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Denial: a message to my Downing Street audience

The Prime Minister's office has been keeping an eye on Bloggerheads... and not for the first time.

As Justin notes in this excellent post, his tracking clearly shows a visit from the PM's office (IP: 194.201.189.212) following a link from the front page of Bloggerheads (contained in this post) to the post on his website about the question he intended to put to the PM:

My own (log-based) tracking shows the wider pattern, with subsequent visits to Bloggerheads over the last few days:

Going further back into the logs, I can see someone from 10 Downing St making regular visits to this weblog as far back as late 2004 (when this new tracking package was introduced). In the last 6 months, they've accessed 3.41 MB of data (this does not take into account visits to Backing Blair).

Hell, you *know* the kind of stuff that I discuss on Bloggerheads... and you know that I present facts and evidence wherever possible. It's not just me prattling on; on serious issues there are links to many other weblogs, articles, reports and documents.

So I can tell you - for yet another fact - that at least one of these charges is irrefutable:

A) Tony Blair's staff choose to keep certain information from him
B) Tony Blair chooses to ignore certain information and/or suffers from an overwhelming lack of curiosity
C) Tony Blair is a lying bastard

Let's leave America using napalm on civilians and our troops being trained to use white phosphorus as a chemical weapon to one side for the moment and focus instead on torture. We do, after all, need a timely example.

Last night I watched John Bellinger, legal adviser to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, being interviewed by Jonathan Beale for the BBC on the subject of the Council of Europe's report on the secret US-led detentions/renditions (the full report can be accessed here).

Bellinger began by praising the Council of Europe, before sticking the knife in and assuring us that the report was no more than tabloid-style trash and not worthy of them. This exchange followed:

Jonathan Beale: You say it's not worthy. Are you saying that what it says is essentially not true? You deny the allegations?

John Bellinger: Well, it is filled with innuendo, with rumour, and with inaccuracies.

And obviously some level of truth, otherwise he would have been able to issue a firm denial. Which he didn't.

(Psst! Have some quick background to the 'denial' pattern here and here. Watch this non-denial magically become a denial within a few short months.)

In this article, we're assured by Honest John that; "... there had been CIA flights, but most were carrying experts or forensic evidence. Only a handful had carried terrorism suspects."

He then goes on to attribute the reports of rendition to people with "anti-American views", but it's that 'handful' term I'm most interested in.

Scale is important to the Bush administration. You're not allowed to call Guantanamo a 'gulag', because they don't detain millions of people without charge or trial and torture them mercilessly; they only detain hundreds of people without charge or trial... and torture them gently. The rough stuff is left to allies. Speaking of those allies...

It would appear that it is OK to ship a few terrorism suspects so they can be tortured abroad, just so long as you shape your admission in the form of a 'denial'. Again, scale is all-important. Hundreds... bad. Handful... gooooood.

But exactly how many terrorism suspects make up a handful? (I'd admit to being able to hold a maximum of two aloft myself *if* they co-operate, but don't want to be charged with having sympathetic links to Al Qaeda.)

As John is a paper-shuffler by trade, perhaps he's referring to the only 'face' he sees on these people... that being their carefully-extracted confessions. I can hold 1000 sheets of A4 paper in one hand without too much difficulty. If we generously allow for a 10-page confession each, that amounts to 100 terrorism suspects self-confessed terrorists. You could probably fit even more of these people into a 'handful' if their experiences under torture were recorded on computer disc (say, if you wanted to be able to show some graphic photos to other detainees as a precursor to interrogation).

Anyway, we're getting off the track, and this post is supposed to be about Tony and torture, so let's drop the small handful and go to the Big Man himself for his reaction to the rendition report:

Downing St Says: Asked for a reaction to the European Council Report on rendition, the PMOS said there was no new evidence in the report and therefore he had nothing to add to his previous comments on the matter. Asked if the Government was acknowledging that some CIA flights had landed and taken off in Britain, the PMOS said that we had acknowledged that there were four requests on 1998, two of which were granted. Those were the only requests we had had. Nothing had changed. Asked if he was rejecting the claim that we were involved in the transportation of detainees through the UK, the PMOS said that we had set out the facts on this. He would not give publicity to a report which said nothing new.

Politics.co.uk: The prime minister said the Council of Europe report "adds absolutely nothing new" to previous claims about the CIA's use of European airports to transport terror suspects to countries where they may face torture. "We have said absolutely all we will on this and I have nothing to add. The Council of Europe report adds absolutely nothing new to that," Mr Blair told MPs.

You may recall that Blair has play this 'old news' game before. You may also be aware that - when he says that "we have said absolutely all we will on this" - he really means; "we have already done our best to avoid getting drawn on detail and move the debate on"...

You should by now be able to see that Blair's statement isn't, in fact, a denial; it is instead evidence of a wilful denial of facts... facts that we can now be certain that Tony Blair and/or his staff have ample access to.

From here on in, this post is addressed directly to Tony Blair. Perhaps one of his willing underlings would be good enough to pass the message on:

Dear Tony,

You may not care enough to acknowledge or investigate reports of torture, but I seek to remind you that others enjoy a rare condition known as 'curiosity'... and anybody searching in any of the major search engines for 'blair torture', 'tony blair torture', 'straw torture', 'jack straw torture', 'uk torture', 'british government torture' (and many other variations besides) will find their way to posts like this and/or these documents (via Bloggerheads or other sites such as blairwatch.co.uk, craigmurray.co.uk, theregister.co.uk and dailykos.com).

Go ahead and try it now... I'll wait.

....

All done? Good. Now we *both* know what we're dealing with.

By now you're probably hoping that I'm only reaching people who are already aware of the truth or suspicious of your lies... but you'd be wrong to do so. Take the single word 'blair' and try it out sometime... or perhaps 'bum' or maybe even 'porn'.

With me now? Good.

Every pair of eyes opened brings you one step closer to your now-inevitable demise, and I remain determined to open as many eyes as possible.

I am coming for you, and I will not stop.

Your time is up, your goodwill is shot to hell, and your plans for further reform are doomed to failure.

Further; the longer you hang on, the easier it will be for me to tie your political heirs to your poisoned legacy.

I will soon be coming for them, and I will not stop.

This is not a vendetta... it is a necessity; I simply cannot allow those in power to continue to cynically exploit the threat of terrorism for political and financial gain.

As your staff have read Bloggerheads, they will no doubt be aware of my clear position on violence... so they will know that I mean you no physical harm, even when I say the following:

I plan to pursue you to the end of your political career and beyond. Further, I have taken a solemn vow to one day piss on your grave. You lying, torturing, murdering bastard.

Cheers

Tim Ireland

(PS - You still owe me two grand. I point this out now only because it highlights the fact that I too am one of the many things that you have ignored in the hope that it would go away.)

Posted by Manic on June 8, 2006 12:29 PM in the category Tony 'King Blair

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