2 October 2008. A sends:
Further to my email yesterday (see below), here is a pdf of the first threat
from Messrs Schillings to Murray's Publisher back in July (at the time, per
Schillings letter, the proposed title of the book was 'The Road to
Samarkand' following Craig Murray's earlier book 'Murder in Samarkand' about
his time as UK Ambassador to Uzbekestan . Publishers have declined to make
subsequent correspondence available. The letter illustrates the power to
supress fair comment that UK libel laws place in the hands of rich
individuals and the sheer arrogance of firms like Schillings in seeking to
exercise that power.
http://cryptome.org/murray-schillings.pdf
(3pp, 740KB)
1 October 2008
A sends:
Attached is the text of that part of a chapter from Craig Murray's forthcoming
book "The Catholic Orangemen of Togo" which his publisher has declined to
include following threats of libel action by solicitors acting for Lt Col
Tim Spicer and Peter Penfold.
The text is currently available on Craig Murray's blog at
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2008/10/censorship_and.html
but Craig expects Messrs Schillings to try to get it removed by threats to
his service provider (something they successfully did for a few days over
a post about Allisher Usmanov earlier this year).
Craig Murray is a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. This text arises
from his service in Sierra Leone during the Nigerian enforced re-instatement
of President Kabbah in 1998. It concerns the row that erupted over illegal
arms shipments from the UK to Sierra Leone and the involvement of the UK
High Commissioner Peter Penfold and Tim Spicer in those shipments. It also
refences the interventions of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair and the
DPP in proposed prosecutions over the shipments. As such it contains important
information that deserves wide circulation in the public interest.
October 1, 2008
Censorship and Freedom of Speech
This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is unwilling
to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel lawyers, acting on
behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:
"Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed separately. Both Penfold
and Spicer were interviewed under caution, as suspects for having broken
the arms embargo.
Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without consulting
the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold, Blair declared, was
"a hero". A dictatorship had been successfully overthrown and democracy restored.
Penfold had "Done a superb job in trying to deal with the consequences of
the military coup." All this stuff about Security Council Resolutions and
sanctions was "an overblown hoo-ha".
I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the country was still
starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of hindsight, this intervention
points the way towards the disasters of his later years in office. It is
extraordinarily wrong for a Prime Minister to declare that a man is a hero,
when Customs had questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very
matter the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair's belief that his judgement
stood above the law of the land, something that was to occur again on a much
bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud Office investigation into British
Aerospace's foreign bribes. But of course Blair's contempt for UN security
council resolutions on the arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy
by invasion could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely
the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently ignoring
the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in charge of little
more than Freetown.
In the FCO we were astonished by Blair's intervention, and deeply puzzled.
Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin Cook's views. Who
was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect that the UN and the law were
unimportant? For most of us, this was the very first indication we had of
how deep a hold neo-con thinking and military interests had on the Blair
circle. It was also my first encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy
being dictated by Alistair Campbell, the Prime Minister's Press Secretary,
The military lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of
their own.
A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their investigations. A thick
dossier, including documentation from the FCO, from the raid on Sandline's
offices, and from elsewhere, was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The
Customs and Excise team who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation
was that both Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo.
The dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown Prosecution
Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in effect, for no further
action. There would be no prosecution. A customs officer told me bitterly
that, given the time between the dossier leaving their offices and the time
it was returned, allowing time for both deliveries, it could not have been
in the CPS more than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not
even have read it before turning it down.
I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer and Penfold.
So were the customs officers investigating the case; at least two of them
called me to commiserate. They had believed they had put together an extremely
strong case, and they told me that their submission to the Crown Prosecution
Service said so.
The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first major instance
of the corruption of the legal process that was to be a hallmark of the Blair
years. Customs and Excise were stunned by it. There is no doubt whatsoever
that Spicer and Penfold had worked together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone
in breach of UK law. Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British
law by an Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their
assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told Spicer
that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any side in the
conflict. Penfold's claim never to have seen an absolutely key Security Council
Resolution about a country to which he was High Commissioner is truly
extraordinary.
But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously no defence
in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this sorry tale of greed,
hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no doubt at all - and more
importantly nor did the customs officers investigating the case - that there
was enough there for a viable prosecution.
The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to prosecute
was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected woman in New Labour
circles. She is married to John Mills, a former Labour councillor in Camden.
That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister
with a penchant for taking out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying
them off with cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the
friend and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to
a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore companies
for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and David Mills were
also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close to Tony Blair. Blair is
also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite the numerous criminal allegations
against Berlusconi and his long history of political alliances with open
fascists. Just to complete the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law
of Barbara Mills and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.
Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of Public
Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to proceed
with the case, and to take that decision in less time than it would have
taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise sent them?
Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions later that
year after being personally criticised in his judgement by a High Court judge
who ruled against the Crown Prosecution Service for continually failing to
prosecute over deaths in police custody. That has not stopped the extremely
well connected Dame Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid
public positions since then."
It is infuriating that, Maxwell-style, Spicer (who has made millions from
the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of defending a libel case
to intimidate my publisher. The result is that important information I received
at first hand, and an account of events to which I am eye-witness, is being
repressed, as is an important independent critique of early Blair foreign
policy.
I am not currently confident the book will get published at all - I am not
prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth, under my name.
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