Former UK Ambassador Craig Murray was honored with the 4th annual Sam Adams Award for Integrity in 2005, [ See samadamsaward.ch ] He was the first male, the first Scot, and the second Brit (after Katharine Gun) to be so honored.
Below is the award citation: ================== Know all ye by these presents that Craig Murray is hereby awarded The Corner-Brightener Candlestick, presented by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. As UK ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, Mr. Murray learned that the intelligence authorities of the UK and the US were receiving and using information extracted by the most sadistic methods of torture by Uzbek authorities. He protested strongly to London, to no avail. Mr. Murray stands out as one who did not forfeit his moral compass to his government or to his career. When his government colleagues referred condescendingly to his “qualms of conscience,” he replied that he would not hide his shame “that I work in an organization where colleagues would resort to casuistry to justify torture.” Mr. Murray recognized that civilized societies have long recognized torture as an intolerable affront to the inherent human right to physical integrity and personal dignity—and that this is precisely why there are so many laws against torture. He did all he could to persuade his government not to condone it. It is shameful that this strong moral stance should jeopardize his promising career. He was forced out of the British Foreign Office, but has no regrets. There are more important things than career. Nor will he cease to call attention to torture. We look forward to early publication of his book, Murder in Samarkand, now banned in Britain. Mr. Murray’s light has pierced a thick cloud of denial and deception. He has set a courageous example for those officials of the “Coalition of the Willing” who have first-hand knowledge of the inhuman practices involved in the so-called “war on terror” but who have not yet been able to find their voice. Presented this 21st day of January 2006 in New York City by admirers of the example set by our former colleague, Sam Adams.
This link should take you directly to a photo of Gerry Condon on the sidewalk after the attack: pic.twitter.com/Z6R27pu1Wh
We are at the point Edward Snowden described as “turnkey tyranny.” Last night the key was turned a bit more, but — at least until now — it has been an almost imperceptibly gradual process, like the proverbial frog in the pan, as the water starts to boil. And, of course, this has happened before. What follows is taken from “Creeping Fascism: History’s Lessons,” which I posted on December 27, 2007: [See: https://consortiumnews.com/2007/122707a.html ]] “There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. … Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….” The above are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.” I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America. … This is almost unbelievable.” [Emphasis added.] More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on here in the U.S. [in late 2007] that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.” Reflect on the key role played by the media.
Collect on Everyone
After suppressing for two and a half years the explosive story of the Bush/Cheney surveillance of Americans in gross violation of the Fourth Amendment, top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Not to mention the U.S. Constitution.
The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information. In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen’s book, “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’s trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print. (The Times’ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”) When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least. …
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article exposing the Fourth-Amendment-trashing program, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee. Bush took a frontal approach, Far from expressing regret, he bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so. The president also said: “Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.” On Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program. Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.” He answered: “We have had discussions with Congress…as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.” …
It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn’t have a prayer for passage. It turns out we didn’t know the half of it. … Bear in mind that when this illegal surveillance program began, it had nothing to do with terrorism, an issue that did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11. … So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us. We know that the Democrats briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, D-Florida, and Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, respectively. May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy? It is an important question [with considerable relevance to the situation today]. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment? Are they all complicit? With respect to Nazis and their enablers: You don’t have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep. In his journal, Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.” But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here? In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds: “It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.” [Emphasis added.] The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers—“for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.” In May, the party leaders sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved. The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship. As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: “Oh God,” writes Haffner, “what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward. … They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. … They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.” In sum: “There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933, millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.” So what about today? This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated. Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison: “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. … The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” We cannot say we weren’t warned.
a succinct summary by a serious former Washington insider Well, there’s a new bad cop in town, and his name’s Bill Barr.
That’s the narrative scalp-hunting Democrats on Capitol Hill pushed this week.
Forget the 448-page Mueller Report. It’s a pile of trivia, non-sequiturs, innuendo, smears, lies, and regurgitated Deep State agitprop.
There’s only one sentence you need to read about the whole matter. It’s this one, from the four-page missive now known as the Barr Letter: The investigation did not establish that [Carter] Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
That’s the essence of the entire $40 million inquisition. And it stinks to high heaven.
FISA warrants subsequent wiretaps on Carter Page were fraudulently obtained. We’re talking about the heart of the whatever state meddling happened in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Without the electronic surveillance on the headquarters of the Republican candidate for the highest elective office in the land, Russiagate wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans.
It’s not some crazy conspiracy theory… the Deep State DOES exist. … They had one thing on Carter Page in July 2016. It was an unproven claim from the infamous Steele Dossier that he’d gone to Moscow to cut some sort of sinister energy deal with Russia.
But we now know, definitively, that it didn’t happen. Page was never even indicted. And the Mueller Report makes no effort whatsoever to confirm the false claim in the Steele Dossier.
Well, Barr is now investigating the provenance of the Trump-Russia probe. And his team at the Justice Department is reexamining the 35-page Steele Dossier to determine whether its allegations were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. [sic]
Here’s how Politico framed it: Barr is conducting the review in parallel with the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who has been examining the FBI’s efforts to surveil a one-time Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. The application to monitor Page was based in part on information from Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who authored the bombshell dossier and served as a confidential source for the bureau.
The FBI code-named its Carter Page operation “Crossfire Hurricane.” But … Carter Page was exceedingly thin gruel – certainly not enough to support a counterintelligence investigation. He was a nobody in the Trump campaign. He presented exactly zero threat to national security.
“To the extent that there was any overreach, I believe it was some – a few people in the upper echelons of the bureau and perhaps in the department,” Barr said. “We’re working together on trying to reconstruct exactly what went down.”
So, here’s the thing… and it far outweighs all the tonnage of the Mueller Report… plus the Barr Letter… plus the Barr Press Conference… plus the Mueller Letter…
There was no basis for mobilizing the intelligence community’s surveillance machinery against Carter Page.
It was evident he had nothing to do with military secrets. There was no excuse for wiretapping him. That’s even if he’d been a paid energy advisor on Vladimir Putin’s personal payroll.
The Obama administration committed the gravest possible assault on individual constitutional rights. They misused the vast machinery of national security to meddle in a presidential election for partisan advantage.
That’s heinous. It cuts right to the quick of democracy’s survival in America.
The FISA application – slathered in redaction ink as it is – proves the real meddlers in the 2016 election are its signers. That’s the very top tier of Obama’s national security team, including John Brennan, Susan Rice, James Clapper, and the secretaries of Defense and State. [sic for SecDef and SecState]
Indeed, it’s their criminality that’s established by the Mueller Report.
Carter Page was just a patsy for a Deep State coup.
This is the kind of intelligence analysis done “back in the day;” conclusions based on facts. not squishy “assessments.” After combing through the Mueller report, former CIA and State Department analyst Larry Johnson concludes: “The preponderance of evidence makes this very simple–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia.
“The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign. …
“The Mueller investigation of Trump “collusion” with Russia prior to the 2016 presidential election focused on eight cases: The Proposed Trump Tower Project in Moscow George Papadopolous Carter Page Dimitri Simes Veselnetskya Meeting at Trump Tower (June 16, 2016) Events at Republican Convention Post-Convention Contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak Paul Manafort
“One simple fact emerges–of the eight cases or incidents of alleged Trump Campaign interaction with the Russians investigated by the Mueller team, the proposals to interact with the Russian Government or Putin originated with FBI informants, MI-6 assets or people paid by Fusion GPS, not Trump or his people. There is not a single instance where Donald Trump or any member of his campaign team initiated contact with the Russians for the purpose of gaining derogatory information on Hillary or obtaining support to boost the Trump campaign. Not one. [Emphasis added.] “Simply put, Trump and his campaign were the target of an elaborate, wide ranging covert action designed to entrap him and members of his team as an agent of Russia. “Let’s look in detail at each of the cases.” And Larry proceeds to do just that in his full text. Readers, you may wish to tell any neighbors who still place credence in “mainstream media.”
Excellent Vocation By Mark Curey, unknown to Ray, who emailed Ray the following of the blue
I have just come back Stateside Most of the working years overseas What is most strange.. Not that folks agree or disagree as to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Niger and ? Not that folks don’t know why they hold a position Not that folks agree or disagree on Iran or North Korea or Venezuela Not that folks agree or disagree as To Russia or China Even one’s positions from pacifism to just war theory to treaties to interventionists All of it…
What is most shocking? Relatively speaking nobody is speaking or thinking We have swung from moral relativism to not knowing anything to not wanting to know anything to not not wanting to think at all
How can one have a nation without a curious and educated citizenry Folks ..us humans are lazy to do our P.T. but we are neglecting our minds A mind is a beautiful thing along with the body Yet without thinking about the highest things the soul shrivels
Your soul is not shriveled Ray Let’s stay irreverent brother
How can we not read and not take seriously Article I Section 8? Clear as a bell How has Congress abrogated for decades its constitutional duty as to Article 1 Section 8 ? How? Why?
How could any President want to usurp The authority of Congress as to Article 1 section 8? What sane person would assume a moral or legal responsibility for something that risks their very soul that they lack the authority for ?
It is so precious that the people decide through our representative democracy. This necessitates a national conversation. They can’t make the case in the light of day So we bomb at night Gil Scott Heron was premature The bombings will be televised With colorful graphics Music
Congress prefers the middle of the night And the folks rally round the flag ” The love of one’s country is a terrible thing “ Patriot Game Liam Clancy Riveting lines And voila First time EVER War Powers Act 1973.. First time reaches any President’s desk Veto as to Yemen No one is talking about it No one is covering it Forget about an opinion The opposition to love is not hate It is apathy
Common sense men like you risk Being derided for being alarmist by complicit sheep Don’t rock the boat nation Get yours while you can Dreams of avarice The left and the right are materialism run amok The here and now No discussion on the War Powers Act
You have a few politicians through the years Pounding the issue Pat Buchanan Ron and Rand Paul Tulsi Gabbard But they are attacked with the ad hominem that they offer you. Anti semitic It chills the debate, journalism, and the 1st amendment Folks are scared Career over country No one wants the label that Kills so they enable others to be Killed literally The imperial presidency We threw off the king but we all Want our Saviour
Coolidge was maybe the last humble guy In the office It’s a shame No one cares Trump is being deceptive over this As they all raise the flag on the Russia hoax The hoax is on us I appreciate your example You are fighting that good fight I am not a pacifist but I am only One inch to the right of pacifism Just war theory … defense only.. Proportional..mercy We are so far from that
The mechanism is there in the Constitutional framework to Avoid the abuse of power And yet Congress abrogated a long time ago And the people abrogated too Apathy is the opposite of love Your speeches are animated with Anything but apathy Ray You are making a difference in helping Snap potential citizens out of their Apathy to force the constitutional Conversation
I think that that focus while not A guarantee not to be duped but Apathy makes us complicit The enabling nation My mentors taught me in I try to do the same We are in the efforts business Ray God is the results business Speaking of God Our church has lost her voice And moral and intellectual Authority A terrible loss to the West God bless you Ray
It does not seem like 13 years ago that Ray confronted prevaricator Rumsfeld. And since it was on live TV at noon in Atlanta, the TV pundits could not ignore it that evening; e.g., “How long have you held such animus toward Secretary Rumsfeld!, Mr. McGovern?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1FTmuhynaw
(9 minutes)
There is a bit more on this in the Bio section of raymcgovern.com
As sign of the times, how would Olbermann play this now? And even more mentally stable pundits will not Interview Ray now, for reasons we know only too well.
Orwell’s Winston Smith imagines that the State might proclaim that “two plus two equals five” is fact. If everybody believes it, Smith wonders: Does that make it true?
