Why do they do this?
In the previous issue I referred to the fictitious comments attributed by Tony Blair to a doctor in Africa. They’ve done it again. In February Blair’s spin doctor in chief, Alastair Campbell, claimed to have saved a man from being beaten by muggers, The Mail on Sunday (23 February) traced the man concerned who denied that Campbell had any role in the affair.
The tumour count is rising
Laurie Garrett of Newsday attended the 2003 meeting of the World Economic forum at Davos. She sent an e-mail about the experience to some friends and one of them leaked it. Her account was interesting if not surprising. This is the concluding paragraph.
‘The world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive – especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise (sic) tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally – better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottom-line foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.’
The sting is in the tail: ‘They….. are glued to their cell phones’. It is some small consolation to learn that one of the tools with which they are destroying the planet is doing the same thing to their brains.
Not in front of the children
When Colin Powell addressed the UN on the issue of Iraq in early February, UN officials hung a curtain over a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica which hung on the wall behind the spot where statements are made to the press.
Greats, dear boy, Greats
When the USA replaced Britain as the world’s number one power the British elites consoled themselves with the belief that while the Yanks had all the money the Brits had all the brains. Classically educated, many of them, they began to think of the relationship as the Greeks (the British) and the Romans (the Americans). A classic of this genre appeared in the run-up to the Iraq war:
‘The army is training the American military to identify British troops so that they do not inadvertently kill them in “friendly fire” incidents in Iraq. Army sources said Britain believed its troops could be in danger because America’s identification methods were “sub-standard”… “They have all the kit but they are useless when it comes to spotting who is on their side,” said one army source. “We are showing them how to do it, so our boys aren’t hit.” ‘ (1)
Gorgeous George and all that
Was George Galloway in the pay of the Iraqis? I don’t know. Would I believe such a report published in the Daily Telegraph? Probably not, even in the best of circumstances; certainly not when the document in question happened to be lying about in an unguarded room in Baghdad. Would MI6 think it worthwhile fabricating such a document to nail Galloway? Of course. However we regard Galloway there is no doubt that the Telegraph has been used by MI6 to run its psy-ops material for many years.
Monkey business?
In ‘How we missed the Saturday dance’ in his recent collection Dreaming War, writing in 1993 Gore Vidal commented:
‘The latest managerial wit has been to encourage – by deploring – something called “political correctness”, this decade’s Silly Putty or Hula Hoop. Could anything be better calculated to divert everyone from what the management is up to in recently appropriating, say, $3.8 billion for SDI than to pit sex against sex, race against race, religion against religion? With everyone up in arms against everyone else, no one will have the time to take arms against the ruinously expensive empire that Mr Clinton and the unattractively named baby boomers have inherited.’ (p. 105)
Daniel Brandt had already commented, in his ‘An Incorrect Political Memoir’, in Lobster 24 in 1992, that:
‘….by 1991 “Politically Correct” had become a buzzword to describe a phenomenon that was happening on U.S. campuses. Critics like Dinesh D’Souza, funded by conservative foundations and think tanks, helped popularize the concept.’
In the same essay Brandt noted how in 1975 at UCLA in Berkeley,
‘These feminists [from the Women’s Affairs Office] were all cruising comfortably on a huge Ford Foundation grant…’
The Ford Foundation? Didn’t they work with the CIA? Yes, indeed. Bob Feldman at < www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html > has assembled a collection of material which shows how some of the US ‘alternative media’ has been funded by corporations and the American state. Does this mean Vidal’s and Brandt’s suspicions about the sources of the political support for PC are correct?
What time is it, Al?
Nexus always provides an interesting picture of what’s shaking out there on the high frontiers of weirdness. The programme for the Nexus conference on 30 March 2003 in Amsterdam included a talk by Al Bielek.
‘One of the few to survive the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment …he says: “I jumped overboard expecting to hit water, but wound up in 1983.” ‘
One of the few? There are others? Do they have Philadelphia Experiment reunions? Is there any evidence at all for the existence of said experiment?
Numerology
Corinne Souza sent the following.
In the latest edition of the Civil Service Yearbook 2002, published by the Cabinet Office in October 2002, if you look up SIS Chief Sir Richard Dearlove in the Index, his column ref. is ….. ‘666’.
If you look up MI5 Chief Sir Stephen Lander (new chief not in yet) in the Index, his column ref. is ….. ‘666’.
If you look up the Security Service, Secret Intelligence Services, GCHQ, in the Index …..you guessed it: all their references are ‘666’.
The book is 550 pages long and it has 1491 column references. How many hours did it take some wonderful civil servant wag to work out how to get all our spooks categorised under the sign of the Devil?
When the civil service makes internal jokes, they can seldom be bettered.
NATO and Eastern Europe
Who wrote the following?
‘Nato is now a device to exert control and extract cash. Those who resist, like Belarus, are punished… All eastern European states are required to sell off their national economic assets to foreigners, and close down their agriculture by accepting the dumping of subsidised EU food imports. This creates massive social disruption and unemployment. In addition, they must spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence, preferably on arms made in the US.
Consequently, a small country like Lithuania, whose economy has collapsed so catastrophically, has just announced the purchase of $34 million worth of Stinger missiles, made by the Raytheon Corporation of Tucson, Arizona. When Tanzania announced it was spending $40 million on a new civilian air traffic control system, there was an outcry; but Lithuania, whose official GDP is not much larger than Tanzania’s, will have to spend $240m on arms every year as the price for Nato membership. And Lithuania is just one of seven new member states, all of which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on arms.’
Someone on the left? Paul Foot? Greg Palast? John Pilger? None of the above. (None of the above would use the word foreigners….) They were written by John Laughland, generally presented and perceived as an anti-EU right-winger. But take out the word ‘foreigners’……
Along similar lines the following appeared on John Young’s Cryptome site a month later:(2)
‘It might interest your readers to understand the aggressive US tactics used to win the Lockheed F-16 deal with Poland last week. Information from an official translator who has first-hand knowledge of various meetings… an aggressive campaign, including electronic surveillance to ensure that Lockheed, rather than Swedish/French rivals, won an order for fighter jets. This campaign included….if Lockheed’s offer was not successful, the US would block or substantially reduce World Bank and International Finance Corporation loan/assistance package worth an estimated $1.4 billion (measured over 2003-2005); US officials warned that the loss of the Lockheed deal would create “substantial setbacks” for Poland’s activities within NATO which could prevent the placement of Polish military officials in special NATO committees and command structures….the US official restated that Poland would not have preferential treatment in the reorganization of Baltic Sea deployments and planning should Lockheed fail in its bid.’
A similar example of this American pork barrel view of international relations, from the 1960s, is in the section headed ‘Latin America’ in Terry Hanstock’s column Re: in this issue.
The unsinkable aircraft carrier
How little say we have over the US bases in this country was illustrated when the Liberal-Democrat MP Norman Baker reported in January: ‘I’ve asked for a tour of Menwith Hill [the NSA base near Harrogate] and I’ve been refused.’
Mea maxima culpa?
‘IMF admits its policies seldom work’ was the headline to a remarkable but apparently little noticed story in The Independent on 20 March 2003.
‘In a paper that will be seized on by IMF critics across the political spectrum, leading officials reveal they can find little evidence of their own success. Countries that follow IMF suggestions often suffer a ‘collapse in growth rates and significant financial crises’, with open currency markets merely serving to ‘amplify the effects of various shocks.’ Kenneth Rogoff, the IMF chief economist who is one of the report’s authors, called the findings ‘sobering’.
A recent study by the United Nations reported that the 47 poorest countries in the world – the biggest recipients of loans from the IMF and the World Bank – are poorer now than they were when the IMF was founded in 1944. The report says that ‘financial integration’ has often led to an ‘increased vulnerability to crises’ because foreign speculators pull out as soon as trouble emerges.’
On the other hand might we not say that the report demonstrates in spades that the IMF’s policies are working splendidly? For is the American-dominated financial system not intended to enable America in particular and ‘the West’ in general to bleed the Third World dry?
The importance of having Balls
One little political mystery was solved in early May. Who was the author of the ‘five economic tests’ which the British economy has to pass before adopting the Euro? Obviously not Gordon Brown: this was well beyond oor Gordie in 1997. My candidate? The Treasury, bent on keeping the UK out. Not even them. According to Charlie Whelan, Brown’s former mouthpiece, quoted in the Mail on Sunday on 4 May, the five tests were cobbled together in a taxi in New York by Ed Balls, Brown’s economics advisor.
What’s Watt
Regular readers of the ‘bit at the back’ of Private Eye written by Paul Foot, may remember a couple of pieces about EU whistle-blower, Dougal Watt. Watt’s story of fraud, corruption, cover-up and Masonry is too complex to summarise here but can be read in more detail at <www.thesprout.net/004/graft/graft21.htm>, < www.thesprout.net/004/graft/graft12.htm > and < www.justresponse.net /DougalWatt3Sep02.html >
The Sprout <www.thesprout.net> is a very interesting on-line journal devoted to the European Parliament and Commission with a refreshing interest in muckraking.
Did someone say organised crime? I only recently learned, from John Burnes, that members of the European Parliament have lifetime immunity to criminal prosecution.
Faking it
Meanwhile, back at the unintended consequences of the ‘target-setting culture’, it was revealed in May that British hospitals, when given a week’s notice that their Accident and Emergency units were to be inspected, did what anyone with half a brain would do: they packed the A and E units with temporary extra staff. See
< http://society.guardian.co.uk/nhsperformance >.
Or was it something else? Was the week’s notice not an invitation from the inspectors to the hospital managers to do this? Was the whole procedure, in effect, not a conspiracy between the inspectors and the managers to produce the ‘good results’ desired by the government?
Notes
1 Marie Woolf, ‘Britain tells America how to avoid “friendly fire”‘, The Independent, 5 March 2003.
2 < http://cryptome.org/pl-f16-fix.htm >