Britain's Role In A Global Torture Network
'The Torture Never Stops'
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/wattorture.htm
BBC Broadcasts Ambassador's Story On 20 February
'Murder In Samarkand'

"I was sacked as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan more than five years ago for pointing out our complicity in torture. That story is going to be told in a David Hare dramatisation of my memoir, Murder in Samarkand, tomorrow [Saturday 20 February] on Radio 4.... It is hard to realise now, but when I was dismissed in 2004 and first blew the whistle that we were routinely complicit with torture, large sections of the media and public did not believe me. They simply could not imagine that Britain would do such a thing. Now I never meet anybody who disbelieves me. We desperately need that public inquiry."
Craig Murray - Why Britain turns a blind eye to torture
London Evening Standard, 19 February 2010

"The head of MI6 has told the BBC there is no torture and 'no complicity in torture' by the British secret service..... Speaking on BBC Radio 4's programme MI6: A Century in Shadows, Sir John Scarlett defended the actions of his organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6. 'Our officers are as committed to the values and the human rights values of liberal democracy as anybody else,' he said."
MI6 'is not complicit' in torture
BBC Online, 10 August 2009

"Intelligence sources have revealed that spy chiefs put pressure on Mr Miliband to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution, or to jeopardise relations with the CIA.... The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, 'is very far down the list of things they did,' the official said. "
UK government suppressed evidence on Binyam Mohamed torture because MI6 helped his interrogators
Sunday Telegraph, 7 February 2010

"David Tennant is to play Craig Murray, the colourful former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, in a new BBC Radio 4 play. The acclaimed Doctor Who star will depict the 'flawed hero' Murray .... Murray was withdrawn from Uzbekistan in 2004 after the Foreign Office became frustrated with his vociferous criticism of human rights abuses in the former Soviet country. He also accused Britain of using intelligence extracted under torture by the Uzbek regime."
David Tennant to play former ambassador Craig Murray in new BBC Radio 4 play
Daily Telegraph, 2 Feburary 2010

"It is the shocking torture and murder of one victim, who was boiled alive while being beaten, that pushes Murray to make a stand. He gives a lecture accusing the Uzbek regime directly. Recalled to the Foreign Office, Murray is given a dressing down and told that 'moral questions aren't our business'....The play, which will be broadcast on 20 February, also documents Murray's nervous breakdown as the Foreign Office tries to force him from office..."
David Tennant takes on role of rebel UK ambassador
Guardian, 2 February 2010

"After a 20-year diplomatic career, I was appointed as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan at the age of 42. Uzbekistan is on the northern border of Afghanistan and was seen as a key ally in the 'War on Terror'. Unfortunately its perpetual ruler, President Karimov, is one of the world's most brutal dictators. There are thousands of political prisoners who suffer the most horrific torture. People are even boiled alive. When I protested in public about this torture by our allies, I made myself very unpopular in Whitehall. When I protested internally about MI6 and the CIA using 'intelligence' gained by Uzbek torturers, they decided I had to go. I had stumbled across the extraordinary rendition programme, and was endangering it... I was stunned that the Foreign Office tried to blackmail me. My entire faith in the British Government had been destroyed. What I could not get my head round was the fact that New Labour Ministers who supported the use of intelligence from torture, and supported the bombing of urban areas, professed moral outrage that I liked nightclubs..... I had met with a huge amount of obstruction from the Government in publishing [the book] Murder In Samarkand, and we were worried there might be obstruction of the radio drama, particularly with a General Election looming. The whole thing was therefore kept secret until production was finished. Even I did not know David Tennant was playing me until two days before recording started....This is a timely and important drama. I hope first and foremost that people will enjoy it. But I also hope they will both listen and think. By combining my story with the recent evidence from the Chilcot Inquiry, people may fully appreciate what an unprincipled and internationally violent Government we have. Once we understand that, we can look to mend it."
Craig Murray
Mail On Sunday, 14 February 2010

"David Hare's witty portrait of an unlikely hero, based on the memoir by Craig Murray. Craig is proud to be sent as Ambassador to Uzbekestan, eager to work hard and also eager for fun. The combination takes him on a dangerous course both professionally and personally, and the stakes couldn't be higher."
Saturday Play - Murder In Samarkand
Next on: Saturday, 14:30 on BBC Radio 4

"We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow. Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived. It said that the man's fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid. He had been boiled alive. That was my welcome to Uzbekistan, a U.S. and British ally in the war on terror. Trying to tell the truth about the country cost me my job.... I saw this happening in a country regarded as a strategic friend by the United States, which was looking for well-placed allies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Karimov had delivered for President Bush, allowing the United States to take over a major former Soviet airbase at Karshi-Khanabad to help wage war in neighboring Afghanistan; the several thousand U.S. forces stationed there were the first Americans permitted to serve in former Soviet territory. As a reward, Karimov had been Bush's guest for tea in the White House in March 2002. It was clear by the time I arrived in Tashkent a few months later that the United States was handsomely rewarding Karimov's cooperation. Hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid were flowing to the country.... [including] $120 million for the Uzbek armed forces and more than $80 million for the re-branded Uzbek security services, successor to the KGB. In other words, when the prisoner was boiled to death that summer, U.S. taxpayers had helped heat the water....The CIA was apparently well aware that it was getting material drawn from torture. At my request, my deputy confirmed this with the U.S. Embassy. She reported back to me that she had been told that the United States did not see a problem 'in the context of the war on terror.' (I immediately reported this back to Britain in a top-secret telegram.) And both the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, were accepting and using this intelligence in their assessments, despite its highly questionable validity..... To me, the meaning of all this was simple: U.S. officials were justifying their support for Karimov with the argument that he was a bastion against Islamic militancy. That argument enabled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to come to Tashkent in February 2004 and say: 'Uzbekistan is a key member of the coalition's global war on terror. And I brought the president the good wishes of President Bush.' Karimov's record as a dictator, persecuting democratic opposition, simply does not fit the narrative; it was not a story my government intended to let me tell. During this period, the key challenge facing then- Secretary of State Colin Powell was the need to keep certifying Uzbekistan's human rights record to Congress.... Powell's subsequent claim that Tashkent was under attack by Islamic extremists helped smooth the path for continuing U.S. aid."
Craig Murray - Her Majesty's Man in Tashkent
Washington Post, 3 September 2006

'Keep Giving Us The Bases - And We'll Keep Russia And China's Hands Off The Pipelines'

"Afghanistan is not the only potential route for transiting Central Asian gas while bypassing Russia. Iran is the most ovbious route, but strangely the US is not keen. The other route is through Georgia and Azerbaijan. But Putin has Azerbaijan locked tight against the pipeline..... There is a minimum of 15 trillion - yes trillion - dollars of natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Since 2005, Russian diplomacy has tied up the contracts for Gazprom. Before that the US had more than a foot in the door, and the US knows that what changed once can and will change again. 15 trillion dollars is worth some strategising. ..... Let me say 15 trillion dollars again. Not to mention the fact that I have been officially briefed that it is the US strategic interest in the region.... In 1986, when I started my first overseas posting in Lagos, the first file on my desk was marked 'West Africa Gas Pipeline'. The WAGP delivered its first gas early this year, 23 years later. .... These are major strategic interests and long term projects. You can believe that the US is in Afghanistan to search for Osama Bin Laden and to back the 'Democratic' Mr Karzai. Or you can believe that this war is about control of resources."
The Sinister Dissembling of Jerome A Paris
Craig Murray (Blog), 5 November 2009

"The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Everybody in the intelligence and security worlds knew there were no such links - Bin Laden and Hussein were enemies. Only torture could yield 'intelligence' of such links to provide a justification of the invasion of Iraq. There could be no clearer indication that these evil people wished to launch an illegal war of aggression for their other reasons. If it is not evil to use torture to try to create a pretext for launching aggressive war, then what is evil? Here is the full text of Marjorie's article...."
Waterboarding Approved Specifically To Justify Iraq War
Craig Murray (Blog), 25 April 2009

"Torture, one might say, is like art — it is hard to define, but you certainly know it when you see it hanging on a wall. From his detention in Pakistan in 2002 to his release from Guantánamo Bay last year, the treatment of the British resident Binyam Mohamed included sleep deprivation, threats, shackled interrogation, beatings and the mutilation of his genitals with a scalpel. While there is no suggestion that the British security services knew about all this, the time is surely past for pretending that they knew about none of it. Over the past week, there has been something worse than depressing — and potentially closer to terrifying — about the spectacle of the Government, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, MI5, MI6 and the Intelligence and Security Committee all banding together to disparage and disdain a senior member of the judiciary. If torture is not British, neither is this. Last Wednesday, Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, ruled that the Foreign Office must release a seven-paragraph summary of 42 classified CIA documents seen by MI5 in 2002. Today, the Government’s lawyer Jonathan Sumption, QC, will respond to this newspaper’s request for disclosure of a paragraph of his ruling that contained damning criticisms of MI5, and which Lord Neuberger was persuaded to excise from his draft judgment before handing it down. His lordship has already faced an Establishment barrage. Jonathan Evans, the Director General of MI5, said that the criticisms he made were 'the precise opposite of the truth'. In a letter to newspapers, David Miliband and Alan Johnson, meanwhile, raged against 'a false impression about the work and ethics, not to mention the accountability, of our security and intelligence agencies . . . (which was) . . . not just unfair on the staff concerned, but dangerous for the country.' All three chose to veil their implied criticism of the judge’s ruling beneath a denunciation of the media that reported it. Kim Howells, who chairs the ISC, did not bother with such niceties. 'I don’t know what the Master of the Rolls is playing at,' he told Radio 4 bluntly. What Lord Neuberger is playing at is called 'judicial independence', and it is the keystone of the rule of law. For his critics to charge that he is jeopardising the security of the state is brazen hypocrisy. It is not the acceptance of misdeeds that tarnishes a country’s reputation and gives succour to its enemies. It is that they happened in the first place, and the cover-up that seeks to pretend that they did not."
See Evil, Hear Evil
London Times, 16 February 2010

"We do not receive torture intelligence from foreign liaison security services sometimes, or by chance. We receive it on a regular basis, through established channels. That plainly makes us complicit. It is worth considering, in this regard, Article 4 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which requires signatories to make complicity with torture a criminal offence. When I protested about these practices within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I was told bluntly that Jack Straw and the head of MI6 had considered my objections, but had come to the conclusion that torture intelligence was important to the War on Terror, and the practice should continue. One day, the law must bring them to account.... James VI and I abolished torture - New Labour is making the first attempt in English courts to justify government use of torture information. Why stop there? Why can't the agencies work over terrorist suspects? The Security Services want us to be able to use information from torture. That should come as no surprise. From Sir Thomas Walsingham on, the profession attracts people not squeamish about the smell of seared flesh from the branding iron. That is why we have a judiciary to protect us. I pray the Law Lords do."
Craig Murray - The reality of Britain's reliance on torture
Independent, 27 October 2005

"An outspoken former British ambassador has said that the UK should disband because it has 'lost any moral authority it had'. Craig Murray, 51, also challenged the authority of UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith in Scotland, saying that his legal writ sanctioning the Iraq war 'carried not a milligram of weight in Scotland'....Speaking at the Scottish Independence Convention, Mr Murray said: 'The United Kingdom is not an entity that deserves to exist because it has lost any moral authority it had.' 'Tony Blair's failure to consider the human cost of war has brought us to where we are today and the only way to right the situation is to split up the UK.'"
Ex-ambassador: 'UK has lost moral authority'
Scotsman, 17 February 2010

"Preserving the working relationship between the British and American intelligence agencies is a touchstone of national security policy. While prime ministers and presidents come and go, and their personal connections span the barometer from frosty to fawning, the links between MI5, MI6, the CIA and other agencies are the real 'special relationship'."
The seven paragraphs on Binyam Mohamed were not for MI5 to disclose
London Times, 11 February 2010

The Name Is 'Oil-Regime-Change'
John 'Oil-Regime-Change'

At 2:30 pm on Saturday, 20 February, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a 90 minute drama centred on Craig Murray's account of British government complicity in torture during his time as Ambassador to Uzbekistan. In a production entitled 'Murder In Samarkand', based on his written memoir of the same name, Murray is played by 'Doctor Who' actor David Tennant (there are also plans to convert the book into a feature film).

The broadcast could hardly be more timely, with the most recent separate revelations about British complicity in overseas torture (this time in Morocco) now leaving people in little doubt that this sort of thing is 'real', despite the explicit denial of Sir John Scarlett before he retired as head of MI6 in 2009.

Such British 'values', as secretly engaged in by certain elements within Britain's 'intelligence' services have little to do with morality, freedom and democracy, or even being 'intelligent' - and everything to do with unsustainable economic and other geopolitical objectives.

The main strategic goals are the securing of oil and gas based energy supply lines and the associated containment of Russia and China, especially the latter as it moves towards becoming the world's next superpower. The most important energy resources involved (both the deposits and the transportation routes serving them) are in the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. As such they are mainly situated in the heart of Islamic world, including within former Soviet Republics.

The need to address Islamic terrorism is real. But it has been hijacked for use as a springboard in the pursuit of broader geopolitical strategic aims whose imperative is most strongly driven by the singular failure to develop a non-hydrocarbon based global economy.

Indeed, the arrival of the 'war on terror' post 9/11 has provided much cover for the execution of these aims under the guise of 'counter-terrorism' and 'counter-insurgency', which are used to justify maintaining military intervention in strategically important geopolitical space (further fuelling Islamic militancy in a self-reinforcing cycle).

At their worst, these usually (but not entirely) unspoken primary objectives have resulted in the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people, and the displacement of millions more as refugees. They are essentially great crimes of state.

Most notably they have involved the bombings and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also covert subversion in former Yugoslavia involving the secret co-option of Islamic jihadists before 9/11 (another deeply scandalous episode about which most people remain unaware, even though it too is partly related to control of pipelines earmarked to transport Caspian region hydrocarbons - this time, through the Balkans).

The BBC's dramatisation of the British Ambassador's torture story has been trailed by the Mail on Sunday in an article written by Murray himself. His experience relates to British behaviour in Uzbekistan under New Labour.

But a similar theme persists irrespective of the colour of government, as evidenced by what MI6 are reported to have done in the 1990s under the Tories in Azerbaijan, another western-courted Caspian region country keen on torture. More can be read about that episode, and related matters, at:

'Rogue State Britain - John Scarlett's Evil Empire'
http://www.nlpwessex.org/docs/watscarlett.htm

Sir John Scarlett is best known for his authorship of the infamous 'intelligence' dossier based on false information that was used as a justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But it was Scarlett who, according to former BP manager Les Abrahams, was also involved in organising two coup d'etats in Azerbaijan when he was MI6 station chief in Moscow after the fall of the Berlin Wall. BP's own alleged role in one of the coups was also divulged by Turkish intelligence and reported in the British press. The aim was to secure a regime in Azerbaijan that would favour the granting of major oil concessions to the company.

BP subsequently concluded their oil deal with Azerbaijan's repressive President, Heydar Aliev, under the watch of Tony Blair in 1998. The two men held a celebratory meeting in Downing St in July of that year.

Despite this blatantly anti-democratic coup-d'etat track record, serial 'regime changer' Scarlett predictably told the BBC last year, when challenged on allegations of MI6 involvement in torture, that "Our officers are as committed to the values and the human rights values of liberal democracy as anybody else".

Meanwhile, Murray is the man to read on British intelligence complicity in torture. His blog is at craigmurray.org.uk. Amongst many other matters, the blog reports on how torture has been used to garner false confessions in support of the 'war on terror'.

Shortly before his death in 2003, following the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that Scarlett had claimed were in Iraq, British government bioweapons expert Dr David Kelly referred to 'many dark actors playing games'. Craig Murray's story reveals just how dark some of those games are.

With the BBC now giving the subject of torture the attention it deserves, surely the time has come to claim our country back from a branch of the 'civil service' that hides behind the Official Secrets Act, and which is essentially only accountable to a deferential parliamentary committee over whose eyes the wool is easily pulled.

This is a faction which is closely allied to 'Big Oil', other economic interests, and the United States of America. As the London Times quietly noted recently,"While prime ministers and presidents come and go, and their personal connections span the barometer from frosty to fawning, the links between MI5, MI6, the CIA and other agencies are the real 'special relationship' [with America]."

These people have tremendous 'Yes, Minister' type leverage potential for shaping events, as the carefully cultivated personal relationship that Scarlett is reported to have developed with Tony Blair would seem to indicate. Scarlett and the leadership of MI6 could have stopped the war with Iraq even before the Prime Minister (apparently somewhat naively) asked for a public dossier.

For when it comes down to it, what evidence did MI6 actually have of Iraq's WMD programme which could have been realistically considered robust at the time it was appraised? (It is now even alleged, apparently by unhappy sources within the intelligence community itself, that the infamous '45 minute' claim came from an Iraqi taxi driver with no prior intelligence credentials).

Until a cure for this disease is administered, the implications for 'liberal democracy', both within Britain and elsewhere, remain unsettling.

In the meantime the more people that are able to contemplate these matters, and to listen to 'Murder In Samarkand' on BBC Radio 4 on 20 February (or afterwards on the BBC's 'Saturday Play' web page), the better.

nlpwessex
www.nlpwessex.org

"During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US funded large numbers of jihadists through Pakistan's secret intelligence service, the ISI. Later the US wanted to raise another jihadi corps, again using proxies, to help Bosnian Muslims fight to weaken the Serb government's hold on Yugoslavia. Those they turned to included Pakistanis in Britain. According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan, trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA's contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly, this was 'with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies'. As the 2002 Dutch government report on Bosnia makes clear, the US provided a green light to groups on the state department list of terrorist organisations, including the Lebanese-based Hizbullah, to operate in Bosnia - an episode that calls into question the credibility of the subsequent 'war on terror'. For nearly a decade the US helped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilise the former Yugoslavia. The insurgents were also allowed to move further east to Kosovo. By the end of the fighting in Bosnia there were tens of thousands of Islamist insurgents in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo; many then moved west to Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Less well known is evidence of the British government's relationship with a wider Islamist terrorist network. During an interview on Fox TV this summer, the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus reported that British intelligence had used the al-Muhajiroun group in London to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo. Since July Scotland Yard has been interested in an alleged member of al-Muhajiroun, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who some sources have suggested could have been behind the London bombings. According to Loftus, Aswat was detained in Pakistan after leaving Britain, but was released after 24 hours. He was subsequently returned to Britain from Zambia, but has been detained solely for extradition to the US, not for questioning about the London bombings. Loftus claimed that Aswat is a British-backed double agent, pursued by the police but protected by MI6. One British Muslim of Pakistani origin radicalised by the civil war in Yugoslavia was LSE-educated Omar Saeed Sheikh..... This is all the more remarkable when this is the same Omar Sheikh who, at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lormel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit. Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for questioning by the US about 9/11."
Michael Meacher MP - Britain now faces its own blowback
Guardian, 10 September 2005

"Omar Sheikh is a British national born to Pakistani parents in London on December 23, 1973. His early education was in the United Kingdom, although he also spent four years at Lahore’s prestigious Aitchison College. He then went to the London School of Economics (LSE) but dropped out before graduation. It is believed in some quarters that while Omar Sheikh was at the LSE he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6. It is said that MI6 persuaded him to take an active part in demonstrations against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. At some point he probably became a rogue or double agent."
President Purvez Musharraf of Pakistan
How we found Pearl buried in ten pieces
London Times, 26 September 2006

"A secret intelligence report accuses BP, Britain's biggest company, of backing a military coup which installed a ruthless KGB hardman in the former Soviet state of Azerbaijan. An intelligence officer says BP... later consolidated its position with the new regime when the middlemen arranged to supply the incoming government with military equipment in an 'arms-for-oil' deal.... Aliyev's arrival was welcomed by Britain and America, which have a strategic interest in securing oil rights. BP has close links to British intelligence and employs several former MI6 officers... The Turkish intelligence document, a report on the alleged role of BP and Amoco in the events surrounding the 1993 uprising, claims the companies were 'behind the coup' in which president Abulfaz Elchibey was overthrown and some 40 people died. The report says: 'As a result of our intelligence efforts, it has been understood that two petrol giants BP and Amoco, British and American respectively, which together forms the AIOC [Azerbaijan International Oil Consortium], are behind the coup d'état carried out against Elchibey in 1993.... The latest allegations will embarrass Lord Simon of Highbury, Tony Blair's former trade minister, who was BP's group chief executive at the time of the coup. Despite Labour's ethical foreign policy and Aliyev's reputation as a hardline autocrat, Blair gave him the red-carpet treatment when he visited London in 1998 to sign a friendship treaty and $13 billion (£9.5 billion) in contracts with BP and other British firms.."
BP accused of backing 'arms for oil' coup
Sunday Times, 26 March 2000

"It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Tomorrow New Labour’s ethical policy will drown symbolically in a poisonous cocktail of blood and oil when the Queen shakes hands with Azerbaijan’s President Aliev. Her Majesty may be forgiven for thinking this is one export-driven photo-opportunity too many. The Queen has dutifully entertained tyrants of all stripes but she has never had to shake hands with a SMERSH agent before.... Today, as President of Azerbaijan his secret police regularly arrest scores of critics allegedly plotting against him and thousands languish in his old haunts, the ex-KGB prisons. Others simply disappear. Yet Aliev’s Azerbaijan is respectable. There is one word to explain this bizarre fact: Oil.... Azeri democracy was uniquely Aliev-style.... oil decreed that Aliev had won 98.9% of the votes - a modest 1% fall from his last Soviet-era total... A gaggle of ex-Tory MPs and former Foreign Office diplomats know the value of keeping in with Aliev. So does a host of stars of George Bush’s Administration... [now] Tony Blair is wining and dining Aliev..."
Aliev In Britain
Daily Mail, 20 July 1998

"Next week, the world will have the answer to a fascinating geopolitical question: whether the pivotal post-Soviet state of Ukraine will choose to return eastward, toward Russia, or to move westward, toward Europe...... Yanukovych, the current prime minister, has shown his colors, and they are all shades of red. Russian intervention in the campaign has been intense, public and utterly clear. For his part, Yanukovych vowed ... to give Moscow special rights to the oil pipeline in the south near Odessa."
RUSSIA'S IMPERIAL FUTURE HINGES ON UPCOMING VOTE IN UKRAINE
Yahoo News, 25 November 2004

"If the ruling party holds on to power [in these elections] in Ukraine, a new cross-Ukraine pipeline designed to feed U.S.-financed, Kazakhstani oil from the Black Sea north to European markets will likely see a peculiar reversal of roles. It's likely the Odessa-Brody pipeline would literally reverse its flow and instead be used to ship Russian oil south through the Mediterranean, strengthening Russia's export position, undermining U.S. energy and investment interests in Kazakhstan, and preventing any European diversification away from Russian energy."
What's at Stake in Ukraine?
Tech Central Station, 19 November 2004

'With A Little Help From Our Friends'
Invasion Or Coup Too Tricky?
Then Why Not Try A Proxy 'Colour Revolution' Instead?

Ukraine 2004

"On the day of Viktor Yushchenko's inauguration [as President of Ukraine], Tom Mangold reveals the extraordinary story of his rivals' plot to deny him power.... And only now are the astonishing truths of Mr Yushchenko's fight for the leadership he had earned being revealed.....[there] was a series of extraordinary co-ordinated intelligence operations. Those operations involved a breakaway faction of Ukraine's Secret Service, the SBU, Ukraine's military intelligence, with CIA and MI6 officers. They helped by running their own special operations to frustrate corrupt politicians and gangsters who tried to seize power from the newly elected leader. American and British agents used spy satellites, intercept technology and old-fashioned dirty tricks against President Leonid Kuchma, the departing leader, and his allies and cronies. In the end, Mr Kuchma's power and authority simply hemorrhaged away and he was left unable to exercise his authority.... If the Kremlin did have a hand in the events in Ukraine, as most observers now believe, they unwittingly came across a series of Western intelligence operations that simply outsmarted them. By November, an important section of the SBU had veered away from Mr Kuchma's tyrannies and believed the future lay with modernist reformers like Mr Yushchenko. Some of this may have been self-serving, but it was realistic and was encouraged by small teams of CIA and MI6 officers sent to back up their respective stations in Kiev for the most important elections in 20 years. An intelligence net involving Mr Yushchenko's youthful and energetic chief of staff, Oleg Rybachuk, an important faction of the SBU, Ukrainian military intelligence and British and US ambassadors was established. When Mr Rybachuk received SBU warnings of attempts to disrupt the elections or threats to Mr Yushchenko, he reported these to both ambassadors. Spy satellites maintained round-the-clock vigilance and Western teams inside Ukraine established an enormous communications intercept. Slowly it became clear that a substantial number of Mr Kuchma's players were deserting his team.... Western intelligence officers had one overriding aim - to ensure that the thousands of protesters would not be provoked into violence. They believed that if the young people held, the country would hold..... Western intelligence officers had recommended constant music and rock concerts to distract the huge crowd, which virtually owned the heart of Kiev. My conversations with PORA leaders reveal that some of them attended a seminar in the Crimea funded by the American Freedom House Foundation - whose chairman is former CIA chief James Woolsey, and USAID, where these techniques were taught."
The man who survived Russia's poison chalice
The Age (Australia), 23 January 2005
(British investigative journalist Tom Mangold is a former reporter for BBC Panorama)

"Murdered Russian former agent Alexander Litvinenko had been working for British secret intelligence service MI6, a newspaper reported today. Citing unnamed diplomatic and intelligence sources, the Daily Mail said that Litvinenko, who died last November in London of radiation poisoning, was receiving a monthly retainer of about £2000 ($A4500) from MI6 when he was murdered. Sir John Scarlett, who is now the head of MI6 and was once based in Moscow, was involved in recruiting Litvinenko, the paper added."
Litvinenko worked for British intelligence: report
Agence France Presse, 27 October 2007

"Russian officials announced yesterday that a criminal investigation had been opened into allegations by a former tax police officer that he was recruited as an informant by MI6 with the help of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent who died of polonium poisoning in London last year. Vyacheslav Zharko is said to have turned himself in to the FSB, the successor to the KGB, 10 days ago and confessed to having worked for British intelligence since 2002. He claims that he was introduced to MI6 officers by Litvinenko during a trip to London in that year. Zharko said he met his British handlers regularly in Turkey, Finland and Cyprus and supplied them with analytical reports on Russia's economy and politics. .....Zharko claimed he had first met Litvinenko through Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian tycoon and opponent of Putin. Berezovsky has been granted asylum in Britain...According to Zharko, during his years of secret work for MI6 he had several meetings in the West with a total of four undercover British handlers..... Zharko said that at first his British handlers had been interested in information on several Russian companies. Then they asked him to compile a series of analytical reports on the political situation in Ukraine in the run-up to the country's Orange revolution and were also interested in information on any FSB operations against western non-governmental organisations working in Russia."
Moscow says it has MI6 spy 'recruited by Litvinenko'
Sunday Times, 8 July 2007

"Boris Berezovsky, the Russian billionaire granted political asylum in the U.K., said he's channeling some of his $4 billion fortune to opponents of President Vladimir Putin in the run-up to elections...... The businessman said he had spent $45 million supporting Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution that brought to power pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko and was prepared to spend 'a lot of money' to achieve a similar outcome in Russia. ''
Berezovsky Taps $4 Billion to Finance Putin Opponents
Bloomberg, 23 November 2007

"The hidden hand of Lord Bell of Belgravia, purveyor of PR advice to Rupert Murdoch, intimate of Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, agent of Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko and longtime confidant of Baroness Thatcher, has probably left more fingerprints on modern history than any other current British media figure. Bell is currently employed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to sell the idea of democracy to the Iraqi people. He is actively engaged in shaping the political futures of Russia and Ukraine, while retaining a hotline to Conservative Party headquarters and offering what help he can to put his friend Michael Howard into Downing Street. He enthusiastically points out that it was once said of him that 'if Alastair Campbell was a spin doctor then I was the president of the Royal College of Surgeons'.... He currently owns the highest-ranked British PR agency Bell Pottinger/Good Relations, whose clients include McDonald's and Vodafone. But to some he is a sinister figure, the behind-the-scenes architect of Margaret Thatcher's election victories of 1979, 1983 and 1987 and the propagandist who helped to crush the resistance of the striking coal miners. Bell is a man who 'he admits' causes some on the political left to 'make the sign of the cross' when he enters the room.... 'I don't think I have an image,' he protests, for once unconvincing. 'I have an image inside my business and in the industry but I don't think I have an image outside that narrow, tiny piece of the population.' He is talking about an elite with an inordinate amount of power and influence, who 'when they are in trouble or need media-related advice' pick up the phone and ring Bell. Such people as Boris Yeltsin, the Sultan of Brunei, Conrad Black and Mark Thatcher. Bell, who was once described as 'Mephistopheles to the reporter's Faust', is seen as someone who can make the story come out right (or at least the client's idea of right)"
THE INTERVIEW LORD BELL: I'd do anything for Margaret
Independent, 2 May 2005

"The Bush administration has spent more than $65 million in the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders and helping to underwrite an exit poll indicating he won last month's disputed runoff election.... No U.S. money was sent directly to Ukrainian political parties, the officials say. In most cases, it was funneled through organizations such as the Eurasia Foundation or through groups aligned with Republicans and Democrats that organized election training, with human rights forums or with independent news outlets."
U.S. money has helped opposition in Ukraine
Associated Press, 11 December 2004

Iran 2009

"Iran accuses foreign powers, particularly Britain and the United States, of attempting to orchestrate another 'colour revolution'."
Iranian government 'illegitimate'
Channel 4, 1 July 2009

"Who knows why the Iranian government acted in this reckless manner [using violence after a disputed election]? Certainly paranoia about Western interference in Iranian internal affairs has been growing in Iran in recent years. CIA and Mossad operatives are known to be operating in Iran. 'Color' revolutions in the former Soviet Union supported by the United States increased this anxiety. When Ahmadinejad's chief opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi, appeared with a 'green' color theme, this may have set off alarms and lack of caution."
William O. Beeman, Professor and Chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota
It’s the Aftermath of the Iranian Election that Counts
New American Media, 18 June 2009

"The White House has been reported to have secretly stepped up covert operations inside Iran with the aim of destablising its leadership. President George W Bush requested and received funding of $400 million (£200 million) for the plan after he made a secret appeal to Congressional leaders last year. The money is likely to be used for operations carried out by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, according to the New Yorker magazine. The appeal for funds 'was focused on undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change' said the magazine. A source cited the contents of the appeal - known as a Presidential Finding - as involving 'working with opposition groups and passing money'.... John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations and a leading foreign policy hawk, told The Daily Telegraph last week that he believed the Bush administration had ruled out military action but that it might acquiesce in Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. The magazine said the move by Mr Bush represented a 'major escalation' in the 'scale and the scope of the operations in Iran' intended to foment dissent against the The Tehran regime, which has made little attempt to convince the world that its nuclear ambitions are purely peaceful. Washington suspects Iran is secretly working to build an atomic weapons arsenal. Iran insists its nuclear activities are for civilian energy purposes."
George W Bush 'raised $400 million for action against Iran'
Daily Telegraph, 30 June 2008

"The Obama administration is moving forward with plans to fund groups that support Iranian dissidents, records and interviews show, continuing a program that became controversial when it was expanded by President Bush. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which reports to the secretary of state, has for the last year been soliciting applications for $20 million in grants to 'promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Iran,' according to documents on the agency's website. The final deadline for grant applications is June 30. U.S. efforts to support Iranian opposition groups have been criticized in recent years as veiled attempts to promote 'regime change,' said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, the largest Iranian-American advocacy group. The grants enable Iran's rulers to paint opponents as tools of the United States, he said. Although the Obama administration has not sought to continue the Iran-specific grants in its 2010 budget, it wants a $15 million boost for the Near Eastern Regional Democracy Initiative, which has similar aims but does not specify the nations involved. Some of that money will be targeted at Iran, said David Carle, a spokesman for the appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign affairs. 'Part of it is to expand access to information and communications through the Internet for Iranians,' Carle said in an e-mail. President Obama said this week the United States 'is not at all interfering in Iran's affairs,' rejecting charges of meddling that were renewed Thursday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Asked how the democracy promotion initiatives square with the president's statement, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said, 'Let's be clear: The United States does not fund any movement, faction or political party in Iran. We support … universal principles of human rights, freedom of speech, and rule of law.' State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said, 'Respecting Iran's sovereignty does not mean our silence on issues of fundamental rights and freedoms, such as the right to peacefully protest.' The Bush program 'was a horrible idea,' Parsi said. 'It made human rights activists and non-governmental organizations targets.'...The State Department and USAID decline to name Iran-related grant recipients for security reasons. After Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a major expansion of the program in 2006 — Congress eventually approved $66 million — the Iranian government arrested activists and closed down their organizations. Several Iranian dissidents, including former political prisoner Akbar Ganji, denounced the U.S. funding as counterproductive."
U.S. grants support Iranian dissidents
USA Today, 25 June 2009

"Weapons expert Dr David Kelly told of 'many dark actors playing games' in an e-mail to a journalist hours before his suicide, it was reported on Saturday. The words appeared to refer to officials at the Ministry of Defence and UK intelligence agencies with whom he had sparred over interpretations of weapons reports, according to the New York Times."
Kelly warned of 'dark actors'
London Times, 19 July 2003

"The so-called 'dodgy dossier' used to justify the invasion of Iraq was partly based on gossip overheard by an Iraqi taxi driver, according to a senior MP. The report's central claim that Saddam Hussein could fire chemical weapons within 45 minutes was supported by discredited information supplied by the driver, who had no intelligence credentials. He falsely claimed to have heard two Iraqi commanders discussing a secret long-range missile programme in the back of his taxi two years before the invasion, according to Adam Holloway, a Conservative MP with contacts in the intelligence community who has carried out his own investigation into the affair. The allegations were then passed on to MI6 by a senior Iraqi military official who was working as a secret agent for the British, Mr Holloway believes. Intelligence officers who looked into the missile claims decided the taxi driver's information was 'demonstrably untrue', as they made clear in the footnote of a report presented to Downing Street. However it appears that their scepticism was ignored, as the claim was included in the notorious briefing document on Iraq's weapons programmes released by Alistair Campbell, the press secretary of then Prime Minister Tony Blair, in an attempt to build support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 'In the SIS analysts' footnote to their report, it flagged up that part of the report describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. The missiles verifiably did not exist,' Mr Holloway wrote in his report, The Failure of British Political and Military Leadership in Iraq. 'The footnote said it in black and white. Despite this the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier.' The report concludes:' 'It seems that someone, perhaps in Downing Street, found it rather inconvenient and ignored it lest it interfere with our reasons for going to war.' The 'dodgy dossier' became notorious amid allegations that it had been 'sexed up' with the insertion of the misleading claim that Saddam Hussein had been poised to launch weapons of mass destruction."
'Dodgy dossier' included gossip supplied by Iraqi taxi driver
Daily Telegraph, 8 December 2009

"Britain's former spy chief has misled the [Chilcot] Iraq inquiry by exaggerating the reliability of crucial claims about Saddam Hussein's ability to launch weapons of mass destruction, according to the leading Ministry of Defence expert who assessed the intelligence behind the decision to go to war. Sir John Scarlett, who was responsible for drafting the Government's controversial 2002 dossier outlining the case for invading Iraq, claimed last week that intelligence indicating Iraq possessed missiles that could be launched within 45 minutes was 'reliable and authoritative'. But Scarlett's evidence is contradicted by the most senior WMD analyst who saw the original intelligence. Brian Jones said that it was vague, inconclusive and unreliable. Dr Jones, who was head of the nuclear, chemical and biological branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, told The Independent that it was 'absolutely clear' that the intelligence the Government relied upon was coming from untried sources. The 45-minute claim was one of the key assertions that convinced MPs to take Britain to war. Having said there was the intelligence to show Iraq had WMD, there was no indication in what [Scarlett] said about what is now very well known, that those additional pieces of new intelligence were all caveated,' said Dr Jones. 'Information was coming from untried sources – that is absolutely clear.' He added that Scarlett crucially misled the inquiry about the source of the information. 'The description Scarlett gave for the secondary source, who passed the information on, was 'reliable and authoritative'... If he is passing on information from someone who has never reported before then that is a nonsense'... Scarlett was the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee when he oversaw the drafting of the September 2002 dossier. Despite the controversy, Scarlett was promoted by Tony Blair to become the head of MI6 in 2004. Although the subsequent Butler review of intelligence concluded that the dossier had been 'flawed', Scarlett was awarded a knighthood by Mr Blair in 2007. He retired from MI6 earlier this year....Dr Jones, who retired in 2003, said that the intelligence received shortly before the Government's dossier was published in September 2002 was not clear about what the 45-minute claim referred to, or the types of weapons it was suggesting could be launched in that time. In an article published on IraqDossier.com, he states that both he and a colleague concluded that the source of the intelligence was unproven, while the information itself had to be treated as 'second-hand'. MI6 now concedes that some of the second-hand sources used in the dossier were unreliable. Casting further doubt on Scarlett's evidence, Dr Jones told The Independent that he was 'very suspicious' about the confusing way in which the 45-minute claim was presented in the Government's dossier...When asked by the Chilcot inquiry whether he had been aware of Dr Jones's concerns about the claims made in the dossier, Scarlett insisted he had not been informed about them."
Exclusive: Scarlett accused of misleading inquiry
Independent, 16 December 2009

"The new head of MI6 tried to persuade weapons inspectors in Iraq to harden up a report on their hunt for weapons of mass destruction, it was claimed yesterday. John Scarlett suggested that the Iraq Survey Group report should include claims about Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenals - which had already been proven unreliable, an unnamed member of the ISG was quoted as saying in The Mail on Sunday. Mr Scarlett - who takes up his role as head of the secret intelligence service this week - sent a confidential email to the head of the ISG on 8 March with a list of 10 'golden nuggets' for possible inclusion in the report, it was claimed. His suggestions were rejected. But after pressure from the US and Britain, the ISG produced only a bland, 20-page document about the failure of their 1,400-strong team to find any trace of WMD in Iraq, rather than the expected 200-page analysis, The Mail on Sunday said. The Foreign Office declined to comment in detail on the allegations, referring questions on the ISG report to the organisation itself. Among the 'nuggets' supposedly put forward by Mr Scarlett were claims that Saddam had a secret smallpox programme, that Iraq had developed mobile chemical weapons laboratories and that it possessed or was building a 'rail gun' as part of a nuclear project. ISG officials were said to be 'stunned and dismayed' by the request.The ISG member was quoted as saying: 'Inclusion of Scarlett's nuggets would have been grossly manipulative of the truth. Let's face it, he wanted us to include lies. 'Everything Scarlett wanted in was based on very old evidence which we had painstakingly investigated and shown to be false,' he said."
Scarlett asked for 'lies' in WMD report
Independent, 2 August 2004

"Tony Blair received two secret intelligence reports saying that Saddam Hussein did not have working weapons of mass destruction just days before ordering the invasion of Iraq. Sir John Scarlett, the former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, told the official inquiry into the war yesterday that the Prime Minister then did not respond to the reports, which had crucial military significance. He also distanced himself from Mr Blair’s claim six months before the invasion that 'intelligence had established beyond doubt' that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Sir John said that he regretted the claim that Saddam could deploy WMD within 45 minutes. He revealed that British Intelligence received a report 13 days before the invasion saying that Saddam did not have missiles that could reach Israel and none that could carry biological or chemical weapons. Sir John agreed that the phrase had been 'lost in translation'. A further report, received on the eve of the war in March 2003, said that Iraq’s chemical weapons had been dispersed and that Saddam had not ordered them to be reassembled. Sir John said that his reports went directly to the Prime Minister’s office. 'I was certainly working absolutely on the basis that these updates were at this stage being read carefully,' he said. 'The consequence of concealing is they would be difficult to use and that was highly relevant because it would be difficult to use against US, UK military forces. So I am pretty sure it was taken on board.' However, he stressed that the official intelligence assessment that Iraq had useable chemical and biological warfare capabilities that could be delivered by artillery, missiles and possibly unmanned aerial drones had not changed. Sir John drew up the Government’s dossier in September 2002, which contained the controversial claim that Saddam could deploy WMD within 45 minutes. He said that the report had been 'firmed up' just five days before publication when the Joint Intelligence Committee received 'reliable and authoritative' new information about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons. But yesterday Sir John, who became head of MI6 from 2004 until earlier this year, distanced himself from the claim of the Prime Minister then in the foreword of the dossier that 'intelligence had established beyond doubt' that Saddam had WMD. He said that he regarded the foreword as 'quite separate' from the rest of the document and did not believe that it was for him to alter Mr Blair’s 'overtly political' statement. Sir John acknowledged that it would have been better if the now infamous claim that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes had referred to battlefield munitions rather than missiles. But he insisted that it had never been his intention to mislead. The inquiry refused to question Sir John in public about allegations that the '45-minute' claim was based on gossip from a taxi driver who had overheard a conversation between army officers two years earlier. Sir John Chilcot, the chairman, said that such issues would be dealt with in private."
Blair ‘did not respond to crucial reports on WMD’
London Times, 9 December 2009

"Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.... the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Herman Göering,
Interview With Gustave Gilbert In Göring's Jail Cell During The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 18 April 1946

It Seems Blair Turned Out To Be A Good Pupil
Texas April 2002 - Oil And The Special Relationship

"Fuel is our economic lifeblood. The price of oil can be the difference between recession and recovery. The western world is import dependent. ....So: who develops oil and gas, what the new potential sources of supply are, is a vital strategic question...The Middle East, we focus on naturally."
Tony Blair's Prime Minister's speech at the George Bush Senior Presidential Library, Texas
10 Downing St, Press Release, 7 April 2002

"An Iraqi taxi driver who overheard two military commanders talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was allegedly the 'intelligence sub-source' quoted in the Government’s dossier to prove that chemical missiles could be fired in 45 minutes, according to a report by a Tory MP. The allegations are due to be published in a report on the Iraq war by Mr Holloway on a website called www.firstdefence.org. Sir John Scarlett, the former MI6 chief who was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee before the war and was responsible for drawing up the dossier, is expected to be questioned about it when he gives evidence to the inquiry head by Sir John Chilcot today. But he is unlikely to be publicly quizzed about MI6 sources. Mr Holloway says that pressure was put on MI6 to come up with intelligence after Mr Blair met President George W Bush in Texas in April 2002. The Chilcot inquiry has heard that this was the meeting at which a plan for Iraq was first discussed."
Gossiping taxi driver source of Iraq 45-minute WMD claim
London Times, 8 December 2009

"The timing could not have been worse. On Tuesday afternoon, set against the sleek backdrop of a London hotel, the vice-chairman of Iraq's oil and gas committee, Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani, told the BBC that the time is right to invest in Iraq as the government has 'gone from strength to strength'. A short distance across town, Sir John Scarlett, head of MI6 and gatekeeper to some of the precious 'intelligence' that triggered the war, refused to confirm or deny the report that an Iraqi taxi driver was responsible for the '45 minutes' WMD claim. While the future and the past of Iraq were being discussed in London, Baghdad was burning in the present, as fire engines were still dousing the smouldering car wrecks and the ambulances were still carefully collecting the remains of some of the 127 people who had been blown up in the co-ordinated blasts that hit the capital .... famously the oil ministry was one of the few buildings to be protected [by US troops] after the fall of Saddam."
Will oil empower or emasculate Iraq?
Guardian (Comment Is Free), 11 December 2009

"At a meeting of oil leaders at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Tony Hayward, group chief executive of BP, said that there was a 'supply challenge' for the industry which would have to increase output to 100mbd - a new peak for oil. Mr Hayward said that at present the world was producing between 83 and 84mbd. He said he hoped Iraq would become a major oil player, producing up to 10mbd in the next decade if the political situation remains relatively stable. A need for a new peak in oil production will dismay environmental campaigners who hoped that the West’s declining reliance on oil would mean less CO2 emissions. Instead, demand from the emerging economies, including India and the other BRIC countries, China, Russia and Brazil, will lead to new record levels of consumption. Mr Hayward’s comments were supported by Peter Voser, the chief executive of Shell, who said that the industry would have to find up to $27trn of investment over the next 20 years to meet demand. At the session new figures from PriceWaterhouseCoopers revealed that non-OECD countries will account for two-thirds of world consumption by 2030. Mr Hayward said that demand from non-OECD nations would increase by 40pc. 'The obvious thing in the mature markets of Europe and the United States is that demand for oil products is in structural decline,' Mr Hayward said. He argued that demand was now coming from the East, pointing out that China sold 13m cars last year. 'The challenge is how do we meet this growing demand for oil and keep a lid on price?' Hayward said.....Turning to Iraq, Mr Hayward said that he was 'cautiously optimistic' that the country could increase world supply. 'BP has a major contract to redevelop an existing field that BP first found in 1953,' Mr Hayward said, revealing that he wanted to increase BP production from 1mbd to 3mbd. Iraq could eventually produce 10mbd. Mr Voser said that although much of the oil in Iraq was 'easy oil' (onshore and relatively accessible) its technology was 20 years behind much of the rest of the sector. "
Davos 2010: a new peak in oil production is needed, energy leaders argue
Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2010

"There’s been a period of intense concentration on counterterrorism and security, for obvious reasons, since 9/11. But we should not neglect the challenges of nation states like Russia and China — these countries have huge potential to be troublesome again.”
Unnamed former head of MI6
On Her Majesty's Not-So-Secret Service
Sunday Times, 4 October 2009

The 'War On Terror' Is Central To Anglo-American Power Projection Into The World's Most Important Oil And Gas Producing And Transporting Regions
As Washington And London Try To Keep These Resources Out Of The Hands Of China (And Russia)
Extracting False Confessions Of Non-Existent Terrorist Plots Can Help Sustain Domestic Support For Foreign Occupations

"....[Foreign Secretary David] Miliband had for months been insisting that disclosure of a censored High Court summary of Mohamed’s treatment derived from American intelligence documents would imperil the transatlantic ‘special relationship’. He had kept on fighting his highly expensive legal battle, even after a US court described Mohamed’s torture – including years of beatings and regular genital slashing, all at the CIA’s behest – as uncontested fact. To persist in those circumstances, the Appeal Court said last week, was simply ‘irrational’.... [he repeatedly asserted] in interviews and the House of Commons that while it was vital to maintain censorship of Mohamed’s torture, he had always done everything in his power to assist Mohamed when he was still a prisoner – who might, before even the Americans realised that the charges against him were absurd, have faced the death penalty for a non-existent plot to detonate a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ in New York. This claim of assistance, as the appeal court noted in its ruling, is bogus. In fact, when Mohamed’s lawyers first asked Miliband to disclose in confidence any documents Britain might have that might help his defence, ‘the initial response of the Foreign Secretary was to resist – [Mohamed’s] claim was said to be 'unarguable' '. Only much later, after months of court hearings, did it become clear that if Mohamed had been brought to trial, the British Government could have helped him enormously: it was already in possession of copious documentation proving his confessions were derived from torture. Back then, in the summer of 2008, Miliband was prepared to let him hang. The appeal judgment also pointed out that Miliband originally claimed that any suggestion that UK agencies had been ‘mixed up’ in Mohamed’s torture was ‘untrue’. Five judges – three in the Appeal Court and two in the High Court – have now concluded that Miliband was mistaken, and that British agents from MI5 were indeed ‘involved in’ and ‘facilitating’ the torture, while their actions are now the subject of a Scotland Yard investigation....Torture is an issue of profound moral significance and in quoting authorities going back to Magna Carta, last week’s judgment endorsed a long and proud British tradition that has found it repugnant for many centuries. But it also doesn’t work. The crimes to which Mohamed confessed were never more than fantasies and if his case has helped to recruit more terrorists, those responsible are his torturers, not those of us who tried to expose them."
How David Miliband obfuscated over Binyam Mohamed torture cover-up
Mail On Sunday, 14 February 2010

But Real Plots, However Unsuccessful, Can Also Play An Important Role In Helping To Head Off China As A Rising Superpower
Enabling The Pentagon To Expand Its Military Footprint Into Strategic Locations In The Midst Of This Not So Secret Sino-American Contest

"China’s growing interest in Yemen is not only related to its strategy of strengthening its economic and energy ties to the oil-rich countries of the Arabian Peninsula and the greater Middle East; given Yemen’s location, it is also part of Beijing’s efforts to project power in the Horn of Africa. China’s strong economic and military ties to Sudan and expanding relations with Kenya are a critical component of this strategy. Yemen occupies a vital strategic position because of its location on the southwestern side of the Arabian Peninsula and across the shore from the Horn of Africa, adjacent to the Red Sea chokepoint known as the Bab al-Mandab and busy shipping lanes connecting the Suez Canal in the north stretching to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. As it has demonstrated by its presence in the Panama Canal Zone and the Egyptian Suez Canal, China places a premium on establishing footholds in or near strategic communication and commercial chokepoints across the globe. Yemen’s position adjacent to the Bab al-Mandab fits this larger pattern of Chinese strategic thinking. Yemen and the Horn of Africa have also become areas of vital concern for U.S. planners since the September 11 attacks. Countries such as Djibouti are already home to a sizeable U.S. military presence that is likely to grow as Washington looks to reduce its footprint in areas where force deployments pose political burdens to allied host governments amidst popular opposition to U.S. troops and policies in the region. In this context, China’s inroads into Yemen must be seen as an attempt by Beijing to diplomatically offset growing U.S. influence in the region. Ongoing violence and instability in Sudan and Somalia, and the region’s history as a base of operations for terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and maritime piracy, have also raised its profile. Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, is also regarded as a hotbed of radical Islamists and al-Qaeda activity....The United States broke off ties with Yemen between 1991 and 1996 in retaliation for Sanaa’s position in the Gulf War. Both countries have since established close relations. Despite its strong ties with Washington, which include close military and intelligence cooperation, Sanaa often faces criticism from the Bush administration for allegedly failing to do enough in the war on terrorism."
Burgeoning China-Yemen Ties Showcase Beijing's Middle East Strategy
Jamestown Foundation, 7 July 2006

"[Following the Detroit Flight 253 'underpants bomber' incident] Gen. David Petraeus, who as head of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) is overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, announced on Jan. 1 that the US would double military aid to Yemen after allocating a reported $70 million in 2009. It has been widely reported that the US is also providing the Yemeni government with intelligence and military trainers. Britain, meanwhile, has announced that it will fund an antiterror police force. Such a sole focus on suspected terrorism is seen as a mistake by some experts as well as locals.”
In Yemen, locals worry about Obama policy on Al Qaeda
Christian Science Monitor, 4 January 2010

Former Nixon Adviser Pat Buchanan Complains About The Security Fiasco Over The Christmas 2009 'Pants Bomber' Based In Yemen
His Complaint Would Be Valid If The Primary Goal Of The War On Terror Was To Stop Terrorism
However Buchanan Is Nearly There - He Does Notice That Perhaps America Is Not Fully Committed To The War It Claims To Be Fighting And Is Prioritising Something Else
That's Because The Real Target Is The Containment Of China Not Al Qaeda
The Pentagon Needs The Perceived Threat Of Al Qaeda In Order To Position Troops Between China And The Energy Resources Of The Persian Gulf And Caspian Sea Regions And To Surround Iran

"Had he not proven incompetent to detonate his lap bomb, Umar Farouk Abdulmullatab [the Christmas 2009 'pants' bomber] would have carried off an air massacre to rival Lockerbie. We would all have ended Christmas day watching TV footage of 300 mangled bodies being picked up around Detroit. The system breakdown was total. His father had reported to the U.S. embassy that Umar had gone extremist, disowned his family and vanished in Yemen. Though the 23-year-old Nigerian had been put on a U.S. terrorist watch list and denied a visa to enter Britain, his U.S. visa was not revoked. Though he had been in Yemen for months, bought his plane ticket in cash and boarded without luggage, he was neither red-flagged nor screened or body-searched.....Obama just ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. Yet, even if Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal pull it off and pacify Kandahar, how does that protect the American homeland from suicide bombers hell-bent on blowing up airliners? How does turning the tide in Afghanistan stop radical Muslim youth in Africa or Arabia from being trained to board planes with bombs and blow them up over the Atlantic? How do 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq make us more safe from an al-Qaida that has moved into Waziristan, Baluchistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa? The Sept. 11 massacre may have been decided upon in Afghanistan. But the perpetrators were Saudis and Egyptians who plotted, planned and trained in Germany, Boston, Delray Beach and Northern Virginia. How has occupying two nations at a cost of 5,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and a trillion dollars made us safer from an enemy that more resembles the Apache of Geronimo than the panzers of Rommel? If protection of the homeland against another Sept. 11 is the goal of this war, how relevant to that goal is the building of clinics and schools in Kabul and keeping the Taliban at bay in Helmand? Are we fighting other people's wars, rather than our own war? We Americans are today widely hated in the Arab and Islamic world by scores of millions, out of whom al-Qaida need but recruit a few hundred suicide bombers to wreak havoc on our country. Does having 200,000 U.S. troops in their part of the world, fighting and killing Muslims, make our country more secure than defending our borders, keeping radicals out, running al-Qaida down, and tracking and killing them where they are?"
Pat Buchanan - The Real War
Townhall.com, 1 January 2010

"The U.S. and China, the world's top two oil consuming nations, must work together to avoid a competition for foreign supplies that might lead to military conflict, U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman said.... China's demand for oil is forecast to grow 2.9 percent a year between now and 2025, and U.S. demand will grow 1.5 percent a year. Efforts by each nation to use imports to meet growing demand may escalate competition for oil to something 'as hot and dangerous' as the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union, Lieberman, 63, said in a speech today in Washington.... 'There is a problem because China, like the United States, is tying its energy deals to military assistance,' said Michael Klare, author of 'Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum.' 'In the short term, it's more a case of stirring up local conflicts, where the U.S. and China are competing for the loyalty of oil producing countries, but that does have a tendency over time to escalate into something bigger,' said Klare, a professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts."
U.S., China Must Cooperate or Risk Oil Conflict, Lieberman Says
Bloomberg, 30 November 2005

"The US has expressed concern to Chinese officials about Beijing's attempts to buy up global oil reserves for the long term. 'We are pursuing intensive dialogue with the Chinese on the subject of energy security, in which we have raised our concerns about Chinese efforts to lock up oil reserves with long-term contracts,' David Shear, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday. 'We will continue to engage them on this subject at very senior levels,' he told the panel, which was holding a hearing on recent security developments in China. Shear was responding to questions by Republican Roscoe Bartlett, who said he was worried that the Chinese were 'aggressively buying up oil all over the world' and might not share it with other countries in the future. China, the world's second-largest oil consumer, has been pressing ahead with efforts to secure long-term access to natural resources such as oil and minerals to help fuel its rapid economic growth. China has been encouraging state-owned oil companies to expand upstream investments abroad and to increase crude stockpiles. China's oil companies have been snapping up energy assets all over the world, including stakes in Canadian oil sands projects, an oilfield in Iraq, and buying the Swiss oil explore Addax Petroleum, reported Reuters."
US raises concern over China oil policy
Upstream Online, 14 January 2010

How The World Peace Gains Flowing From The End Of The Cold War Are Being Devoured
By The Pentagon's Destructive 'Containment' Policy

"A secret intelligence report warns a number of Western nations soon could be caught up in a new 'cold war' brewing between China and the United States, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin. The dispute apparently was sparked by a Washington decision to arm Taiwan with $6.4 billion of state-of-the art weapons systems. The deal includes 60 Black Hawk helicopters, 114 Patriot anti-missile missiles and 12 Harpoon missiles....The collective views of global industrialists, internationalists, economists and heads of companies who trade with China have been analyzed by MI6 strategists for the intelligence service's political chief, Foreign Secretary David Milliband. Sources close to Milliband say he is alarmed that the Chinese leadership could use the arms sale to Taiwan as a reason to sell a range of its latest weapons to Syria and Iran to kick-start the trading cold war. Both those countries already present strategic problems for Britain and other nations which trade with China. 'Certainly Britain would strongly object to China arming either country,' said a Foreign Office source in London."
New 'cold war' gaining steam
WorldNetDaily, 12 February 2010

"It would be justified and proper for China to increase military expenditure as the US has posed a threat and challenged China's core strategic interest by planning a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, Chinese experts said. 'The US action gives China a justified cause to increase its national defense expenditure, to enhance the development and purchase of weapons, and to accelerate its modernization process in national defense,' said Luo Yuan, a senior researcher with the Academy of Military Science, in an interview with the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV. 'China is being pressured by the US which is posing a threat to it's core interests,' Luo said. Within 17 hours of the Obama administration notifying US Congress on Friday of the plan to sell Taiwan an arms package that includes Patriot missiles, Black Hawk helicopters and minesweepers, China announced countermeasures. The Defense Ministry said it would suspend scheduled military exchange visits with the US and closely monitor the situation and take further actions as required....In 2009, China's national defense budget was over 48 billion yuan, up by 14.9 percent than the previous year. But its defense expenditure takes up about 1.4 percent of the total GDP, while the figure in the US is over 4 percent, and over 2 percent in UK and France."
US deal forces China to boost defense budget
China Daily, 1 February 2010

"The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country. Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program. 'I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles,' he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. 'I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.' Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is 'endemic' to the country's justice system. Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a 'totalitarian' state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union. Suspects in Uzbekistan's gulags 'were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.' 'I was absolutely stunned -- it changed my whole world view in an instant -- to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves,' Murray said. Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region. Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. 'The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,' Murray noted. Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built. 'There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy.' The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank. Murray was dismissed from his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence."
Former UK Ambassador: CIA Sent People to be ‘Raped with Broken Bottles’
Raw Story, 5 November 2009

"Afghanistan is not the only potential route for transiting Central Asian gas while bypassing Russia. Iran is the most ovbious route, but strangely the US is not keen. The other route is through Georgia and Azerbaijan. But Putin has Azerbaijan locked tight against the pipeline. The father of President Aliev of Azerbaijan was Putin's old KGB boss, and the two are very close. While the proposed route as it passes through Georgia is now under Russian military occupation..... There is a minimum of 15 trillion - yes trillion - dollars of natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Since 2005, Russian diplomacy has tied up the contracts for Gazprom. Before that the US had more than a foot in the door, and the US knows that what changed once can and will change again. 15 trillion dollars is worth some strategising. ..... Let me say 15 trillion dollars again. Not to mention the fact that I have been officially briefed that it is the US strategic interest in the region. If you think about it, it would be crazy if it were not.... In 1986, when I started my first overseas posting in Lagos, the first file on my desk was marked 'West Africa Gas Pipeline'. The WAGP delivered its first gas early this year, 23 years later. .... These are major strategic interests and long term projects. You can believe that the US is in Afghanistan to search for Osama Bin Laden and to back the 'Democratic' Mr Karzai. Or you can believe that this war is about control of resources."
The Sinister Dissembling of Jerome A Paris
Craig Murray (Blog), 5 November 2009

Unocal And The Confidence Trick

"The occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its allies is there to prop up the government of President Karzai. Karzai's has always been an ultra-corrupt government of vicious warlords and drugs barons....Karzai comes directly from the Bush camp and was put in place because of his role with Unocal in developing the Trans Afghanistan Gas Pipeline project. That remains a chief strategic goal. The Asian Development Bank has agreed finance to start construction in Spring 2011. It is of course a total coincidence that 30,000 extra US troops will arrive six months before, and that the US (as opposed to other NATO forces) deployment area corresponds with the pipeline route. Obama's claim that 'Our cause is just' ultimately rests on the extraordinary claim that, eight years after the invasion, we are still there in self-defence. In both the UK and US, governments are relying on the mantra that the occupation of Afghanistan protects us from terrorism at home. This is utter nonsense. The large majority of post 9/11 terror incidents have been by Western Muslims outraged by our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Put bluntly, if we keep invading Muslim countries, of course we will face a violent backlash. The idea that because we occupy Afghanistan a Muslim from Dewsbury or Detroit disenchanted with the West would not be able to manufacture a bomb is patent nonsense. It would be an infinitely better strategy to make out theoretical Muslim less disenchanted by not attacking and killing huge numbers of his civilian co-religionists. Our cause is unjust. We are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for the further of radicalisation of Muslim communities worldwide. That threatens a perpetual war - which is of course just what the military-industrial complex and the security industry want. They have captured Obama. .... The ordinary people of the UK and US have begun in sufficient numbers to see through this perpetual war confidence trick; they realise there is nothing in it for them but dead youngsters and high taxes. That is why Obama made a very vague promise - which I believe in its vagueness and caveats to be deliberate deceit - that troops will start to leave in 2011."
Obama Is Wrong On Both Counts
Craig Murray (Blog), 2 December 2009

"A senior delegation from the Taleban movement in Afghanistan is in the United States for talks with an international energy company that wants to construct a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. A spokesman for the company, Unocal, said the Taleban were expected to spend several days at the company's headquarters in Sugarland, Texas. Unocal says it has agreements both with Turkmenistan to sell its gas and with Pakistan to buy it. But, despite the civil war in Afghanistan, Unocal has been in competition with an Argentinian firm, Bridas, to actually construct the pipeline. Last month, the Argentinian firm, Bridas, announced that it was close to signing a two-billion dollar deal to build the pipeline, which would carry gas 1,300 kilometres from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, across Afghanistan.... A BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea. With the various Afghan factions still at war, the project has looked from the outside distinctly unpromising. Last month the Taleban Minister of Information and Culture, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said the Taleban had held talks with both American and Argentine-led consortia over transit rights but that no final agreement had yet been reached. He said an official team from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan should meet to ensure each country benefited from any deal. However, Unocal clearly believes it is still in with a chance - to the extent that it has already begun training potential staff. It has commissioned the University of Nebraska to teach Afghan men the technical skills needed for pipeline construction. Nearly 140 people were enrolled last month in Kandahar and Unocal also plans to hold training courses for women in administrative skills. The BBC regional correspondent says the Afghan economy has been devastated by 20 years of civil war. A deal to go ahead with the pipeline project could give it a desperately-needed boost. But peace must be established first -- and that for the moment still seems a distant prospect."
Taleban in Texas for talks on gas pipeline
BBC Online, 4 December 1997

"The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that 'military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October'. Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs' (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001). The overriding motivation for this political ['war on terror'] smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s. This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing 'severe' gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil. A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas. Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that 'the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts' with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002). The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project."
Michael Meacher MP - This war on terrorism is bogus
Guardian, 6 September 2003

"The United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC) has just been established in Washington, D.C. Their goal is to promote and advance the development of business and commerce between the US and Azerbaijan. The Chamber will facilitate the entry of US businesses into Azerbaijan's market, serve as a liaison between them and the Azerbaijani government, as well as help Azerbaijani businesses connect to markets here in the US. The Chamber extends deep appreciation to the following companies which have contributed to its establishment: Amoco, BP America, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, Occidental, Panalpina, and Unocal. Board of Directors [include].... Ambassador Richard Armitage, Armitage Asscociates.... John Imle, President, Unocal Corporation..."
Announcing The US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
Azerbaijan International, Spring 1996 (4.1)

"....for the foreseeable future oil will remain an essential commodity. Greater attention must therefore be given to increasing supplies of oil in ways that diversify supplies from areas other than the Persian Gulf. The most promising new source of world supplies is the Caspian region, which appears to contain the largest petroleum reserves discovered since the North Sea. This geopolitical crossroad, which includes Iran, Russia, and a number of newly-independent states struggling with post-Soviet modernization and dangers of Islamic extremism, demands more attention by American policymakers."
AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTERESTS
A Report from The Commission on America’s National Interests, July 2000
Co-authored by Condoleezza Rice, Richard Armitage et al

The Battle With China And Russia For Control Of Central Asia's Energy Resources

"Iran's relations with both Russia and China are swell -- and will remain so no matter who is elected the new Iranian president next month. China desperately needs Iranian oil and gas, has already clinched a $100 billion gas 'deal of the century' with the Iranians, and has loads of weapons and cheap consumer goods to sell. No less close to Iran, Russia wants to sell them even more weapons, as well as nuclear energy technology. And then, moving ever eastward on the great Grid, there's Turkmenistan, lodged deep in Central Asia, which, unlike Iran, you may never have heard a thing about. Let's correct that now.... The Chinese are already moving to successfully lobby the new Turkmen president, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, to speed up the construction of the Mother of All Pipelines. This Turkmen-Kazakh-China Pipelineistan corridor from eastern Turkmenistan to China's Guangdong province will be the longest and most expensive pipeline in the world, 7,000 kilometers of steel pipe at a staggering cost of $26 billion. When China signed the agreement to build it in 2007, they made sure to add a clever little geopolitical kicker. The agreement explicitly states that 'Chinese interests' will not be 'threatened from [Turkmenistan's] territory by third parties.' In translation: no Pentagon bases allowed in that country. China's deft energy diplomacy game plan in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is a pure winner. In the case of Turkmenistan, lucrative deals are offered and partnerships with Russia are encouraged to boost Turkmen gas production. There are to be no Russian-Chinese antagonisms, as befits the main partners in the SCO, because the Asian Energy Security Grid story is really and truly about them. By the way, elsewhere on the Grid, those two countries recently agreed to extend the East Siberian-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to China by the end of 2010. After all, energy-ravenous China badly needs not just Turkmen gas, but Russia's liquefied natural gas (LNG)."
Pipeline-Istan: Everything You Need to Know About Oil, Gas, Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan and Obama
Tomdispatch.com, 13 May 2009

"The inauguration of the Dauletabad-Sarakhs-Khangiran pipeline on Wednesday connecting Iran's northern Caspian region with Turkmenistan's vast gas field may go unnoticed amid the Western media cacophony that it is 'apocalypse now' for the Islamic regime in Tehran. The event sends strong messages for regional security. Within the space of three weeks, Turkmenistan has committed its entire gas exports to China, Russia and Iran. It has no urgent need of the pipelines that the United States and the European Union have been advancing....The 182-kilometer Turkmen-Iranian pipeline starts modestly with the pumping of 8 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Turkmen gas. But its annual capacity is 20bcm, and that would meet the energy requirements of Iran's Caspian region and enable Tehran to free its own gas production in the southern fields for export. The mutual interest is perfect: Ashgabat gets an assured market next door; northern Iran can consume without fear of winter shortages; Tehran can generate more surplus for exports; Turkmenistan can seek transportation routes to the world market via Iran; and Iran can aspire to take advantage of its excellent geographical location as a hub for the Turkmen exports. We are witnessing a new pattern of energy cooperation at the regional level that dispenses with Big Oil. Russia traditionally takes the lead. China and Iran follow the example. Russia, Iran and Turkmenistan hold respectively the world's largest, second-largest and fourth-largest gas reserves. And China will be consumer par excellence in this century. The matter is of profound consequence to the US global strategy....What matters most to Russia is that its dominant role as Europe's No 1 energy provider is not eroded. So long as the Central Asian countries have no pressing need for new US-backed trans-Caspian pipelines, Russia is satisfied. During his recent visit to Ashgabat, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev normalized Russian-Turkmen energy ties. The restoration of ties with Turkmenistan is a major breakthrough for both countries....Moscow has chosen to pay a high price, that is primarily because of its resolve not to leave gas that could be used in alternative pipelines, above all in the US-backed Nabucco project.....The United States' pipeline diplomacy in the Caspian, which strove to bypass Russia, elbow out China and isolate Iran, has foundered. Russia is now planning to double its intake of Azerbaijani gas, which further cuts into the Western efforts to engage Baku as a supplier for Nabucco. In tandem with Russia, Iran is also emerging as a consumer of Azerbaijani gas. In December, Azerbaijan inked an agreement to deliver gas to Iran through the 1,400km Kazi-Magomed-Astara pipeline. The 'big picture' is that Russia's South Stream and North Stream, which will supply gas to northern and southern Europe, have gained irreversible momentum. The stumbling blocks for North Stream have been cleared as Denmark (in October), Finland and Sweden (in November) and Germany (in December) approved the project from the environmental angle. The pipeline's construction will commence in the spring."
Russia, China, Iran redraw energy map
Asian Times, 8 January 2010

US Ambassador In Kabul Reports On
Karzai's (Correct) Assumption About America's Real Territorial Objectives In Afghanistan

"The United States ambassador in Kabul warned his superiors here in November that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan 'is not an adequate strategic partner' and 'continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden,' according to a classified cable that offers a much bleaker accounting of the risks of sending additional American troops to Afghanistan than was previously known. The broad outlines of two cables from the ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, became public within days after he sent them, and they were portrayed as having been the source of significant discussion in the White House, heightening tensions between diplomats and senior military officers, who supported an increase of 30,000 American troops. But the full cables, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time just how strongly the current ambassador felt about the leadership of the Afghan government, the state of its military and the chances that a troop buildup would actually hurt the war effort by making the Karzai government too dependent on the United States. The cables — one four pages, the other three — also represent a detailed rebuttal to the counterinsurgency strategy offered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, who had argued that a rapid infusion of fresh troops was essential to avoid failure in the country. They show that Mr. Eikenberry, a retired Army lieutenant general who once was the top American commander in Afghanistan, repeatedly cautioned that deploying sizable American reinforcements would result in 'astronomical costs' — tens of billions of dollars — and would only deepen the dependence of the Afghan government on the United States. 'Sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable,' he wrote Nov. 6. 'An increased U.S. and foreign role in security and governance will increase Afghan dependence, at least in the short-term.' An American official provided a copy of the cables to The Times after a reporter requested them. The official said it was important for the historical record that Mr. Eikenberry’s detailed assessments be made public, given that they were among the most important documents produced during the debate that led to the troop buildup. On Nov. 6, Mr. Eikenberry wrote: 'President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner. The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibility and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal — a secure, peaceful, minimally self-sufficient Afghanistan hardened against transnational terrorist groups. Yet Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further,' Mr. Eikenberry wrote. 'They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending ‘war on terror’ and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.'”
U.S. Envoy’s Cables Show Worries on Afghan Plans
New York Times, 25 January 2010

"The US objectives in Afghanistan should be assessed with a healthy amount of realism. It is no secret that, having occupied the country, the US has practically no control over its territory outside the coalition's military bases, but is that really seen as a problem in Washington?.... The US has deployed 19 military bases in Afghanistan and Central Asian countries since the war began in October, 2001. These bases function autonomously from the surrounding space, are networked by airlifts, and get supplies from outside of Afghanistan, also mostly by air. The system of bases makes it possible for the US to exert military pressure on Russia, China, and Iran....Considering that in any war the US mainly relies on its air force, the above strategy can be implemented with the help of a network of isolated bases and does not require control over the entire territory of Afghanistan.... The US does not need a final victory over the Talibs. Despite their widely advertized ferocious conflict, the US and the Talibs manage to coexist quite successfully in Afghanistan."
US Objectives in Afghanistan
Strategic Culture Foundation, 3 September 2009

"Some of my friends and a large part of the public, perhaps most, believe that he's committed himself [Obama] to put a ceiling on the American troop presence [in Afghanistan] of about 100,000. They realize that his officials quickly backed away from his talk in December of beginning to withdraw then, but they think he won't go above the level reached by this 'one-time' deployment (which will be closer to 40,000 than his announced 30,000). I believe that's mistaken. I expect that no later than his 18-24-month 'deadline' and probably much earlier than that, General McChrystal will be asking for a lot more troops. And I now expect Obama to give them to him (if and when troops become available from Iraq, and perhaps elsewhere as necessary). A president who didn't say 'No' to this recent request--the best chance he'll ever have to do so, when he could still blame a hopeless situation on the last eight years under his predecessor and 'reluctantly' name a date for total withdrawal--will find it even harder to do after wasting more lives in coming months. The odds are very high, I believe, that Obama's War will last as long as he's in the White House--whether four or eight years--and beyond....I flatly do not believe that [in Iraq] he has ever had any intention to give up permanent bases, manned by tens of thousands of US troops and mercenaries.... His excuse for accepting a Peace Prize while he was conducting four wars (including covert wars in Yemen and Pakistan: and Somalia? Iran?) was that unlike Martin Luther King and Gandhi he lived in the real world (not the bubble of the Birmingham Jail or the Salt March) and that he had 'sworn to defend his nation.' Actually, he hadn't. Like all presidents, he had sworn to protect, preserve and defend 'the Constitution of the United States' against 'all enemies foreign and domestic.' He hasn't done a very good job of that, failing to reverse or even investigate the effective assaults on it of his predecessors Bush and Cheney, fairly described, I believe, as domestic enemies of the Constitution."
Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the 'Pentagon Papers' during the Vietnam war)
Evaluating Obama So Far
OpEdNews, 16 Februay 2010

"Our cause is unjust. We are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for the further of radicalisation of Muslim communities worldwide. That threatens a perpetual war - which is of course just what the military-industrial complex and the security industry want. They have captured Obama. ..... The ordinary people of the UK and US have begun in sufficient numbers to see through this perpetual war confidence trick; they realise there is nothing in it for them but dead youngsters and high taxes. That is why Obama made a very vague promise - which I believe in its vagueness and caveats to be deliberate deceit - that troops will start to leave in 2011."
Obama Is Wrong On Both Counts
Craig Murray (Blog), 2 December 2009

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1250751/CRAIG-MURRAY-
My-storys-torture-car-chases-sex-evil-tyrant--No-wonder-called-Doctor-Who.html

MAIL ON SUNDAY - 14 FEBRUARY 2010

CRAIG MURRAY: My story's about torture, car chases, sex and an evil tyrant... No wonder they called in Doctor Who

By CRAIG MURRAY

'My name is Craig Murray. I used to be a diplomat.' It is hard to explain how thrilling, yet at the same time disconcerting, it is for me to hear those words in David Tennant's unmistakeable voice. Few people have the experience of being portrayed by an actor; even fewer by one of the most brilliant of his generation. It is weird.

David Hare's adaptation of my memoir, Murder In Samarkand, will be aired on Radio 4 next Saturday. It started life as a film script, and its story is long and complex.

But let me begin by reminding you of why the country's brightest dramatic talents would feel mine is a story worth telling.

After a 20-year diplomatic career, I was appointed as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan at the age of 42. Uzbekistan is on the northern border of Afghanistan and was seen as a key ally in the 'War on Terror'.

Unfortunately its perpetual ruler, President Karimov, is one of the world's most brutal dictators. There are thousands of political prisoners who suffer the most horrific torture. People are even boiled alive.

When I protested in public about this torture by our allies, I made myself very unpopular in Whitehall. When I protested internally about MI6 and the CIA using 'intelligence' gained by Uzbek torturers, they decided I had to go. I had stumbled across the extraordinary rendition programme, and was endangering it.

But it is difficult to sack an ambassador for opposing torture, so the Foreign Office attempted to frame me with a series of allegations. These included offering visas in exchange for sex, being an alcoholic and driving an office vehicle down a flight of stairs.

I refused an offer to quietly resign and take another ambassadorship. I stayed on and fought the accusations - at considerable cost to my health. Eventually I cleared my name, but finally resigned after my classified protests against torture intelligence were leaked.

I am no saint. I like the occasional drink and the company of beautiful girls - and I use the plural deliberately. My sexual morality is closer to John Terry than to Pope Benedict.

That is what gives the story its dramatic potential. The lead figure is not a goody-goody hero, but just as flawed as anybody else.

I told David Tennant the key to my character was that when I work, I like to really, really work, and when I have fun, I like to really, really have fun.

That said, as I explained in a character note to Tennant, there is a massive difference between liking a drink and being an alcoholic. There is an even greater difference between liking women and blackmailing them into sex in return for visas. I find the very idea sickening.

I was stunned that the Foreign Office tried to blackmail me. My entire faith in the British Government had been destroyed. What I could not get my head round was the fact that New Labour Ministers who supported the use of intelligence from torture, and supported the bombing of urban areas, professed moral outrage that I liked nightclubs.

It was in a Tashkent nightclub that I met my wonderful wife Nadira. We married last year and have been together for more than six years.

We have the great joy of our son, Cameron, born in May last year. Nadira has a really warm relationship with my children from my first marriage - Jamie, 21, and Emily, 15 - and they both love little Cameron.

Without telling me, Emily collected up a bag full of her own treasured soft toys. She gave them to Cameron, introducing him to them one by one. I was so touched, I burst into tears. Parents are always embarrassing to their teenage children.

No joking matter: Steve Coogan, pictured as Alan Partridge, wants to play Craig Murray in a film version of Murder In Samarkand

I started writing Murder In Samarkand as therapy. I found it hard to come to terms with the incredible events I had lived through and setting it all down on paper seemed a good start. That is why it is so raw and honest about my feelings and failings.

But a few chapters in, it became obvious the book was much more than a personal exercise. It included government secrets, drug trafficking, torture, murder, car chases, false charges and beautiful women. There have been less exciting James Bond films. Except this was all true.

I was taken on by a top London agent on the basis of a few chapters, and the manuscript was shown to film producers immediately.

Warner Bros, Paramount and almost every British film producer wanted it. But I gave the rights to British director Michael Winterbottom - who made Welcome To Sarajevo, Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People - because he bought me lunch, and I liked him.

Suddenly I was swept into a glamorous world. Paramount acquired the rights from Michael. It agreed he would direct, but wanted a top screenwriter and brought in veteran British playwright and director David Hare. Then I was told Brad Pitt was to be executive producer - and loved the manuscript.

I flew to Hollywood for meetings in Paramount's fantasy pink plaster offices. I confused everyone by insisting on walking around town rather than using chauffeur-driven limousines.

David's work is always scrupulously researched, and Michael and he set out for Uzbekistan to see the locations and to interview witnesses to what were almost unbelievable events.

David asked my former secretary, Kristina, whether a scene was true where I threw myself over her to protect her from the impact as our car skidded to a smash in -30C temperatures, or when we faced down a mob of murderers in a remote village. David told me he was honestly very surprised to find it was all true.

The actor Steve Coogan accompanied David and Michael to Tashkent. Steve had been chosen by Michael to play me. At first I was taken aback. Like most people I was more familiar with Steve's comedy - as Alan Partridge - than his serious acting.

But there is a great deal of humour in Murder In Samarkand - the publisher told me at one point he fell off his chair laughing. Real life is like that. I was readily convinced that Steve could do it. Brilliantly.

While development was under way, I started going to parties with these people. I recall an overnight party in a country house with Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Fry, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. My brother Stuart caused a bit of a stir when he grabbed Gillian Anderson from behind - he'd mistaken her for Nadira - and shouted: 'Guess who?'

Then it all started to go wrong. Michael flew to meet Brad and Angelina in Namibia, and they agreed with Paramount that before Murder In Samarkand they would do A Mighty Heart, a film about the murder of American reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

At the same time, Michael and David fell out over the script. Michael was keener to emphasise the comic aspect, while David had created a profound and complex tragedy. So Michael went and wrote his own script.

At this stage Paramount pulled the plug. I suspect the fact that A Mighty Heart was one of the dullest films ever made had a great deal to do with it. But by this time three years had been lost.

David Hare was really upset. He said that the screenplay was 'one of the best things I have ever written'. He was determined it should not be lost.

Meanwhile, there was almost as much interest in the newly returned film rights as the first time around. This time I understood more of how to learn if a director had the right vision for the film, and after meeting him I gave the rights to Julien Temple, who is most famous for his work with the Sex Pistols.

Who else? Former Doctor Who star David Tennant is playing Craig Murray in the Radio 4 drama based on his book

Steve Coogan is still on board for the film, and screenwriter Don McPherson is producing what will be the third film script of Murder In Samarkand. We are in what filmmakers call 'the development phase' - looking for money.

However, David is nothing if not tenacious. The rights to his screenplay were still held by Paramount. It couldn't do anything with it, as it no longer had the film rights, but it could stop anyone else using the script.

It seemed a crime that a major work by David should simply moulder on a Hollywood shelf. Eventually, he managed to persuade Paramount to release the radio rights and set about converting the screenplay to a radio drama. Radio 4 was delighted to have the opportunity to premiere such a major work.

I had met with a huge amount of obstruction from the Government in publishing Murder In Samarkand, and we were worried there might be obstruction of the radio drama, particularly with a General Election looming.

The whole thing was therefore kept secret until production was finished. Even I did not know David Tennant was playing me until two days before recording started.

I am of course absolutely delighted. I watched Tennant's Hamlet on TV at Christmas and thought it was superb. I have been a Doctor Who fan virtually my whole life - I even once knitted myself a Tom Baker scarf. To have my story retold by great talents such as Hare and Tennant outweighs the Hollywood dream.

Nadira had been taking a break from her acting career to have Cameron, so it was great for her to be able to take a number of very small parts in the radio production - although her real-life role is played by Jemima Rooper.

She got to work directly with Tennant and found him charming, helpful and entirely unassuming. After working with Tennant playing me, it must be pretty disappointing to return home to the real thing. And if you listen very carefully during the crowd scenes, you can hear Cameron's small contribution too.

I am delighted with the final outcome. I had doubted it would be possible to reduce such a morally complex book to a 90-minute radio drama, but it is stunning.

This is a timely and important drama. I hope first and foremost that people will enjoy it. But I also hope they will both listen and think.

By combining my story with the recent evidence from the Chilcot Inquiry, people may fully appreciate what an unprincipled and internationally violent Government we have. Once we understand that, we can look to mend it.

• Murder In Samarkand is on BBC Radio 4 next Saturday at 2.30pm.

"The head of MI6 has told the BBC there is no torture and 'no complicity in torture' by the British secret service.....There has been growing concern about the role of the intelligence services in the mistreatment of suspects abroad. The Joint Human Rights Committee of MPs and peers recently called for an independent inquiry into the matter. In a highly critical report, the committee said there was now a 'disturbing number of credible allegations' of British complicity in torture. These allegations include the rendition and alleged abuse of British resident Binyam Mohamed from Pakistan to Morocco, prior to being taken to Guantanamo Bay. However, the committee said it was unable to draw conclusions about the involvement of British officers because ministers and the head of the domestic security service MI5 refused to testify at parliamentary hearings on the claims. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's programme MI6: A Century in Shadows, Sir John Scarlett defended the actions of his organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6. 'Our officers are as committed to the values and the human rights values of liberal democracy as anybody else,' he said."
MI6 'is not complicit' in torture
BBC Online, 10 August 2009

"Listeners to the Today programme yesterday would have heard Kim Howells, the Labour MP, demanding to know what a senior judge was 'playing at'. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the Master of the Rolls, had made some harsh assertions against the security services in his original judgment on the Binyam Mohamed torture case, for which Dr Howells, chairman of the 'completely independent' Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), claimed that there was no evidence. I was astounded at Dr Howells’s gall. The British public isn’t permitted to see the classified evidence about Mr Mohamed’s abuse. As his lawyer, I am — albeit in the US — and this places me in a fairly good position to call Dr Howell’s bluff. I cannot reveal anything not in the public domain but I can suggest, sad to say, that Dr Howells has been less than forthright; either that, or evidence has been hidden from him and his committee.....Dr Howells claimed yesterday that the ISC 'investigations do not seem to confirm that the agencies are involved in any way in torture and in the complicity in torture'. In other words everyone is innocent. We can accept this, he says, because he and the ISC remain 'completely objective'. From 2005 until October 2008, Dr Howells was Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, initially with responsibility for the Middle East and Afghanistan. As such, he was responsible for MI6 operations in those areas — in fact, in charge of the very policy the Government is so desperate to keep secret....There is, the Court of Appeal told us this week, a 'vast body' of secret evidence that has not been revealed. Yet, in making his own public assessment on the innocence of every intelligence officer, Dr Howells lacks the appearance of objectivity. Nor was he fair in his criticism of Lord Neuberger. The assertion by a politician that we should take his word for it is no substitute for a full and impartial inquiry."
Clive Stafford Smith - We are not being told the whole truth about torture
London Times, 13 February 2010

"Parliament's supervision of the intelligence agencies was branded 'not fit for purpose' yesterday amid growing evidence that MPs have been misled about MI5's complicity in torture. Lawyers and MPs are calling for an overhaul of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which reports to the Prime Minister. Some believe it has become a mouthpiece for MI5. Last night lawyers for Binyam Mohamed, the terrorist suspect at the heart of the recent court case into Government complicity in CIA torture, issued a dossier of errors in the committee's reports. Chairman Kim Howells said last week that his committee had seen all the classified evidence, and agreed emphatically that the security services had 'no case to answer'. But the courts have turned up 42 different documents which show that the security services were aware of the treatment meted out to Mohamed, and supplied 70 questions to his interrogators. The Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, has accused MI5 of 'deliberately misleading Parliament' and operating a 'culture of suppression' of information. Clive Stafford-Smith, the director of human rights group Reprieve, which represents Mohamed, said last night: 'The ISC not fit for purpose because the members are hand-picked by the Prime Minister's office. 'The PM's office then gets to vet any report to make sure nothing is published that it does not like. This would almost serve as a definition of a compromised review process.' He pointed out that Mr Howells was a Foreign Office minister with responsibility for MI6 between 2005 and 2008, part of the period covered by the allegations of complicity in torture. Mr Stafford-Smith said: 'Nothing that the ISC has done gives any cause to think that it is actually independent Five judges have reached a contrary conclusion to the committee.' In the dossier sent to Mr Howells, Reprieve points out how MI5 officials gave incomplete and false information when they testified to the committee. For example the ISC report, published in 2007, showed that former MI5 boss Eliza Manningham-Buller and her team claimed to lack knowledge that Mohamed was being ill-treated. It has emerged since that MI6 officers prepared a 35-page briefing on Mohamed's detention in Karachi in May 2002. In a joint statement from Mr Howells and his senior Tory counterpart Michael Mates, the Intelligence and Security Committee has claimed that MI5 does not connive in torture but was 'slow recognising that there had been a change in the U.S. approach to torture'. But MPs yesterday demanded changes. Former shadow home secretary David Davis said: 'We need a judicial inquiry which must be as transparent as possible.' Andrew Tyrie, the Tory chairman of the all-party group on extraordinary rendition, said: 'The ISC is not getting, nor able to get to, the truth. Reform is needed to restore public confidence. 'An immediate step should be the reform of the method of appointment of the chairman to this committee. At the moment he or she is a prime ministerial appointee. This has allowed a revolving door between chairmanship of the ISC and the Government front bench. That door should be closed.'"
Files that reveal how MPs were misled over torture
Daily Mail, 16 February 2010

"Material in a CIA dossier on Mr Mohamed that was blacked out by High Court judges contained details of how British intelligence officers supplied information to his captors and contributed questions while he was brutally tortured, The Sunday Telegraph has learned. Intelligence sources have revealed that spy chiefs put pressure on Mr Miliband to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution, or to jeopardise relations with the CIA.... The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, 'is very far down the list of things they did,' the official said. "
UK government suppressed evidence on Binyam Mohamed torture because MI6 helped his interrogators
Sunday Telegraph, 7 February 2010

"The Foreign Secretary persuaded senior judges to erase 'exceptionally damning criticism' of MI5 from their ruling yesterday detailing the Security Service’s complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed.... In his draft judgment in the case, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, Master of the Rolls, said that MI5 operated a culture of suppression and disregard for human rights; that it deliberately misled a parliamentary committee; and that its assurances could not be trusted."
Judges persuaded to curtail MI5 criticism
London Times, 11 February 2010

"The head of MI5 is facing growing criticism after it emerged that he was the senior spy responsible for most of the 13 cases involving former terror suspects who are suing the government for alleged torture. Jonathan Evans was director of MI5’s counter-terrorism branch between 2001 and 2005 — when the British residents claim they were tortured in foreign jails with the collusion of MI5 or MI6. A lawyer for one of the men said yesterday that Evans was 'probably in the frame' for the agency’s policy on torture at the time.... Last week Evans appeared to make an unprecedented public attack on claims by Lord Neuberger, the master of the rolls and the country’s second most senior judge. Evans spoke out after Neuberger drafted a judgment in the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who alleges he was tortured with the complicity of MI5. In the draft court of appeal ruling, Neuberger reportedly condemned MI5 for failing to respect the human rights of detainees, misleading the parliamentary intelligence watchdog and being riddled with 'a culture of suppression'. Evans responded in a newspaper article that claims of an MI5 cover-up were 'the precise opposite of the truth'.This weekend Clive Stafford Smith, Mohamed’s lawyer, said Evans may have a conflict of interest because he was 'probably in the frame' over policy instructions circulated by MI5 in January 2002 for its agents to ignore allegations of torture.The policy was issued after a field agent in Pakistan complained that he had interviewed a British terror suspect who appeared to have been tortured.' He [Evans] is probably the one responsible for the policy,' said Stafford Smith. 'It’s a criminal offence to tell an agent in the field to ignore allegations of torture.' Evans was appointed director of the MI5 division responsible for combating Islamic terrorism just days before the 9/11 attacks on America in 2001. He remained in that role for four years until he became deputy director general in 2005.... The most high-profile case is that of Mohamed, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and ended up in Guantanamo Bay. A US court has accepted his testimony that he was beaten with a leather strap and had his private parts cut with a scalpel while he was being held."
Victims target MI5 chief over torture claims
Sunday Times, 14 February 2010

"I was sacked as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan more than five years ago for pointing out our complicity in torture. That story is going to be told in a David Hare dramatisation of my memoir, Murder in Samarkand, tomorrow on Radio 4. More than five years on, the story remains depressingly topical, and a reflection of a shameful, sordid part of our history to which ministers will still not admit... The vast bulk of our torture material in recent years has come to us through the CIA. The basic tenet of the UK/US intelligence-sharing agreement is that all intelligence is shared. So when you hear of a prisoner being waterboarded or otherwise tortured by the CIA or their proxies anywhere in the world, the UK ought certainly to have received any intelligence report that resulted from that torture — just as we received 'intelligence' from the torture of Binyam Mohamed. This is how it worked in Tashkent. I did not have an MI6 station in my embassy because MI6's health and safety people considered the country too dangerous (sorry, James Bond fans). But the Uzbek security services, perhaps the most brutal in the world, were considered 'friendly'. They passed on intelligence material from 'detainee interrogations' to the CIA. The CIA issued intelligence reports from this material, which they copied to MI6. MI6 released these reports around Whitehall to senior officials and ministers, and at the same time copied them to me in Tashkent. So material which had originated in the Uzbek security service torture chambers a few miles away, and passed through the US Embassy just down the road, eventually got to me via Washington and London. The key point — and one I cannot stress too much — is that the vast majority of this material was absolute rubbish. The Uzbek government was eager to convince the US it was fighting a massive Islamic militant threat, so that the US government would continue to give large subsidies to this appalling dictatorship, and particularly to its security services. The Uzbek government therefore rounded up en masse dissidents, the religious and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and tortured them into admitting membership of al Qaeda or other allied terror organisations, and into denouncing long lists of other 'terrorists'. The tortured were given the lists to sign up to, exactly as done by Stalin's secret police, the direct institutional ancestor of the Uzbek security service.... I can swear to you that none of the intelligence I saw from detainees in Uzbekistan was useful. Much of it was palpably untrue, such as referring to terror training camps in places where we knew they physically did not exist."
Craig Murray - Why Britain turns a blind eye to torture
London Evening Standard, 19 February 2010

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Alan Greenspan, Chairman Of The US Federal Reserve 1987 - 2006
Sunday Times, 16 September 2007

"Oil ruled the 20th century; the shortage of oil will rule the 21st.... Last Tuesday the lead story in The Financial Times was the latest report from the International Energy Agency. The FT quoted the IEA as saying: 'Oil looks extremely tight in five years’ time,' and that there are 'prospects of even tighter natural gas markets at the turn of the decade'. For an international agency, that is inflammatory language.... 27 of the 51 oil-producing nations listed in BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy reported output declines in 2006. One projection of world crude oil production actually forecasts a 10 per cent reduction in total world output between 2005 and 2015. That would be a revolution..... Some analysts think that the peak oil moment has already been reached; some still think that it will not come until 2020 – which is itself only 12 years away. Market trends and the statistics both support the IEA’s view that consumption is accelerating and supplies falling faster than expected. Of course, if the 'crunch' point is only five years’ away for oil, and closer for natural gas, it has, for practical purposes, already arrived....The shortage of oil and natural gas, relative to demand, had already changed the balance of world power. Historians may well conclude that the US decision to invade Iraq was primarily motivated by the desire to gain physical control of Iraq’s oil and to provide defence support to other Middle Eastern oil powers. Political motivations are always mixed, but oil is an essential national interest of the United States. If the US is now deciding to withdraw from Iraq, the price will have to be paid in terms of loss of access to oil.... The world is coming to the end of the age of oil, which produced its own technology, its balance of power, its own economy, its pattern of society. It does not greatly matter whether the oil supply has peaked already or is going to peak in five or 12 years’ time. There is a huge adjustment to be made. There will be some benefits, including higher efficiencies and perhaps a better approach to global warming. But nothing will take us back towards the innocent expectation of indefinite expansion of the first months of the new millennium."
Lord William Rees-Mogg
Are these the last days of the Oil Age?
London Times, 16 July 2007

"The Iraq war was just the first of this century's 'resource wars', in which powerful countries use force to secure valuable commodities for themselves, according to the UK government's former chief scientific adviser. Sir David King predicted that with human population growing, natural resources dwindling and seas rising because of climate change, the squeeze on the planet would lead to more conflict. 'I'm going to suggest that future historians might look back on our particular recent past and see the Iraq war as the first of the conflicts of this kind – the first of the resource wars,' he told an audience of 400 in London as he delivered the British Humanist Association's Darwin Day lecture. Implicitly rejecting the American and British governments' argument that they went to war to remove Saddam Hussein and search for weapons of mass destruction, he said that the US was very concerned about energy security and supply because of its reliance on foreign oil from unstable states. 'Casting its eye around the world – there was Iraq,' he said."
David King: Iraq was the first 'resource war' of the century
Guardian, 12 February 2009

The Difference Between Azerbaijan's Torturer Aliyev And Iraq's Torturer Saddam
Is That Aliyev Continued To Co-operate With The West Over Oil

"Is there any way this country can officially disown Anthony Blair? Those of us who were never fooled by him now have to watch as he cashes in on his time as Prime Minister in ways which are actually shaming....These two wars [in Kosovo and Iraq], one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle. But how can they now, after Mr Blair’s trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory?... Far worse than this piece of prostitution (he is said to have been paid £90,000 for his appearance) is the fact that he consorted, while in this sinister little country, with its President, Ilham Aliyev. President Aliyev [of Azerbaijan], like Kim Jong Il [of North Korea], inherited his job from his father, the late KGB General Heydar Aliyev. And Heydar Aliyev inherited his job from the Kremlin, which installed him as ruler of Azerbaijan when it was a Soviet province. Opponents of the current President Aliyev get beaten up or imprisoned. There are reliable reports of torture, including threats to humiliate female relatives of political prisoners. Protesting demonstrators sometimes end up clubbed to death. He ‘won’ his last election with a comically unlikely 87 per cent of the vote. Well, there is an old argument which says that if such people control big oil supplies, we pass over their faults for the sake of our economy. But that is an argument Mr Blair, and his few remaining defenders, simply cannot make – because they all claim to have been so outraged by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny that even his oil couldn’t save him. So I think we can conclude from this well-rewarded little visit that Mr Blair’s outrage against Saddam was as false as it looked. In which case, what is there left of this person that is worth a farthing, let alone £90,000?."
A dedicated foe of tyranny... until there's a £90k speaking fee up for grabs
Mail, 12 December 2009

"For nine weeks, they have been making their solemn way to the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Westminster to account for their actions - or inactions - in the build-up to war. More than 70 witnesses have given evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry; among them the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and many of his closest ministers and acolytes. One by one they have sought to justify their own role in what many regard as the greatest foreign policy failure of the modern era. Yet as the inquiry next week adjourns the main phase of its public hearings (a handful of additional witnesses, among them Gordon Brown, will be summoned in the weeks ahead), one vital voice has not been heard. Nor will it ever be. But make no mistake, the spectre of my late, former husband Robin Cook should haunt the collective conscience of all those who have given their testimonies. The inquiry cries out for his evidence - the only minister who spoke out and walked out of a shamed government that, seven years ago, waged what Robin knew to be 'an illegal war built on a false prospectus. . . without any international authority'. .... His words are worth repeating here, as a stinging rebuke to all those whose cowardice and arrogance have cost the lives of so many: 'The longer I have served in this place, the greater respect I have for the good sense and collective wisdom of the British people. On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain.' How prescient those words sound; and how true. I took part in one of the anti-war demonstrations in Glasgow on March 15, 2003 - one of several of the largest, multiple mass protests ever seen in Britain. How could Blair see all this and fail to be moved, or at least to question his own judgment? It is not difficult to perceive, as we all did then, that there were hidden agendas at play behind the scenes. There was the ego-boost for the Prime Minister hanging on to President George W. Bush's heels and Blair's own exultant, personal success in the U.S., where he is now making such immense sums of money. Perhaps the adulation he had received after the success of the Kosovo campaign was in his memory. Then there was the temptation of oil. For if a nasty dictator was fair game for toppling, why choose Saddam Hussein rather than Robert Mugabe? Or why not choose to lean hard on Israel to disarm, if disarming was so urgent in the Middle East? It was all curiously selective and the public was not deceived.... Robin lost his job as Foreign Secretary in June 2001. It took him by surprise, and he was given no reason for it, except that Blair needed to make changes. This was before the horrors of 9/11 changed geopolitics for ever, but I can't help wondering if Blair already had an inkling that some kind of Bush-associated, military adventure might be on the cards and wanted a mediocre yes-man in Robin's place. Certainly Bush's Neo-Cons had been sabre-rattling against Iraq since the first Gulf War... Robin observed wryly how the West had armed and supported Saddam as an ally (and useful counterweight to Iran) up until the moment he invaded Kuwait. And he noted that in the long run-up to war in Iraq, a large majority of the public remained opposed to military action. When Robin put this point to Blair, his response was that he 'could turn public opinion around'. How arrogant is that? Democracy, in Blair's mind, appeared to consist of getting people to change their minds; and if they wouldn't, ignoring them....The other picture indelibly etched on my mind is that of Robin when he stood to make his resignation speech, having realised that he could do no more to halt the Cabinet's relentless march to war. Incisive and fluent as always, his logic seemed irrefutable: 'We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.' At a stroke he had exposed all the hypocrisy of the government position. His final words still bring tears to my eyes: 'I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the Government.' Though we had by then been divorced for five years, I have never been more proud of him than at that moment. He was abandoning all in his life that he had ever worked for..... Astoundingly, there was a standing ovation after Robin's resignation speech - the first ever in the history of the House of Commons. But the Whips had done their dirty work and it made no difference to the outcome of the parliamentary vote the next day. Still less to the unstoppable, grinding war machine. In his subsequent book, Point Of Departure, Robin wrote: 'I am a tribal politician of the old school. I will go to my grave clutching my party card.' Alas, events before and after the war on Iraq have shown, in the UK, just how undemocratic those party's politics had become."
Margaret Cook, former wife of Robin Cook
I'm so proud of you, Robin Cook... you're the only man to emerge with honour from the Iraq debacle
Mail, 6 February 2010

"Preserving the working relationship between the British and American intelligence agencies is a touchstone of national security policy. While prime ministers and presidents come and go, and their personal connections span the barometer from frosty to fawning, the links between MI5, MI6, the CIA and other agencies are the real 'special relationship'."
The seven paragraphs on Binyam Mohamed were not for MI5 to disclose
London Times, 11 February 2010

"The senior Labour MP who led the revolt against Tony Blair's 90-day detention bill yesterday intensified the political storm over Britain's alleged complicity in torture by attacking the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) for failing in its remit as overseer of the security services. The ISC, David Winnick said, had become a 'mouthpiece for MI5'. 'The impression given is that this committee, which reports directly to the prime minister, is in danger of being open to the accusation that it has gone native,' said Winnick. His attacks came after Kim Howells, the ISC's chairman, defended MI5's director general, Jonathan Evans, in the row over allegations that British security officers colluded in torture. Howells denied that the ISC had been misled by the security service and said the committee had seen no evidence that MI5 had been involved in torture. Any claim to the contrary, said Howells on Friday in a joint statement with the senior Tory on the ISC, Michael Mates, was 'calumny and a slur and it should not be made'. Winnick, a long-standing member of the home affairs select committee, said the ISC needed to start holding sessions in public to reverse its current 'unhappy' lack of accountability. He accused it of closing ranks with the intelligence services at the very time when scrutiny should be at its most intense. The attack puts further pressure on the government after it lost a long and damaging court case to try to suppress a court document which showed that MI5 officers were complicit in the ill-treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British former Guantánamo inmate. The furore only increased when it was revealed that a draft judgment written by the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, had originally contained a strong attack on MI5 officers who had 'deliberately misled parliament' and shared a 'culture of suppression'. The government's lawyer, Jonathan Sumption, successfully demanded the removal of the phrases. The home secretary, Alan Johnson, then waded into the fray, accusing the media of publishing 'ludicrous lies' about the intelligence services and the shadow home secretary, David Davis, of spreading 'gross and offensive misrepresentation of the truth'. Davis had alleged that there were other cases beyond Mohamed's where M15 or MI6 had been involved."
MI5 watchdog slammed over torture probe
Observer, 14 February 2010

"It is said that the very existence of the Security Services (SyS) involves violating, if not our own laws, the laws of other countries. We do not need to look at the excesses of the past eight years to know that, notwithstanding the best intentions of those involved in a crisis, the temptation to sail close to the moral line and, often, across it, may prove too strong to resist. It is for this reason that there must be strong, independent oversight of the SyS. It is hard to think of an area of government where such review is more important. When one describes the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), neither 'strong' nor 'independent' springs to mind.... Even the ISC selection process is problematic. It is comprised entirely of MPs, appointed by the prime minister. Since they review the actions of the government, there is something of the henhouse fox about it. Then there is the issue of who signs off on the ISC report: nothing may be made public unless the PM first vets it. Anything he considers inappropriate is redacted..... On 7 August 2009, I wrote to Howells pointing out aspects of the 2005 report that were wholly unsustainable, given the evidence that had since emerged in court. It was clear that the SyS had provided erroneous evidence to the ISC. Far from being unaware of American abusive interrogation, the SyS knew Binyam Mohamed was being mistreated from the start. SyS did not lose track of Binyam in February 2003 – it was still sending questions for the Americans to put to him more than a year later. SyS did not believe that Binyam was in US military custody; it knew (the judges' word) that he was in a black site. And so forth. I suggested that it might want to review and amend its report. I have never heard back. On Friday, Howells took to the airwaves to savage Lord Neuberger for having the temerity to suggest that something was rotten at the Security Services. We should not prejudge the issues, said Howells. But as chairman of the 'completely independent' and 'completely objective' ISC, Howells assured the nation that he has seen all the classified evidence and the SyS has 'no case to answer'. Well, five independent judges disagree. Even Howells's own government did not dispute that the SyS was 'mixed up in the wrongdoing' of Binyam Mohamed's torture. Howells leaves the Commons at this election, and I wish him well in his retirement. But he should never have been on the ISC, let alone its chair. He was a minister in the Foreign Office from 2005 until 2008, so he had a supervisory role over MI6 when the FCO was defending it (unsuccessfully) in court. The ISC does not even qualify as a toothless tiger. It is, as best, Tigger, befuddled friend of Winnie the Pooh. Britain – and the Security Services – deserve more. It is time for a proper, robust supervisory body to ensure that the pressures of an inevitable crisis do not tempt us from our principles."
Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve
A stuffed toy can't stop prisoner abuse, Mr Howells
Independent On Sunday, 14 February 2010

Feeble Intelligence And Security Committee Fails To Do Its Job
In Investigating Torture Claims

"It was in the middle of 2008 that Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, delivered a bombshell confession to the previously compliant parliamentarians of the intelligence and security committee. He told them, in strict secrecy as usual, that assurances of MI5 innocence previously accepted without demur by the politicians had in fact been false. The committee, which was supposed to supervise MI5's policies, had already published a reassuring report on the basis of what it had been told. That report, based on testimony from Eliza Manningham-Buller, Evans's predecessor, informed the world that MI5 had been unaware of any ill-treatment dished out by its US allies to Binyam Mohamed. The opposite was true. As the appeal court has now finally revealed, detailed briefings had been supplied at the time by Washington on the CIA's 'new strategy' for softening up Mohamed and others, for which it demanded British help. This new American 'war on terror' involved the use of prolonged sleep deprivation, shackling and threats that Mohamed would be 'disappeared', applied to the point where his mental stability corroded and he apparently became suicidal. These interrogation tactics, of systematic ill-treatment which might amount to torture, had supposedly been banned by Britain since 1972, when it came to light that the British army was using them on IRA suspects. But far from denouncing or even criticising US behaviour, MI5 officers co-operated with it. The secret files, when they eventually emerged, revealed that an MI5 officer had travelled to Karachi to help with the interrogation of Mohammed. Other MI5 desk officers and 'more senior' figures also knew the contents of the CIA files, according to judgments of the British high court. That these facts had been kept from the ISC was a demonstration of the committee's impotence. Critics say the ISC is a useless government poodle, and the Binyam Mohamed affair appears to strengthen their case. Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie said yesterday: 'The ISC is not … able to get to the truth. The chairman is a prime ministerial appointee. This has allowed a revolving door between chairmanship of the ISC and the government front bench. That door should be closed.' The MI5 head finally felt obliged to confess to the ISC in 2008 and hand over the documents, because disclosure orders obtained by Mohamed's lawyers and enforced by the courts had led to the discovery of 42 incriminating files. All had originally been kept from the ISC, which, despite its supposed special access within Whitehall's 'ring of secrecy', is powerless to compel disclosure of documents, even if its under-resourced members had any idea of what to ask for..... Had it not been for the judges defying repeated heavy pressure from the executive and going public, British voters would have learnt little from the ISC's activities. The ISC has so far only provided them with false information in its 2007 report, followed by a lack of information in subsequent reports. This is nothing new, critics say. Its heavily censored reports have long been derided as establishment whitewash. Not appointed by parliament, gagged by the Official Secrets Act, and even forced to meet outside Westminster, the ISC's members are more emasculated even than conventional select committees. The chairmanship is usually awarded as a sop to a former government minister, currently Kim Howells. Downing St has enforced a 'convention' under which only its chair is allowed to give interviews. The committee has had only had a tiny secretariat of half a dozen clerks, and no investigative capacity of its own."
How MI5 kept watchdog in the dark over detainees' claims of torture
Guardian, 15 February 2010

And In Investigating 'The Rockingham Cell's' Role In The Iraq Intelligence Scandal

"David Kelly, giving evidence [since released to the Hutton inquiry] to the prime minister's intelligence and security committee in closed session on July 16 - the day before his suicide - made a comment the significance of which has so far been missed. He said: 'Within the defence intelligence services I liaise with the Rockingham cell.' Unfortunately nobody on the committee followed up this lead, which is a pity because the Rockingham reference may turn out to be very important indeed. What is the role of the Rockingham cell? The evidence comes from a former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who had been a US military intelligence officer for eight years and served on the staff of General Schwarzkopf, the US commander of allied forces in the first Gulf war. He has described himself as a card-carrying Republican who voted for Bush, but he distinguished himself in insisting before the Iraq war, and was almost alone in doing so, that almost all of Iraq's WMD had been destroyed as a result of inspections, and the rest either used or destroyed in the first Gulf war..... In an interview in the Scottish Sunday Herald in June, Ritter said: 'Operation Rockingham [a unit set up by defence intelligence staff within the MoD in 1991] cherry-picked intelligence. It received hard data, but had a preordained outcome in mind. It only put forward a small percentage of the facts when most were ambiguous or noted no WMD... It became part of an effort to maintain a public mindset that Iraq was not in compliance with the inspections. They had to sustain the allegation that Iraq had WMD [when] Unscom was showing the opposite.' Rockingham was, in fact, a clearing house for intelligence, but one with a predetermined political purpose. According to Ritter, 'Britain and America were involved [in the 1990s and up to 2003] in a programme of joint exploitation of intelligence from Iraqi defectors. There were mountains of information coming from these defectors, and Rockingham staff were receiving it and then selectively culling [picking out] reports that sustained the [WMD] claims. They ignored the vast majority of the data which mitigated against such claims'. Only one other official reference to Operation Rockingham is on record, in an aside by Brigadier Richard Holmes when giving evidence to the defence select committee in 1998. He linked it to Unscom inspections, but it was clear that the Rockingham staff included military officers and intelligence services representatives together with civilian MoD personnel. Within, therefore, the UK intelligence establishment - MI6, MI5, GCHQ and defence intelligence - Rockingham clearly had a central, though covert, role in seeking to prove an active Iraqi WMD programme.... A parallel exercise was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US, named the Office of Special Plans. The purpose of this intelligence agency was the provision of selective intelligence which met the demands of its political masters. Similarly, in the case of the UK, Ritter insists that Rockingham officers were acting on political orders 'from the very highest levels'.... The other highly contentious item in the dossier was that Saddam tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Africa. How did material that the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded on February 4 was a blatant forgery come to be included in President Bush's January 28 State of the Union address? And, since the British were named as the source, why did MI6 not spot this outlandish forgery? In fact, they alleged that the Niger claim came from another independent source, which has never been identified. Could this be because this disinformation served the Rockingham purpose only too well? It is not only the massaging of intelligence that seems to have gone on, but also the suppression of the most reliable assessment of the facts. David Kelly, we now know, had been advising privately prior to the war about the likelihood of Iraqi WMD. He told the foreign affairs select committee: 'I have no idea whether there were weapons or not at that time [of the September 2002 dossier]'. And to the intelligence and security committee the next day he added: 'The 30% probability is what I have been saying all the way through ... I said that to many people ... it was a statement I would have probably made for the last six months.' Yet this view from the leading expert within government never saw the light of day. Why not? If the tabloid headlines the day after the September dossier was published had read: 'Blair says only 30% chance Iraq has WMDs' rather than 'Brits 45 mins from doom' (the Sun), would the Commons vote still have backed the war? Rarely can the selective use of information have had such drastic consequences. If there is one conclusion which must flow from the Hutton revelations, it must surely be the demand for a full-scale independent inquiry into the operation of the intelligence services around the top of their command and their interface with the political system."
Michael Meacher MP - The Very Secret Service
Guardian, 21 November 2003

"Extracts, published today in the Daily Mail, report that the SAS was initially deployed to Iraq to help MI6 find weapons of mass destruction. 'It was quickly apparent that this was a blind alley,' according to the book. 'The debriefing of agents who had provided the British intelligence service with eye-catching lines in the Government’s Iraq dossier produced some awkward scenes in Iraqi living rooms as the sources shrugged their shoulders and confessed they had little idea where the stuff was — or if it even existed.'”
Special forces ‘killed or captured 4,000 in Iraq’
London Times, 13 February 2010

So Why Did They Do It?
Desperate Situations Precipitate Desperate Actions
Regime Change In Iraq Was Perceived As Essential To Postpone The Expected Onset Of Global Oil Supply Shortages

"Optimists about world oil reserves, such as the Department of Energy, are getting increasingly lonely. The International Energy Agency now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in 1999 and world production overall will peak between 2010 and 2020. This projection is supported by influential recent articles in Science and Scientific American. Some knowledgeable academic and industry voices put the date that world production will peak even sooner—within the next five or six years. The optimists who project large reserve quantities of over one trillion barrels tend to base their numbers on one of three things: inclusion of heavy oil and tar sands, the exploitation of which will entail huge economic and environmental costs; puffery by opec nations lobbying for higher production quotas within the cartel; or assumptions about new drilling technologies that may accelerate production but are unlikely to expand reserves. Once production peaks, even though exhaustion of world reserves will still be many years away, prices will begin to rise sharply. This trend will be exacerbated by increased demand in the developing world....."
Richard G. Lugar and R. James Woolsey (Former Director of the CIA)
The New Petroleum - Foreign Affairs January/February 1999

"For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."
Dick Cheney, Chief Executive of Halliburton, later Vice President of the United States
Speech at London Institute of Petroleum, Autumn Lunch 1999

"... the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages. These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention.... Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to U.S. allies in the Middle East, as well as to regional and global order, and to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a 'Pan Arab' leader supporting the Palestinians against Israel, and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments... Like it or not, Iraqi reserves represent a major asset that can quickly add capacity to world oil markets and inject a more competitive tenor to oil trade.... There are few options available to United States to expand supply in the short run whether or not there are energy supply shortfalls. There are even fewer options available to reduce short-term demand. Fortunately, in the area of petroleum, the government has a fairly robust strategic reserve. But beyond petroleum, the options are severely limited. It is in this context that the Task Force recommends that the government consider all possible means of de-bottlenecking supplies and removing obstacles to delivery of supplies, both domestically and internationally.... In addition, the government needs to establish permanent machinery for integrating energy policy with economic, environmental, and foreign policy on a sustained basis. Virtually all domestically available raw-material energy resources are being produced that can be. In fact, there are virtually no actions that can be taken in the short term to increase these home-grown supplies.... Middle East Gulf crude oil currently makes up around 25 percent of world oil supply, but could rise to 30–40 percent during the next decade as the region’s key producers pursue higher investments to capture expanding demand for oil in Asia and the developing world. If political factors were to block the development of new oil fields in the Gulf, the ramifications for world oil markets could be quite severe."
STRATEGIC ENERGY POLICY CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the
James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University and the Council on Foreign Relations - April 2001

"The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported. That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider.... In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. 'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,' says O'Neill in the book.... "
Saddam Ouster Planned Early '01?
CBS News, 10 January 2004

"The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed..... Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered. In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of 'Big Oil' executives and US State Department 'pragmatists'. 'Big Oil' appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants. Insiders told Newsnight that planning began 'within weeks' of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US....The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel. Mr Ebel, a former Energy and CIA oil analyst, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Newsnight he flew to the London meeting at the request of the State Department.....Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.... Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields..... New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. Formerly US Secretary of State, Baker is now an attorney representing Exxon-Mobil and the Saudi Arabian government.... "
Secret US plans for Iraq's oil
BBC News, 17 March 2005

".... a series of crises in oil supply is likely over the coming decades. The first, related to the peak and decline of non-OPEC production, is practically upon us and underpins the currently high oil prices...... The imminent inability of non-OPEC production to meet incremental demand and its decline after 2010 precipitates the second crisis as OPEC’s diminishing spare capacity (even with Iraq’s production back to preinvasion levels) becomes less and less able to accommodate short-term fluctuations.....The third crisis, due to OPEC’s incremental supply being unable to meet incremental demand, follows in the first half of the next decade. This assumes that OPEC’s reserves are as published. .....These crises will have global economic and geopolitical significance: The oil price will be high and volatile, and demand growth will have to be curtailed..."
Oil Supply Challenges - 2: What Can OPEC Deliver?
Oil and Gas Journal, 7 March 2005

"If Iraqi production does not rise exponentially by 2015, we have a very big problem, even if Saudi Arabia fulfills all its promises. The numbers are very simple, there's no need to be an expert.... Within 5 to 10 years, non-OPEP production will reach a peak and begin to decline, as reserves run out. There are new proofs of that fact every day. At the same we'll see the peak of China's economic growth. The two events will coincide: the explosion of Chinese growth, and the fall in non-OPEP oil production. Will the oil world manage to face that twin shock is an open question.... I really hope that consuming nations will understand the gravity of the situation and put in place radical and extremely tough policies to curb oil demand growth."
Fatir Birol, Chief Economist, International Energy Agency
Le Monde, 27 June 2007

"(Steven Chu, Obama Secretary of Energy) was my boss. He knows all about peak oil, but he can't talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can't say anything about it."
David Fridley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US Department of Energy)
Cheer Up, It's Going to Get Worse
Bohemian.com, 17 June 2009

"Christophe de Margerie, CEO of the French oil giant Total...[says] oil supplies will soon run seriously short, and until we come up with something better we need to make sure we suck every last drop from every last nook and cranny on the planet. 'We don't know everything,' he says. 'But on oil reserves and production we know a lot. And it's our duty to speak out.'....In an industry famous for being opaque, de Margerie speaks openly about the nightmare scenario — oil shortages — that most energy firms prefer to avoid or deny. De Margerie says the possible effects on the world economy of dwindling oil supplies are so great 'I am not prepared to shut my mouth.' Shortly after taking over at Total, he jolted oil executives at a London conference by stating the industry would be unlikely to produce more than 100 million barrels a day, far below the 120 million or so the International Energy Agency estimates the world could produce by 2030, and which will be needed for Asia's galloping growth. De Margerie now says 90 million barrels a day is 'optimistic.' Audiences regularly ask him when he thinks we might use earth's last drop of oil, and de Margerie says that date is decades off. But it's important to realize, he says during an interview with TIME, 'what will happen very soon is that oil supplies will not cover demand. That won't mean there is no oil. There are oil reserves, but you will need to invest billions and billions to get it.'"
Christophe de Margerie: Big Oil's Straight Talker
TIME, 25 January 2010

"Despite share price worries, BP's chief executive Tony Hayward remains focused on a positive future....BP raised its oil and gas production levels by 4%, while Shell saw a 2% fall over 2009. But the latter has also been looking madly for cost-savings and has rowed back on plans to invest more heavily in carbon-intensive tar sands. Hayward has kept Browne's sunburst logo and 'beyond petroleum' slogan on its marketing material but has followed Shell into Canada's tar sands. The BP boss – an improbably youthful 52-year-old – says he is not cutting back there despite mounting criticism from green groups that they are in danger of triggering runaway global warming. He is keen to emphasise that BP is engaged in a much more limited way than Shell while steering clear of the more controversial mining techniques. 'BP has never been in the strip-mining of the tar sands and never will be. We are focused on so-called steam-assisted gravity drainage, which is much more akin to conventional reservoir engineering … therefore the environmental footprint on the ground is no more or worse than normal oil or gas operation.' 'It is clearly carbon-intensive and we also see that it will remain commercial even with a very high legislative price of CO2'. Tar sands are part of a wider diversity of supply of energy sources that the world is going to require, Hayward argues, dismissing the idea that the growing pressure on the US military not to use these imports will bear fruit. By 2015 BP could be providing 100,000-200,000 barrels a day from this source for which the company is preparing two US refineries specially to process the crude. 'The likelihood of the US army not using a secure local supply of energy is quite low … Canadian heavy oil is going to be a very important part of America's energy,' he argues. He rejects the suggestion that exploiting tar sands contradicts the "beyond petroleum" mantra, seeing it instead as just another fuel source on top of its wind, solar and biofuel investments. He is particularly upbeat about the prospects of the latter even allowing for the food-not-fuel arguments that arose when crop-price increases were blamed on biofuels. By 2020 up to 10% of global petrol supplies will be made up of plant-based biofuels, Hayward believes, while the figure could be as high as 20% in the US. BP is preparing for this by making big investments of between $5bn-$6bn in Brazil on sugar-based ethanol 'first-generation' biofuels. But BP is also working on synthetic 'second generation' biofuels in conjunction with US chemical group, Du Pont, in this country. The wind operations that BP is involved with are based onshore in the US where the land is cheap and planning easy to obtain. But Hayward makes clear he has enormous reservations about the North Sea wind 'revolution' launched by the UK government. He questions whether the UK can build 14 to 15 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2020, never mind the 25-27GW – the total expected by ministers and industry here. Equally, he questions how quickly nuclear power plants can be built and whether a rush will help either develop in the most cost-efficient way....The straight-talking oil explorer, who is said to still enjoy the occasional triathlon, is an optimist and has little time for those who argue the world has passed, or is even approaching, peak oil supplies. 'I personally – and BP – have never believed we will see peak oil because of supply. We always believed we would see peak oil because of demand. There will come a time – I believe it is beyond 2020 – when because of the changes in the energy portfolio, because of the drive for energy efficiency, because of the introduction of biofuels, demand for oil will peak.' There is plenty of oil in the world, he argues, not least in Iraq, where BP has staff working on the ground, even ahead of important political elections. Hayward expects Iraq's oil production to grow from a couple of million barrels a day today to close to 10m, putting it on par with Saudi Arabia. This makes it 'a big part of oil security for the world.'"
Tony Hayward: BP's straight-talking chief on evolution not revolution
Guardian, 4 February 2010

"Total has previously mentioned 100 Mb/d [for the peak of global oil production] and that they are now saying 95 Mb/d shows that they are approaching the conclusion that my Ph.D. student Fredrik Robelius presented in his thesis. That scenario had a maximal production of 93 Mb/d in 2018. The requirement for that level of production was that production from 7 giant oil fields in Iraq would commence immediately. The fact that this has been delayed makes it all the more difficult to reach that production level."
Kjell Aleklett, President of ASPO International
ASPO International, 4 February 2010

"The world will have to suffer a deep economic downturn before serious attempts are made to kick the oil habit, according to the chairman of PFC Energy, the Washington based oil consultancy. In an interview with lastoilshock.com and Global Public Media, Robin West said it would be very difficult for the oil industry ever to produce more than 95-100 million barrels per day, and that when output growth stops the oil price will go 'through the roof'. This will cause 'massive demand destruction, a huge recession, and only then will you see very substantial substitution'. Mr West was in London to deliver a presentation at the IP Week oil conference entitled 'Dances with Wolves', about the dwindling power of the international oil companies....Asked if he agreed with IEA chief economist Fatih Birol, who said last year that Iraq must increase its output exponentially if the world is to avoid a supply crunch by 2015, Mr West said 'I think we're going to get into a nasty crunch at some point, one way or another. If Iraq comes on, the crunch can be deferred for a while – but it's coming'."
Oil production constraints to cause 'huge recession'
Global Media, 20 February 2008