone so far as to ban "bad news" cables from countries that are friendly with the United States.

The diplomat, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution against himself and colleagues, said that, in one instance under the George W. Bush administration, an embassy in the Middle East did not report local government interference in elections. Senior management censored accounts of low morale at another Middle East mission that had been the target of terrorist attacks, he said.

More than a dozen diplomats serving in Washington and abroad told The Times that they agreed with most of the officer's critique, and that the censorship has continued to a lesser extent in the Obama administration. All asked not to be named to avoid retribution.

It must seem self-evident to any normal taxpayer that there is not much point in having diplomats if they do not send back their best, honest analyses of the places they live in, but rather shape their analysis to suit prevailing policy prejudices back at HQ.

Well, yes. But...

Your job as a diplomat is to represent your government's policy abroad. If after due deliberation your government has decided that it is in your country's interests to befriend the odious government/regime in the country to which you are posted, that is what you are paid to do.

It then becomes a matter of nice judgement how far and often you call that position into question. You need to find a way to get across to your political masters that the position to which they have publicly committed themselves is, for one reason or the other, unwise or counter-productive or wrong in principle. Part of Craig Murray's problem as HM Ambassador in Uzbekistan was his inability to do this with even minimum guile and judgement. See eg here. 

And it is genuinely not easy to get such changes effected. Other partners/allies may have views. Domestic lobbies too. There may be some deeply-held secret reasons for continuing the policy which even diplomats in the country concerned do not know.

In these circumstances, the issue is not so much self-censorship as avoiding fighting battles which have been fought and lost, or which are just not going to be won this time round.

This earlier post by me takes up that question with some real examples, and features an interesting exchange (well, I thought it was interesting) between Craig and myself which goes into the professional issues in some depth. 

Two examples from my own career.

1   Back in 1983/84, a couple of us middle-ranking young dips at the British Embassy to socialist Yugoslavia in Belgrade came to the view that the decay of Yugo-communism was such that this country could no longer sensibly be termed 'a pillar of stability in the Balkans' as the official briefs in London proclaimed. In fact, it was a crumbling pillar of instability.

We had various internal disagreements if not rows with our senior Embassy colleagues about this: how far was it true, and how far should those who felt the policy analysis was wrong be allowed to put their concerns to high levels in London? One of my first blog postings was all about my famous MTS/Non-MTS paper about just these questions.

2   I think now that the Embassy pulled its punches in reporting the massive devastation caused by Moscow trying to suppress separatist elements in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. The general policy instinct had it that the nascent democracy in Russia just had to be supported come what may, and that if that meant looking away from gruesome human rights excesses in and around Chechnya, so be it. That approach made political sense at the time - but what problems did it store up for later?

So, all this is not as straightforward a subject as you might think, the more so these days when just about anything is likely to leak.

Yet the hard fact remains. It is right to take a firm policy stand, and sometimes the only available choices are all deeply unattractive.

But a firm stand in the end is only as firm as the ground it stands on.

And surely Ministers need to know if that ground is not as firm as it looks:

“One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

The most important sentence I wrote in my diplomatic career? Both because it was right in fact - and because I put it on the public record that I thought our policy was wrong?

The Total Politics list of the Top 300 UK political blogs is here.

I have sunk to place 196 from 161 last year. Craig Murray has soared to 95 from 145.

Aaargh.

The methodology of this survey was curious this year, with people being expected to list ten blogs to take part:

Bloggers and blog readers were asked to rank their top ten blogs and then email them to Total Politics. The results were fed into a spreadsheet, with the top blog getting ten points, the second blog nine points and so on.

In total, people voted for 940 blogs (compared to 590 in 2008).

In other words, the sample is tiny, and skewed in favour of (a) people who read Iain's blog, and (b) people who follow ten UK political blogs - a bit of a stretch for many of us?

Given the vast numbers of people who do read Iain's blog, the participation rate was surprisingly small. I assume that he wanted to get the views of people who read a variety of blogs, so that less well-known blogs get a look-in? Were he to ask for people to vote for only (say) five blogs, he might get many more people voting but fewer blogs represented?

Anyway, all good clean fun. I wear my Top 20 Libertarian Blog badge with pride.

And feeble as my showing was in the Total Politics 2009 poll, I have moved up the Wikio ratings to a majestic 449th place for some reason.

Thanks, readers!

Former Ambassador Craig Murray has thrown himself back into the blogging ring after some self-doubt.

He has a long post about the Lockerbie/Megrahi business, which covers the ground with the volleys of adjectives and adverbs one has come to expect:

The Tories have shown their blood-baying, American bum-sucking true colours. New Labour have been caught in their usual horrible hypocrisy, attempting to capitalise on anti-SNP right wing media reaction, while having been deliberately paving the way for the release for years...

Syria was responsible for the Lockerbie bomb. But in the first Iraq war, we needed Syria's support, while Libya remained a supporter of Iraq. Lockerbie was a bar to our new alliance with Damascus, so extremely conveniently, and with perfect timing, it was discovered that actually it was the Libyans!! Anyone who believes that fake intelligence started with Iraqi WMD is an idiot...

Al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber. The scandal is not that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation led to his release. The scandal is that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation were what led the Libyans to hand him over in the first place - very much in the way their ancestors had given hostages to Imperial Rome.

Not sure I follow all that.

But what caught my professional eye was this amazing passage:

It haunts me that I had a chance to read the intelligence reports which, I was told by a shocked FCO colleague in Aviation and Maritime Department where I then worked, showed that the new anti-Libyan narrative was false. I say in self-defence that at the time I was literally working day and night, sleeping on a camp bed. I was organising the Embargo Surveillance Centre and I was convinced that a watertight full physical embargo could remove the need to invade Iraq.

I was impatient of the interruption. I listened to my colleague only distractedly and did not want to go through the rigmarole of signing for and transporting the reports I hadn't got time to look at then. Events overtook me, and I never did see them.

Wha-a-a-at?

Craig had the chance as a self-proclaimed FCO High-Flier to see intelligence reports 'showing' something or other to the effect that Libya was not responsible for Lockerbie - and he did nothing about them (and did not even read them) because he was too busy/tired?

Various points of interest here:

• Craig firmly believes these reports now, without even having read them then.
• Elsewhere in his oeuvre Craig denounces  many intelligence reports as 'dross', all too often obtained by torture. What if these reports had been obtained by torture or were somehow linked to torture? Would he have believed them any the less, if their subject-matter was so far-reaching?
• Had such reports been credible but probably or even possibly extracted by torture, would it have been right to rely on them to drop the case against Libya?
• What if anything made these reports seemingly so believable?

As for whether Libya was responsible for Lockerbie, I think that Col Gadhafi is made of stern stuff. He would not have coughed up so much LIbyan compensation for victims of the atrocity without a pretty damn clear case laid out before him?

FCO Quirk Note: I used to work in the predecessor of the FCO Aviation and Maritime Department which Craig mentions. In my day it was called Maritime, Aviation and Environment Department (MAED). But then Environment went elsewhere in a shuffle of responsibilities.

It would have provoked unseemly titters to call the new smaller department MAD. So they went for AMD instead.

The British government are not planning on holding an enquiry into their possible complicity in overseas torture:

Kim Howells, Labour chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee which scrutinises the secret services, said the issue of UK complicity in torture had been "clarified as far as it can be on the evidence that we have".

"I can tell you that we've found no evidence that there has been collusion between the intelligence services, any Government department and governments that torture their individuals," Mr Howells told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

... "So I'm very worried that these calls for judicial inquiries and so on are really treating the intelligence agencies as guilty until proven innocent and that's very, very dangerous for the security of this country."

Mr Howells said "no government on Earth" could guarantee that prisoners who had been picked up and held in another country had not had their human rights abused in some way.

But, he added: "If we don't have that information from other intelligence agencies, how can you be sure that there aren't jihadists who are trying to murder citizens on the street or Irish republicans who want to blow people to pieces in order to further their cause? You have no way of knowing that."

Hmm.

What is all this 'complicity' stuff about anyway? The term is used in the UN Convention Against Torture. According to the best available formal legal pronouncement upon the subject (namely by the Hague Tribunal dealing with war crimes in former Yugoslavia) it means this:

(1) knowledge that torture is taking place;

(2) a contribution by way of assistance, which

(3) has a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime of torture itself

Complicity is quite tightly defined here. Anyone complicit in torture would have to be close to the act of torture and 'assisting' it to the point of helping perpetrate the crime.

This is all very technical on one level, but very simple on another. Thus, if (say) HMG are getting via the CIA a stream of reports from eg Uzbekistan which might well have been produced by Uzbek torture, are HMG thereby 'complicit' in that torture by virtue of 'acquiescing' in it?

On the face of it, clearly not. There may well be knowledge or at least very strong suspicions, but there is no British 'assistance' or other contribution which impacts on the acts of torture (if any) themselves.

Hence strenuous efforts (a) to expand the definition, and (b) to get that expanded definition accepted as the new standard. The UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights proposes this:

'Constructive knowledge' means things you would have known about had you asked the questions you should have asked, or done what you should have done.

Whereas Craig Murray's evidence to the Committee was rather too full of his own self-importance and lacking logical rigour (albeit with some strong and cogent points), the following evidence of Professor Philippe Sands (via same link) drills right down into these distinctions:

... one can easily imagine a situation where a government becomes aware that certain practices are being followed and makes it clear it does not accept that such practices are tolerable and that if they continue it will take further steps in order to indicate displeasure with what is going on. The “do nothing” option in effect can be seen as encouragement and in that sense may constitute in an indirect way a contribution to what is happening.

What I have just said is not that helpful in that everything turns on the specific facts of the scenario.

Exactly. It all turns on facts.

And how a court might look at such facts and their practical implications, weighing (ultimately) the risks of getting too close to nasty foreign regimes in their torturing ways against the risks which might come from ignoring intelligence reports going to threats to UK citizens.

See that House of Lords judgement. Professor Sands picks out the passages he likes in building his case for the Committee, but there are many others going in a quite different direction.

So it looks as if the government are comfortable (enough) that if the 'complicity' issue were to go a serious court, their arguments that in fact British officials and agents had kept sufficient distance from any overseas torture to stay within the best available legal standard (laid down by ICTY) and so not be 'complicit' would win the day.

Not an easy or even noble position to defend. But given the current state of international law not, perhaps, shameful or disgraceful either?

One final noteworthy point.

Craig throughout this matter has put a great emphasis on the minute written by FCO Legal Adviser Michael Wood to advise the FCO dealing with Craig's many allegations, which he 'published'.

It is obvious that this minute does not support Craig's claims to any significant degree or at all. The minute narrowly answers a specific question said to have been raised by Craig himself, and does so accurately.

Professor Sands explains why:

I would not treat this document as a formal legal advice in that sense; it is a letter (sic) addressed to another civil servant that purports to address a very narrow question and does not purport to give a full reasoned legal opinion on the subject.

What I say in my written evidence is that insofar as the letter seeks to address a very narrow question it is not formally inaccurate but it misses the bigger point which was addressed in the previous witness’s contribution, namely in what circumstances might the receipt of information obtained through torture constitute complicity within the meaning of article 4 of the convention.

Exactly.

Which (alas) is what reasonable people are arguing about.