Blogoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which one says, piffle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simply. Not. True.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig,

You write:

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

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

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

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

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

Now you repeat this nonsense again in the posting above:

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

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

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

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

Thus, for example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good point.

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

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

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

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

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

Was the intervention legal?

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

Was the intervention technically doable?

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

Was the intervention - all things considered - wise?

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

Was the intervention in fact done well?

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

To be continued...

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

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

But this caught my eye:

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

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

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

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

Anticant delivers a fierce analogy:

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

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

Craig Murray celebrates his birthday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, my point is rather this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Too Difficult:  France (plus UK)

Same question.

So, problem.

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

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

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

That it might be unpopular does not make it wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

Not so much beyond contempt as beyond bizarre.

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

Some wider thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig,

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

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

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

Other permutations and sub-permutations could be listed:

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

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

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

·         Etc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regards, Charles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles

Let's see what we get.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, yes. But...

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

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

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

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

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

Two examples from my own career.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaargh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, readers!

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

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

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

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

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

Not sure I follow all that.

But what caught my professional eye was this amazing passage:

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

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

Wha-a-a-at?

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

Various points of interest here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm.

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

(1) knowledge that torture is taking place;

(2) a contribution by way of assistance, which

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly. It all turns on facts.

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

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

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

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

One final noteworthy point.

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

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

Professor Sands explains why:

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

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

Exactly.

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

Craig Murray swings at President Clinton for being photographed with the 'appalling' Gulnara Karimova, the not unattractive daughter of the leader of Uzbekistan.

Just why Clinton is posing with the appalling Gulnara Karimova is unclear. But it might well relate to the continued efforts by the Obama administration to improve relations with President Karimov of Uzbekistan. As reported here in March, the US has signed new treaties with Uzbekistan, on use of the country for land transit to US forces in Afghanistan.

This jogged something in the back of my mind. But what .......?

Oh yes! Got it.

Craig's book Murder in Samarkand, pp 210-211. It describes a bekilted Craig's pride at being joined at the Queen's Birthday Party hosted by the President's daughter Gulnara - her first ever presence at a national day event! Unheard of!

And Gulnara was quite hot:

... charming and girlish ... in a simple dress and laughing eyes ... giggling at my light conversation...

Gulnara even flirted with Craig, prettily wondering about getting a job as his interpreter as they fended off a passing drunken Uzkek functionary.

Appalling!

Update: Laurence Jarvik picks up this angle and links to this article by Ken Silverstein about Gulnara's possible donations to the Clinton Foundation, and said Foundation's reluctance to confirm or deny this.

That article led me to Gulnara's own site. Lots of pictures of her with celebs, but alas not one that I could see from that QBP with Craig Murray.

Her biography tells its story. As communism ends and her Dad gets to run Uzbekistan free from Moscow, she begins to soar upwards to her current giddy height as Uzbekistan's Ambassador to the UN in Geneva.

And see her superb artwork, including one fine work depicting the rescue craft sent to rescue the topless Uzbek woman who jumped into Craig Murray's Ambassadorial swimming-pool as his Tashkent QBP ("in conventional terms, the highlight of my professional career") ended in exuberantly intoxicated late-night revelry.

Alas her poems are in Russian.

Numerous Crawfs have made it safely back home after two weeks in sizzling Greek sunshine, freed from the temptation to look at the Meejer via the Internet during this period by the fact that the clueless hotel had no wireless capability and a solitary Internet computer charged out at €5 for 45 minutes.

I did look at BBC World fleetingly, for a clip about Swine Flu in the UK. Various experts intoned earnestly about the risk of mass panic and why that would be bad.

These observations might have been supported by some context figures showing how many people die from different sorts of flu or other common ailments in a normal year. Instead we were shown a large blue science-fictionish pulsating scary blue computer-animated germ-like blob, tentacles a-quivering, without any explanation of what it was.

How can apparently intelligent people put out such irresponsible - and pitifully poor - material?

The highlight of the hol, other than seeing two insolent turtles swimming near our boat without the basic good manners to take their heads out of the water for a nice photo, was the local ice-cream emporium. Our ice-cream - Warm and Fresh

Back here just in time for the Norwich North by-election result. Independent candidate Craig Murray has scored a resounding success, reversing the embarrassment of being beaten by the BNP in Blackburn in 2005.

Then he lost by 181 votes and romped home in fifth place.

This time he crushed them by 12 votes, a significant swing in his favour, but he only finished 6th. His share of the vote dropped from 5% to 2.8%.

The Libertarian candidate got 36 votes. Hmm.

Oh, and Labour got tonked too.

Conclusion?

Nothing, other than the fact that people have been coming to the Blogoir in non-trivial numbers despite (or maybe even because of??) the total absence of recent postings.

Thanks.

Normal service to be resumed gradually.

First Craig Murray Candidate discovers that he does not exist in real life.

Then, worse, he discovers that he does not exist on the BBC, apart from a perfunctory mention as per the relevant rules.

The fact is that in a strange, unspoken, even unanalysable way the Story just Moves On.

What were fascinating if not compulsive issues just get ... boring.

Is it because we now have President Obama, so media railing against the hypocrisy of government does not have quite the same fierce moral urgency it had before?

Or just a fickle public mood and limited attention span?

Or just the hard fact that some things are more important than other things, and Craig's self-absorbed fight for righteousness is not one of them?

Undeterred by doing worse than the British National Party in the 2005 election result in Blackburn, former Ambassador Craig Murray is back on the campaign trail.

He is running as a local lad independent candidate in the North Norwich by-election, under the slogan "honest people can fight back".

And he is going hard for the local Polish vote:

Do I think 30% of Poles have seriously racist attitudes? Absolutely.

This is Craig's argument supporting his ambitious claim about Poland's Law and Justice Party:

I was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw heading the Embassy's political and economic sections. I speak Polish. I can tell you definitively that the Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party - the British Conservative's now main ally in the EU parliament - consists of a large number of anti-semitic and ultra-conservative Catholic crazies of the worst kind. I actually know these people, and they are miles to the right of the BNP.

I offered a thought:

What do you mean by saying that PiS is 'miles to the right of the BNP'? Drivel...

You're right to say that there are racist instincts and tendencies out there in former communist Europe as in Western Europe. It is a long slow job weaning societies away from such things, as we have seen in this country.

One unambiguous (and NB intended) success of the Kaczynskis has been to marginalise politically the former lumpen populist parties in Poland, and so create a much more 'mainstream' political space there with fewer, bigger and more stable pro-European parties. Hence Poland's relatively strong position now - a huge gain for the EU.

And on it goes from a Craig fan replying to me:

It is self evident that you are an insufferable boor but your comments on the PiS are really taking the P**S. The Kaczynskis are ultra Catholic ideologues of the Old School; homophobic and antisemitic. No-one is fooled by their pro-Jewish posturing as they try to buddy up to the US. Except you, of course: so the fact that you rose through the ranks to become HM Ambassador to Warsaw just goes to prove the Peter Principle: 'In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence'.

Sigh.

Craig previously linked to the Political Compass survey which posits two axes:

• Economic: State - Market
• Social:  Authoritarian - Libertarian

The evident problem with the Political Compass methodology is that the two axes are in fact too similar in what they cover, which is why almost all Western politicians end up huddled together in the Market/Libertarian box.

A much better way to look at these things which gives a spread of views for Poland at least is to have two different axes:

• Economic:  State - Market
• Belief:  Religion - Atheist

Looked at this way much more articulated differences appear between the parties.

Civic Platform occupy a blob mainly on the Market side but dipping down into the Atheist camp. Law and Justice occupy a blob which overlaps significantly with Civic Platform but which is also notably more Religious/State. The former communists rebooted as social democrats are a blob with both Market and State but notably more Atheism.

As Poland is, yes, a Catholic country it is not surprising that the two parties (Civic Platform and Law and Justice) which now express in different ways a not too extreme combination of State and Market but with more Religion than Atheism occupy nearly 75% of the popular vote.

The EU is zealous in its hunt for 'right-wing extremists' and duly did so when it tried to freeze out Jörg Haider, an Austrian populist who made overt anti-immigrant and xenophobic noises.

The reaction of the EU when the Law and Justice party won a surprise election victory in 2005 in which they had been widely expected to come second behind Civic Platform but then form a coalition with them?

Nil, other than some eyebrows being raised and bemusement over which twin is which.

Why?

Because EU governments rightly saw Law and Justice as nothing like the Haider people or eg the BNP, but rather a sui generis Polish party of rather stuffy middle-class Euro-sceptic etatists playing up Polish patriotism to drive a hard and very irritating bargain on EU issues.

So once again Craig is talking rot.

Or is he claiming that his beady eye spotted something which every EU government which for over three years negotiated politely with a Law and Justice-led government in Warsaw failed to spot: deranged racist homophobic foam-flecked Polish extremists sitting across the table? 

As for the Law and Justice supposed ultra Catholic anti-semitism, the Israelis are pretty good at spotting anti-semitic lunatics - and people who are take a genuine interest in Jewish issues. Hence this.

Of course the emerging reality in the UK and maybe elsewhere in Europe is that the two most significant axes are:

• Economic:  State - Market
• Europe:  More Brussels - More Member State

Which (unlike Craig's blathering) explains why the UK Conservatives are talking to Law and Justice about a new European Parliament grouping. The two parties are very different, with Conservatives a lot more pro-Market and socially 'liberal' than the Kaczynskis. But where they overlap strongly is opposing a 'federal Europe' with ever more powers ceded from national capitals to Brussels.

This core position happens to be popular with most populations round Europe, although it expresses itself in different ways. Hence the dilemma for the Conservatives and indeed L and J. Is it better to articulate that popular position in a new small but determined EP grouping at the price of losing 'influence' in the European Parliament?

Anyway, any Norfolk media folk or bloggers wanting a fair-minded account of honest candidate Craig Murray's doomed mission to Uzbekistan - and some insight into his professional judgement and fitness to lead them at Westminster - need not look too far.

Craig Murray writes approvingly of the zany survey of political opinions run by Political Compass. But it was posted at 0200 hrs, so maybe baby Cameron Murray was stopping him getting a much needed rest.

Read the Political Compass FAQs. They are a hoot.

See eg this description of why Hitler was Right-wing (their exclamation mark):

Under the Reich, corporations were largely left to govern themselves, with the incentive that if they kept prices under control, they would be rewarded with government contracts. Hardly a socialist economic agenda !

Er, wrong. It is a blatant socialist economic agenda - one which makes private economic activity hostage to collectivist manipulation. It's just not an all-out communist agenda.

And isn't it the way some of the current Democrat policies are heading? Liberal Fascism and all that?

What attracted me to Craig's posting was this passage:

... right wing libertarians, though a theoretical possibility, do not actually exist in any significant number.

I think the reasons probably come down to the psychological motivation of most right wingers; they are just really nasty people. Right wingers tend to be psychologically incapable of not wishing power over others in what they view as the lifelong struggle for personal economic advantage.

Paul Staines is a good example. Paul and Charles Crawford are two of the better known alleged right wing libertarian bloggers who in fact, should they answer the questions honestly, would fall in the George Bush quadrant.

Wo!

First I find myself joined in a single sentence with Camille Paglia.

And now with Guido Fawkes (although we libertarian purists might have some doubts about the theoretical soundness of his idea of using spare piano wire to string up wayward MPs from passing lamp-posts).

So I did the silly survey and, yes, Craig's bold prediction as to where I would end up was just wrong.

I have posted a comment on Craig's site, concluding thus:

So, yet again, you're talking rot.

Is a Nutter someone who talks rot inadvertently? Or someone who knows he's talking rot but just carries on doing so?

Craig's asserts that right wing libertarians ... do not actually exist in any significant number.

This bestseller?