Conspiracy Theories

The Geneva Convention Against Torture: Article Two, Section One “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability of any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”

Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary, 2005. Evidence to Parliamentary Select Committee.

"Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop."

Jeremy Wright, Attorney General, apology to the Belhaj family, Parliament 10 May 18.

" The UK Government believes your accounts. Neither of you should have been treated in this way.
The UK Government’s actions contributed to your detention, rendition and suffering. The UK Government shared information about you with its international partners. We should have done more to reduce the risk that you would be mistreated. We accept this was a failing on our part.
Later, during your detention in Libya, we sought information about and from you. We wrongly missed opportunities to alleviate your plight: this should not have happened.
On behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, I apologise unreservedly. We are profoundly sorry for the ordeal that you both suffered and our role in it."


So, in Jack Straw's words, there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States.

Of course Condi Rice was lying.  Everybody in the Bush administration was lying.  Most everyone in the Blair administration was lying.

In 2004 the reasons given for attacking Iraq, WMD (in itself not a legal reason), had been exposed as a lie.

  
Why would the U.S. set up an extra-legal prison (Guantanamo Bay) if not to render and torture prisoners ??  
Why would anyone think they weren’t doing it elsewhere ??  

We now know, due to the Senate Select Committee study (2014)  of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, that the US tortured prisoners to death.

We do know that one of the torturers’ overseers, who also destroyed evidence of torture, Gina Haspel is now head of the CIA.  And that former head of the CIA (and its torturers), Michael Pompeo, is now US Secretary of State.

We know that no one in the USA or the UK has been brought to book for extraordinary rendition and torture.


“The secret state ... in league with some dark forces” is Conspiracy Fact.




Kudos to the conspiracy theorists /citizen journalists who went to the airfields to note the ID numbers on the planes and examine the flight plans which led them to the conclusion that we were supporting the CIA’s rendition programme.



Jack Straw
(https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmfaff/768/5121304.htm  Q23)

Jeremy Wright
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2018-05-10/debates/B9AD50CD-9D54-41DA-A18B-1526E7658593/BelhajAndBoudcharLitigationUpdate

Senate Select Committee study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program
http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/senate-intelligence-committee-study-on-cia-detention-and-interrogation-program

Fears of the Semites

Lockdown 2.  I live alone, shielding, so have no conversation except with my self which, I find, only reinforces my prejudices.  I miss other people’s opinions. 

I rang an old friend.  We first met around 1980 so you can count the decades on your own  fingers.  He moved out of town in the mid ‘90’s but has kept up as a treasured friend since.

He’s just become a grandad and I figured he’d be full of news about the neonate and judgments on the Arsenal.
If only.

He opened with “What do you think about Labour ?”
“What ?”
“I’m feeling a bit nervous when I go out for a walk.”

(I’d known him for about five years when I learned he was jewish.  If that’s the word.  It was in conversation with him and his missus one day, about Israel, when she’d said “But you must’ve known we were Jews ?”  Why should I ?  It doesn’t occur to anyone to ask someone their race.  Does it ? )

“Why ?  You live in Brighton for God’s sake.  Where are you getting your news from ?    Do you only read the Guardian and watch the BBC ?”

“I read the Guardian. Did you see Nick Cohen’s piece ?”
“No.  Nick Cohen is a bag of bile.  He’s a chickenhawk neocon who probably thinks War in Iraq is still a good idea and is looking forward to Israel fighting Iran to the last dead American soldier.
Guardian M.G. employs people like Carol Cadwalladr who’s just apologised to Aaron Banks for lying about him,  and Luke Harding whose Trump /Russia Collusion fabrications collapsed under the Muller Inquiry.  And his story about Mannefort visiting Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy has been shown to be false.  It’s a disgrace the way the Graun have disowned Assange after the scoops he gave them..  Likewise the rest of the MSM.”

I gave up on the Guardian when they sawed up a couple of computer hard drives to destroy the files  Snowden have given them.  I mean, if they’d set fire to a filing cabinet full of paper files that he’d brought in a suitcase, fair enough.  But to “destroy” software by cutting up a hard drive is the gesture of an idiocracy.

“What about when that woman MP said they should transport the population of Israel to the US ?”
“You mean Naz Shah.  That isn’t what she said.  From what I could make out she copied a tweet, a joke, from the twitter feed of prominent Jewish US academic Norman Finkelstein.  It’s a poor reworking of an old joke I first heard in 1966.
How do you solve the terrible problems of the world ?  Move the population of N.Ireland to Israel and the population of Israel to N.Ireland. “

He laughed.  It’s a good joke.

“You knew things had gone awry when Corbyn didn’t say ‘Je suis Naz’. 
The year before, we’d had the bloodiest handed tyrants and mass murderers of the world parading arm in arm in the streets of Paris for the right to spout offensive shit.  David Cameron was among them.
Instead, Cameron smeared Labour and Corbyn packed her off for reprogramming.

And another thing.  Just a few years before, US VP Joe Biden had told some meeting of Jewish dignitaries that  ‘it's fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage.’ “

“What about that mural ?”
“There are six people sat around the table.  Which two of them are Jews ?  What about the  people whose backs are supporting the table.  How many of them are Jews ? “
“But the hooked noses.”
“Are they ?  Some people see hooked noses where they care to look.  Have they ever been to France or Italy ?  Have they never heard of a ‘roman nose’ ?
The mural is typically ‘anti capitalist’, in the cartoon style I associate with Gilbert Sheldon of Furry Freak Brothers fame.”

“What about the eye in the pyramid above it.  It’s an Illuminati symbol ?”
“It’s also to be found on every dollar bill.  You don’t think the reserve currency deserves a mention in an anti capitalist mural ?”


“You surely don’t believe that conspiracy theory that it’s a smear campaign, do you ?”
“Not every conspiracy is a theory.  Just ask Guy Fawkes, it is November.
Antisemitism is traditionally the province of the right, not the left.  (he agreed.)


You don’t feel safe.  When I walk down the street, I don’t see ‘It’s all the fault of the Jews’ sprayed on the walls.  Marks and Spencers haven’t had their windows broken.
I’d like to see some quantification please.  Margaret Hodge submitted over two hundred antisemitism complaints last year but, it turned out only 20 of them concerned members of the Labour Party..
Half of all antisemitism complaints to the Labour Party in 2019 came from one individual. “


“But it’s all about Israel isn’t it.  Israel was set up as a safe home for the Jews.  If you’re anti Israel you’re anti Zionist and you’re against the Jews”.

“Christ on a bike, which school of philosophy did you go to ?  Not all Jews are Zionists  and not all Zionists are Jews.  Fact, most Zionists aren’t Jews.  Zionism is one of the tenets of the Evangelicals and over a quarter of the population of the USA describe themselves as Evangelicals.   VP Mike Pence is one of them. 
If I criticise Mike Pence for his Zionism it doesn’t make me an antisemite, it just means I find some of his beliefs a bit daft.”


“Have you read the EHRC?”
“It’s a hundred and thirty pages long.  No.  Have you ?”
“No.”
“I’ve read a few accounts by people who have.   Your fellow Brightonian Tony Greenstein for one.  (He’d never heard of him.  No reason why he should.)
Tony Greenstein was the first Jew to be expelled from the Labour Party for antisemitism.  I’ll just say those words again in case it sounded rational.  ‘Jew expelled for antisemitism.’

A lot of the ‘antisemitism’ expulsions have been Jews.

I’ll send you some links and in the meantime you can think about why Nick Cohen, Jonathan Freedland, Owen Jones and all the other shits at the Guardian etc haven’t metioned anything like what I have.

How’s the baby ??”


Turns out the baby’s bouncing and the parents are doing well too.  :thumbsup:


And I’m beyond disgusted that the media have created in people’s minds the illusion that it isn’t safe to walk the streets.


Joe Biden  http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2013/05/biden-jewish-heritage-is-american-heritage-164525

Pandemic greeting

Where once we sprang across the space, arms outstretched eager to shake hands, we now greet at an antisocial distance. 
Like no longer lovers at the funeral of the friend who brought us together.

Jailbreak

Chuck came round the other night.  Yeah.  Exactly. At least it was after dark, so only he saw. 

He turned up on my doorstep seeking sanctuary.  Jailbreak. 
It’s not the first time but the period is getting shorter.  Chuck lives in a tiny flat with Mrs C and their lad. They’ve all been working from home since Lockdown.  Only one of them has won the prize for geography essay in that time.

Chuck’s been a home worker for a week longer than Lockdown.  The global corporation he works for is located at Kings X.  The top management there, knowing what the word “pandemic” meant and realising they were next to one of the largest transport hubs in the world, didn’t want their HQ staff breathing the air exhaled by virus carriers so they sent them to work from home.  VPN’s all round.

I let him in and, keeping an anti-social distance, prepared the route to the kitchen for him to decontaminate.  Doors have to be blocked open and the sink tap turned on.  Then I wait with the bottle of Fairy Liquid to squirt soap on his hands, after which I can leave him to it.  He washes himself and anything he’s brought with him.
I open the balcony door so’s we get a good circulation of air.  I too live in a tiny flat.  The balcony is no bigger than a railing.

So we sat and talked.  The family are all well, neither of us know anyone afflicted.  He tells me, apart from the necessary shopping interactions, he hasn’t seen anyone outside but me.

He tells me “The Govt are incompetent.  They’ve known since the end of January there was an epidemic on the way.” 
I point out, yet again, that no one voted for the present lot because they thought they were smart.  That wasn’t what the election was about.  Parliament had spent the previous two years choking us with their incapability.

He thinks they’ll restart the schools soon.  “When the lad goes back to school, I’ll have to stop coming to visit you.”
“You realise that may mean for a decade ??”
He blinked.
If the lad stays at home;  school, uni and a postgrad is ten years.

Doing the simple maths, with my simple understanding, the plague is highly contagious.  Two days after contracting it, you become infectious.  It may take a week before symptoms show.  The pupil takes it from home and infects the school before symptoms show at home.  The infected school kids take it home with them etc etc ....
School is transmission central.

I felt he was missing a link. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do to protect yourelves when the lad comes home from school every day ??”
The answer, obviously, was “No”.  It’s unthinkable because there’s nothing you can do.

There’s also the question of how you are going to protect the teachers facing the simple maths.


There’s no way to cover the schools’ risk until there’s a mass vaccination programme and that will be two years away. Assuming that immunity is possible, we don’t yet know.

Anyway, the core function of school is not to teach the “three R’s”, it’s to learn how to communicate with your social peers.  Hence the continued existence of public schools.


We turned to the near future.  I think suppression is necessary and that means a minimum of three months Lockdown.  My guess on the economic hit with that, and the ensuing unemployment costs, will knock out at least a quarter of annual GDP.  How to pay for it ??  Print money and /or borrow it.  It took 60yrs to repay our WWII loans, why be pussy now.

  Chuck thinks there’ll be a second wave in the autumn, I think the way they’re going it’ll be sooner.  We agree that public transport is a problem.  Apart from the crush, buses, tubes, trains all have air conditioning, recirculating air.  It’s guessed that’s why bus drivers have proved vulnerable. 

I figure the sooner they get people going back to work, the sooner the infection rate is going to go up.  The risk on public transport, and for office workers, is increased in an environment with recirculating air conditioning.

He also said, if he goes back to work the environment is going to be so weird.  His colleagues are going to be looking at him like he’s come to poison them.  And he’s going to be  looking at them as though they’ve come to poison him. 


I think it’s likely that Lockdown will break down soon.  He’s sat on my sofa, allotments are suddenly popular with former pub regulars, and the girls I pass on the street have a look in their eye that says “It’s Spring”.  

Political Dynasties


I had a look through the Shadow Cabinet appointees. 
I notice Rachel Reeves, she who thought Ian Duncan Smith was a softie when it came to dealing with the unemployed, has got a job.  So has her sister, Ellie Reeves gets Solicitor General.
It must be a diisappointment for John Cryer that a niche hasn’t been found for him.  John Cryer, the son of Bob and Ann Cryer (once MPs) is the husband of Ellie Reeves.


It got me thinking of political dynasties.  I read the Chips Channon Diaries not long back.
Chips was an ultra wealthy american youngster who got sent to England for his education at the beginning of the 20^th Century.  He never went back.
He married into the Guinness family, his father in law was an MP.  When the old boy died, mother in law became the MP.  When she tired of it, Chips became the MP.  Decades later, Chips packs it in and his son, Paul Channon, becomes the MP.

It was a not uncommon arrangement in those days.

Chips’ Diary is the social scene around the politicking and the power brokers in the 1930’s. 


It makes me reflect how we still have dynasties and tolerate their continuation.

I see Valerie Vaz, sister of Keith, is Shadow Leader of the House.  And Ed Miliband, who followed his brother into the House has a job.
I don’t know about the rest of them, couldn’t be bothered to look. 

There are plenty of siblings, spouses, and scions for Starmer to choose from.

List here    http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04809/SN04809.pdf




As the birds are said to be descendants of the dinosaurs,  in that list you’ll see Hilary Benn, a polititcian most noted for his enthusiasm for attacking countries of no threat to us, comes from a line almost unbroken from the 19^th Century.
.  
I recall hearing the end of his speech, as Shadow Foreign Secretary, in favour of bombing Syria (against the Party line),  I thought it was a risible impersonation of Churchill.  The BBC found it stentorian enough to repeat is several times over the following days.

Clearly, it was a pitch for the leadership.

When the latest leadership election came up, I was struck by the lack of senior Party figures who wished to put themselves forward.  I took it to be indicative of how toxic the membership is to the Parliamentary Party.