Craig Murray on the Death of Libel in the UK

Craig is in a triumphalist mood:

We have comprehensively blown wide apart the UK's infamously repressive libel laws. Up until now, these have routinely been used not to prevent untruth, but to hide truth on behalf of the ultra-rich. In so doing they have spawned a whole universe of massively wealthy lawyers devoid of any moral values, dedicated only to the service and pursuit of money.

...

But we are living now, so we put it free online, and published some copies privately. After just two days, a Google search on the precise phrase "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo" brings up 1,810 hits. A great many of these lead to a free download of the book. 23,000 copies of Murder in Samarkand have been sold so far, and most of those have been read by more than one person. But readership of The Catholic Orangemen looks likely to overtake in two weeks the readership that Murder in Samarkand achieved in two years.

If "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo" is anywhere near as good as the excellent "Murder in Samarkand" it certainly deserves that success.

As for "busting" the UK libel laws, I think it may be a little premature to declare victory; but actions like Craig's certainly help to undermine these anachronistic and deeply amoral laws. I wish him luck with his book - and his busting.

Tell Us What You *Really* Think, Craig....

Some fine outrage from our ex-man in Tashkent:

I still do believe that we will come to recover from the terrible poison of the New Labour years, and return to being a liberal society. We will look back at all this as Americans now look back at McCarthyism, with horror and shame. And when historians write the history of these times, there will be a special footnote devoted to the infamous, the disgraceful, the appalling Sir Michael Wright.

This in reference to Wright's extraordinary instruction to the jury at the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes that it will not be able to consider a verdict of unlawful killing.

Er, why might that be, Mike baby? Aren't open societies supposed to leave this kind of decision to the jury, rather than being directed by the powers that be? You know, that's why we have juries....

Morphic Resonance?

My thoughts, precisely.

Open Letter to America

Since some of America's top minds are apparently having a bit of bother deciding this one, I thought the following personal experiences might help. (Via Craig Murray.)

Update: Not that we can talk, of course.

The Power of Blogs - Ain't that the Truth?

Few can match the British Government when it comes to belligerent secrecy. Under the shameful Official Secrets Act, not only is practically everything a state secret, but there are no public interest exceptions that allow the whistle to be blown on corrupt, deceitful or inept politicians, for example.

One person suffering mightily at the hands of the British Government and its attempts to stifle the truth is Craig Murray. Until recently, he was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. But his growing distaste for the current Uzbeki regime, and the for the British Government's complicity in obtaining intelligence extracted by foreign torturers (specifically Uzbeki ones), has led him to become one of both governments' most articulate and implacable critics.

Of course the British Government hardly wants the information he has been privy to out in the open, and it has been steadily applying pressure to keep it secret. A few years back, it would have succeeded. But in these days of the Internet it has already lost that battle.

Murray has posted some deeply incriminating documents to his blog (read them here, and weep at the Machiavellian duplicitousness and moral degradation of the UK Government). Just as importantly, he has asked other bloggers to copy and publish them.

Heaven knows that I have no time for facile boosterism that sees every blogger - all 24 million of them - as a potential William Shakespeare. But never mind the quality, feel the width: their astonishing numbers, and their continuing growth, make them potentially powerful weapons in the fight against closed minds in general, and official secrecy in particular. As this useful page shows, the Uzbekistan genie is out of the proverbial bottle, and nothing the UK Government can do is going to put it back.