Captain Bob’s notorious interview with an ageing European dictator

[Paul Rigby]

Or how a fearless MI6 asset interrogated a war criminal

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/comm...rticle_continue

[Paul Rigby]

Or how a fearless MI6 asset interrogated a war criminal

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/comm...rticle_continue

I am appalled at my own lack of discrimination. How on earth could I have mistaken Captain Bob's grovelling rubbish for Garter Sash's probing examination of our beloved Prime Minister? By way of atonement, I now expose my error for the travesty it was:

“Dear Mr Prime Minister, you have been holding the highest political and state office in Britain for a decade, a fact for which we warmly congratulate you. What has — in your opinion — made you so popular with Britons?”

Timothy Garter Sash. Blair: Builder of Modern Britain (Scarlett Press, 2007), p.147.

“Nicolae Ceausescu bounds into the garden of the Palace of the People, looking as if he’s ready for another 18 years there…As for Rumania’s other pivotal alliance, what, I ask, has Rumania got out of its ‘special relationship’ with Moscow over the last decade? What was in it for us? The relationship itself, is his answer, and the influence it enables us to exert on other issues… ‘Time we had an independent foreign policy is the easiest applause-line in the world, but start distancing yourself from Moscow and see how your influence will be diminished.’”

Robert Maxwell, “Like it loathe it, after 18 years Ceausescu knows exactly what he stands for,” The Daily Mirror, 15 December 1989, pp.1-32

A deeply ashamed Rigby

[Paul Rigby]

Or how a fearless MI6 asset interrogated a war criminal

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/comm...rticle_continue

I am appalled at my own lack of discrimination. How on earth could I have mistaken Captain Bob's grovelling rubbish for Garter Sash's probing examination of our beloved Prime Minister? By way of atonement, I now expose my error for the travesty it was:

“Dear Mr Prime Minister, you have been holding the highest political and state office in Britain for a decade, a fact for which we warmly congratulate you. What has — in your opinion — made you so popular with Britons?”

Timothy Garter Sash. Blair: Builder of Modern Britain (Scarlett Press, 2007), p.147.

“Nicolae Ceausescu bounds into the garden of the Palace of the People, looking as if he’s ready for another 18 years there…As for Rumania’s other pivotal alliance, what, I ask, has Rumania got out of its ‘special relationship’ with Moscow over the last decade? What was in it for us? The relationship itself, is his answer, and the influence it enables us to exert on other issues… ‘Time we had an independent foreign policy is the easiest applause-line in the world, but start distancing yourself from Moscow and see how your influence will be diminished.’”

Robert Maxwell, “Like it loathe it, after 18 years Ceausescu knows exactly what he stands for,” The Daily Mirror, 15 December 1989, pp.1-32

A deeply ashamed Rigby

[Sid Walker]

Or how a fearless MI6 asset interrogated a war criminal

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/comm...rticle_continue

I am appalled at my own lack of discrimination. How on earth could I have mistaken Captain Bob's grovelling rubbish for Garter Sash's probing examination of our beloved Prime Minister? By way of atonement, I now expose my error for the travesty it was:

“Dear Mr Prime Minister, you have been holding the highest political and state office in Britain for a decade, a fact for which we warmly congratulate you. What has — in your opinion — made you so popular with Britons?”

Timothy Garter Sash. Blair: Builder of Modern Britain (Scarlett Press, 2007), p.147.

“Nicolae Ceausescu bounds into the garden of the Palace of the People, looking as if he’s ready for another 18 years there…As for Rumania’s other pivotal alliance, what, I ask, has Rumania got out of its ‘special relationship’ with Moscow over the last decade? What was in it for us? The relationship itself, is his answer, and the influence it enables us to exert on other issues… ‘Time we had an independent foreign policy is the easiest applause-line in the world, but start distancing yourself from Moscow and see how your influence will be diminished.’”

Robert Maxwell, “Like it loathe it, after 18 years Ceausescu knows exactly what he stands for,” The Daily Mirror, 15 December 1989, pp.1-32

A deeply ashamed Rigby

Don't be too hard on yourself Paul.

Yours was a mistake any reasonable person could make - although I understand Maxwell was not MI6 but Mossad (a related clan of murderous gangsters).

Great quote from The Mirror, BTW. A gem.

Edited April 27, 2007 by Sid Walker

[Paul Rigby]

I understand Maxwell was not MI6 but Mossad (a related clan of murderous gangsters).

Sid,

You forgot "self-enriching" before "murderous gangsters." And I have the distinct impression Pergamon Press was an MI6 jolly.

Paul

[Paul Rigby]

Or how a fearless MI6 asset interrogated a war criminal

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/comm...rticle_continue

Garter Sash was widely pilloried for his nauseatingly sycophantic interview with Blair, as he acknowledges here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...2076177,00.html

Alas, his apologias – for both the war-criminal soon-to-be-ex-Prime-Minister and his own sagacious self – are every bit as nauseating as the original piece. Note, in particular, the determined attempt to save “liberal interventionism” from contamination by the charnel house that is Iraq. The Balkans is his great exemplar. Here’s one piece – and subject- that never quite makes it into any of his accounts of what he terms “Blair’s finest hour”:

Peter Beaumont, Ed Vulliamy, & Paul Beaver, “CIA’s bastard army runs riot in Balkans,” 11 March 2001, p.2:

“The United States secretly supported the ethnic Albanian extremists now behind insurgencies in Macedonia and southern Serbia.

The CIA encouraged former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters to launch a rebellion in southern Serbia in an attempt to undermine the then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, according to senior European officers who served with the international peace-keeping force in Kosovo (K-For), as well as leading Macedonian and US sources.

The accusations were made in a series of interviews…They emerge as America has been forced into a rapid U-turn over its support for Albanian extremists in Kosovo seeking a ‘Greater Kosovo’ that would include Albanian communities in Serbia and Macedonia.

In the past week ethnic Albanian guerrillas have intensified their campaign of attacks in two areas, threatening a new war in the region which last week put US troops in the firing line in the Balkans for the first time.

The accusations have led to tension in K-For. European officers are furious that the Americans have allowed guerrilla armies in its sector to train, smuggle arms and launch attacks across two international borders.

One European K-For battalion commander told…yesterday: ‘The CIA has been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Now he’s gone the US State Department seems incapable of reining in its bastard army.’

He added: ‘Most of last year, there was growing frustration with US support for the radical Albanians. US policy was and still is out of step with the other NATO allies.’

The claim was backed by senior Macedonian officials in the capital, Skopje. ‘What has been happening with the National Liberation Army [which has been responsible for a series of attacks on Macedonia’s borders in recent weeks] and the UCPMB [its sister organisation in southern Serbia] is very similar to what happened when the KLA was launched in 1995-96,’ said one.

‘I will only say this: the US intelligence agencies have not been honest here.’

The claims were given extra credence from an unexpected source – Arben Xharafi, leader of Macdeonia’s main Albanian party who tried to prevent the crisis on the border igniting an ethnic civil war inside Macedonia itself.

A US State Department official blamed the last administration. There had now been ‘a shift of emphasis.’”

Did I mention the Pentagon plans for an oil pipeline through the Balkans? Or the Al Qaida legions imported by the CIA to train and fight with the KLA? Hell, no. But then nor does Garter Sash.

PS The name of the loony left-wing, conspiracy theorist paper in which the above report appeared? The Observer, the Grauniad's Sunday sister-paper.

[Guest David Guyatt]

I also think he was mainly SIS, although that does not limit his use to other agencies on an ad hoc basis. I was told that once it was clear he was going to be prosecuted for criminal fraud, he had to be got rid of... just take your pick who pulled the metaphorical trigger - Brits, Yanks, Israeli's.

David

[Paul Rigby]

I also think he was mainly SIS, although that does not limit his use to other agencies on an ad hoc basis. I was told that once it was clear he was going to be prosecuted for criminal fraud, he had to be got rid of... just take your pick who pulled the metaphorical trigger - Brits, Yanks, Israeli's.

David

Garter Sash is dead? When? Who done it?