Layer 441 . . . Egypt, Mubarak, Resignation, Revolution, Detentions, Torture, Scapegoating and Banking

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Egypt, bankers, and public expenditure cutbacks continue to dominate the news, but here's an interesting piece by Zoe Williams on the Tories' continuing efforts to discriminate in favour of married couples:

All Iain Duncan Smith's rot about marriage disguises a tired old taboo

The guff Duncan Smith talks about commitment shows what really drives him: painting cohabiting couples as an aberration

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/10/iain-duncan-smith-marriage-taboo

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Hosni Mubarak 'may step down'
 

Ruling party officials suggest Egypt's president will 'meet protesters demands', ahead of televised statement.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/20112101653445426.html

The Supreme Council of Egyptian Armed Forces has met to discuss the ongoing protests against the government of Hosni Mubarak, the president.

In a statement entitled 'Communique Number One', televised on state television, the army said it had convened the meeting response to the current political turmoil, and that it would continue to convene such meetings.

Thurday's meeting was chaired by Mohamed Tantawi, the defence minister, rather than Mubarak, who, as president, would normally have headed the meeting.

"Based on the responsibility of the armed forces and its commitment to protect the people and its keenness to protect the nation... and in support of the legitimate demands of the people [the army] will continue meeting on a continuous basis to examine measures to be taken to protect the nation and its gains and the ambitions of the great Egyptian people," the statement.

The army's statement was met with a roar of approval from protesters in Tahrir Square as vast crowds poured into the area.

Earlier, Hassan al-Roweni, an Egyptian army commander, told protesters in the square that "everything you want will be realised".

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Mubarak resignation rumours grow

PM and army officials suggest Hosni Mubarak may step down as state television says Egyptian president will address nation soon

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/10/mubarak-resignation-rumours-grow

President Hosni Mubarak's rule appears to be on the brink of collapse after senior politicians said they expect him to relinquish power in the coming hours as strikes and demonstrations spread across the country.

The prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, told the BBC that he believed Mubarak would step down and that the situation in the country will be clarified soon.

Hossam Badrawi, the new secretary general of the ruling party, was quoted in the state press as saying that he has requested Mubarak to transfer his powers to his vice-president, Omar Suleiman, and that he expects him to resign this evening. But he later told state television that no decision had been made.

General Hassan al-Roueini, the military commander for the Cairo, told the crowds packed in to Cairo's Tahrir square, the epicentre of the protests to demand Mubarak's resignation, that: "All your demands will be met today". The tens of thousands of people let up a deafening cheer and chants of: "The people and army are one".

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Unfortunately this may not be the case, according to this morning's Guardian:

Egypt's army 'involved in detentions and torture'

Military accused by human rights campaigners of targeting hundreds of anti-government protesters

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/09/egypt-army-detentions-torture-accused

The Egyptian military has secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured, according to testimony gathered by the Guardian.

The military has claimed to be neutral, merely keeping anti-Mubarak protesters and loyalists apart. But human rights campaigners say this is clearly no longer the case, accusing the army of involvement in both disappearances and torture – abuses Egyptians have for years associated with the notorious state security intelligence (SSI) but not the army.

The Guardian has spoken to detainees who say they have suffered extensive beatings and other abuses at the hands of the military in what appears to be an organised campaign of intimidation. Human rights groups have documented the use of electric shocks on some of those held by the army.

Egyptian human rights groups say families are desperately searching for missing relatives who have disappeared into army custody. Some of the detainees have been held inside the renowned Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on the edge of Tahrir Square. Those released have given graphic accounts of physical abuse by soldiers who accused them of acting for foreign powers, including Hamas and Israel.

Among those detained have been human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, but most have been released. However, Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights in Cairo, said hundreds, and possibly thousands, of ordinary people had "disappeared" into military custody across the country for no more than carrying a political flyer, attending the demonstrations or even the way they look. Many were still missing.

"Their range is very wide, from people who were at the protests or detained for breaking curfew to those who talked back at an army officer or were handed over to the army for looking suspicious or for looking like foreigners even if they were not," he said. "It's unusual and to the best of our knowledge it's also unprecedented for the army to be doing this."

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The west's debt to Egypt

After actively supporting Mubarak's corrupt and violent rule, the west has a duty to help end it

by Ahmed Salah

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/10/the-west-has-debts-to-egypt

This week has seen the biggest protest in the history of Egypt. Millions have demonstrated in Cairo and other cities all over the country – north, south, east, and west. All had the same demands. The first, as the world knows now, is that the dictator Hosni Mubarak must step down.

We managed to lay siege to the parliament, the government, and the notorious ministry of interior, sites that have witnessed the murder and injury of hundreds of Egyptians, and where I was hit by a sniper's rubber bullet. This was proof that – contrary to the regime's belief that time is on their side, and that the revolution will grow weaker as protesters tire and lose momentum – the revolution is actually getting stronger by the day.

This revolution is not for bread as much as for freedom. It was made principally by the educated, rather than the crushed poorer classes. And it is getting more and more popular as Egyptians balance values such as democracy, freedom, justice, dignity and transparency on one hand, and despotism, oppression, injustice, humiliation and corruption on the other.

Understanding this, the regime has gone back to the language of threats. So, the newly appointed vice-president, former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, now warns that he won't tolerate this much longer and that Mubarak is not leaving any time soon. Meanwhile, security forces are still kidnapping, interrogating and torturing activists, even taking them from their homes. Some of them are still in unknown locations. They do not understand that we, the activists, no longer control the will of the people. The will of the people has its own impulse and power.

But why is this regime clinging to power so hard? Why are they willing to do whatever it takes to stay in control? They still murder protesters in parts of the country where they believe they can get away with it. On Tuesday they shot dead two and injured scores more in the city of Sohag, in the south. On Monday dozens were injured in the Oasis of Elkharga after live bullets were fired at them. The regime is doing this only to protect its loot. The wealth of Mubarak, in British and Swiss banks alone, is estimated at between $40bn and $70bn. And what about his bank accounts in other countries, property and real estate, gold and diamonds? He is not alone, either. All members of his regime, past and present, have huge fortunes in western banks that resulted directly from obscene corruption.

Why has the west been silent about this corruption, about the terrible violations of human rights in Egypt and the region, and about the torture and killing? The west, including the UK, has been complicit in all these crimes by providing support and safe havens. It has mistakenly believed that democracy and freedom is dangerous if implemented in the Middle East, fearing that Islamists would take power.

The world can see now, in both Tunisia and Egypt, how false this assumption was. It is clear those revolutions encompass all elements of society and seek values aspired to by people around the world – the most important of which is freedom. We were systematically punished for decades for a notion that only resides in the minds of western politicians and the lies of tyrants. We lived in a police state, occupied by a two million-strong militarised police force. Given this, isn't there now a moral responsibility that the west bears?

Britain, and other western powers, must take a moral stand in support of the people of Egypt and their demand for the right to be free. This should not be mere diplomatic words: real tangible support should include measures to ensure power is passed to the people, and to put an end to the regime's efforts to kill this revolution.

This is the least compensation our people deserve for the years of western support for these injustices. The money looted from Egypt should be returned and a democratic government should use it to resolve the huge problems this regime has been creating for decades. Dare we hope that these calls for support won't be ignored again?

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Not 1989. Not 1789. But Egyptians can learn from other revolutions

Ecstatic crowds in Cairo prove there is no clash of civilisations – everyone wants freedom. The question is, how to get it?

by Timothy Garton Ash

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/09/egypt-can-learn-from-europe-revolutions

Before we go any further, let us make two deep bows. First and deepest to those who started this, at great personal risk, with no support from the professedly freedom-loving west, and against a regime that habitually uses torture. Honour and respect to you. Second, hats off to Lady Luck, contingency, fortuna – which, as Machiavelli observed, accounts for half of everything that happens in human affairs. No revolution has ever got anywhere without brave individuals and good luck.

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Beyond Tahrir: Two faces of Egypt

On the one hand there is vice-president Omar Suleiman, and on the other young activist Wael Ghonim

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/10/beyond-tahrir-two-faces-egypt

Editorial

On the very day when the old regime was hoping the revolution would run out of steam, it instead gathered fresh strength. But Tahrir is now as much a cul-de-sac politically as it has become physically. It cannot be abandoned by the protesters because it is symbolically too important, yet just being in Tahrir is not enough. On the other hand, the regime cannot clear the square by the use of force because that would be the wrong kind of victory for them. Some protesters now want to march to parliament or to the headquarters of state TV. They may do so, but the real struggle is now as much about information as location.

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Cameron's scapegoating will have a chilling, toxic impact

Blaming Islamists and multiculturalism for the backlash from US and British wars risks fuelling violence on the streets

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/09/cameron-scapegoating-muslims-toxic-impact

by Seumas Milne

By blaming the threat of terrorism on multiculturalism, Cameron has signalled that ethnic minority policy will now be driven by an alarmingly skewed conception of state security.

And by branding political Islam as extremist, he's playing on the ignorance of those for whom Muslim and Islamist are as good as indistinguishable. What is called Islamism includes a wide spectrum of political trends, peaceful and violent, socially conservative and progressive, from Turkey's ruling party to al-Qaida. Mainstream Islamists, certainly including almost all the groups Cameron is now casting into outer darkness, are in fact committed to democratic freedoms.

What Cameron and the bulk of the British political class cannot acknowledge is that their continued support for the war on terror and occupation of Afghanistan, far from keeping the streets safe, is the crucial factor in the continuing threat of terrorism in Britain.

The revolutionary upheavals taking place in Tunisia and Egypt should offer the western powers a chance to change direction. After all, backing for despots across the Arab worlds such as Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak has long been one of the central grievances at the heart of Islamist (and nationalist) politics, in the region and beyond. It would be bizarre if just as the British and other western governments are having to come to terms with Islamist movements in the Middle East, they were treating their counterparts at home as enemies of the state.

The practical policy consequences of Cameron's neocon turn may be modest. But its wider impact is likely to be chilling and poisonous. If the government's message is that peaceful independent Muslim political activism is beyond the pale, it won't just be regarded as hypocritical and undemocratic – it will strengthen the hand of those committed to violence.

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Politicians and bankers: Struggle for power

The truth is that Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both failed to stand up to the City

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/10/politicians-bankers-struggle-for-power

Editorial

Yesterday's parliamentary debate degenerated into an argument over which party had been weakest in tackling the banks. The truth is that Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both failed to stand up to the City. Less than three years on from the worst financial crisis in a lifetime, ministers of all stripes have simply let bankers get back to business as usual.

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Layer 376 . . . Human Rights, Truth, Torture, Bush, China, Waterboarding, and Lessons to be Learned

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"Truth is the first casualty of war."  -  Aeschylus

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There are another 100 million people throughout the world living in poverty since the great banking crisis took place. Western-style so-called democracy and capitalism do not, and have never, guaranteed prosperity. Various countries in Scandinavia, South America and Asia have long ago woken up to the fact that capitalism needs regulation, that societies benefit from greater fairness and equality, that poverty is intolerable where it is avoidable, and that a free press in itself is no guarantee of better public information, understanding and enlightenment.

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Cameron in China: What does Beijing think of us? Let's start with hypocrisy

Alleged British war crimes in Iraq and George Bush's comments on waterboarding have weakened David Cameron's hand 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/10/cameron-china-beijing-hyprocrisy

As David Cameron vowed to raise human rights as a topic of discussion in Beijing, it became the subject of two other international news stories.

One was a report that British troops may face trials for war crimes in Iraq. The other was the insistence by George Bush – who enjoyed British support throughout his "war on terror" – that waterboarding is not torture.

Despite Downing Street's dismissal of the former president's claim, the conjunction is likely to feed the perceptions of some in China that western concern about human rights is at best selective and at worst downright hypocritical.

Beijing has embraced such ideas. In its annual riposte to the US state department's country reports on human rights, official news agency Xinhua wrote this spring: "The reports are full of accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China, but turn a blind eye to, or dodge and even cover up rampant human rights abuses on its own territory."

"There is no better example than Guantánamo Bay of abuses committed by governments that say they uphold rights both at home and abroad," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. "But if we sat around and waited for a government that had a pristine record to raise other governments' rights records, we would be standing by watching gross abuses take place on a significant scale."

Campaigners also point to Beijing's deliberate elision of foreign governments and other foreign entities – portraying activists or critical media as part of a coalition of hostile forces intent not on reforming China, but containing or even destroying it. In this view, expression of concern for human rights is not just hypocritical but a ruse.

"The Nobel peace prize … is part of a concerto supplemented by various NGOs, economic identities and international organisations orchestrated by the developed countries. They hope to harass China's growth, and press China to surrender more economic interests. They even hope that China will one day collapse under the west's ideological crusade," the People's Daily article said.

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Waterboarding is no basis for truth

George Bush's defence of torture relies on a belief in information that our intelligence agencies treat with deep scepticism

by Richard Norton-Taylor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/nov/09/george-bush-waterboarding-torture

Bush cannot be allowed to get away with making these kind of claims about information based on torture, information that Britain's security and intelligence agencies treat with deep scepticism and – as far as the supposed links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's Iraq are concerned – incredulity.

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George Bush's torture admission is a dismal moment for democracy

When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/09/george-bush-torture-admission-democracy

by Philippe Sands

Although it comes as no surprise, George Bush's straight admission that he personally authorised waterboarding – an act of torture and a crime under US and international law – marks a dismal moment for western democracies and the rule of law. When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards? Certainly not before it takes steps to bring its own house in order.

Unlike the UK's coalition government, which has announced a judicial inquiry on allegations of British involvement in torture, Barack Obama's administration has apparently ended the practice – but has done nothing to investigate the circumstances in which it was used by the Bush administration.

Bush claims that the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah "saved lives", including British ones. There is not a shred of evidence to support that claim, one that falls into the same category as the bogus intelligence relied on to justify war in Iraq.

Indeed, waterboarding and Iraq appear to be interconnected, as torture-induced information was relied upon to justify the invasion. Torture may produce information, but it doesn't produce reliable information, as every experienced interrogator I have spoken with repeatedly tells me – on both sides of the Atlantic. It produces the information that the subject believes the interrogator wants to hear.

What is accurate – up to a point – is Bush's claim to have acted on legal advice.

Bush fails to mention that the advice prepared by Yoo and Bybee – which did not go through the normal inter-departmental consultations – has been subject to devastating criticism. The DOJ's own office of professional responsibility concluded that Yoo "put his desire to accommodate the client above his obligation to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice and … therefore committed intentional professional misconduct".

It found that Bybee had acted in "reckless disregard" of his professional obligations. Both men escaped sanctions only because an associate deputy general counsel, David Margolis, later concluded that both men had exercised "poor judgment" but did not knowingly provide false advice. Margolis nevertheless concluded that Yoo's "loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client".

This is the dismal, bogus legal advice on which Bush relied, and the fact that he continues to invoke it today says much about his judgment. He would do better to take on board those with first-hand experience of what the embrace of torture might mean for Americans abroad, who recognise that its use by the US will justify its use against the US.

When Bush first authorised waterboarding, says former US Centcom commander General Joseph Hoar, "he sent America down the wrong road, battering our alliances, damaging counterinsurgency efforts, and increasing threats to our soldiers". So much for saving lives.

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No charges over destruction of CIA interrogation tapes

Videos showed harsh interrogation techniques used on two al-Qaida suspects at secret CIA detention centre after 9/11 attacks

by Ewen MacAskill

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/09/no-charges-destruction-cia-interrogation-tapes

The US justice department announced today that there is to be no prosecution of CIA officers who destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of two alleged terrorists, both subjected to waterboarding.

The 92 tapes covered the interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was accused of being the al-Qaida mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and Abu Zubaydah, who the US claimed was a senior al-Qaida operative involved in the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998.

The interrogations took place at one of the CIA's "black sites", a secret detention centre, in Thailand. The tapes were ordered to be destroyed in 2005 during the Bush administration by the head of CIA clandestine operations, José Rodriguez, but it is not known if he was acting on his own initiative or on orders from higher up. The tapes had been held in a safe at the CIA station in Thailand.

The justice department offered no explanation today why no prosecution case would be forthcoming or why the tapes were destroyed.

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Servicemen at 'UK's Abu Ghraib' may be guilty of war crimes, court hears

Evidence of alleged systematic mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at JFIT facility near Basra submitted to court

by Ian Cobain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/08/servicemen-uk-abu-ghraib-court-iraq

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British military interrogators may be charged as war criminals

Videos produced in court appear to show Iraqi detainees being abused at secret prison

by Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/10/iraq-prisoners-abuse-british-military

The Ministry of Defence is at the centre of a new crisis over the abuse of prisoners after it was disclosed yesterday that a number of British military interrogators may be charged as war criminals.

The development comes after videos submitted as evidence to a high court case appeared to show members of a military intelligence unit threatening, abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees at a secret prison near Basra.

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British troops may face Iraq war crimes trial

Interrogators at secret jail dubbed 'UK's Abu Ghraib' referred to chief military prosecutor

by Ian Cobain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/09/british-military-iraq-war-crimes

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War crimes charges against military interrogators would put MoD on trial

Human rights lawyer in high court action that aims to force an inquiry into 'systematic abuse' of detainees in Iraq

by Ian Cobain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/09/war-crimes-charges-military-interrogators-iraq

The revelation that a number of members of a secretive British military intelligence unit could face war crimes charges threatens to put the Ministry of Defence's entire interrogation regime on trial.

The high court heard today that the cases of three men have been referred to the Director of Service Prosecutions, who has been asked to consider war crimes charges under the 2001 International Criminal Court Act. Possible charges, the court heard, included "committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" – a war crime under article 8 of the act.

But as the Guardian reported last month, men and women who undergo training as interrogators at the Intelligence Corps headquarters in Chicksands, Bedfordshire, are instructed to do just this. Among the training material upon which last month's report was based are PowerPoint slides and training manuals telling trainee interrogators that they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear. The material also suggests how this can be achieved.

One aid, created in September 2005, tells trainees that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. "Get them naked," it says. "Keep them naked if they do not follow commands." Another manual, prepared around the same time, advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that "Cpers" – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are "valid operational reasons". It also urges enforced nakedness. Prisoners should be "conditioned" before questioning, the material says, with conditioning defined as the combined effects of self-induced pressure and "system-induced pressure". Harsh questioning – or "harshing" – in which an interrogator puts his face close to the prisoner, screaming, swearing and making threats, is recommended as a means to provoke "anxiety/fear". Other useful methods include "insecurity", "disorientation" and "humiliation".

This material was created for the instruction of "tactical questioners", who conduct initial interrogations of prisoners of war, as well as for the instruction of servicemen and women from all three branches of the armed forces who conduct "interrogation in depth".

The material suggests not only that British military interrogators have employed techniques that may be in breach of the International Criminal Court Act, but that the MoD has spent a considerable amount of time and money training them to do just that.

Subsequently, hundreds of men who were prisoners of JFIT between 2003 and the end of 2008 alleged that they were subjected to mistreatment, including sleep deprivation, starvation, beatings, sensory deprivation, threats and humiliation.

Phil Shiner, a Birmingham human rights lawyer, has brought proceedings at the high court aimed at forcing the MoD to concede a public inquiry into the men's allegations.

Many of the former inmates complain that they were severely beaten when arrested, usually at their homes. Many allege they were again beaten in transit, in the backs of trucks or aboard helicopters.

On arrival at a British base, most of the former inmates say they were photographed and examined by a military doctor who would take no interest in their injuries. Many say they were forced to kneel upright for long periods on arrival. Many also say they were hooded or blindfolded and forced to run in zig-zags before interrogation.

For reasons that remain unclear, the interrogators filmed themselves while conducting these interrogations, and 1,253 of their recordings have now been seized by military police investigators. Those recording are expected to be central to any prosecutions.

The former inmates say the most severe mistreatment was meted out while they were not being filmed, however. In all, Shiner's team has documented 59 allegations of detainees being hooded, 11 of electric shocks, 122 of sound deprivation through the use of earmuffs, 52 of sleep deprivation, 160 of sight deprivation, including 117 using blackened goggles, 132 of the use of stress positions, 39 of enforced nakedness, and 18 allegations that detainees were kept awake by pornographic DVDs played on laptops.

In bringing proceedings on behalf of 222 former prisoners, Shiner's team argued that a public inquiry was needed to examine the systemic issues and the lessons to be learned. Anything less, they said, would fail to meet the UK's obligations under the European convention on human rights.

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Layer 243 . . . A Quiet Night in the Village

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There's ice on the pond opposite the Village Store, where business is still brisk as it's only 10.00pm. Outside, on the pavement, next to the curb, there's a guy in a sweater, holding a cordless electric drill. He's just standing there, breathing in the cold air - not going anywhere, not doing anything - just holding his drill.

A police Astra comes revving down the road from the roundabout, lights flashing, siren on . . .  swings right at the junction and disappears.

Further on, 30 yards down the road, the cops have created a bay in the bus lane using cones and flashing blue lights. At the far end of it stands a BMW copmobile, a white estate with its back door open, showing all kinds of cop gear in the back. 20 yards further on from that stands an anonymous white van, whose presence is explained by two open flaps above its back doors, with two cop video cameras looking out - down past the road beyond the BMW and its cop pen. No doubt the telephoto lens are focused way back up the road at the traffic approaching the pen - checking number plates for the wanted, the illegal, the bad and the ugly. A car approaches . . . tiny red lights blink next to the cameras, an instant check is made, a message comes back from the central computer, and the car is waved into the bay.

Another 20 yards and there's a rasta corner shop in what, years ago, used to be a local bank. A door is open. Inside, the shelves are sparsely stocked, several bredrin are chatting loudly, and raucous laughter reverberates through the door.

Across the road stand the Turkish Coffee Shop and the Turkish minimarket. No-one ever seems to go in or out of the coffee shop, and the grocery never closes.

Another 20 yards and a BMW Flashmobile Dopedealer Coupe stands with its engine idling, its driver grooving to some cool sounds, with his buddy inside the Nigerian takeaway, scoring some food.

2 more minutes down the street and a small gaggle of drinkers and smokers is hanging around outside the corner bar. Inside it's busy - all the seats taken, including the bar stools. You weave your way through to the back room where there's jazz going down - a drummer driving, a bass guitar funking, a rhythm guitar swinging, and a sax grooving. It's a nice, tight sound - nothing outstanding, but not too loud, so people can chat or listen.

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What's the word on the street tonight?

Nelson Mandela's 1990 release is being celebrated. 20 years of freedom already. He's still getting around at 92.
Alexander McQueen seems to have committed suicide.
"Rebel MP" Hoon will retire at the next election.
A woman who put poison in her lover's curry is given 23 years.
Bill Clinton's been taken to hospital with chest pains.
Our Master of the Rolls has said that the Binyam Mohamed case shows MI5 to be devious, dishonest and complicit in torture. By implication, so is our government. Our Foreign Secretary has been going round the TV studios giving a very passable imitation of Blair in full-on brazen smarmy liar mode.

MI5 faced an unprecedented and damaging crisis tonight after one of the country's most senior judges found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a "culture of suppression" that undermined government assurances about its conduct.

The condemnation, by Lord Neuberger, the master of the rolls, was drafted shortly before the foreign secretary, David Miliband, lost his long legal battle to suppress a seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed.

Amid mounting calls for an independent inquiry into the affair, three of the country's most senior judges – Lord Judge, the lord chief justice, Sir Anthony May, president of the Queen's Bench Division, and Lord Neuberger – disclosed evidence of MI5's complicity in Mohamed's torture and unlawful interrogation by the US.

So severe were Neuberger's criticisms of MI5 that the government's leading lawyer in the case, Jonathan Sumption QC, privately wrote to the court asking him to reconsider his draft judgment before it was handed down.

The judges agreed but Sumption's letter, which refers to Neuberger's original comments, was made public after lawyers for Mohamed and media organisations, including the Guardian, intervened.

They argued that Neuberger had privately agreed with Sumption to remove his fierce criticisms without giving then the chance to contest the move.

In his letter, Sumption warned the judges that the criticism of MI5 would be seen by the public as statements by the court that the agency:

• Did not respect human rights.

• Had not renounced participation in "coercive interrogation" techniques.

• Deliberately misled MPs and peers on the intelligence and security committee, who are supposed to scrutinise its work.

• Had a "culture of suppression" in its dealings with Miliband and the court.

Sumption described Neuberger's observations in his draft judgment as "an exceptionally damaging criticism of the good faith of the Security Service as a whole".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/10/binyam-mohamed-torture-mi5

This devastating verdict upon a secret intelligence agency – contained in the original paragraph 168 of the Master of the Rolls's judgment – was drastically watered down in the published judgment, though Lord Neuberger later admitted he may have been "over hasty" in submitting to Mr Sumption's critique of his original words. The court should now agree to the publication of the original paragraph so that the public can judge the three versions of it now in circulation. Parliament cannot claim to exercise effective oversight of MI5 if (as one of our most senior judges apparently believed) it has been "deliberately misled". This is a desperately serious state of affairs, whatever spin Mr Miliband puts on it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/11/binyam-mohamed-torture-missing-paragraph

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Further to comments in recent Oxzen postings about the poor getting even poorer over the past 10 - 20 years we heard today that in South Africa (and for sure elsewhere) the number of people living on a dollar a day has doubled in a decade.

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Our housing minister, John Healey, is in deep shit for telling the BBC that, for some people, having their home repossessed "can be the best option".

Earlier, figures showed repossessions in the UK had reached a 14-year high.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) said 46,000 homes were repossessed in 2009, the highest number since 1995.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8510997.stm
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Layer 120 I Wanna Live With The Common People

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This should have been posted two days ago.

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Jarvis Cocker was featured on a Sky Arts programme last night, about songwriters and their techniques. A whole hour of the wonderful Jarvis explaining how to compose, even if you only have a rudimentary ability to strum chords on the guitar. At one point he used the very same ancient model of Casio keyboard my children played with two decades ago, complete with little orange percussion pads. He was having a laugh, to be sure, but also demonstrating that he's no snob about having the coolest instruments, and showing that you don’t need expensive equipment in order to write and be creative.

There are three excellent and very different versions of Pulp performing ‘Common People’ on Utube. As Jarvis says, it’s only three chords: C, G and F.

Coincidentally I was thinking just last week how imperceptibly we make progress with playing an instrument. What sparked that thought was memorising and playing the chords for Lennon & McC’s ‘In My Life’ on the guitar.

Eight years ago I had to abandon the attempt to play the song, but suddenly, now, it seems quite doable - to move easily from A to F#m to D, then Dm and back to A, and so on. Whereas getting three fingers squashed into an A chord used to be an almost impossible task, it’s now even become possible to nail that B7 that sneaks into the final sequence.

We really need a campaign in this country to implement the Venezuelan scheme that enables all children to learn to play an instrument. I believe it ought to be a basic right of every child in this country, and if it can be done in Venezuela then it can surely be done here.

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Saturday’s Guardian Review carried a curious two-page spread giving massive publicity to a new book by Iain Sinclair, “A bittersweet love letter to the London borough of Hackney”. Eh?

So what’s he have to say? He came to live among the common people some 40 years ago. He doesn’t like the new flats next to the new Dalston station. He can’t bear to leave “the repository of memory” (i.e. Hackney) where the children of this Welshman were born. He can see the end of Hackney as he knows it, and he feels like he’s ‘crumbling in synch with the old Hackney’. He’s “deeply disturbed and angry” at the Olympics site that’s taking shape just across the River Lea, calling it “a folly”, “apocalyptically catastrophic”, and “brutalising”. And . . . Er . . . That’s about it, according to the author of the piece, Rachel Cooke.

For a mere £20 you can buy the book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, out now in all good booksellers. Don’t all rush at once.

Apparently NuLabour’s tosspot of a Mayor, Jules Pipe, has banned Sinclair from doing readings in Hackney libraries, since Sinclair’s so anti-Olympics, and they can’t allow “controversial topics” to be discussed in libraries. No, that would never do, Jules - clearly he's the mayor that likes to say No.

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Technically, and statistically, Hackney is a dump. However, it has huge pockets of poverty, but it also has more parks and open spaces than anywhere else in London; parts of it have more artists per square mile than anywhere on earth, and it also has some nasty and vicious gangs who fight one another for territory and control of the drugs trade.

Property prices are high, rents are high, many of the common people are extremely poor. It’s incredible that there isn’t far more crime and danger on the streets.

This morning my local cornershop owner was livid about the bonuses that the bankers are still determined to pay themselves, in spite of their spectacular greed and incompetence having totally fucked up the economy. He was absolutely fuming. He’s been a pillar of my local community for two decades, and operates an informal community centre, with a loyal customer base that values both the shop and the family that runs it.

And now he’s struggling with pressure from the bank, and lack of credit facilities. Plus customers whose spending power is seriously depressed. To know that the bankers are still stuffing their own pockets with cash when all else are suffering is just too much. The bastards wouldn’t even have a job if we, the people, hadn’t bailed them out, and they still expect to keep their snouts in the trough. Unbelievable.

Martin Rowson’s cartoon in the Guardian sums it up superbly:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/cartoon/2009/feb/08/banking-crisis-executive-pay-cartoon

As Johnny Prescott said on Newsnight last night, “They’ve bust our economy and they’ve a lot to answer for”. Yes Johnny, and whose government allowed them to get away with it, and who was Deputy Prime Minister for ten years and said not a word about the need to re-regulate casino capitalism and put and end to the bonus culture and the obscene salaries the fat cats awarded one another?

Today in Parliament four of the former top guys in the bust British banks faced questions from a committee of MPs. They appeared to apologise, but as someone said, since they didn’t own up to any personal incompetence and liability for fucking up our financial and economic system then their apology’s worth nothing. Off with their heads!

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Nick Cohen, in his Observer column, makes the point that the government’s greatest desire is to restore the status quo ante to the wonderful capitalist system we still have - just.

They still hope that the model of free trade and globalisation can be put together again. Property prices will shoot upwards. The tax receipts from financial services will flow. The City will resume its primacy and all will be right with the world.

In this intellectual climate, reforms that appear obvious to social democrats remain unthinkable to insiders. Closing tax havens, regulating hedge funds and stopping high street banks behaving like investment banks so that never again do we have the obscenity of taxpayers bailing out speculators are items the agenda-setters have no wish to put on the table.

Much to their discomfort, however, our leaders are realising that although the Washington consensus lives on in London, it is dying in Obama's Washington. Now when they talk about Paulson there is a faint whiff of nostalgia. Say what you like about old Hank, but at least he wanted to consult us. We wish we could say the same about his successors.

Every day brings news from Washington our rulers find profoundly unsettling. Conceivably, Labour may have to imitate Obama's pay cap on executives of firms that have taken public money. The power of the American example, combined with the public's disgust at the remarkably dumb yet brazenly rapacious executives of Lloyds, Barclays and RBS, could be too much for any government to resist.

But, trust me, they will hate intervening if they forced into it. They still yearn for the roaring days when the moneymen were getting richer and Labour was winning elections. Salary caps and bonus bans are alien inventions from a strange, new world they neither like nor understand.

[Alistair Darling] argues for international co-operation to stop the banks bringing the roof down again, but there is no echo of the talk in Washington about closing tax havens or regulating hedge funds.

In my view, tax havens are centres of organised crime and, like everyone else, I find the sight of bankers enriching themselves at public expense revolting.

I also know, however, that Whitehall regards such social democratic views as naive and extremist.

But I sense as I watch startled ministers react to the changing line from Washington that they are beginning to suspect that perhaps normal is dead and gone; that maybe, just maybe, there is no normal to get back to.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/barack-obama-protectionism

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The Observer’s editorial, meanwhile, says,

The bonus culture encouraged short-term risk and irresponsible behaviour, leading eventually to the banking sector's near collapse and rescue by the state. With the taxpayer now in charge, the bonuses must stop.

What is baffling, then, is why the government has seemed unable to exert any power on this matter despite having majority opinion and moral authority on its side. Authorities in France, Germany and the US have all used the leverage of state bail-out to demand pay restraint in the financial sector. The British government, by contrast, has appeared impotent, relying on vague exhortation and thinly veiled pleading. Now at last it seems a government review is to be launched.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/banking-salaries-bonuses-government

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The Torture Papers

Andrew Rawnsley’s column focuses on the complicity of the Blair government in torture and kidnapping in the ‘war on terror’.

Torture was sanctioned by George W Bush early in 2002 when he signed the now notorious memorandum declaring that the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to members of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

From those strokes of the presidential pen flowed the outrages in the cells of Abu Ghraib and the cages of Guantánamo, at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan and CIA "black sites" in Europe and around the world. From that sprang "extraordinary rendition", the Orwellian euphemism for state-licensed kidnap, and "enhanced interrogation", the spin-torturer's way of describing his trade in pain.

Charles Guthrie is no one's idea of a bleeding heart liberal. He served with the SAS and was commandant of the intelligence corps before he became chief of the defence staff. As he puts it, torture is not only illegal, unethical, ineffective, cruel and counter-productive, it is also plain dumb. "Western use of torture to counter terror has been a propaganda coup for al-Qaida and a recruiting sergeant for its global jihad. Our hypocrisy has radicalised our enemies and corroded the power we base on our proclaimed values."

David Miliband has just suppressed the publication of grave allegations about the activities of US and British officials in the case of Binyam Mohamed. In the view of two high court judges, what happened to him "gives rise to an arguable case of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment". There was a "very considerable public interest" in publication, they argued, "particularly given the constitutional importance of the prohibition against torture".

The David Miliband that I know is a humane and liberal man who utterly abhors torture. Yet he finds himself suppressing a dossier about the crime, doing so in the name of national security, the very invocation used to justify torture in the first place.

On the same day that the foreign secretary was facing accusations of a cover-up, Tony Blair was in Washington wearing his faith on his sleeve. At a "prayer breakfast" with Barack Obama, the former prime minister made more than 30 mentions of God and declared: "We pray that in acting we do God's work and follow God's will."

Only God knows how Tony Blair reconciles his conscience with his role in this disgraceful period. It was not as if the Bush administration made much pretence about it. "Bad things happen to bad people," baldly declared Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Did Tony Blair never ask what was going on? If he did not ask, was it because he knew he would not like the answer? His own law officers were highly uncomfortable with the legal black hole created at Guantánamo. Charlie Falconer, not only his lord chancellor but also one of his closest allies, tried to persuade his friend to raise his voice in opposition. He failed. "An anomaly" was all Mr Blair would ever say about Camp Delta when he was prime minister.

The true extent to which British officials colluded in torture is yet to be established. In terms of ethical complicity, I think we can already begin to return a verdict. As the God-fearing Tony Blair knows, there are sins of commission and there are sins of omission. "We have condoned with our silence torture committed by others," says Charles Guthrie, his favourite general.

That was arguably the biggest moral failure of Tony Blair's premiership.

The biggest? Hmmm - maybe. We might give equal status to his failure to regulate the fat cats; his failure to prevent the gap between the poor and the rich increasing; his failure to prevent the rich becoming obscenely rich; and . . . oh yes - the little bit of a failure to keep this country out of Iraq and thereby have no part in the unlawful and unnecessary killing of thousands of innocent men, women and children, the common people indeed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/08/tony-blair-human-rights-torture
.

Layer 109 Welcome to 2009

.
There is a war
Between the rich and poor
A war between the black and white
A war between the odd and the even.

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The poor get poor
The rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Leonard Cohen

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Actually, as I said in a previous blog, everybody knows some of it, but most of us don’t know the half of it. Reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine helps to get up to speed.

We don’t even know a fraction of what we ought to know about the incredible way in which wealth has been systematically looted, defrauded, swindled and transferred from the public realm to the private, and from the poorest to the richest, over the past 35 years, since neo-conservatism, free-marketeering, globalisation and rampant capitalism really took hold of the world, broke the post-war social-democratic consensus, and imposed the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’.

Just as colonialism in the 18th and 19th Centuries expropriated wealth from the poorest parts of the world for the enrichment of the already rich parts, capitalism in the late 20th Century and early 21st has transferred incredible sums of money from the poorest sections of this and other countries into the coffers and offshore bank accounts of those who already were, and are, fabulously wealthy. The Shock Doctrine explains how it was done.

What’s more, since Naomi Klein published her book, the process has continued, even though the world’s financial system and its global bubble, its world-wide pyramid swindle, or Ponzi Scheme, if you like, has exploded and created a near-meltdown of the entire capitalist system.

And now those who created the bubble - the financiers and bankers - are being left to get away with it, with the fruits of their looting and robbing intact and safely squirreled away, whilst the millions who have seen their lives made poorer by what’s been going on are now having to hand over even more of our money in order to prop up the banks, their bosses and their shareholders, and the entire financial systems of countries both rich and poor, which suddenly found themselves imploding thanks to the billions of dollars, pounds and Euros that have been appropriated by the greed and ruthless scams of the fat cats and wise guys who ran, and in most cases still run, the capitalist system.

The main reason these fuckers are not being held to account and made to pay for what they’ve done is that for the most part it was all perfectly legal. The ‘Big Bang’, as it was known, the deregulation of our financial system, made it legal for huge financial businesses, banks, hedge funds, etc, to start playing the world’s financial system like it’s a huge casino.

So as for holding these bastards to account - forget it. They were just doing what they were allowed to do. They were allowed to lend seven times salary to people who had no deposit to put down on the property they were convinced they needed to buy in order to ‘get on the housing ladder’. They were allowed to increase rents on crappy flats and houses to extortionate levels. They were allowed to lend huge sums to people who had low incomes, little job security and little hope of keeping up repayments when the downturn came along, as it was surely bound to.

They were allowed to give the impression they knew what they were doing and that there would be no bust at the end of the boom. What the fuck did they care? They were in line for huge bonuses for being employed by the Capitalist Casino, as long as they were reasonably competent and just kept on selling their financial ‘products’, just kept the commissions rolling in. So there was no way they were going to blow the whistle or upset the gravy train. They weren’t doing anything illegal.

Immoral - yes. Sleazy and despicable and completely unethical - of course. They weren’t even exercising due diligence, but then no-one’s going to beat them up for that at this stage of the game. The entire fucking government and state apparatus of this and other countries wasn’t even exercising due diligence. So who are they to get heavy about the way things have panned out? New Labour’s been in bed with the City - and everybody knows it.

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We just didn’t know all the things we should have known. I can’t remember which of those neo-con cretins went on about ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’? Was it Cheney or Rumsfeld? Or Greenspan? Well it was true. Many of us sensed there were things happening that shouldn’t have been happening, but there were so many more things that we had no idea, not even any inkling, were happening.

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Having read Chapter One (The Torture Lab) of The Shock Doctrine I now realise that the CIA not only funded research in various universities into effective techniques of torture and terror, but they also trained the operatives working for South American fascist military dictatorships in how to apply those techniques after they’d rounded up their opponents - socialists, liberals, anti-capitalists, left-wing radicals, artists, intellectuals, etc.

Those same techniques, again disseminated by people employed by the US government using public funds, are still being used around the world to this day - from Guantanamo Bay to Iraq, and in the various ‘offshore’ prisons and hell-holes where those who have been rounded up by the ‘security forces’ have been taken by ‘extraordinary rendition’.

But who’s now strong enough and determined enough to bring them to book for what they’ve been doing, in the international courts of justice? America considers itself above international law.

And who, for instance, could possible take to task the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of which are based in Washington, and which, under the direction of their ‘Chicago School’ economists and managers, ceased to operate for the benefit of the poorest counties, as per the Bretton Woods agreement which created those institutions in the first place following WW2?

Many years ago the WB and the IMF started to impose conditions on those poor nations which desperately needed support and bail-outs thanks to falling commodity prices and unmanageable ‘debt repayments’. Conditions like not getting any money or help unless they agreed to sell off their State-owned assets to overseas fat cats at ludicrous knock-down prices. It was a question of privatise, deregulate, allow foreign takeovers, etc - or fuck off.

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Torture and the Shock Doctrine

The CIA became seriously interested in torture during the period of the war in Korea. At that time, and indeed by the time the war in Vietnam took place, there appears to have been no official sanction for assassinating, terrorising and torturing opponents, other than carpet bombing various parts of Vietnam from high-flying B52s, the prospect of which must be regarded as some kind of terror or mental torture if you happened to be living in the war zone.

Interestingly the US government and the CIA became very interested in the subject of torture when various shot-down airmen and captured soldiers began to appear on North Korean TV saying to camera that they did not support their government’s actions, and did not think that US forces should be in Korea. Some of them were filmed denouncing US imperialism and capitalism.

Altman’s excellent film ‘Mash’, and its spin-off TV series, gave a real flavour of what the more thoughtful of the conscripted servicemen and women thought about the Korean war. It’s not exactly surprising that those thoughtful and reflective young people of the USA, very few of whom had actually volunteered to join the army or airforce or wished to fight in Korea, were unhappy about America’s role in the conflict. Nevertheless, the head honchos in the US government and the CIA assumed that anyone who voiced such opinions on Korean TV must have been ‘brainwashed’ and tortured in order to elicit such opinions.

They therefore set about investigating how to brainwash young people, using what we now recognise as the classic techniques of interrogation and torture. Certain academics in certain universities were eager and willing to take the CIA’s money in order to pursue enquiries into how to wipe minds ‘clean’ and fill them with whatever you want them to believe. They seemed to believe that if you understood how to carry out ‘brainwashing’, then you could teach those serving in the military how to resist it. At least that’s how they justified the millions of dollars invested in this ‘research’.

Naomi Klein:

The United States Central Intelligence Agency funded a Montreal doctor to perform bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients, keeping them asleep or in isolation for weeks, then administering huge doses of electroshock as well as experimental drug cocktails including the psychedelic LSD and the hallucinogen PCP. The experiments - which reduced patients to preverbal, infantile states - had been performed at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute under the supervision of its director, Dr Ewen Cameron.

Patients had gone to Cameron seeking relief from minor psychiatric ailments - postpartum depression, anxiety, etc - and had been used, without their knowledge or permission, as human guinea pigs to satisfy the CIA’s thirst for information about how to control the human mind.

Not only did Cameron play a central role in developing contemporary US torture techniques, but his experiments also offer a unique insight into the underlying logic of disaster capitalism. Like the free-market economists who are convinced that only a large-scale disaster - a great unmaking - can prepare the ground for their ‘reforms’, Cameron believed that by inflicting an array of shocks to the human brain, he could unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild new personalities on that ever-elusive clean slate.

In the mid-fifties, several researchers at the CIA became interested in Cameron’s methods. It was the start of Cold War hysteria, and the agency had just launched a covert program devoted to researching “special interrogation techniques”. (Including psychological harassment and ‘total isolation’, as well as ‘the use of drugs and chemicals’.) Project MKUltra spent $25 million on research in a quest to find new ways to break prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents. Eighty institutions were involved in the program, including forty-four universities and twelve hospitals.

Cameron’s work was funded by the CIA until 1961, and for many years it wasn’t clear what, if anything, the US did with his research. When proof of the CIA’s funding for the experiments finally came out in Senate hearings and then in the patient’s groundbreaking class-action lawsuit against the agency, journalists and legislators tended to accept the CIA’s version of events - that it was conducting research into brainwashing techniques in order to protect captured US soldiers. The CIA and Ewen Cameron had recklessly shattered lives with their experiments for no good reason - the research appeared useless: everyone knew by then that brainwashing was a Cold War myth.

In the exposes of MKUltra from the eighties . . . the experiments are consistently described as “mind control” and “brainwashing”. The word “torture” is almost never used.

In 1988, The New York Times ran a groundbreaking investigation into US involvement in torture and assassinations in Honduras. Florencio Caballero, an interrogator with Honduras’s notoriously brutal Battalion 3-16, told the Times that he and twenty-four of his colleagues were taken to Texas and trained by the CIA. “They taught us psychological methods - to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.” There was one technique he failed to mention: electroshock.

[Torture victim] Ines Murillo said, “I smelled smoke and realised I was burning from the singes of the shocks. They said they would torture me until I went mad. I didn’t believe them. But then they spread my legs and stuck the wires on my genitals.” Murillo also said that there was someone else in the room: an American passing questions to her interrogators whom the others called “Mr. Mike”.

The revelations led to hearings of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, where the CIA’s deputy director, Richard Stolz, confirmed that “Caballero did indeed attend a CIA human resources exploitation or interrogation course”. The methods taught ranged from sensory deprivation to stress positions, from hooding to pain.

Wherever the Kubark [CIA] method has been taught, certain clear patterns - all designed to induce, deepen and sustain shock - have emerged: prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatamala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, the use of electroshock is ubiquitous.

Though sanctioned by successive administrations in Washington, the US role in these dirty wars had to be covert, for obvious reasons. Torture, whether physical or psychological, clearly violates the Geneva Conventions’ blanket ban on “any form of torture or cruelty”, as well as the US Army’s own Uniform Code of Military Justice barring “cruelty” and “oppression” of prisoners.

[After September 11, 2001] what had previously been performed by proxy, with enough distance to deny knowledge, would now be performed directly and openly defended.

Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush administration’s real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being tortured by US citizens in US-run prisons or directly transported, through “extraordinary rendition”, to third countries on US planes. That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution - a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.

According to the new rules, the US government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability - only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.

Human rights groups point out that Guantanamo, horrifying as it is, is actually the best of the US-run offshore interrogation operations, since it is open to limited monitoring by the Red Cross and lawyers. Unknown numbers of prisoners have disappeared into the network of so-called black sites around the world or been shipped by US agents to foreign-run jails through extraordinary rendition. Prisoners who have emerged from these nightmares testify to having faced the full arsenal of Cameron-style shock tactics.

The problem was the premise on which his entire theory rested: the idea that before healing can happen, everything that existed before needs to be wiped out. Cameron was sure that if he blasted away at the habits, patterns and memories of his patients, he would eventually arrive at the pristine blank slate. But no matter how doggedly he shocked, drugged and disoriented, he never got there. The opposite proved true: the more he blasted, the more shattered his patients became. Their minds weren’t “clean”; rather, they were a mess, their memories fractured, their trust betrayed.

Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing. Fervent believers in the redemptive powers of shock, the architects of the American-British invasion imagined that their use of force would be so stunning, so overwhelming, that Iraqis would go into a kind of suspended animation, much like the one described in the Kubark manual. In that window of opportunity, Iraq’s invaders would slip in another set of shocks - these ones economic - which would create a model of free-market democracy on the blank slate that was post-invasion Iraq.

But there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people - who, when they resisted, were blasted with more shocks . . .

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This is the legacy that Obama’s team now have to sort out. As I say, it’s going to be interesting.

His team of the best and the brightest will be welcomed with open arms by the international community, after the years of having to deal with the voodoo henchmen (and women) of the Bush junta.

They can immediately save billions of dollars by cutting back drastically on the global reach of their armed forces and spy networks, their plans to put missiles into eastern Europe, their Star Wars bullshit, etc. They don’t even have to make an ideological case for it - the country simply cannot afford such useless luxuries. It’s the shock doctrine turned to good purpose.

They can then start to redress the unbelievable inequalities that exist through the USA, through a modern-day New Deal - building decent housing for the poor, and decent schools for the nation’s children. They can also put funds into proper health care for those who need it, and decent hospitals and clinics for every section of the population.

No wonder the poorest sections of society feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. This can really happen. As Obama bravely said - what’s wrong with spreading the wealth around a little?

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More on Bankers

Meanwhile, what’s likely to happen in little Britain in 2009? Simon Jenkins, as usual, told it like it is in the Guardian this week:

If there is one sentiment that should have died in 2008 it is faith in the collective intelligence of Whitehall. The economic forecasters league table for 2008 was published last week and, of the 42 pundits listed, no public authority was in the top half. The Treasury came in at 37th and the IMF was bottom.

This is the mob that brought us City deregulation and the house-price bubble. Yet I doubt if a single one has been upbraided, let alone sacked. The entire Bank of England monetary policy committee is still in office - except for the only one who called the recession correctly, David Blanchflower, who has mysteriously been stood down.

This is not some City luncheon parlour game. As a result of the arrogance of these economic managers, a million people will lose their jobs next year and tens of thousands their houses. Yet all they think to do, egged on by politicians, is take more money from spenders and give it to savers, to their beloved City banks.

Banking is a profession that excels at making money for itself. For 10 years it mesmerised Blair and Brown, who showered it with tax loopholes, offshore profits, PFI contracts and vacuous government consultancies. Ministers and bankers enjoyed a revolving Whitehall door.

Frustrated ministers are still expecting the City to rescue the economy in 2009, continuing to trust it with the public's money to an extent that they will not trust the public. They seem unaware that bankers do not rescue economies. They rescue banks.

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Abandoned and Betrayed

Radio 4 news yesterday had a lead item on a new survey which highlights the fact that the English white working class feels abandoned, resentful and betrayed. As well they might. They also complain about unfairness, lack of decent housing, and unequal resource allocation, which seems to be a coded way of saying ‘policies that favour non-whites’, especially in housing.

What’s so stupid and divisive about this is the fact that the non-indiginous communities in this country are equally entitled to those sorts of feelings. This is a class issue, and in fact nobody who voted Labour in any of the last three general elections was voting for policies that amount to Thatcherism-lite. Absolutely everyone whose income is around or below the national mean or median is entitled to feel resentful, betrayed, etc.

But then again, so does virtually everybody. Even the middle classes have a sense that New Labour has sucked up to the City and Big Finance to the detriment of everyone who’s not pretty damn wealthy. Nobody voted for more outsourcing, more deregulation and more privatisation. Nobody voted for New Labour in order to have more inequality, or for the rich to get even richer. Nobody voted for the boss class to jack up its salaries by about 20% per year whilst everyone else got rises around the rate of inflation, i.e. no increase at all.

Timothy Garton Ash wrote a strange column in the Guardian this week, supposedly about the future of capitalism, and posing questions such as, how much more money and things do we need? “Is enough as good as a feast? Could we manage with less? What really matters to you? What contributes most to your individual happiness?”

Well, Tim, old pal, my individual happiness would be greatly affected by feeling the rich were being put under some restraint, that tax havens were about to be abolished, that the rich were going to pay their fair share of taxes, and that disaster capitalism was no longer going to rule the roost. I’d feel a lot happier if I thought that the poorest sections of society were becoming a lot less poor. What really matters to me is that child poverty is totally eradicated. I’d also like to see full employment, decent housing for all, and an education system that cared about the all-round well-being and development of children and not just preparing them for employment.

We could have had these things years ago if this government had done its job properly and not squandered huge landslide victories and a massive mandate for change.

What the majority of this country’s population needs to face up to sooner or later is that successive governments by adhering to Friedmanite monetarist orthodoxy, by running the economy for the benefit of disaster capitalists, was bound to make them feel abandoned and betrayed, because that’s exactly what this political and economic creed is supposed to do. It’s often been called ‘trickle down’ economics, but in practice nothing really even trickles down. It all gets sucked up.

The Chairman of Citigroup, Sir Win Bischoff, a man who goes to 2 or 3 black tie dinners per week, was interviewed on the radio this week, and even he admitted that the root cause of our current financial and economic crisis is “enormous amounts of liquidity seeking ever higher returns”.

That’s code for “huge amounts of surplus money in the hands of fat cats who will go to any lengths to keep it and deposit it wherever they can generate even more money”.

The people who own and control this money have no loyalty to any one country and aren’t in the least bit interested in investing in productive industry and receiving a moderate rate of return over long periods of time. They want big bucks, "ever higher returns", and they want it now. Creating a property bubble was the fastest way to lever up their profits.

Will Hutton described all this extremely well in The State We’re In. Just read it.

Incidentally, the failed boss of Citibank received a ‘retirement’ kiss-off of £38 million.

Franklin Roosevelt spoke about the Depression being caused by selfish and callous wrongdoing by financiers and bankers. How come our Prime Minister can’t bring himself to use similar language?

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Blathering Blears

Hazel fucking Blears was on World At One yesterday, blathering on about the survey showing white working class disaffection. The housing issue! What a vile creature she is. All she kept going on about is what she assumes is ignorance on the part of those who complain about the allocation of council houses and flats. “They need to understand that the majority of people who arrive in this country live in privately-rented accommodation, not council property.”

So fucking what, you idiot!? She can’t even see, or admit, that the key issue for most people is the points system, and the fact that no consideration is given for length of residence in this country, and the fact that people want to live near family and friends and not some godforsaken estate on the outskirts of nowhere - as well they might. What’s so unreasonable or racist about that?

I know of at least one couple who live in a two bedroom council flat on an estate they don’t want to live on, and would love to move into one of the newer flats in a more desirable part of the district. However, they stand NO chance, on account of the fact that they already have a flat! So we then have a situation where new arrivals are allocated the newest and best houses and flats, whilst long-time residents stay put in their sink estates. Who wouldn’t be resentful?

Blears then tries to shift the blame to the local authorities on the basis that they make their own rules. So how come the government hasn’t tried to influence or persuade them towards more enlightened policies? Isn’t that what government is supposed to do? This government’s done no such thing because they prefer to cop out, and don’t even properly understand the issues, the causes of the resentment, anyway.

Stupid bloody Blears then said that the real problem is the shortage of houses and flats. So who’s fucking fault is that? John Major? Margaret Thatcher? Tony Blair? Gordon Brown? How come this government has built fewer units of social housing than the Tories? The woman is shameless, as well as stupid. She can’t even bullshit convincingly.

Ken Livingstone, on his LBC programme this morning, is talking about Labour making a ‘catastrophic mistake’ in not immediately funding vastly more council housing. But he’s still focused on the lack of properties, and isn’t addressing the issue of who gets to live in which of the stock that’s available.

When there’s a shortage of resources like housing the government has a responsibility to share them out fairly, unless they want to foment resentment and disaffection. NO fair-minded individual who’s without a home resents moving into the poorest of a council’s accommodation, providing they get a chance to live in the better places later on.

And those who have lived in an area the longest, and have paid taxes the longest, surely deserve a chance to live in the best of the council’s housing before they die.

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There is a war
Between the rich and poor
A war between those who say there’s a war
And those who say that there isn’t.

Leonard Cohen
There Is A War
.