Five reasons the MI6 story is a lie, according to Craig Murray

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador who now spends his time telling the truth about the British state and its activities has asked that the following post of his be reproduced as widely as possible:

The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie. 

1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

2) The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense. No MI6 officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese for 50 years. The worst that could happen is they would be sent home. Agents’ – generally local people, as opposed to MI6 officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified. I once got very, very severely carpeted for adding an agents’ name to my copy of an intelligence report in handwriting, suggesting he was a useless gossip and MI6 should not be wasting their money on bribing him. And that was in post communist Poland, not a high risk situation. 

3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them. 

4) This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed – is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online. 

5) The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now? 

There you have five reasons the story is a lie. 

Craig Murray asked his fellow bloggers to republish his piece because in his words:

The site is under a strong denial of service attack from a bot trying to crash it by overloading with millions of pings from multiple locations. I presume the objective is to take down the revelation of the fake MI6 Snowden story, which had been read by tens of thousands already and is now really taking off.

While the copyright in that article remains mine, I grant permission for it freely to be reproduced by anybody, anywhere. I shall be grateful for multiple copies to be posted around the web so it can’t be taken down.

I don't know how much truth there is to any of this denial of service line, since it strikes me as a lot of effort to go to just to delete a blog post. That said, the MI6 post deserves a wider readership because I reckon that Murray has hit the nail firmly on the head with that one. The Sunday Times story does read like utter bollocks to be honest.

By the way, if you want to read the actual bollocks without paying to access Rupert Murdoch's site, then a copy of the Google cache has been stored at this link. Please note that it is the text only version - so scroll down the page to read it.

Tories back down on some of Scotland's subsidies

Today was a good news day for Scotland as the partial surrender of the Tory demand that Scotland make cuts of £170 million in its budget has been announced. The Tories have agreed to only £107 million instead, but sources in Tory HQ tell me that much of this will be covered by payments in other areas.

For instance the subsidy which allows the Scottish government to provide the BBC with a backdrop of saltire flags and bagpipe players no matter what the television report is actually about will  be increased and could go towards making up the new shortfall. "The advantage of this is that it will not only please the Scots, but it also means that the BBC stereotype of all things Scottish can be maintained," said my source who only agreed to speak on conditions of anonymity and following a promise that I made to keep quiet about a sex video she made during her days at Oxford thirty years ago.

Some cuts may have to be made in the door to door service that is currently provided to take the unemployed to and from home when they have to sign on, but my source told me that the Tories are hopeful that First Minster Nicola Sturgeon will agree that one car can collect and then take home three claimants at a time.

How will the hard working families in places like Nuneaton take this? My source told me that all is under control: "If they are stupid enough to believe that a vote for Labour last month would lead to a Scottish clan army invading Nuneaton and doing to it what the Soviet army did to Nemmesdorf in 1944, then they will swallow whatever guff we give them," she said. "They will probably think that this report of yours is the truth and that I am not a figment of your over-pornographic mind," she concluded, truthfully.

Charlie Kennedy dies suddenly: Mailoids blame the SNP

The death of Charlie Kennedy at the terribly young age of just 55 has left all of us stunned. As the then leader of the Liberal-Democrats he was the only senior political figure who opposed the war against Iraq in 2003, and he went on to position his party into a serious contender for political power for the first time since the Great War. He felt obliged to resign the leadership owing to too close a relationship with the bottle which I always thought was a pity. When people complained to President Abraham Lincoln that General Grant was a heavy drinker, Abe asked them to let him know what Sam's favourite tipple was so that a crate could be sent to him. The fools who ditched Kennedy and then turned the Lib-Dems into a Tory stooge party before leading it to destruction last month, might have been better advised to follow Lincoln's strategy and stick with Charlie.

Perhaps needless to say, the web's nastier denizens have taken the opportunity to blame the SNP for this tragedy. I am tempted to say that this is what you expect from creatures who really are lower than vermin, but what the hell, let's have the buggers instead.

As you might expect, the Daily Mail's readers are leading the charge, as the screenshots which follow will demonstrate. The interesting thing about these attacks is the way in which other Mailoids jump in to vote up the loathsome comments:

It's also interesting to see how people who object to the nastiness get voted down by the more traditional Mailoids who are clearly in a roll:

If you think that the Mailoids are bad enough, then Wings Over Scotland has proof that Twitter is even worse:

What all these commentators have in common, apart from being scum-sucking Tories, is that they tend to hail from the anally retentive towns of Southern and Midlands England. Chichester, Guildford and Walsall are all nothing more than places on a map to the more civilised members of British society, but they are overrepresented when it comes to the hatred that their inhabitants have for Scotland. The only reason that I can think of to account for that is because they resent that fact that Scotland refused to roll over for another kicking from the Tories or their stooge parties.

They could have done as the rest of us did and voted against the party that makes the rich even richer and reduces the poor to penury, but that would require not just a brain between their ears, but balls that harden in anticipation of the battles to come. Sadly for all of us, the lower middle class really are nothing more than people without the brass to be gaffers or the balls to be workers. It's much easier for these buffoons to blame greedy workers, or immigrants or Scots for their crappy standard of living, rather than fix the blame where it belongs which is with capitalism and the class that moves and shakes it.

As I have said before, the irrational hatred that these comments typify really is a one-way-street. The myth that Scots hate the English is just that, a myth. On the other hand, the sheer nastiness that flows from England into Scotland is real. The root of it, I am convinced, is jealousy. 

Deep down in their souls they know that they have got no fucking balls and they resent anyone who still wishes to take the fight to the Tory enemy.

We should feel pity for them. Pity, mixed with a good dose of contempt.