Shameless, Hypocrite US Capitalist Oligarchy Refuse Entry to Former British Ambassador

Shameless, Hypocrite US Capitalist Oligarchy Refuse Entry to Former British Ambassador https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y200nnocMY Craig Murray https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/09/thought-dangerous-usa/ Thought is Dangerous to the USA 5 Sep, 2016 I have been refused entry clearance to the USA to chair the presentation of the Sam Adams Award to CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou and to speak at the World Beyond War conference in Washington DC. Like millions of British passport holders I have frequently visited the USA before and never been refused entry clearance under the visa waiver programme. I shall apply for a visa via the State Department as suggested but I must be on a list to be refused under the ESTA system, and in any event it is most unlikely to be completed before the conference. It is worth noting that despite the highly critical things I have published about Putin, about civil liberties in Russia and the annexation of the Crimea, I have never been refused entry to Russia. The only two countries that have ever refused me entry clearance are Uzbekistan and the USA. What does that tell you? I have no criminal record, no connection to drugs or terrorism, have a return ticket, hotel booking and sufficient funds. I have a passport from a visa waiver country and have visited the USA frequently before during 38 years and never overstayed. The only possible grounds for this refusal of entry clearance are things I have written against neo-liberalism, attacks on civil liberties and neo-conservative foreign policy. People at the conference in Washington will now not be able to hear me speak. Plainly ideas can be dangerous. So much for the land of the free! https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/09/thought-dangerous-usa/ PETITION To: U.S. State Department Tell U.S. to Let Craig Murray into the Country LINK | PETITION TO US STATE DEPT TRANSCRIPT SOURCE VIDEO Why Did US Just Bar Former British Diplomat https://youtu.be/4y200nnocMY  The Real News [For quotation purposes, confirm audio] PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT Narrator Over the weekend, the United Stated denied entry to an unsuspecting individual, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murry, who ten years ago made the critical mistake of exposing the Uzbek torture system that we now know the Americans supported and the British condoned. He was scheduled to participate in an awards ceremony next week ... John Kiriakou CIA Whistleblower We're talking about a British diplomat, a highly respected — an internationally respected British diplomat, a whistleblower in his own right; an exposer of torture, who has travelled to this country, dozens and dozens of times. And then, for reasons that have not been explained to him, finds himself banned by the United States. Narrator The Sam Adams [Associates] award for Integrity and Intelligence is given out annually to someone who shows moral courage in the midst of wrong-doing on the part of the state. Ray McGovern Founder, Sam Adams Associates In 2006, the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity and Intelligence decided to award Ambassador Murray our annual award for integrity ... he came and talked at several of our Sam Adams awards ceremonies here in the States and also at Oxford — we did two there.  We did more or less one in Berlin.  We go where the people are. Narrator Ten years after having won the award himself, Murray is still at home wondering how his name received what the State Department and Homeland Security call a 'hit'. Peter Van Buren Whistleblower, former Foreign Service Officer It means that the Department of Homeland Security believes that Ambassador Murray may be ineligible to enter the United States, under one of the categories of ineligibility. Peter Van Buren is a former United States foreign service employee turned whistleblower, after he heavily criticised the United States reconstruction effort in Iraq. Van Buren also just wrote a piece for Consortium News, that someone like Murray may have received a 'hit'. Peter Van Buren Whistleblower, former Foreign Service Officer More often than not, particularly in cases like Ambassador Murray's where there are political components, what we'e got is a likely potential 3(b) violation, or potential violation, which means terrorism. You don't have to be a terrorist to fall under this category ... you can just be placed on one of these watch lists, by any one of the dozens American intelligence agencies and organisations that are allowed to 'nominate names' — and they do love their Orwellian vocabulary — nominate names to the list. Narrator In his relatively short tenure as Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray uncovered a torture infrastructure within the country that once silenced Uzbeki dissidents and fed the Americans shaky intelligence they were so desperate for, as the 'war on terror' in Iraq and Afghanistan began to unravel. In 2009, five years after Murray had left the British Foreign Office, but still seven years away from being denied entry into the United States, Murray spoke at that year's Sam Adams awards ceremony, which took place in Washington DC at American University. Craig Murray Former British Ambassador You know, there are over 10,000 political prisoners in Uzbekistan. Anybody who is a religious Muslim of any kind, no connection to terrorism; anyone who prays five times a day, as prescribed, will be arrested as a terrorist. Any young man with a beard will be arrested. Narrator He subsequently sat down with Real News editor, Paul Jay, to expand on the disturbing revelations that ended his career as ambassador. Craig Murray Former British Ambassador Many of them are killed at their [?] terrible, literally Stalinist Gulags:  they are in the old Stalinist Gulags which are still there, like Jaslik(?) in the middle of the Kyzylkum Desert, and people are tortured dreadfully.  The most appalling tortures that you can think of, on a routine basis.  If you are arrested, you're going to be tortured; and that means you're going to have a broken bottle inserted in your anus; you're going to have your neck broken; you're going to have your feet held over a fire; you're going to be suffocated by having a blocked gas mask put on your head.  Even, I came across instances of children tortured in front of their parents. You shouldn't forget the purpose of the torture was to get false intelligence which vastly exaggerated the threat from al-Qaeda. It vastly exaggerated the strength of al-Qaeda in Central Asia, and people knew that. Narrator Murray saw the Western powers like the UK and the US were far more interested in profiting from Uzbekistan's oil reserves and vital geopolitical position than they were with human rights. Craig Murray Former British Ambassador Uzbekistan sits at the heart of Central Asia.  It has half the population of Central Asia.  It really dominates the region. And Central Asia has the world's largest untapped reserves of oil and gas. So anyone who is interested in acquiring influence over hydrocarbon reserves needs to be in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek government plays this to its own advantage. The Uzbek government has no interest in [???] its own advantage, and is quite happy to switch between different world powers as it's able to get something out of them. Narrator Murray says that when he went over to Uzbekistan in 2002, the US viewed Uzbekistan, and especially its late President Islam Karimov (who coincidentally just died last week), not only as a long-term interest in the region, but also as maybe the most important ally of Central Asia when it came to the 'war on terror'. Beyond firing off a steady stream of intelligence memos and reports to the CIA, which were then being forwarded to the British intelligence service MI6; and beyond allowing the United States to set up its crucial Karshi-Khanabad airbase, the Uzbeks were engaged in a program of extraordinary rendition with the United States, of so-called 'suspected terrorists', and it happened to be a part of a network of black sites that spanned across many countries. Craig Murray Former British Ambassador The CIA were flying people in to be tortured, and I reported that officially to London is as many words; and this is in, you know in 2003, before anyone had even heard of the words 'extraordinary rendition'. I didn't realise that the people being flown in were not Uzbek. The idea that, you know, strangers would be flown in to be tortured— Interviewer Subsequently how do you know that that's the case, because essentially you're saying that CIA was flying people in to be tortured in Uzbekistan. Craig Murray Former British Ambassador I knew the CIA people who did it. There weren't many expats in Uzbekistan.  You're talking, quite seriously, of (not including military personnel) three or four hundred British and American expatriates in the whole of the country. So, not surprisingly, we used to drink in the same bars and meet. And I actually knew of the CIA people who flew people in.  Subsequently, we've learnt a great deal more.  For example, the Council of Europe inquiry into extraordinary rendition showed that 90% of the flights which took prisoners to the secret base in Poland at Szymany flew on to Tashkent as their next destination. There's a great deal of other evidence that this was a part of a global transportation of prisoners. ------- Other ------- Poland feels sting of betrayal over CIA 'black site' http://archive.is/1N4DX Poland admits role in CIA rendition programme http://archive.is/VnRi4#selection-763.1-763.47 Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence AWARDED TO: JULIAN ASSANGE Aussie Journalist WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Page 1 Page 2  23 October 2010, London COMMENT American capitalist oligarchy can't help themselves:  proving they really are running a corrupt, totalitarian state. Even Russia, the US-Anglo capitalist target and official 'enemy', hasn't refused a critical Craig Murray entry.  LOL Bet the CAPITALIST-OWNED CORPORATE MEDIA won't be highlighting this totalitarian state of affairs. P.S.   Just read some of Murray's blog.  Comes across as a super softie.  Way soft from my perspective (I've no problem with challenging threats of the religious kind etc ... but I'm not really big on the senseless torture that Uzbekistan and CIA seem to like).  Anyway, I can't believe they banned Murray's entry.   P.P.S.  Screw the 'Fourth Estate' Sam Adams awards nonsense:  there is NO Fourth Estate. There NEVER HAS BEEN.  The Fourth Estate is a LIE. WikiLeaks is the only exception in how long?  How many hundreds of years of press/media lies and capitalist information control and exploitation of the people the capitalists have now moved onto robbing of even their nations?  That would be 566 years of capitalist lies before WikiLeaks was established ten years ago, making it a total of 576 years of nothing but capitalist press lies and censorship: The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire by the German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 ... [wikipedia] And the filthy capitalist partnership that is the US-Anglo Capitalist Empire destroyed the last vestige of the Holy Roman Empire when it twice unleashed capitalist war on Germany, and in the process the US-Anglo capitalist partnership has destroyed all of Europe and all European societies since WWII. All there is is rule by CAPITALIST OLIGARCHY, fortified by their propaganda organs:  the press / media and so-called 'social media', exploited, controlled and censored by despicable self-serving capitalist turds like Mark Zuckerberg. Once the criminal US-Anglo capitalist oligarchy imprison or murder Assange, that's the end of that road.  Back to nothing but propaganda, indoctrination and lies from capitalist owned and controlled, government and CIA colluding, Western corporate media.

State Crimes, Secrecy, Lies & Whistleblowers

ꕤ Article SOURCE https://consortiumnews.com/2015/12/02/global-angst-over-us-secrecy-fetish/ Global Angst over US Secrecy Fetish December 2, 2015 With the reach of U.S. surveillance now global – and with the U.S. military deployed all over the world – anger at President Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers who disclose the U.S. government’s abuses and crimes has gone international, as this Norwegian opinion piece by Victor Wallis shows. By Victor Wallis The more extreme the crimes of state, the more the state seeks to shroud them in secrecy. The greater the secrecy and the accompanying lies, the more vital becomes the role of whistleblowers – and the more vindictive becomes the state in its pursuit of them. Whistleblowers are people who start out as loyal servants of the state. Their illusions about the state’s supposed moral agenda – and the wholeheartedness of their own patriotic commitment – make them all the more shocked when they discover evidence of the state’s wrongdoing. Given the extreme concentration of weaponry (as well as surveillance capabilities) in the hands of the state, and given the disposition of the state to apply such resources even against nonviolent mass movements, the type of defection practiced by whistleblowers – an option available to military and intelligence operatives at all levels – is crucial to any eventual triumph of popular forces over the ruling class. Whistleblowers thus not only embarrass the government, disrupt its policies, and (assuming adequate diffusion) educate the citizenry; they also are harbingers of a broader crumbling of the capitalist state and the order it defends. Acting largely in isolation and at great risk to themselves, they embody the conviction – or at least the hope – that basic decency has a more universal grounding than does any possible scheme of oppression. Whistleblowing’s principal near-term function is educational. It demonstrates the undemocratic character of the regime whose secrets it lets out; it is thus an essential redient of investigative journalism. The documents it brings to light reach the public through those who practice such journalism, whom the government then threatens with prosecution unless they disclose their sources. The novelty of Wikileaks is that it provided a new form of protection for the anonymity of sources. This, together with the facility of electronic transmission, has made the potential for disclosure greater than ever before. It accounts for the extraordinary fact that the U.S. government has been pursuing draconian charges against someone who not merely is only the recipient rather than the “leaker” of sensitive information, but someone who is not even a citizen or resident of the United States – Julian Assange. Disclosure is particularly embarrassing when it documents the fact that government officials have lied. The Director of Central Intelligence lied under oath to the U.S. Congress – a felony for which he was never prosecuted – when he denied that the National Security Agency monitors the communications of the entire U.S. population. This lie was the culminating event in Edward Snowden’s decision to blow the whistle. As we all know, of course, it is Snowden who was then criminalized by the government. This parallels the experience of John Kiriakou, who publicly confirmed, on the basis of his first-hand knowledge, that the CIA practiced torture by waterboarding. Kiriakou then became the only government official to be prosecuted and imprisoned in connection with CIA and military practices of torture. The debate over whistleblowers reached tens of millions of viewers when the presidential candidates of the Democratic Party were asked (on Oct. 13) their views about Snowden. Hillary Clinton falsely asserted that he could have used established channels to transmit his disclosures of excessive surveillance, presumably at no risk to himself. This claim is refuted by the experience of previous whistleblowers who had taken just that approach. One of them, Thomas Drake, retold his story two days later, at a news conference ignored by most of the corporate media (video), which was organized on behalf of yet another whistleblower, Jeffrey Sterling, who recently began a 42-month prison term on a conviction of “espionage.” What Sterling had done was report to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about a counterproductive CIA attempt (in 2000) to feed misleading technological data to Iranian scientists. What he was prosecuted for was his subsequent conversations with New York Times journalist James Risen, although no evidence was available as to the content of those conversations, since Risen refused to testify. Sterling’s story is recounted in a letter from his wife, seeking presidential clemency from Obama. Sterling had been fired from the CIA in 2002 after filing a complaint against the agency for racial discrimination (an episode on which Risen wrote a news story). After Risen’s book State of War (2006) came out, the FBI raided Sterling’s home, but it was not until more than four years later – under President Obama – that he was arrested (2011). The latest whistleblower, who documents the “normalization of assassination” via drone warfare, is wisely seeking to remain anonymous. The U.S. government will surely take all possible steps to track him down. The work of whistleblowers, as well as their personal safety, is obviously an issue that cuts across national borders. Support for U.S. whistleblowers will need to be as global as the reach of the policies and the weapons that they expose. Victor Wallis is managing editor of the journal Socialism and Democracy. [This is the original text of a column (written on Oct. 20) posted on the Norwegian website radikalportal.no.] https://consortiumnews.com/2015/12/02/global-angst-over-us-secrecy-fetish/ ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT A Canadian archive: http://www.cjfe.org/snowden contains published Snowden documents. Archive also contains US government published documents, as an aid to understanding the leaked documents. It's an archive of approximately 400 documents, which figure presumably also includes the accompanying USG documents, intended as explanatory information. That would be 400 released documents or less, out of an estimated 50,000 documents that were reportedly turned over by whistleblower Snowden. Sitting on almost 50,000 'freed' documents that ought to be in the public domain, seems more like minding an archive of protected (and closed to the public) information  than whistleblower publishing. The 'leaked' information middleman dole-out approach doesn't appeal to me at all. RT News Despite calls from Congress to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for lying under oath, United States President Barack Obama says that the spy chief should have just been a little more careful with his words. Clapper, the 72-year-old retired Air Force lieutenant general in charge of the nation's intelligence departments, caused a commotion last year when he was caught lying during sworn testimony delivered to the Senate. ... Clapper claimed that the National Security Agency does “not wittingly” collect and store data on American people. When former contractor Edward Snowden proved him wrong through leaked NSA documents weeks later, though, Clapper was forced to take back his words. CONTINUED https://www.rt.com/usa/obama-dni-clapper-lie-485/ While on the subject of surveillance etc, I thought this commenter had a point: The Age Paradoxically, if governments weren't illegally monitoring law-abiding citizens then there'd probably be no serious market for encryption - why bother hiding when nobody's looking (at your personal data?) Other than those committing cyber crimes perhaps, who would therefore stand out like the proverbial canine testicles. 'mutt' December 02, 2015, 6:25AM TheAge - here ꕤ