further reasons to doubt Assad regime was behind Ghouta attack

The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence cooperation. The communications intercept agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US, share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6). Troodos is valued enormously by the NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus. Even almost all landline telephone communication in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos.

Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown of British intelligence. Its capacity and efficiency, as well as its reach, is staggering. The US do not have their own comparable facility for the Middle East. I should state that I have actually been inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s. This is fact, not speculation.

writes former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan and human rights activist, Craig Murray, in an article he posted on Saturday [August 31^st].

Why is this important? Well, as Murray goes on to explain:

It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that John Kerry claims to have access to communications intercepts of Syrian military and officials organising chemical weapons attacks, which intercepts were not available to the British Joint Intelligence Committee.

On one level the explanation is simple. The intercept evidence was provided to the USA by Mossad, according to my own well placed source in the Washington intelligence community. Intelligence provided by a third party is not automatically shared with the UK, and indeed Israel specifies it should not be.

But the inescapable question is this. Mossad have nothing comparable to the Troodos operation. The reported content of the conversations fits exactly with key tasking for Troodos, and would have tripped all the triggers. How can Troodos have missed this if Mossad got it? The only remote possibility is that all the conversations went on a purely landline route, on which Mossad have a physical wire tap, but that is very unlikely in a number of ways – not least nowadays the purely landline route.

His own conclusion?

The answer to the Troodos Conundrum is simple. Troodos did not pick up the intercepts because they do not exist. Mossad fabricated them. John Kerry’s “evidence” is the shabbiest of tricks.

Click here to read Craig Murray’s full article.

There is also more direct evidence in the form of an eyewitness report from Yahya Ababneh (who was on the ground in Ghouta) and who published an article in collaboration with Dale Gavlak, herself a Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press for two decades and someone has also worked for National Public Radio (NPR) and written articles for BBC News.

They wrote on Thursday [August 29^th]:

Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much.

The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad’s guilt was “a judgment … already clear to the world.”

However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.

I recommend reading the full article but in short, Ababneh says that he was told that release of chemical agents was the result of an accident after at least 13 rebels “were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion”:

“They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,” complained a female fighter named ‘K.’ “We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”

“When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them,” she warned. She, like other Syrians, do not want to use their full names for fear of retribution.¹

It should be noted that the website on which the story originally appeared, Mint Press, is a legitimate media organization based in Minnesota. Indeed, the Minnesota Post did a profile on them last year.

Click here to read the full article.

Incidentally, Bandar bin Sultan, or Prince Bandar if you insist, is a member of the ruling House of Saud and former Saudi ambassador to the United States, who has had extremely close ties to a number of American presidents, but most notably the two George Bushs – and apparently it was George W who gave him the creepy nickname “Bandar Bush”.

As current head of Saudi intelligence he has also made it into the news more recently for other reasons:

Leaked transcripts of a closed-door meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan shed an extraordinary light on the hard-nosed Realpolitik of the two sides.

Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, allegedly confronted the Kremlin with a mix of inducements and threats in a bid to break the deadlock over Syria. “Let us examine how to put together a unified Russian-Saudi strategy on the subject of oil. The aim is to agree on the price of oil and production quantities that keep the price stable in global oil markets,” he said at the four-hour meeting with Mr Putin. They met at Mr Putin’s dacha outside Moscow three weeks ago.

The extract taken from an article published by The Telegraph on Tuesday [August 27^th] then goes on to outline a little more detail on the sort of “deal” Bandar was proposing:

The details of the talks were first leaked to the Russian press. A more detailed version has since appeared in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, which has Hezbollah links and is hostile to the Saudis.

As-Safir said Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia’s naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” he allegedly said.

Prince Bandar went on to say that Chechens operating in Syria were a pressure tool that could be switched on an off. “These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role in Syria’s political future.”²

Click here to read the full article published in The Telegraph.

Revelations that certainly lend further credibility to the version of events reported on by Gavlak and Ababneh. So might it have been Saudi Arabia then who actually armed rebels with the chemical weapons that killed so many at Ghouta?

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Additional:

Here is Dale Gavlak being interviewed by Henry Peirse for GRNlive from June 2012. She shares her thoughts particularly with regards to the developing situation in Jordan where she has worked as a foreign correspondent for many years:

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Update:

On Monday [Sept 2^nd], the news group McClatchy released a detailed article entitled “To some, US case for Syrian gas attack strike has too many holes”.

It begins:

The Obama administration’s public case for attacking Syria is riddled with inconsistencies and hinges mainly on circumstantial evidence, undermining U.S. efforts this week to build support at home and abroad for a punitive strike against Bashar Assad’s regime.

The case Secretary of State John Kerry laid out last Friday contained claims that were disputed by the United Nations, inconsistent in some details with British and French intelligence reports or lacking sufficient transparency for international chemical weapons experts to accept at face value.

Click here to read the full article.

One of the joint authors of the piece, Mark Seibel, was also interviewed on Wednesday’s Democracy Now! which you can listen below. I have also included parts of the transcript to offer just a flavour of what Seibel had to say:

The holes that we identified in the piece really have to do with contradictions between what Secretary of State Kerry has said in his public announcements and what other partners, if you use that phrase, in the Syrian issue have also reported. And, basically, what we identified is that when it came to questions of the efficacy of a U.N. investigation or the number of people killed in the conflict, or even the U.S. rendition of what happened in what order, there are contradictions. Do they completely undercut the case? I don’t know. If you believe that conclusions are based on facts, then the question becomes, do we have the facts? And that’s—you know, that’s an issue.

Well, you know, we’ve been told that a chemical attack took place, and the evidence seems to be that some sort of attack took place. We don’t actually know what the chemical was. The U.S. has said that it was sarin. There’s every reason to think that might be true, but we don’t know what the chemical test was that led them to conclude that it was sarin. We don’t know how the evidence was obtained. We don’t know what lab it was worked in. We actually don’t know how they arrived at that conclusion so quickly. You know, they announced it Sunday. But, you know, according to—again, to the secretary of state, it will take the U.N. two, three, maybe four weeks to reach that same determination in very modern labs in Europe. So there’s an awful lot we don’t know about that. And because we don’t know it—because we don’t know the details, at least in the public case—and again, you know, we’re not sitting in the classified briefings, but we don’t really know. We are being asked to—excuse me—to trust the assertion that it was sarin and that we know that, but, here again, it’s—we’re asked to make a leap of faith.

Well, you know, the problem we see for our correspondents going in is that it’s not as safe to be there in areas that we used to think were safe, and it’s largely because of the presence of al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which are two al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations that we’ve seen their influence grow from closer to the border with Iraq, across the northeast and northern Syria, where they’re now very, very active in Idlib province and were responsible for fighting in Latakia, which is on the Mediterranean coast, though the fighting was not on the coast. And so, we’ve actually seen Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq—we’ve seen their influence grow in the last few months, and it’s one of the reasons that news organizations now are not sending correspondents into Syria in the way they used to, because it is not safe to be there.

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Further update:

McClatchy also reported on Monday 9^th, citing information first released by the major German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, that “Intercepts caught Assad rejecting requests to use chemical weapons…”:

The report in Bild am Sonntag, which is a widely read and influential national Sunday newspaper, reported that the head of the German Foreign Intelligence agency, Gerhard Schindler, last week told a select group of German lawmakers that intercepted communications had convinced German intelligence officials that Assad did not order or approve what is believed to be a sarin gas attack on Aug. 21 that killed hundreds of people in Damascus’ eastern suburbs. […]

The newspaper’s article said that on numerous occasions in recent months, the German intelligence ship named Oker, which is off the Syrian coast, has intercepted communications indicating that field officers have contacted the Syrian presidential palace seeking permission to use chemical weapons and have been turned down.

The article added that German intelligence does not believe Assad sanctioned the alleged attack on August 21.

Click here to read the full article.

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And more evidence…

Furthermore, a Belgian journalist, Pierre Piccinin da Prata, who was held hostage with Italian reporter, Domenico Quirico, for five months says that he overheard his rebel captors admit that President Bashar al-Assad was not responsible for the Ghouta massacre. The two reporters had been kidnapped while working in the war torn country back in April and were released over the weekend.

Following his release, Piccinin gave the following interview on Belgian RTL:

And here is a more extended interview Piccinin has also since given:

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1 From an exclusive report entitled “Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack”, written by Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh published by Mint Press on August 29, 2013. http://www.mintpressnews.com/witnesses-of-gas-attack-say-saudis-supplied-rebels-with-chemical-weapons/168135/

2 From an article entitled “Saudi’s offer Russia secret oil deal if it drops Syria” written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, published in The Telegraph on August 27, 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html

as Craig Murray pushes for the truth about Gould and Werritty, where are the media?

Ever since the scandal involving former Secretary of State for Defence, Liam Fox, and his close friendship with the lobbyist Adam Werritty first broke, Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, has been pursuing his own private investigation. Week by week developments in that investigation can be found on his blog. You can also find an overview of the case on previous posts on this blog here and here.

The latest turn of events started on Feb 2^nd, and Murray begins a post on that day as follows:

Evidence continues to mount that, rather than simply pursuing commercial interests with then Defence Secretary Liam Fox, Adam Werritty was involved centrally in working with the British and Israeli intelligence services to try to engineer war against Iran. His official contact in all this was Matthew Gould, now British Ambassador to Israel.

For those who have followed Craig Murray’s enquiries up to this point, there is nothing remarkably new in that statement. If it sounds incredible, that’s simply because the mainstream media has remained more or less mute on this story. So what is Murray’s reason for saying that the evidence is mounting? Well, it comes in the form of a negative, and it involves Murray’s search for proof of the existence of certain meetings between international man of mystery Adam Werritty and Matthew Gould, that begins with a reply from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) acknowledging that:

There are entries in diaries indicating that there were two meetings at which Mathew Gould and Mr Werritty were both present while he was serving as Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary on 8 September 2009 and 16 June 2010.

Murray writes:

It is a very simple request indeed – copies of two diary entries. But the FCO is extremely anxious not to give them out. FCO Legal Advisers were consulted and said that, under the FOI [Freedom of Information] Act, the FCO was legally obliged to release them. The FCO has now gone to the Justice Department and Treasury Solicitors looking for a different answer. I have this from a sympathetic source in FCO Legal Advisers (which is a large department, and miffed to be overruled in this way).

My source has not told me what the diary entries say, but has said it appears that these meetings between Werritty and Gould were taking place without the knowledge of other FCO officials. That opens up one particularly interesting possibility. The Secretary of State at the FCO is the head not just of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but also of MI6. His Principal Private Secretary is his right hand man for both roles. Was Gould therefore meeting Werritty on behalf of first [David] Miliband and then [William] Hague, with the MI6 hat on rather than the FCO hat on? The diary entries may give that away, particularly if they list the other participants in the meetings – or if they were held in Vauxhall Cross.

And Murray concludes his post as follows:

Tension over Iran continues to be stoked for the next neo-con war. Werritty’s role as a go-between with MI6, Mossad and Iranian pro-Shah groups came briefly into view as a result of what the press thought was a ministerial gay scandal, but government and a complicit media and opposition have sought to bury it as quickly as possible, before the real truth is revealed. I am not going to let that happen.

The investigation continues. Do not get your news from TV or newspapers – only on little blogs like this is there any chance of catching a glimpse beneath the propaganda story.

Click here to read Craig Murray’s post entitled “Gould-Werritty: the Continuing Cover-Up” in full.

On the following day, and in his next post, Murray says that he was again contacted by the FCO, and that:

I now know the reason the FCO was trying to conceal the diary entries for the Gould-Werritty meetings. The answer is absolutely stunning, but I have to wait for documents the FCO is sending me by post before I reveal it.

A few days and nights pass by… and then another post [on Feb 6^th]:

It is now four days and three postal deliveries since the FCO emailed me saying that they were sending me the Gould/Werritty diary entries by post, together with a covering letter – and something else of which the very existence is explosive news. But still, this has not actually arrived.

But then, the bombshell was finally delivered [Feb 7^th]:

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has finally, this evening, released the Gould/Werritty diary entries under the Freedom of Information Act. The three links above are the diary entries for their meetings on 8 September 2009, 27 September 2010 and 6 February 2011. You may have to click a few times to get the full size image. The lines across the page usually run right across the main right centre column. The entire column, with all the details on the Adam Werritty meeting, has been redacted – literally cut out.

The same is true of all eight of the diary pages I have been sent for Gould’s meetings with Adam Werritty – all information has simply been censored. We can only speculate what is there, who else was present and the subject of the meetings.

If anyone doubts there is a cover-up of massive proportions on what Werritty was actually doing, doubt no more.

Click here to read Craig Murray’s thoughts on the latest denial of information, along with electronic copies of the retrieved but almost entirely blanked out ‘documents’.

In Murray’s most recent reflection on this unsavoury debacle, posted on Feb 9^th, he writes:

Werritty’s access really was quite astonishing. As the Werritty/Gould email correspondence I published yesterday showed, he was able to get the Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary to meet him one and one, without even giving an explanation of what he wanted. 99.9999% of taxpayers could not get a private meeting with the FCO’s Principal Private Secretary even with an explanation of why they wanted it.

I have been trying to think how to get over to you how difficult this is. Let me try it this way – Richard Branson could probably get such a meeting without explanation, Richard Dawkins probably could not. The vast majority of retired Ambassadors could not get such a meeting. The vast majority of paid lobbyists and think tank employees could not casually get such a meeting without explanation. I could not get such a meeting.

Yet officially Werritty was nothing but a paid lobbyist, the sole employee of an obscure neo-con think tank. But he could get that level of access under both New Labour and the Tories. How and why?

Craig Murray is asking all the right questions, and he is slowly getting some answers, if only ones that open up yet more questions. He seems to be on the trail of something hugely important, involving nothing less that Israeli plans for a war on Iran, and he is pursuing his inquiries in a perfectly proper fashion. Meanwhile he is demanding that the mainstream media give this story some deserved attention, but so far they have mostly remained stony silent. The question again is how and why?

banned news involving attack on Iran leaked by Craig Murray

Here is an introduction by Craig Murray regarding his latest article:

I am going to publish the very important article on the plot to attack Iran at noon GMT on this site. Other sites are welcome to republish it, and I would be grateful if each and every reader can do whatever is in their power to get it seen, be that reposting it yourself, sending it to an outlet, retweeting it, facebook messaging it, emailing a link or just telling your mates or family to look at it.

To remind you, here is the extraordinary reaction from the mainstream outlets I write for regularly. I have left nothing out from the replies I received. Nobody found a single fact that did not check out, and nobody could claim it was not newsworthy. They simply prevaricated and passed it around various editors in a risible buck-passing exercise.

The extremely strong Israeli influence on the media is not a theoretical construct. It has a real existence, vast amounts of real money and physical mechanics of operation. Anybody who doubts this should read this recent leaked internal email from BICOM, a full time highly-funded Israeli lobby organisation which was closely linked to Adam Werritty. Their direct and day to day access to those making editorial decisions could not be more clear.

We can’t match anything like their funding, and they can block me from mainstream media effectively. But we have honesty and we have effort. Noon. Be ready.

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Matthew Gould and the Plot to Attack Iran

by Craig Murray

This is Matthew Gould, second from right, British Ambassador to Israel, who was pictured speaking at a meeting of the Leeds Zionist Federation that was also the opening of the Leeds Hasbarah Centre. The Leeds Zionist Federation is part of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, motto “Speaking Up for Israel.” A collection was made at the meeting to send packages to members of the Israeli Defence Force.

On 29 May 2011 The Jerusalem Post reported: “British Ambassador Matthew Gould declared his commitment to Israel and the principles of Zionism on Thursday”.

Remember this background, it is unusual behaviour for a diplomat, and it is important.

The six meetings between British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould and Minister of Defence Liam Fox and Adam Werritty together – only two of which were revealed by Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell in his “investigation” into Werritty’s unauthorised role in the Ministry of Defence – raise vital concerns about a secret agenda for war at the core of government, comparable to Blair’s determination to drive through a war on Iraq.

This is a detective story. It begins a few weeks ago, when the Fox-Werritty scandal was first breaking in the media. I had a contact from an old friend from my Foreign Office days. This friend had access to the Gus O’Donnell investigation. He had given a message for me to a trusted third party.

Whistleblowing in the surveillance state is a difficult activity. I left through a neighbour’s garden, not carrying a mobile phone, puffed and panted by bicycle to an unmonitored but busy stretch of road, hitched a lift much of the way, then ordered a minicab on a payphone from a country pub to my final destination, a farm far from CCTV. There the intermediary gave me the message: what really was worrying senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office was that the Fox-Werritty link related to plans involving Mossad and the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould.

Since I became a notorious whistleblower, several of my ex-friends and contacts have used me to get out information they wanted to leak, via my blog. A good recent example was a senior friend at the UN who tipped me off in advance on the deal by which the US agreed to the Saudi attack on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain, in return for Arab League support for the NATO attack on Libya. But this was rather different, not least in the apparent implication that our Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, was engaged in something with Werritty which went beyond official FCO policy.

I was particularly concerned by this because I knew slightly and liked Matthew Gould, from the time he wrote speeches for Robin Cook. I hoped there was nothing much in it. But then Gould’s name started to come up as professional journalists dug into the story, and reported Werritty’s funding by pro-Israeli lobby groups.

I decided that the best approach was for me to write to Matthew Gould. I did so, asking him when he had first met Werritty, how many times he had met him, and how many communications of every kind there had been between them. I received the reply that these questions would be answered in Gus O’Donnell’s report.

But Gus O’Donnell’s report in fact answered none of these questions. It only mentioned two meetings at which Fox, Gould and Werritty were all three present. It did not mention Gould-Werritty bilateral meetings and contacts at all. To an ex-Ambassador like me, there was also something very fishy about the two trilateral meetings O’Donnell did mention and his characterisation of them.

This led me to dig further, and I was shocked to find that O’Donnell was, at the most charitable interpretation, economical with the truth. In fact there were at least six Fox-Werritty-Gould meetings, not the two given by O’Donnell. Why did GOD lie? I now had no doubt that my informant had pointed me towards something very real and very important indeed.

Matthew Gould was the only British Ambassador who Fox and Werrity met together. They met him six times. Why?

The first meeting to which O’Donnell admits, took place in September 2010. O’Donnell says this was

“a general discussion of international defence and security matters to enable Mr Gould better to understand MOD’s perspective.”

O’Donnell says Werritty should not have been present. An FCO spokesman told me on 21 October that

“Mr Gould’s meeting with the Defence Secretary was arranged by his office as part of his pre-posting briefing calls.”

All Ambassadors make pre-posting briefing calls around Whitehall before taking up their job, as you would expect. But even for our most senior Ambassadors, outside the Foreign Office those calls are not at Secretary of State level. Senior officials are quite capable of explaining policy to outgoing Ambassadors; Secretaries of State have many other things to do.

For this meeting to happen at all was not routine, and Werritty’s presence made it still more strange. Why was this meeting happening? I dug further, and learnt from a senior MOD source that there were two more very strange things about this meeting, neither noted by O’Donnell. There was no private secretary or MOD official present to take note of action points, and the meeting took place not in Fox’s office, but in the MOD dining room.

O’Donnell may have been able to fox the media, but to a former Ambassador this whole meeting stunk. I bombarded the FCO with more questions, and discovered an amazing fact left out by O’Donnell. The FCO spokesman replied to me on 21 October 2011 that:

“Mr Werritty was also present at an earlier meeting Mr Gould had with Dr Fox in the latter’s capacity as shadow Defence Secretary.”

So Gould, Fox and Werritty had got together before Gould was Ambassador, while Fox was still in opposition and while Werritty was – what, exactly? This opened far more questions than it answered. I put them to the FCO. When, where and why had this meeting happened? We only knew it was before May 2010, when Fox took office. What was discussed? There are very strict protocols for senior officials briefing opposition front bench spokesman. Had they been followed?

The FCO refused point blank to answer any further questions. I turned to an independent-minded MP, Jeremy Corbyn, who put down a parliamentary question to William Hague. The reply quite deliberately ignored almost all of Corbyn’s question, but it did throw up an extraordinary bit of information – yet another meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould, which had not been previously admitted.

Hague replied to Corbyn that:

“Our ambassador to Israel was also invited by the former Defence Secretary to a private social engagement in summer 2010 at which Adam Werritty was present.”

Getting to the truth was like drawing teeth, but the picture was building. O’Donnell had completely mischaracterised the “Briefing meeting” between Fox, Werritty and O’Donnell by hiding the fact that the three had met up at least twice before – once for a meeting when Fox was in opposition, and once for “a social engagement.” The FCO did not answer Corbyn’s question as to who else was present at this “social engagement”.

This was also key because Gould’s other meetings with Fox and Werritty were being characterised – albeit falsely – as simply routine, something Gould had to do in the course of his ambassadorial duties. But this attendance at “a private social engagement” was a voluntary act by Gould, indubitable proof that, at the least, the three were happy in each other’s company, but given that all three were very active in Zionist causes, it was a definite indication of something more than that.

That furtive meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould in the MOD dining room, deliberately held away from Fox’s office where it should have taken place, and away from the MOD officials who should have been there, now looks less like briefing and more like plotting.

My existing doubts about the second and only other meeting to which O’Donnell does admit make plain why that question is very important.

O’Donnell had said that Gould, Fox and Werritty had met on 6 February 2011:

“in Tel Aviv. This was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK Ambassador was present.”

There was something very wrong here. Any ex-Ambassador knows that any dinner with senior figures from your host country, at which the British Ambassador to that country and a British Secretary of State are both present, and at which international affairs are discussed, can never be “private”. You are always representing the UK government in that circumstance. The only explanation I could think of for O’Donnell’s astonishing description of this as a “private” dinner was that the discussion was far from being official UK policy.

I therefore asked the FCO who was at this dinner, what was discussed, and who was paying for it? I viewed the last as my trump card – if either Gould or Fox was receiving hospitality, they are obliged to declare it. To my astonishment the FCO refused to say who was present or who paid. Corbyn’s parliamentary question also covered the issue of who was at this dinner, to which he received no reply.

Plainly something was very wrong. I therefore again asked how often Gould had met or communicated with Werritty without Fox being present. Again the FCO refused to reply. But one piece of information that had been found by other journalists was that, prior to the Tel Aviv dinner, Fox, Gould and Werritty had together attended the Herzilya conference in Israel. The programme of this is freely available. It is an unabashedly staunch zionist annual conference on “Israel’s security”, which makes no pretence at a balanced approach to Palestinian questions and attracts a strong US neo-conservative following. Fox, Gould and Werritty sat together at this event.

Yet again, the liar O’Donnell does not mention it.

I then learnt of yet another, a sixth meeting between Fox, Gould and Werritty. This time my informant was another old friend, a jewish diplomat for another country, based at an Embassy in London. They had met Gould, Fox and Werritty together at the “We believe in Israel” conference in London in May 2011. Here is a photo of Gould and Fox together at that conference.

I had no doubt about the direction this information was leading, but I now needed to go back to my original source. Sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right under the noses of those looking for it, and on Wednesday I picked up the information in a tent at the Occupy London camp outside St Paul’s cathedral.

This is the story I was given.

Matthew Gould was Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy in Iran, a country which Werritty frequently visited, and where Werritty claimed to have British government support for plots against Ahmadinejad. Gould worked at the British Embassy in Washington; the Fox-Werritty Atlantic Bridge fake charity was active in building links between British and American neo-conservatives and particularly ultra-zionists. Gould’s responsibilities at the Embassy included co-ordination on US policy towards Iran. The first meeting of all three, which the FCO refuses to date, probably stems from this period.

According to my source, there is a long history of contact between Gould and Werritty. The FCO refuse to give any information on Gould-Werritty meetings or communications except those meetings where Fox was present – and those have only been admitted gradually, one by one. We may not have them all even yet.

My source says that co-ordinating with Israel and the US on diplomatic preparation for an attack on Iran was the subject of all these meetings. That absolutely fits with the jobs Gould held at the relevant times. The FCO refuses to say what was discussed. My source says that, most crucially, Iran was discussed at the Tel Aviv dinner, and the others present represented Mossad. The FCO again refuses to say who was present or what was discussed.

On Wednesday 2 November it was revealed in the press that under Fox the MOD had prepared secret and detailed contingency plans for British participation in an attack on Iran.

There are very important questions here. Was Gould really discussing neo-con plans for attacking Iran with Werritty and eventually with Fox before the Conservatives were even in government? Why did O’Donnell’s report so carefully mislead on the Fox-Gould-Werritty axis? How far was the FCO aware of MOD preparations for attacking Iran? Is there a neo-con cell of senior ministers and officials, co-ordinating with Israel and the United States, and keeping their designs hidden from the Conservative’s coalition partners?

The government could clear up these matters if it answered some of the questions it refuses to answer, even when asked formally by a member of parliament. The media have largely moved on from the Fox-Werritty affair, but have barely skimmed the surface of the key questions it raises. They relate to secrecy, democratic accountability and preparations to launch a war, preparations which bypass the safeguards of good government. The refusal to give straight answers to simple questions by a member of parliament strikes at the very root of our democracy.

Is this not precisely the situation we were in with Blair and Iraq? Have no lessons been learnt?

There is a further question which arises. Ever since the creation of the state of Israel, the UK had a policy of not appointing a jewish Briton as Ambassador, for fear of conflict of interest. As a similar policy of not appointing a catholic Ambassador to the Vatican. New Labour overturned both longstanding policies as discriminatory. Matthew Gould is therefore the first jewish British Ambassador to Israel.

Matthew Gould does not see his race or religion as irrelevant. He has chosen to give numerous interviews to both British and Israeli media on the subject of being a jewish ambassador, and has been at pains to be photographed by the Israeli media participating in jewish religious festivals. Israeli newspaper Haaretz described him as “Not just an ambassador who is jewish, but a jewish ambassador”. That rather peculiar phrase appears directly to indicate that the potential conflict of interest for a British ambassador in Israel has indeed arisen.

It is thus most unfortunate that it is Gould who is the only British Ambassador to have met Fox and Werritty together, who met them six times, and who now stands suspected of long-term participation with them in a scheme to forward war with Iran, in cooperation with Israel. This makes it even more imperative that the FCO answers now the numerous outstanding questions about the Gould/Werritty relationship and the purpose of all those meetings with Fox.

There is no doubt that the O’Donnell report’s deceitful non-reporting of so many Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings, the FCO’s blunt refusal to list Gould-Werritty, meetings and contacts without Fox, and the refusal to say who else was present at any of these occasions, amounts to irrefutable evidence that something very important is being hidden right at the heart of government. I have no doubt that my informant is telling the truth, and the secret is the plan to attack Iran. It fits all the above facts. What else does?

Please feel free to re-use and republish this article anywhere, commercially or otherwise. It has been blocked by the mainstream media. I write regularly for the mainstream media and this is the first article of mine I have ever been unable to publish. People have risked a huge amount by leaking me information in an effort to stop the government machinery from ramping up a war with Iran. There are many good people in government who do not want to see another Iraq. Please do all you can to publish and redistribute this information.

UPDATE: A commenter has already pointed me to this bit of invaluable evidence:

“My government absolutely agrees with your conception of the Iranian threat and the importance of your determination to battle it.” Dealing with the Iranian threat will be a large part of my work here.” Gould said.

From Israel National News. It also says that he will be trying to promote a positive atmosphere between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, but the shallowest or the deepest search shows the same picture; an entirely biased indeed fanatical Zionist who must give no confidence at all to the Palestinian Authority. He must be recalled.

This article can also be read on Craig Murray’s blog.

the secret life of Dr Fox and Mr Werritty – a scandal that almost went missing

With so much happening right now – multiple wars, revolutions, civil unrest, mass public protests and general strikes, not to mention the never-ending tragedy at Fukushima juxtaposed by our own government’s efforts to push ahead with the construction of more reactors, or the votes in parliament that further the deconstruction and sell-off of the NHS – there is just so much that is happening that the scandal surrounding the relationship between the Secretary of State for Defence, Liam Fox, and businessman, Adam Werritty, has mostly been passing me by. In the bigger scheme it barely seemed newsworthy…

An eternal triangle involving a politician, his closest buddy and filthy lucre was surely just one more example of the kinds of backslapping cronyism we’ve come to expect. And with Fox resigning from office on Friday, the whole sorry spectacle appeared to have come to its inevitable, if rather speedy, conclusion. But it transpires that there’s more, much more, to Liam and Adam’s fall from grace than immediately meets the eye –

“To many, it always appeared an unlikely friendship. When Liam Fox met Adam Werritty, one was a middle-aged politician well-established in public life and the other a student just starting out in adult life.”

was the strapline to The Telegraph Political Correspondent, James Kirkup’s delve into Fox and Werritty’s friendship from a week ago [Oct 10^th].

They’d met by chance at Edinburgh University. Fox the guest speaker, and Werritty, a student with big ambitions. In 2002, after their friendship had developed, Werritty moved to London, and took up residence in Fox’s London flat. He moved out again in 2003, but by then their friendship was firmly cemented. And then, in 2005, Werritty was chosen to be best man at Fox’s wedding. So that’s the background for anyone who doesn’t already know it, but of course there’s more, much more:

[Werritty’s] first business interest was health care, and he registered both UK Health Group Ltd — in which Dr Fox once owned shares — and UK Health Supply Services Ltd. By coincidence, Dr Fox was the Conservative shadow health secretary between 1999 and 2003, writing his party’s health policies and influencing national debate. […]

As Dr Fox settled into married life, Mr Werritty’s business empire grew. One of the companies he subsequently registered was Security Futures, a defence consultancy. By another coincidence, Dr Fox in 2005 became his party’s defence spokesman.¹

And this was just the beginning. Kirkup continues:

It was in that role that Dr Fox’s friendship with Mr Werritty appeared to spill over into his professional life as a leading politician.

Yes, Fox and Werritty were soon travelling everywhere together. Meetings with security think-tanks in Dubai (2007), at high-level conferences in Israel (2009), as well as trips to Sri Lanka the same year, officially to help out with the peace process after the country’s civil war. Not that Werritty had ever actually been appointed by Fox to work in any official capacity, as his special adviser; Werritty was never more than ‘a friend’. But the story gets much stranger again:

Some details of their friendship remain unclear, but it is known that Mr Werritty visited the Ministry of Defence’s secure Whitehall headquarters 14 times in 16 months. He has also visited the minister’s official residence in Admiralty Arch by Trafalgar Square.

Still, Dr Fox has insisted that their friendship has no official dimension. “Mr Werritty is not an employee of the MoD and has, therefore, not travelled with me on any official overseas visits,” he told MPs last month.

Click here to read James Kirkup’s full article.

But my own interest in the story was really piqued when I came across a post on Craig Murray’s blog from Thursday [the day before Fox announced his resignation]. Intriguingly, it began as follows:

This information comes straight from a source with direct access to the Cabinet Office investigation into Fox’s relationship with Werritty.

Murray then goes on to outline how Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary – a man who apparently prefers to be called by his initials: GOD – “has fixed with Cameron” to narrow the investigation, by only considering, as Murray puts it, Werritty’s “little grubby money-making for introductions to Fox”, and entirely overlooking something “much worse and much more serious”. So what could O’Donnell and Cameron be trying to keep under wraps? Murray, who draws a direct comparison to the Profumo Affair in the 1960s, says he knows:

The answer is that Werritty is paid by representatives of far right US and Israeli sources to influence the British defence secretary. It has been discussed within the MOD whether Werritty is being – knowingly or otherwise – run as an agent of influence by the CIA or Mossad. That is why the chiefs of the armed forces are so concerned, and why there is today much gagging at the stitch up within the Cabinet Office.

This has parallels to the Christine Keeler case but is much, much worse.

That the British Defence Minister holds frequent unrecorded meetings in the Ministry and abroad with somebody promoting the interests of foreign powers is much, much worse than a little cash-grubbing. That the person representing the foreign powers is actually present, apparently to all as a ministerial adviser, at meetings of Fox with important representatives of foreign nations is simply appalling.

Click here to read Craig Murray’s post entitled “The Real Werritty Scandal”.

By Friday [the day of Fox’s resignation] some of the mainstream media were catching on. Here is a report in the Guardian, which mentions claims that Fox was “conducting what a senior Whitehall source called a ‘maverick foreign policy’”, and that “what government officials are stressing is what they call Fox’s separate – “maverick” – foreign policy interests”, and that:

Officials expressed concern that Fox and Werritty might even have been in freelance discussions with Israeli intelligence agencies.²

Craig Murray adding in a post, also on Friday:

As I have been explaining, the real issue here is a British defence secretary who had a parallel advice structure designed expressly to serve the interests of another state and linked to that state’s security services. That is not just a sacking offence, it is treasonable.

Murray, in his efforts to get the story out, had also managed to get a short slot on Peter Oborne’s Radio 4 show “Week in Westminster”.

Click here to listen (Murray is about 9 minutes in) — Back in his blog, Murray says of the broadcast:

Incidentally my single sentence reference to Mossad was edited out, but I think my meaning remains clear.

Then yesterday, just a day after his Radio 4 interview, as Murray put it himself, the mainstream media finally woke up:

A week late, but the mainstream media has finally learnt (not least through my telling them) that it was the Mossad link that was really worrying Whitehall about Fox.

Click here to read Murray’s post.

Indeed, The Independent on Sunday actually ran with a front-page ‘exclusive’ : Werritty ‘plotted with Mossad to target Iran’:

Mr Werritty, 33, has been debriefed by MI6 about his travels and is so highly regarded by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad – who thought he was Mr Fox’s chief of staff – that he was able to arrange meetings at the highest levels of the Israeli government, multiple sources have told The IoS. ³

And the Mail on Sunday granted Murray space to present his own account.

Click here to read it.

Back on his own blog, Murray has again called on Matthew Gould, British Ambassador to Israel, to answer the questions he has put to him. After all, the real scandal is only beginning to be uncovered.

And Murray also takes a sideways swipe at the news media, writing:

The Indie on Sunday story of a Fox-Israel plot against Iran is a great deal more credible than Obama’s announcement of a plot by Iranian used car salesmen to employ the Canadian Mounties to assassinate Justin Timberlake outside the Won-Ton Chinese restaurant in Champaign-Urbana (I may have got some of the details of Obama’s fantasy wrong, but what’s the difference?)

So congratulations to Craig Murray on finally turning the mainstream media’s attention to such important revelations. It takes some doing these days, because unless a story is officially sanctioned, as was the case with Obama’s Won-Ton restaurant fantasy (see my previous post), it seems they just don’t want to know.

Click here to read more from Craig Murray.

1 From an article entitled “Liam Fox and Adam Werritty: an unlikely friendship” written by James Kirkup, published in The Telegraph on October 10, 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/conservative-mps-expenses/8817267/Liam-Fox-and-Adam-Werritty-an-unlikely-friendship.html

2 From an article entitled “Rightwing Tories rally to Liam Fox’s side” written by Patrick Wintour, Rupert Neate and Richard Norton-Taylor, published in the Guardian on October 14, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/13/rightwing-tories-rally-liam-fox

3 From an article entitled “Revealed: Fox’s best man and his ties to Iran’s opposition” written by Jane Merrick and James Hanning, published in The Independent on Sunday on October 16, 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-foxs-best-man-and-his-ties-to-irans-opposition-2371352.html