The BBC still doing their bit to promote Snowden’s treachery as a good thing:

Snowden spying leaks prompt millions to protect data

Never mind his spying has resulted in extremely serious difficulties for the intelligence services looking to combat islamic terrorists as they learn not just the intelligence gathering capabilities of the intelligence services but more importantly the techniques used.

The fact that the intelligence services could monitor so much information is nothing new as shown by this report from 1999:

Echelon spy network revealed

Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.

So why would the BBC continue to tell us that Snowden has revealed anything new about the extent of surveillance or eulogise him for the service he has supposedly provided to the world?

Anyone would think the BBC believes the real enemy isn’t the likes of the Taliban and its Islamic fellow travellers but the intelligence services who are trying to protect us from such mass murderers.

If like me you have been listening or watching the BBC for the last few years and hearing their coverage of the alleged abuse of Iraqis or Afghans by British troops you will know that the BBC has given itself over to the likes of lawyer Phil Shiner and his extraordinary tales, his own very singular version of the truth.

Today the BBC must be absolutely gutted as the Al Sweady inquiry clears, as expected, British troops of allegations they tortured and killed prisoners.

The BBC has put a lot of work into helping Shiner smear the Army’s reputation and put a great many soldiers through the wringer for so many years.

In 2008 the BBC’s Panorama produced a programme, On Whose Orders?, that claimed to investigate the allegations….here is what one viewer thought of the programme:

Is it just me or do these left wing lobbyists and solicitors actually work with, or very close with the BBC , they have a voice out of all proportion and seem to be able to spout whatever bollox they like on the BBC, I swear they should give Shami Chakrabati her own show, for someone who’s never been elected as any kind of public official, she seems to get more airtime than the PM!

Is it any co-incidence that her sister works for the beeb?

What I’m getting at is do these far left lawyers aproach the bbc with program ideas?

Make no mistake , this was phil shiners program, the bbc only tried to distance themselves from him at the end because of all the critisism they’d recieved in all the major newspapers , that’s the reason they emphisised the program was still being made in the newspaper reports, to do some last minute distancing from phil shiner.

 

The Sun newspaper wasn’t impressed:

Beeb ‘slurs’ on Iraq heroes

The BBC were initially blocked from broadcasting the programme but went to court to force the issue so insistent were they about finding out the ‘truth’ of the matter:

Panorama’s legal victory

Panorama has won an important victory in the High Court against the Ministry of Defence which was attempting to prevent the broadcast of details of alleged abuse by soldiers in Iraq.

The Panorama programme ended with a bit of a disclaimer…as set out in the web report:

Panorama has seen no proof that prisoners died at the hands of their captors and concludes that the case being brought by solicitors Phil Shiner and Martyn Day represents the most extreme interpretation of a troubling but confusing incident. They are asking for the bodies to be disinterred and evidence to be handed to Scotland Yard.

 

Despite that dsitinct lack of proof for the next 5 years the BBC continued to bombard us with the allegations in a manner that suggested there was far more substance to them than there was…as we now know…they being the result of deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hatred….you can wonder whether the judge was talking about the Iraqis, Shiner, the BBC or all three of them.

The BBC was very proud of its Panorama programme stating this on the announcement of the inquiry:

New inquiry into British army abuse in Iraq vindicates Panorama

Ironically the first line of this pyrrhic victory was this:

Time can make a world of difference in an emotive, ongoing story.

 

The BBC goes on to suggest:

In revisiting these allegations through public inquiries, the entire system of military justice will inevitably be called into question.

 

Well I imagine military justice has been vindicated…the RMP said there was no case…and there was no case….it was clearly a case of highly suspect allegations being encouraged by ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers backed up by a media organisation that had its fingers badly burnt as it was caught lying about the Iraq War Dossier and has been seeking to exact revenge ever since.

As the BBC was so clearly ready to congratulate itself on firstly getting its ‘legal victory’ and then slapping itself on the back when it thought itself ‘vindicated’ perhaps it should now make a very large apology to the Public it so badly misled and not least the soldiers it helped pillory and their families who have all had to suffer these allegations for so long.

Con Coughlin at the Telegraph is of the same mind:

Al Sweady inquiry: The British Army deserves a full apology from the BBC

Looking back, it is amazing just how many people were prepared to believe the accusations that the British Army routinely tortured detainees.

BBC limbering up for a new bout of blackening the reputation of the British military today, ahead of the publication of the Al Sweady Inquiry report. I heard a BBC journalist intone this morning that on some occasions Iraqi combatants were…..gasp…SHOUTED at. Oh the horror. When you combine this with the BBC’s embrace of the partisan Democrat Senate report on the CIA, we see the remarkable sight of the State broadcaster damning OUR armed forces whilst the enemy slaughter at will around the world. It’s my view that had the BBC been as pervasive in WW2 as it is now, we could not have won the war because we had to actually FIGHT back. In this refined times that is not possible and the BBC ensures this is the case by pushing the £30m absurdity of this report, in my view.

On time and ready for completion. No sooner had the BBC been propagating the “lone wolf and disturbed individual” meme over the Sydney Jihadist than a group of Pakistani jihadists slaughter over 130 schoolchildren. Hard to put that one down to the preferred “lone wolf” theory, eh? Fill the space.

Your help required. As we all know the BBC is riddled with connections to the UK political left. Do me a favour and detail as many names as you can with the political lineage. I ask for a good reason!

Here you go, a new Open Thread. I see the BBC are virtually orgasmic about the latest UKIP “revelation” and I heard them discussing on the Today programme whether there was a core UKIP support that is indeed homophobic and racist. Plus ca change. Meanwhile, BBC doing all they can to suggest that a devout Muslim has been taken hostage by coffee extremists in Sydney! The floor is yours…

Labour has issued a document that lays out its election strategy for dealing with UKIP…here they talk about how Labour should talk about immigration……essentially only talk about it in order to raise other issues that Labour would prefer to talk about…say the NHS or cuts…change the narrative not people’s minds….

As a political party, we are more effective at changing what is discussed and debated (the salience of the issues), as opposed to changing what may be long-held and entrenched opinions of each party or views on which party has the best policies on each issue. For example, in autumn 2013 we saw a sharp rise in the salience of energy prices in the wake of Ed’s policy announcement at Annual Conference and the integrated campaigns we ran in the weeks and months that followed. More recently, we have seen a substantial increase in the salience of the NHS.

Following from this, when we embark on policy messaging around immigration, which is not an area where Labour has the strongest lead over other parties, we should ensure that this messaging is always done in conjunction with other policy areas. The purpose of this is to raise the salience of those issues in which Labour has a much clearer lead and stands to benefit more from their prominence with the electorate. This is especially true when messaging comes from the local candidate and local party, where the magnitude of this effect may be greatest.

The BBC seems to have taken that approach on board for its reporting as noted in a previous post…..

The BBC field reporter, Matthew Price,  summed it up with the new pro-immigration line of defence…..whilst most studies show that immigrants bring little benefit, if any to the country, Price decided to state that the problem is that the benefits they do bring are being hijacked by national government and resources are being removed from the area they are created in….the problems are created by government not immigrants.

‘Islamists’ take 20 hostages in Sydney cafe siege

Don Jonnison likes to play down the threat of Islamic extremism in Oz and play up the anti-Muslim vibe:

Here Donnison blames the war in Iraq for the rise of ISIS and the radicalisation of  Muslims…never mind that 9/11 happened before 2003.

No doubt he’s working on a line for this story…..

Let’s remember where his heart really lies:

The BBC’s idea of how a poll on the brilliance of its news website should really be run:

When assesssing the BBC’s coverage of the Democratic Party’s hatchet job on the CIA consider this from Douglas Murray:

‘Torture is torture’ ignores the complex nature of intelligence gathering

Murray appeared on the BBC’s ‘This Week’ putting some of the points he raises in the article……but will any of his concerns be reflected in subsequent BBC reporting?  The BBC has a habit of having such discussions on controversial issues but entirely failing to filter the relevant findings through to the news department or its presenters who carry on as if there is no other line to take other than the one chosen by the BBC in its general reporting, shows and news bulletins.

Here there’s not a single utterance of any doubt about the Senate Committee’s report.

But in this article the BBC actually looks at some of the nuances so often left out by the everyday news and current affairs discussions on BBC shows…such as the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee was the ‘oversight’ committee for the CIA and its activities……if torture was going on they must have known about it….the Democrats claim the CIA lied to them…but even the BBC admits the interrogation techniques were an ‘open secret’….

Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads up the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke on Tuesday on the Senate floor.  This committee oversees the CIA, and agency officials are required to tell committee members about their activities.

Yet she said the CIA officials misled her and others about the interrogation programme, keeping it a closely-guarded secret.

The real story is more complicated.

The CIA’s interrogation programme, for example, was a badly-kept secret.

People all over Washington knew what was going on. Condoleezza Rice, as President George W Bush’s national security adviser, said she would “not object”, according to the report.

Others at the White House followed suit.

 

The CIA was religiously demanding written sanction for their interrogations….did the SIC not know of these requests and if not why were they not asking about them?

In this climate of fear Mr Rizzo and other CIA officials were grappling with the prospect of conducting interrogations for the first time in the agency’s history.

Mr Rizzo paved the way for the harsh interrogations by ensuring they fell within the parameters of the law. He did it in the way a lawyer does: He got it in writing.

Between 2002 and 2005 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel lawyers wrote several memos about interrogations, saying the methods could not be described as torture.

 

And:

According to the report, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden said: “every committee member was ‘fully briefed,‘ and that ‘this is not CIA’s programme. This is not the president’s programme. This is America’s programme.'”

People at the White House knew what the CIA was doing. So did people in Congress, as well as lawyers and journalists.

 

How then did the Democrats on the SIC not know anything….or are they just telling porkies for political gain?

I haven’t heard a BBC presenter talking on this issue who doesn’t start from the point that the Senate Intelligence Committee [failing to mention it was Democratic and didn’t interview any CIA people] found the CIA guilty of torturing people and went on from there to lead the discussion down a path that inevitably didn’t reach the right conclusions due to being based on a false premise to start with.

Will you see such important considerations reflected in the BBC’s everyday coverage when you listen to programmes from the likes of Nicky Campbell and Peter Allen that probably get the bulk of the BBC’s audience?  I doubt it if past history is anything to go by…..look how the BBC reported the FIFA ‘investigation’ into corruption in the bidding process for the world cup when Russian and Qatar were allegedly cleared of any corruption whilst England were pilloried…and the BBC fully accepted that narrative until new revelations that couldn’t be ignored came along.

The narrative will be ‘CIA (Neo-con Republican approved) tortured people, Britain may be involved, this is a moral outrage and a stain on the West…isn’t it?’ with all the nuance, depth, complexity, and the failure to pin the blame on a single guilty party,  removed.

There is another angle on the business of interrogation that looks at whether ‘torture’ is effective…the BBC has decided it has been proven not to work,  choosing to highlight this finding:

What did the Senate committee find out?

1) The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.

2)The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.

But do they work?…….

The enhanced techniques work.

The Central Intelligence Agency repeatedly tortured suspected terrorists, regularly lied about it to Congress and the White House, and, for all the pain and trouble this caused the agency and the United States, didn’t end up extracting a single piece of valuable information not readily available by other means.

That, at least, is the conclusion of the forthcoming Feinstein report, a long and, in certain quarters, much-anticipated review of the CIA’s detainee and interrogation programs during the Bush administration.

Now, for the first time, one of the lead interrogators is attempting to tell the other side of the story. Writing under the pseudonym Jason Beale, he has produced a provocative 39-page document in an effort to counter the narrative pushed by Democrats and amplified by journalists eager to discredit the program.

News accounts of the forthcoming Feinstein report make clear that a central claim of that narrative will be its most contentious: The techniques didn’t work.

Beale challenges that contention on the basis of his experience in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) course taken by intelligence and military personnel exposed to a high risk of capture.

Here is the actual document from the interrogator that reveals the duplicity of the Democrats who now deny all knowledge of the interrogation programme…..

An Interrogator Breaks His Silence

When your unanimous and full-throated opposition to the program you once supported hinges upon the notion that it was not only immoral, but ineffective –  because how can you explain shutting down a program, however objectionable, which was effective at pulling actionable intelligence out of high value Al Qaeda leadership detainees?

When the President who signed the executive order shutting down the program, having actually seen the intelligence after being inaugurated and spoken with the leadership at CIA, changes his campaign trail characterization from “It didn’t work; people will say anything to make it stop” to “even if it did produce some information, we don’t know if we could have gotten that information using standard techniques.”

When the only viable narrative remaining is that it was approved by Democrats briefed on the program, it had the full support of briefed Democrats until it (and the notion of their support) became public, those same Democrats then characterized it as ineffective and immoral, yet significant doubt remains after credible claims that information gathered in the program led to Bin Laden.

You [the Democrats of the SIC] can count on the media and various pundits to advance your position in an incurious and uncritical manner.

I know that we couldn’t have collected the same information using standard techniques because I was an expert in using standard techniques –  I used them thousands of times over two decades –   and the notion that I could have convinced the detainees [redacted] to provide closely-held information without the use of EITs is laughable. There is zero chance. Zero.