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LONDON Oct. 21, 2005 — Eliza Manningham-Buller does not specifically mention torture in a statement to the law lords about using intelligence information from overseas. But she says: “Experience proves that detainee reporting can be accurate and may enable lives to be saved.”
Questions ‘rebuffed’
She points to information from Algerian agencies who questioned a man called Mohammed Meguerba. The evidence led to a raid on a London flat and the eventual uncovering of the so-called ricin plot.
«« click on pic to enlarge
There has been press speculation that Meguerba was tortured.
Collapse of the Ricin Conspiracy Plot & Trial »»
by Severin Carrell and Raymond Whitacker
It was a weapon of mass destruction, a warning that we all needed to be “vigilant and alert”. Weeks before the invasion of Iraq, it was presented as the final proof that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qa’ida. Anyone wanting to exploit the politics of fear could scarcely conjure up anything more potent than the news that a suspected terrorist cell had been making ricin, one of the deadliest poisons known to man, in a north London flat.
But there was no ricin – a fact suppressed for more than two years.
There was no terrorist cell, just one deluded and dangerous man who killed a police officer during a bungled immigration raid. Kamel Bourgass (probably not his real name; he used several aliases) is serving life for the murder of Special Branch detective Stephen Oake, but despite more than 100 arrests and months of investigation which took detectives to 16 countries, no al-Qa’ida plot ever materialised.
The Collapse of the UK’s ‘ricin conspiracy’ Trial,
LONDON April 27, 2005 — A Guardian story on “The ricin ring that never was” has been pulled from the newspaper’s website, for what are said to be ‘legal reasons’.
If a PII did constitute the “legal reasons” it’s difficult to see where the public interest in the action lies. The removal of the article does however mean that one of the very few correctives to widespread ‘UK 911 poison terror scare’ hysteria no longer exists in the mainstream press.
Au contraire; the weekend after the end of the trial and the publication of the evidence, the Sunday Telegraph reported that we were/are faced with “chaos and panic in London’s public transport system”, and our security forces narrowly averted “our September 11, our Madrid. There is no doubt about it, if this had come off this would have been one of al-Qa’eda’s biggest strikes”, a “senior officer at Scotland Yard” told the paper.
Having observed the trial and – one presumes – read and digested the Porton evidence the “senior officer at Scotland Yard” should surely have grasped that smearing ricin on the handles of the Heathrow Express was a complete non-starter. Security forces’ ‘discovery’ of a ‘map’ of the train’s route is meanwhile baffling; the train is non-stop, so either you’re in it smearing away or you’re not. But perhaps the terrorists intended to fling gobs of it at ventilation intakes as the train whistled by.
Laboratory did not reveal absence of ricin in plot cited by Blair
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent
LONDON 16 Sept. 2005 — Vital evidence in a terror case that was used by Tony Blair to justify the war with Iraq was withheld by Britain’s top chemical weapons laboratory.
Tests demonstrating that no ricin was found at a flat linked to a gang suspected of planning a poison attack on the London Underground in January 2003 were not disclosed to police and ministers by officials at Porton Down.
- Fear is the mindkiller: surely some co-incidence!?
Bioterror: fear of the invisible; threat agenda… - How Bush and Blair are destroying the
very values that we are supposed to be defending
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
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FBI: Iraq-Niger Forgeries Part of Scheme for Profit
By Bryan Bender and Michael Kranish, Globe Staff
WASHINGTON Nov. 5, 2005 — A set of forged documents outlining an alleged Iraqi deal to buy nuclear materials from an African country — a claim that famously wound up in President Bush’s State of the Union speech in 2003 — was probably ”part of a criminal scheme for financial gain,” according to the FBI.
The FBI issued its statement a day after the Italian intelligence chief testified before a parliamentary inquiry and named Rocco Martino, a former Italian policeman and spy, as the source who provided the documents to an Italian magazine in October 2002.
The FBI began its investigation into the documents in March 2003, at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. During that time, investigators have delved into many theories about the case, including suggestions from some former US intelligence officials that a secretive Pentagon office set up before the war had the documents produced to persuade President Bush to go to war.
The question of the documents’ authorship could be one focus of a Senate Intelligence Committee probe beginning next week to investigate how faulty prewar intelligence was handled by top Bush administration officials.
”It is very important to find out where they come from,” said David Kay, who headed the futile CIA search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and who immediately deemed the documents as fake when he reviewed them in 2003. ”I am not sure that’s possible, but we have to understand why our process let them gain so much credence.”
Kay and other specialists said the alleged Iraq-Niger connection was central to the White House’s argument that Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program because very little other intelligence existed.
”The administration had almost no evidence for its claim,” said Kay.
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
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BREAKING NEWS — 6 hours ago …
Listen to {BBC World Live}
Controversial anti-terror legislation defeated 322 – 291 in House of Commons where Labor has a clear majority. Detention proposal for 6 months without charges were seen as too aggressive for British communities.
BBC News – Tony Blair Defeated Over Terror Laws
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
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Both 90 and 60 day plan rejected
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
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This article needs to be diaried – who is game?
By Robert Parry — November 4, 2005
Indicted ex-White House aide Lewis Libby played a key role in an earlier case of slanting U.S. intelligence for political gain – four years before the Iraq War when he was legal adviser to a House investigation into how communist China got U.S. nuclear secrets.
In 1999, Libby, a China expert, served on a special Republican-controlled House committee that laid the blame for the compromise of U.S. secrets almost exclusively on Democrats, despite evidence that the worst rupture of nuclear secrets actually occurred during the Reagan-Bush administration in the mid-1980s.
The committee’s findings served as an important backdrop for Election 2000 when George W. Bush’s backers juxtaposed images of Democrat Al Gore attending a political event at a Buddhist temple with references to the so-called “Chinagate” scandal.
The “Chinagate” investigation, headed by Republican congressmen Christopher Cox and Porter Goss, released an 872-page report in three glossy volumes on May 25, 1999. Its unmistakable message was that the Clinton administration had failed to protect the nation against China’s theft of top-secret nuclear designs and other sensitive data.
Along with Libby, Dean McGrath served as the investigation’s staff director. After George W. Bush became president, McGrath joined Libby again in Cheney’s office, working as deputy chief of staff. (Cox and Goss also joined the administration, with Cox as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Goss as CIA director.)
Ollie’s Mission
But the full story of the Republican-Chinese collaboration was even darker than the Times described.
By 1984, Ronald Reagan’s White House had decided to share sensitive national security secrets with the Chinese communists as it drew Beijing into the inner circle of illicit arms shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels …
Though the evidence of North’s secret contacts with Chinese intelligence had been public knowledge since the late 1980s, the “Chinagate” report in 1999 made no reference to this secret collaboration between Reagan’s White House and China.
Enter Wen Ho Lee
Wen Ho Lee came to the FBI’s attention in 1982 when he called another scientist who was under investigation for espionage, according to the New York Times chronology.
But Lee’s contacts with China – along with trips there by other U.S. nuclear scientists – increased in the mid-1980s as the Reagan-Bush administration turned to China for help getting weapons to the contras …
“On Sept. 25, 1992, a nuclear blast shook China’s western desert,” the Times wrote. “From spies and electronic surveillance, American intelligence officials determined that the test was a breakthrough in China’s long quest to match American technology for smaller, more sophisticated hydrogen bombs.”
September 1992, George H.W. Bush Was Still President
[…]
But Lewis Libby had learned an important lesson – fears of foreign dangers could move the American people in a desired direction, as long as the information was carefully tailored and controlled.
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY