Showing posts with label secret inquests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secret inquests. Show all posts

Sunday, 30 September 2012

Is the public enemy no.1?

September 2012

As the world was distracted by the great Olympic sideshow, Britain and the US admitted to giving military aid to the insurgents in Syria. "And we will give them more", stated UK Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the US of trying to justify terrorism.

Kabul Press notes the lack of comment from the US administration on the assassination of Syria's Foreign Minister, suggesting that they are encouraging Syrian suicide bombers.

An article in Iran's Press TV website claims that NATO has secretly authorised an attack on Syria.

History is repeating itself. The mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from Iraq. Yet Syria seems to be the line drawn in the sand, as far as Russia and China are concerned.

Attempts to isolate Iran, again on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction, are now looking ridiculous, as 120 nations assemble in Tehran for a conference of the Non-Aligned Movement.

"Non-Aligned Movement: Tehran's new secret weapon?" asks an article on the Russia Today website:

Leaders and ranking envoys from more than 120 developing nations flew to Tehran this week to attend the 16th summit of the NAM. There, they are expected to throw their support behind Iran in its standoff with the UN Security Council and the ‘big six’ of world powers. Basking in the publicity they are usually deprived of by international media, the leaders of “underdeveloped and unprivileged” nations (to use the NAM’s parlance), will feel like real movers and shakers in world politics. At least, for the five days before they return home.

Yet who is the enemy? They keep saying that terrorist incidents bear all the hallmarks of Al Qaida. I pointed out in my July newsletter that Al Qaida always has been a US database of CIA operatives and their co-fighters, and that perhaps it should be written as 'Al CIA da'.

An analysis of the possible links with the CIA has since been published by Elias Davidsson on the website Muslims for 9/11 Truth, under the heading 'Al-CIA-duh exposed! Who are Al Qaeda's enemies?'

I think we were all relieved that there wasn't a terrorist attack on London during the Olympics, but it's not over yet. The Paralympics ends on the 9th of September. In an article headed 'Imminent terror attack on London?', the Iranian television website Press TV has published further reasons to think that an attack may have been planned.

In September 2011 the Westfield Stratford City Mall, situated next to the Olympic Park, was opened by former Executive Chairman and General President of the Westfield Group Frank Lowy. "Frank Lowy and his copartner Larry Silverstein had rented the whole World Trade Center (WTC) for 99 years just a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks", the article states. It also points out:

"The WTC complex buildings 1, 2, and 7 along with Westfield Hotel were ruined in the 9/11 attacks, so Silverstein and the Westfield company pocketed about $5.4 billion from the attacks".

I think that must have been the Marriott Hotel, owned by the Westfield Group. Other Marriott Hotels which suffered terrorist attacks were those in Islamabad (2008-09-20) and Jakarta (2008-07-17). "With regard to Lowy's talent for investment in places that are victims of terrorist attacks, the question raises that [of] whether the Olympic Park would be a possible target for terrorist attacks. The insurance companies have been committed to compensate about $7 billion for lost profits, if terrorist attacks happen", the article suggests

I think we have to regard the scenario analysis published by the Rockefeller Foundation, which I reported on in my July newsletter, as being just that: four possible scenarios, one of which was the 'Hack Attack' involving a terrorist attack during the London Olympics. That document could have been put out to sound out ideas amongst the insiders, in rather a similar way that think tank reports in the UK can be put out to sound out political ideas before politicians have the courage to talk about them in public. Perhaps someone should be analysing the other three scenarios put out by the Rockefeller Foundation.

I think there's not much doubt that the London Olympics must have been the most militarised and draconian ever. I don't think there can be many people left in the UK who would not agree that the Olympics were taken over by giant corporations. Stories of the 'brand police' defending the commercial rights of these corporations against other business told us whose side the Establishment was on. The most ludicrous of these that I came across was the announcement of an investigation when unofficial condoms were found in the Olympic village.

So what's it all about? Suppose this were extended to the whole country, not just for the Olympics, but forever, with G4S running the brand police, the rest of the police, the prisons and possibly parts of the the judicial system, too. That's what Mussolini called Fascism. When I say we are governed by corporations, most people nowadays seem to agree. That is how close we are. Could it be that the Olympic circus was just an exercise for the coming Fascist state?

There's been a lot of nonsense, as well as a lot of sense, talked of the year 2012. My own interpretation has been that 2012 is the culmination of a twenty-year operation to introduce the draconian New World Order. This may have consisted of four five-year plans following the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. In the UK these stages look like: stage 1 (1992 - 1997) establishment of New Labour, Demos, etc; stage 2 (1998- 2002): pretexts for Blair's wars; stage 3 (2003 - 2007) chaos in the Middle East and fear at home; stage 4 (2008 - 2012): financial control. So perhaps there's now a fifth stage (2013 - 2017): consolidation of the corporate / Fascist state.

In my July newsletter I mentioned Richard Cottrell's idea that Tony Blair may be positioning himself to come back as Prime Minister. I thought he could never be an elected leader ever again, so if he was to become Prime Minister again they would get some clown elected in 2015 - perhaps the current Mayor of London Boris Johnson - then let Tony Blair take over in 2017.

I asked Richard for his thoughts on this, and he wrote back, "I think we are mistaken that Bliar is popularly unelectable. I am afraid the electorate in the UK is now so dumbed down (just the same here in Italia, btw) that Iraq happened somewhere in the Old Testament, ...". He wrote that he thought there'll be a new openly 'National Socialist' movement, building on the rather successful New Labour model, except this will be a mass movement with distinct fascist overtones and organisation. "Somewhere in London", he wrote, "the blueprints are being worked on right now. The elimination of all opposition groups will lead the way to compulsory membership if there's to be any kind life for the ordinary individual: jobs, access to health and education, housing, even food - and the right to travel, especially abroad. Of course it won't happen overnight, it will 'evolve' with the assistance of a few dramatic false flags here and there". It's a chilling thought, but if you look at Tony Blair's website and you understand Orwellian newspeak, it's believable.

Tony Blair came under attack from Archbishop Desmond Tutu in The Observer, in an article explaining why he refused to share a platform with Tony Blair at the 'Discovery Invest Leadership Summit' in Johannesburg the previous week. He wrote that those responsible for the suffering and loss of life arising from the invasion of Iraq in 2003 "should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague".

It was a good time to bury bad news for the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war. Publication of the findings of the inquiry, which began in 2009, has been delayed for at least a further year, owing to the refusal of the government to release cabinet papers. However, the Chilcott committee has had access to those papers; the only issue is whether the papers can be released to the public. So why can't Chilcott go ahead with the report, even if it is partly based on evidence which they cannot publish? According to The Guardian article: "Chilcot has said Blair's claim that MI6 established 'beyond doubt' that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was 'not possible to make on the basis of intelligence'".

The Daily Mail reacted with an editorial, beginning:

"Tony Blair stands accused, by this paper among many other observers, of one of the most serious abuses of power a prime minister can commit. The charge is that he made a private agreement with George Bush to join the US in an offensive war against Iraq. Then, with the aid of spin doctor Alastair Campbell, he wildly exaggerated evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a deadly threat to this country, so as to persuade the Cabinet, Parliament and the British people that the invasion was justified".

What puzzles me is that the Daily Mail can condemn Tony Blair for deception over the Iraq War but remain quiet on deception over the Afghan War. Shortly after 9/11 Tony Blair told Parliament that he had proof that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, and that he would make the evidence available to MPs, who would be able to read it after the debate in the House of Commons Library. The document he deposited there said little more than he had told the Commons, and he could just as easily have presented that to the Commons as the speech he gave. That was plain deception. <

Now history is repeating itself, with talk of possible use of chemical weapons by Syria, and development of a nuclear bomb by Iran, with Israel threatening to bomb Iran and presidential candidate Mitt Romney giving them the green light if he is elected as US President. If Israel were to carry out its threat it's unlikely they could disrupt any underground nuclear facility in Iran, unless they themselves dropped a nuclear bomb on Tehran in order to wipe out all the people involved. In carrying out any bombing campaign they would have most of the world against them, including many in Israel and the US. And if Tehran did have a nuclear bomb, could they use it? Their Muslim neighbours in Pakistan haven't used theirs yet.

In this war rhetoric against Iran, Mitt Romney stated that Iran had "seized embassies". That is exactly what UK Foreign Secretary William Hague threatened to do to the London embassy of Ecuador, in order to arrest Julian Assange, who has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, and is now residing in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. On 19 August Julian Assange gave a speech from the embassy balcony, but beforehand, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gave a speech outside, in which he stated:

"The Vienna Convention is absolutely plain. The Vienna Convention of 1961 is the single most subscribed international treaty in existence, and it states in article 22 section 1 that the diplomatic premises of an embassy are inviolable. Full Stop. Are inviable. You can not invade the embassy of another country. As Tariq [Ali] rightly said, there were times when I sheltered Uzbek citizens from their government within the confines of the British embassy in Uzbekistan. Even during the height of the tensions of the Cold War the opposing parties never entered each other's embassies to abduct a dissident. The fact that William Hague now openly threatens the Ecuadorians with the invasion of their sovereign premises is one further example of the total abandonment of the very concept of international law by the Neoconservative juntas that are currently ruling the former Western democracies [cheering]".

He went on to say:

"And I tell you this: in international law and in Ecuadorian law, whatever British domestic legislation may say, if the Metropolitan Police enter the premises of the Ecuadorian embassy they are subject to Ecuadorian law, and they are committing a crime under Ecuadorian law [cheering] and for this as individuals policemen are quite likely liable to prosecution [cheering]".

Answering a question from a journalist, Craig Murray said that the British diplomatic service was extremely unhappy at this threat by William Hague, and that it makes every British embassy around the world liable to invasion. The video and a full transcript were published on the Democracy Now website.

Craig Murray wrote in his blog the following day that a Guardian editorial claimed that he had omitted all mention of the sexual allegations against Julian Assange, and that the Guardian had made no attempt to indicate the gist of what he had actually said. He wrote that even the New York Times had at least got to the point, when reporting: "a former British diplomat, Craig Murray, asserted that Mr. Assange had been 'fitted up with criminal offenses' as a pretext".

The Guardian had earlier been working with Julian Assange in publishing some of the material which he had provided.

"The Guardian's shrill and vitriolic campaign against Assange is extraordinary in its ferocity, persistence and pointless repetition", he wrote, "The sad truth is that its origins lie in the frustration of the Guardian's hopes to make a great deal of cash from involvement in Assange's putative memoirs".

Perhaps the sad truth is that otherwise the Ecuadorian embassy might get a little overcrowded.

The following day, Craig Murray appeared on Newsnight, and said, "I think there are elements of a set-up", and outlined why. He was widely criticised for naming Anna Ardin as one of the women who had made allegations against Julian Assange. He defended this on the grounds that this information was already widely known, and, indeed, Anna Ardin had herself publicised her case by giving interviews to the press. He also pointed out that the BBC had repeatedly named Nafissatou Diallo, the alleged rape victim of Dominique Strauss Kahn, while the criminal investigation into the alleged rape was still in progress. "Why the contradiction?", he asked.

In the same edition of Newsnight, a video clip of Respect Party MP George Galloway was shown, in which he stated: 'The Julian Assange Sex Crime Allegations, If True, Are Not Rape'. This attracted widespread condemnation in the press, though I don't recall any similar condemnation when former cabinet minister and now veteran anti-war campaigner Tony Benn told the Stop the War Coalition on 7 February 2011, "The charge of rape simply doesn't stand up to examination". It's important to point out, though, that Julian Assange hasn't been charged; he's only wanted for questioning. The Swedish government's website states: "Within the EU the procedure for extradition has in general been replaced by surrender according to the European Arrest Warrent".

So I'm confused.

US feminist Naomi Wolf told Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that the Assange case was being treated differently from other similar alleged rape cases in Sweden.



Canadian author Naomi Klein, too, on December 2010 tweeted: "Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that women's freedom was used to invade afghanistan. Wake up!"

Australian author and film director John Pilger wrote on 23 August that the British government's threat to invade the Ecuadorean embassy in London and seize Julian Assange is of "historic significance". "Hague has made a laughing stock of Britain across the world", he wrote. "It is as if the Olympics happy-clappery has been subverted overnight by a revealing display of colonial thuggery", he continued, going onto the "Guardian's perfidious role in the whole Assange affair". He also wrote of a Pentagon document which described how Julian Assange would be destroyed with a smear campaign leading to "criminal prosecution".

I have to say that there has been some scepticism within the 9/11 Truth Movement concerning Wikileaks. The amount of information and the amount of editing would suggest that there must be a national intelligence agency at work behind it. Some commentators whose analyses I generally value were taking this line, such as Gordon Duff of Veterans Today, who in December 2010 thought that Wikileaks was a Mossad operation and Webster Tarpley argues that Wikileaks is a CIA operation.

It's possible, of course, that Julian Assange himself doesn't know where the information is coming from, since Wikileaks is the publisher rather than the spying network. It's quite possible that such an operation would be used by national intelligence agencies. One possibility that no-one ever seems to consider is that Russia could be behind Wikileaks. Julian Assange has had his own show on Russia Today, and the Russian intelligence services would surely not let their television station fall into such a trap. Russia does have an interest in limiting NATO's advance throughout the world, as we all have, and it would be expected that they would have some operation to counter the CIA/MI6 subversion that they are reporting across the globe, including Russia. Selective reporting would be expected, even if only to avoid revealing their sources. Russia Today does regularly interview people who are active in the truth movement in Britain and the US.

Daniel Estulin, famous for his revelations on the secretive Bilderberg meetings, has just published a book called 'Deconstructing Wikileaks'. The author "freely admits to some ambivalence in his opinion of Wikileaks".

Whatever the truth, the propaganda war continues. John Pilger's latest film 'The War You Don't See' is now available to watch online. It's about the role of journalists in military propaganda. "If people really knew the truth", British prime minister Lloyd George told the editor of The Manchester Guardian in 1917, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know".

"Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public."

"What are you going to do about it?", asked John Pilger four times on 26 April 2012 in an article headed 'You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?'. I intend to do exactly what I have been urging others to do, and what we in '9/11 Keep Talking' are doing, and what John Pilger, Craig Murray and many others have been doing: Keep Talking!

Saturday, 4 June 2011

When we stop debating important topics is the day we surrender freedom

Originally sent October 2009

Censureship and suppression of the truth has been on many people’s minds over the past few weeks in the UK, and even the mainstream media are getting concerned.

The case of Binyam Mohammad, the former Guantanamo Bay captive, who claimed British involvement in his torture, returned to the headlines when

the Law Lords stated that seven redacted paragraphs of their initial judgment should be made public. The paragraphs relate to CIA documents passed to MI5, relating to Binyam’s treatment. The judges said that the public interest in making the paragraphs public was “overwhelming”.

The minister has stated his intention to appeal against that ruling, on the basis of a letter from the CIA which stated that public disclosure could be reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the UK’s national security.

If the minister does appeal, says Clare Algar, executive director of the charity Reprieve, “he will be saying that English Court has no right to decide what information is necessary to disclose in the public interest. If this is right, we will have become an American client state, and the rule of law will no longer exist”.

There has long been a supposition in the UK that parliamentary proceedings are public. Yet the country’s most senior judge, Lord Judge, found it necessary to speak out following the use of a ‘super-injunction’, deployed to gag the media from reporting on a question raised by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly.

The issue concerns an attempt to suppress the Minton report on dumping of toxic waste by the company Trafigura. One MP, Peter Bottomley, said the order should never have been granted, and that he intended to report the lawyers concerned to the Law Society. Speaking at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Lord Judge added: "We use the words 'fundamental principle' very frequently, but this is a fundamental principle. The absolute privilege for Members to speak freely in Parliament did not come without a price, and previous generations fought – and indeed died – for it. It is a very precious heritage which should be vigorously maintained and defended by this generation”.

The Independent reports on plans to introduce secret inquiries into controversial deaths from which the public and bereaved families could be banned, and that they are to be pushed through the House of Commons despite a Lords defeat. The new powers, it states, would allow them to turn inquests such as that of Jean Charles de Menezes and those involving the deaths of British soldiers into secret hearings.

We need only think of the deaths of Dr David Kelly, Princess Dianna, and those 52 people in London who died in the terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005, to have deep concerns. In my September Newsletter I reported on the banning of the book ‘The Terrorist Hunters’, written by the the top counter terrorist officer of the London Metropolitan Police at the time of the London bombings of July 7, 2005. I received an email from the author, Andy Hayman, saying that the book has now been unbanned. We weren’t allowed to know at the time why the book was banned, but the story now is that “further sales of the book should be delayed to ensure a section was not read by jurors in an ongoing court case and interpreted by them, rightly or not, as a reference to that case”.

Publication of ‘The Terrorist Hunters’ may also, of course, have complicated things following Mike Rudin’s BBC Conspiracy Files piece on 7/7 on June 30. I wrote in my September Newsletter, that the documentary seemed more interested in discrediting bona fide researchers who had found inconsistencies in the official version of events than in trying to establish the truth. What I didn’t spell out, because I think it was a red herring, was that they denounced one researcher as being a ‘holocaust denier’. I think it is true that most of us would agree that the far-right in the UK are using this issue to stir up racial hatred for their own political agenda. However, as with everything else, there is a small number of academics who question the generally accepted view. I have no reason to think that Nick Kollerstrom, the author of ‘Terror on the Tube’ has any links or sympathies with the far-right, and every reason to think he doesn’t. Mike Rudin’s team were clearly playing the racist card in order to discredit meticulous research on 7/7, research which had even brought a government minister to account before Parliament when one crucial part of the official theory was proved to be wrong. Yet even the government minister did not play the racist card. My impression after that programme had gone out was that it was so over-the-top in its propaganda effort that a substantial number of viewers would have realised that there had to be something to hide.

Shorty after sending the September Newsletter out, I received an insinuating email from one guy, who is supposed to be on the side of truth in the 9/11 truth movement, attacking Nick’s book, but even worse, attacking me personally for reporting on its launch. He wrote: “If you too are a Holocaust denier than that would perhaps explain your treatment in the esperanto society”. There has clearly been a substantial effort put into suppressing information on the 7/7 issue, which could be embarrassing to the powers that be, and I reported on the antics of the wreckers in the September Newsletter. I was not surprised to come under attack following that Newsletter, but the insinuation was awful. I have been in the Esperanto movement since 1962, and never once have I been involved in any dispute concerning race or religion. I had to think hard before I could even recollect anyone else being in a dispute of that nature in the movement, before coming up with a charming nutter in Switzerland who set up a quasimasonic organisation that uses Esperanto and subverts the Esperanto movement.

Many Esperantistists, as well as Jews, Gypsies and others died under both Hitler and Stalin. The estimate for Esperantists was 30 000 , and I have regularly rubbed shoulders with people from all nationalities, including some who had fled Nazi Germany.

I took that email along to the following 9/11 meeting in London, because the only item announced for the agenda was whether or not to exclude Nick. Of course, with such an agenda, you wouldn’t expect many people to turn up, and they didn’t. The point I made was that they could do the same to anyone, and what they were saying didn’t even have to be true. It turned out, as I had expected, that despite being a charming guy in public, he had been abrasive to others, too. After the meeting, there was a flurry of emails, in which two of us were described as Nazi sympathisers, as well as Nick, who was accused of having posted on Nazi websites. None of this was true. It was nasty stuff, and all carefully worded. You can’t reasonably condemn someone for offensive views and yet send out that sort of stuff.

My own view is that this sort of stuff has to be faced up to, otherwise, we find that people just drop by the wayside. We need to deal with the matter, and then just carry on promoting the cause. If we accept that some people can go around labeling others, banning them and instigating quarreling, then how do we in future discuss the central issues? Any serious discussion on 7/7 would necessarily eventually contain references to Nick’s book. Anyone referring to Nick’s book, as I did in the newsletter, would then run the risk of being called a Nazi sympathiser. That is censorship in its worst form. I would call it intimidation.

There was a parallel case in France, in which a new law was brought in to control dissenting opinion.

The linguist and social commentator Noam Chomsky was one of those petitioning against that law. When he came under attack for that, he wrote an essay, stating: “Faurisson's conclusions are diametrically opposed to views I hold and have frequently expressed in print (for example, in my book Peace in the Middle East, where I describe the Holocaust as "the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history"). But it is elementary that freedom of expression (including academic freedom) is not to be restricted to views of which one approves, and that it is precisely in the case of views that are almost universally despised and condemned that this right must be most vigorously defended. It is easy enough to defend those who need no defense or to join in unanimous (and often justified) condemnation of a violation of civil rights by some official enemy”. On Faurisson's alleged anti-semitism, Chomsky wrote “such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here”. Further on, he wrote: “Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read -- largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him -- I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort”.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19801011.htm

As I write, we have a press frenzy over whether the leader of the British National Party should have been invited by the BBC to take part in the panel discussion programme Question Time. The most objectionable part of the BNP is that they exclude people from their party whom they consider to be ethnically not indigenous to Britain. That one is being dealt with by the courts. Politicians may justifiably complain about that, but it is for the courts to decide. I think that the general public opinion is to agree with the decision, because, whatever his views, his party did receive a million votes in the EU election, and he is an MEP. A minority, including some in government, have been expressing the opposite point of view. If we accept that an MEP and party leader should be excluded because we don’t like his views, then what is to stop the government from excluding others, like 9/11 Truthers? Perhaps they are already. I haven’t heard of Michael Meacher on this topic for a while. The leader of the BNP has spoken out against the Afghan war. Does that make everone else who opposes that war a Nazi? Of course not. What if he now tells the world that 9/11 was an inside job? We don’t solve anything by allowing disreputable journalists to set our agenda. If they throw in red herrings, we should just say, “So what?”. That is more-or-less what a primary school teacher told one of my children when he had been denounced by another as not believing in God.








The US 9/11 truth movement is much stronger than that in the UK. I was sorry to hear that the 9/11 truth movement in the US is going the same way as that in the UK, but our young US friend seems to have got it spot on. He was describing a combination of elitism and in-fighting. He wouldn’t have had the life experience to realise that such things don’t just happen by chance, but that’s exactly what you look out for. Perhaps we need more sixteen-year-olds in the 9/11 truth movement in the UK.

At the very first meeting of the 9/11 truth movement, in Ipswich on December 13, 2006, it was made clear that the truth movement was not set up as a national membership association, because it would be infiltrated and dismantled from within. David Shayler then talked of ‘Very Persuasive People’. One thing to look for, they told us later, was quarreling. They had set up the truth movement to be flexible, as a chaotic network of individuals and groups. When one group gets into trouble, another might spring up. So many people are now aware of the 9/11 issue that when they move on to other issues of public concern, the 9/11 issue is always there in background.

It’s the seminal event that made us aware that we live in a managed democracy. You don’t expect a smooth ride when you go into something like this.


The combination of elitism and quarreling was evident in the More 4 documentary ‘When Boris met Dave’, which went out on October 7

about the mayor of London and the leader of the opposition, when they were both members of the exclusive Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. It showed the aristocratic swagger, together with the smashing up of the middle classes.

This was a development of their life at Eton, where pupils learn not only to be highly competitive, but, according to the programme, to be pathologically power-hungry. They could probably have produced a programme on Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, too, if they had thought of that early enough. Former Bullingdon Club members had taken over the heart of both major parties, essentially giving the electorate a choice between Bullingdon and Bullingdon.

Now I hear that there is to be a historic debate on French television on the 9/11 issue. “You have until October 28 to learn French because French TV France 2’s “L’objet du scandale” with Guillaume Durand will air a historic debate over the official version of the 9/11 events”, says the World for 9/11 Truth website (http://world911truth.org/historic-911-debate-with-bigard-laurent-kassovitz-and-harrit-on-french-tv/).

“This is already a victory for the Bigard/Kassovitz camp who challenged the French media to organize a fair debate over 9/11 after being vilified by many French journalists because of their positions on 9/11. They have been called many names and even received death threats. But no serious journalist was able to challenge them on their positions and to seriously make a case against them based on facts. Now will be their chance, and like Bigard mentions in the below video, ‘good luck to them.’”, says the website.

They also point out that this is also a victory for the 9/11 truth movement because “the official US government conspiracy theory is supposedly not debatable. ... The day we stop debating important topics is the day we surrender freedom. Not only is it debatable, but the 9/11 truth movement is growing faster than ever — worldwide — and nothing will stop it”.

That indeed is a breakthrough, but we’re still not getting through to the mainstream media in the UK. The British have a unique way of dealing with censorship when they see it. The trouble is, they don’t usually see it.

George Orwell described how censureship works in the UK in his introduction to the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. Unfortunately, his introduction didn’t appear in the book. Here is one paragraph from that essay, which seems timeless:

“The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news - things which on their own merits would get the big headlines - being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodials.”