The National Archives move towards a 20-year-rule mean that many records from the early New Labour years are now available.
That includes episodes like the 1998 Arms to Africa Affair when a British mercenary outfit, Tim Spicer's Sandline International, sent arms to Sierra Leone in defiance of a UN arms embargo.
Continue reading "Intelligence and the Arms to Africa Affair" »
The following is a mirror of an original post from Craig Murray:
This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is unwilling to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel lawyers, acting on behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:
" Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed separately. Both Penfold and Spicer were interviewed under caution, as suspects for having broken the arms embargo.
Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without consulting the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold, Blair declared, was “a hero”. A dictatorship had been successfully overthrown and democracy restored. Penfold had “Done a superb job in trying to deal with the consequences of the military coup.” All this stuff about Security Council Resolutions and sanctions was “an overblown hoo-ha”.
I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the country was still starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of hindsight, this intervention points the way towards the disasters of his later years in office. It is extraordinarily wrong for a Prime Minister to declare that a man is a hero, when Customs had questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very matter the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair’s belief that his judgement stood above the law of the land, something that was to occur again on a much bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud Office investigation into British Aerospace’s foreign bribes. But of course Blair's contempt for UN security council resolutions on the arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy by invasion could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently ignoring the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in charge of little more than Freetown.
In the FCO we were astonished by Blair’s intervention, and deeply puzzled. Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin Cook’s views. Who was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect that the UN and the law were unimportant? For most of us, this was the very first indication we had of how deep a hold neo-con thinking and military interests had on the Blair circle. It was also my first encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy being dictated by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Inister’s Press Secretary, The military lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of their own.
A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their investigations. A thick dossier, including documentation from the FCO, from the raid on Sandline’s offices, and from elsewhere, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The Customs and Excise team who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation was that both Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo. The dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown Prosecution Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in effect, for no further action. There would be no prosecution. A customs officer told me bitterly that, given the time between the dossier leaving their offices and the time it was returned, allowing time for both deliveries, it could not have been in the CPS more than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not even have read it before turning it down.
I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer and Penfold. So were the customs officers investigating the case; at least two of them called me to commiserate. They had believed they had put together an extremely strong case, and they told me that their submission to the Crown Prosecution Service said so.
The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first major instance of the corruption of the legal process that was to be a hallmark of the Blair years. Customs and Excise were stunned by it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Spicer and Penfold had worked together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone in breach of UK law. Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British law by an Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told Spicer that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any side in the conflict. Penfold’s claim never to have seen an absolutely key Security Council Resolution about a country to which he was High Commissioner is truly extraordinary.
But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously no defence in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this sorry tale of greed, hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no doubt at all – and more importantly nor did the customs officers investigating the case – that there was enough there for a viable prosecution.
The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to prosecute was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected woman in New Labour circles. She is married to John Mills, a former Labour councillor in Camden. That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister with a penchant for taking out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying them off with cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the friend and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore companies for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and David Mills were also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close to Tony Blair. Blair is also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite the numerous criminal allegations against Berlusconi and his long history of political alliances with open fascists. Just to complete the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law of Barbara Mills and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.
Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to proceed with the case, and to take that decision in less time than it would have taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise sent them?
Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions later that year after being personally criticised in his judgement by a High Court judge who ruled against the Crown Prosecution Service for continually failing to prosecute over deaths in police custody. That has not stopped the extremely well connected Dame Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid public positions since then. "
It is infuriating that, Maxwell style, Spicer (who has made millions form the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of defending a libel case to intimidate my publisher. The result is that important information I received at first hand, and an account of events to which I am eye-witness, is being repressed, as is an important independent critique of early Blair foreign policy.
I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.
It's about time that I broke radio silence on here, and this certainly merits it.
Former diplomat Craig Murray is having another run-in with Schillings, the lawyers who briefly managed to get his website taken down on behalf of Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
Now they are attempting to block the publication of my new book in the interests of mercenary commander Tim Spicer, one of those who has made a fortune from the Iraq War. It is sad but perhaps predictable that private profits from the illegal Iraq war, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died, are providing the funding to try to silence my book.
The Road to Samarkand sounds as if it will be very interesting.
Among the incidents I cover in my new book are the murder of Peter McBride, the Aegis Trophy Video, the Papua New Guinea coup, the Equatorial Guinea plot, Executive Outcomes' murder of civilians in Angola and the Arms to Africa affair. I do hope that other bloggers will generate another Streisand effect through blogging on these subjects.
David Habbakuk will be familiar to readers of Col Pat Lang's blog Sic Semper Tyrannis. He has some very interesting thoughts on the November 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko over at Yuri Mamchur's Russia Blog:
Uncritical acceptance of claims by [Oleg] Gordievsky about how Litvinenko died is particular bizarre -- given that he has made different and incompatible claims at different times, so as a simple point of logic some of what he has claimed has to be false. A further curious feature of Gordievsky's accounts, however, is that much of what he has claimed directly contradicts central elements of what has become the official British version of Litvinenko's death. And in fact, while one would be ill-advised to take anything Gordievsky says at face value, some of what he has claimed fits in distinctly better with the publicly available evidence than the official version does.
Jeremy Scahill has been doing some good work trying to pin down the US Democratic contenders on the issue of mercenaries in Iraq (hat tip:The Spy Who Billed Me):
A senior foreign policy adviser to leading Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has told The Nation that if elected Obama will not "rule out" using private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq. The adviser also said that Obama does not plan to sign on to legislation that seeks to ban the use of these forces in US war zones by January 2009, when a new President will be sworn in. Obama's campaign says that instead he will focus on bringing accountability to these forces while increasing funding for the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the agency that employs Blackwater and other private security contractors. (Hillary Clinton's staff did not respond to repeated requests for an interview or a statement on this issue.) (The Nation)
In the wake of Scahill's article, Hilary Clinton issued this statement:
Continue reading "Clinton, Obama, and America's Mercenary Army in Iraq" »
Just wanted to belatedly note this story from earlier this week, and given the week that's in it, perhaps this is one area where the Northern Rock trend for nationalisation might usefully be extended:
Foreign secretary David Miliband today faces a legal challenge over his failure to ensure democratic control over private military companies – only days after he promoted Britain spreading democracy around the world.
The challenge, from the anti-poverty charity War on Want, follows mounting reports of human rights abuse by mercenaries employed by private military and security companies in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. (War on Want)
War on Want has released a new briefing on mercenaries today to coincide with the annual conference of the British Association of Private Security Companies.
Ruth Tanner, senior campaigns officer at War on Want, said: “Mounting human rights abuses by mercenary firms making a killing in Iraq are fuelling demands for legislation. But while the US and Iraqi governments move towards controls, UK ministers fail to take action. It is high time foreign secretary David Miliband followed suit with strong measures to curb these private armies.” (press release)
Incidentally, for those on Facebook the group Stop Aegis and Blackwater security firms abusing Iraqi civilians is worth a look.
America's use of corporate mercenaries in Iraq is under renewed scrutiny in the wake of the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad on Sept. 16. Employees of Blackwater USA stand accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians.
There is reason to believe that commercial and bureaucratic rivalries played a part in bringing the episode to public attention, after four years in which contractors have routinely shot at Iraqi civilians with impunity.
From my latest piece for Antiwar.com
Following yesterday's meeting between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, it looks as if the US military is going to take on a bigger role in the oversight of State Department security contractors as a result of the Nisour Square Massacre.
R.J Hillhouse suggests that Blackwater will therefore come under the co-ordination of the military's Reconstruction Operations Centers, which are outsourced to Tim Spicer's Aegis Specialist Risk Management.
Kind of ironic that increased accountability for Blackwater should mean reporting to a company that got off scot-free after the trophy video episode.
It looks like Craig Murray's next book will include his account of the Arms to Africa Affair. Apparently, it was Murray who tipped off Customs and Excise about Tim Spicer's attempt to import arms into Sierra Leone in the first place.
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