Dear all,
This mail does not concern the al-Jazeera Memo, your pledge to publish it being the reason your email address is on this list, but another plea for help from Craig Murray.
For those of you not familiar with him, Craig was formerly the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, until he took a stand over our use of intelligence obtained by torture that is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Murray The British government have been trying to silence Craig since his departure from the Foreign Office, and many of you on this mailing list did a superb Job of publicising the documents he released over Christmas when the government threatened him with the Official Secrets Act.
Craig's book, Murder in Samarkand has just been published.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1845961943/026-4266193-9868425?v=glance&n=266239 This has happened despite the best efforts of the British Government to suppress it. In support of the points he makes in his book, Craig has published a number of documents online that the British Government does not want you to see.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/murray/http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/documents/docs.html http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/murray/docs.html
Yesterday Craig received a letter [attached] from lawyers acting on behalf of the Foreign Office demanding that he remove the documents from his website by 4pm Monday 10th July or he will be issued with a high court injunction. [We at Blairwatch are awaiting our letter.]
Do take the time to have a look through the documents. The above link to Dahr Jamail's website is likely to be the most stable mirror to link to as Craig and ourselves are located in the UK and therefore within the reach of the British courts.
If you feel that this information is something that should not be taken offline by Monday, well, you know what to do...
ringverse
www.blairwatch.co.uk The following is from Craig Murray:
I am sorry to trouble you, but believe that we now face a threat both to the Web and to Freedom of Information in the UK which must be challenged. The British government is arguing that government documents, even if released under the Freedom of InformAtion Act or Data Protection Act, cannot be published, on the web or elsewhere, as they remain Crown Copyright. They have required me to remove documents from my website on that basis, under threat of legal action - see the attached letter from the Treasury solicitors.
If you think about it for a moment, the government could thus cancel out almost the whole purpose of the Freedom of Information Act; information released would be just for the private use of an individual. Newspapers - or bloggers - could not publish it in any detail.
If accepted, this extraordinary use of copyright could keep literally everything - everything - produced by government a secret.
The documents in question are the supporting evidence for my book, Murder in Samarkand, which has just been released. The government continues to claim my story is untrue. There is one important advance in all this. Up until now the government refused to acknowledge the documents were authentic. Now Buttrill's letter specifically acknowledges all of the documents and claims copyright over them.
Some of these documents have already been published widely on the web
(not least due to the efforts of many of you on this list), particularly the "Tashkent telegrams" on CIA and MI6 use of intelligence obtained under torture in Uzbekistan. Those are now admitted as authentic.
Some are new to the web. Perhaps the most important is the chart of the changes the British Government insisted be made to the book. These are extremey revealing for what they admit to be true - for example, only minor changes are requested in the key meeting between senior officials on the legality of using intelligence from torture, at which it was confirmed that this is US and UK policy.
Perhaps still more revealing is the insistence on removal of the assertion that "Colin Powell knowingly lied" when he claimed that bombs in Tashkent were the work of al-Qaida. The British government insisted on removal not because it was untrue - as detailed in the book, they know full well it is true - but because it would "Damage UK-US relations".
The changes requested were made in the book, because my publisher would not publish without. That is why the truth needs to be out there on the web.
It is on the face of it very strange that the British Government is going after me over the Copyright Act and not the Official Secrets Act. The answer is simple - under the Copyright Act there is no jury. A jury would never convict for campaigning against torture, and be most unlikely to accept that documents released cannot be published. The table of changes requested by the government is not even a classified document in the first place. But a single judge may be more malleable - John Reid had put a huge effort lately into browbeating judges over anything connected to the so-called War on Terror. As the government know very well I have no money to pay a small, or even large fine, they can get the book and documents banned and me in jail without having to convince any jury of pesky citizens.
How to fight back?Well, we must not let the documents disappear from the web. There is as yet no legal ruling on these matters, Mr Buttrill's claims are only highly controversial legal contentions. So if you post the documents pending a court ruling, there is a danger you may be contravening the - civil, not criminal - law, but then again you may not. You would quite likely receive a threatening letter from Mr Buttrill. Now you have this email from me, NSA and GCHQ are almost certainly tracking you, (they can, incidentally, reciprocally spy in the other country for each other and then swap the info, because neither needs a warrant to spy abroad), but then they probably were already.
The publisher had firm and very expensive legal advice that it was not contravening any civil or criminal law to publish in the book links to web pages containing the documents. So you are almost certainly on safe legal ground in publishing this link to the Dahr Jamail site if you do not wish to mirror the docs yourself.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/murray/ Feel free to publish this email and the letter from Mr Buttrill [attached].
It might also be helpful if we urged people to contact him, by phone, email or letter, and ask him complex questions about the fascinating and difficult legal and ethical questions thrown up by the government's position. As a government servant he's obliged to reply.
Finally, the government made plain to parliament that it would act against the book itself if it was published. As it only came out on Friday, no injunction yet but it could happen any time. So if you are interested in getting it, buy now and beat the injunctions! It is available from most online booksellers, though bookshops seem very reluctant to stock it.
Many Thanks,
Craig Murray
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/ emailStripper.htm
"Are we seeing the end of Labor's so-called "three mines policy"?
Blogroll
"Almost 6000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the past two months as casualties rise.
"A human rights lawyer and a former member of the Canadian cabinet have accused prison authorities in China of killing Falungong dissidents for their organs. Lawyer David Matas and Canada's former secretary of state for Asia and the Pacific, David Kilgour, spent two months investigating the claims. The Chinese government has denied similar allegations in the past, pointing to a new law prohibiting the buying and selling of human organs, with a proviso also that written consent must be given by donors. "
