This is taken from No 10's own Press briefing. Just read carefully and read between the lines. Oh the joy of it:
"The Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) advised journalists that the timing of the publication of the Cabinet Secretary's response had yet to be settled because time was needed to collate and copy the relevant material. He said that he would be happy to bring forward the 3.45pm press briefing were any further information to come to light before then.
Asked why "another branch of Government" had told journalists that the Cabinet Secretary's response would be available at this morning's briefing, the PMOS said that as he was sure people could imagine, there were all sorts of pieces of paper flying around and it was inevitable that some people might get the wrong end of the stick. He could only apologise if journalists had been misinformed.
Asked if Cabinet had discussed Tessa Jowell's situation, the PMOS said no. It was being regarded as a completely separate matter, as was entirely appropriate.
Asked if the Cabinet Secretary would accede to a request by the Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, to conduct a fresh inquiry into the Home Office's actions in dealing with a request from Italian prosecutors for David Mills's extradition, the PMOS said that these were matters which would be dealt with once the Cabinet Secretary's response and various statements had been published. In answer to further questions about the Home Office aspect of the case, the PMOS said that the Home Office had issued a detailed rebuttal of any suggestion that it had applied anything other than the routine diplomatic protocols in relation to this matter. Mr Davis had written to the Cabinet Secretary following yesterday's PMQs. The matters in question would be dealt with at a later stage. Asked if that meant that the Cabinet Secretary would deal with this issue separately, the PMOS said that it was up to the Cabinet Secretary to make such a decision.
Asked if Downing Street had been contacted by the Italian prosecutors, the PMOS said not as far as he was aware. He also took the opportunity to emphasise that it was important for journalists to understand that there were two separate issues here. The first related to the Ministerial Code and Tessa Jowell. The second was about the ongoing investigation in Italy. While we were able to deal with the first matter, it would be entirely wrong for us to become involved in the Italian investigation in any way. Put to him that the construction of a "wall" between the two issues would be difficult in the light of the fact that it would be hard to decide whether the Ministerial Code had been breached until a judgement had been made as to whether the money which Mr Mills had received had been a gift or not, the PMOS acknowledged the legitimacy of the question being asked. However, as he had already said, it would be easier to address such issues once the Cabinet Secretary's response and the statements had been published.
Asked repeatedly if the Prime Minister believed Tessa Jowell's assertion that the money had not come from Prime Minister Berlusconi, the PMOS said that answering the question would mean him getting drawn into the Italian investigation which he was obviously unable to do. He reminded journalists of the importance of keeping the two issues he had outlined earlier separate. He underlined the fact that, in this country, it was important for us to observe the same standards of justice in relation to a foreign case as we would expect in a domestic case. That meant maintaining the tradition that someone was innocent unless proven guilty.
Asked how the Prime Minister felt about being used as a "referee" by Mr Mills, the PMOS said that he was unable to comment on this aspect of the case. It would seem that the material being put together by one side of the investigation was being leaked and since we did not have the whole picture - and nor did we want to become involved in the investigation - it would be unwise of him to provide any commentary. Asked to state categorically that Mr Mills was no longer "invoking" the Prime Minister's name or the fact that his wife was a Cabinet Minister to further his legal interests, as reported in today's Daily Mail, the PMOS repeated that he was unable to provide comment because to do so would mean him commenting on a matter which was part of an ongoing investigation, which he was not prepared to do.
Questioned as to whether the Prime Minister or other Ministers had taken any steps to talk to the Italian prosecutors to "stabilise the situation" in the light of the leaks appearing in the media, the PMOS said that he appreciated the intent behind the question inasmuch as it was clearly not the way we conducted judicial proceedings in this country. However, it wasn't for us to comment on another country's judicial processes.
Asked if the Prime Minister believed that "socialising" with Mr Mills, such as inviting him to Chequers, would be "appropriate or inappropriate" given the current situation, the PMOS reiterated his earlier point that someone was innocent unless proven guilty. That was the judicial standard in this country and was one we must all abide by. Asked if Mr Mills was right to suggest that he enjoyed the full support of the Prime Minister, the PMOS said that since the question was being asked as a result of leaked papers which were part of an ongoing investigation, he had no intention of becoming involved in the legal processes of another country.
Questioned as to whether the Prime Minister was already aware of the contents of the Cabinet Secretary's response, the PMOS said that we were in the final stages of preparing for the publication of the response. That was all he could say at the moment.
Asked if the Prime Minister continued to have full confidence in Tessa Jowell, the PMOS said that as he had been saying all week, the answer to that question was yes. For the avoidance of any doubt, that was spelled
Y-E-S, not N-O or M-A-Y-B-E.
Asked if the Prime Minister had spoken to Mr Berlusconi this week, the PMOS said not as far as he was aware. Asked when the Prime Minister had last spoken to Mr Berlusconi, the PMOS said that he couldn't give an exact date off the top of his head. That said, the Prime Minister spoke to the Italian Prime Minister on a regular basis, as you would expect. Asked if the Prime Minister had ever discussed Mr Mills with Mr Berlusconi, the PMOS said not as far as he was aware."
Where to begin on New Labour's latest scandal? Me thinks love of the rich man and celebrity culture is at the heart of this funny funny story.
“I believe it would be wiser to refrain from comment on the allegedly crucial role played by David Mills, the fanatically New Labour husband of Blair’s culture minister Tessa Jowell, in allegedly giving Berlusconi considerable legal assistance over rather controversial matters relating to allegedly massive international capital flows that preoccupied certain Milanese magistrates. On the other hand, there is no similar risk of falling foul of Britain’s draconian defamation laws in highlighting the fact that Prince Strozzi with whom Blair spent some of his Tuscan holidays is widely known to be a supporter of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia rather than of the Ulivo.” (from What Next Journal, Berlusconi and Europe, Tobias Abse).
...but as Silvio himself once said, "The political tradition of ancient thought, filtered in Italy by Machiavelli, says one thing clearly: every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs." Only problem now is it seems as if Mills is going to sing like a canary.
Yesterday Fabio de Pasquale and Alfredo Robledo, the Milan prosecutors in the case, said that a plea bargain was under discussion. Federico Cecconi, Mr Mills’s chief defence lawyer in Milan, confirmed that it was “an option”. Signor Cecconi disclosed that he had spent the past three days in talks in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland, close to the Swiss-Italian border.
Legal sources said that if Mr Mills were guilty of an offence and collaborated, he could expect a symbolic sentence of less than a year in prison — possibly suspended. Sources close to the investigation said they believed that Mr Mills could provide evidence damaging to the Italian leader, especially if he agreed to plea bargaining.
Craig Murray's good on this: " Finally, yesterday I reported a fact that the mainstream media still does not dare to print; that Mills was under Serious Fraud Office investigation (and his office was raided as a result) at around the same time that New Labour came to power. I also reported that some of the SFO staff on the case were confused and concerned that no prosecution arose."
More here...
The only large-scale farmers I've ever met have been Tory *s awsh in massive subsidy to produce chemical-doused food. My own instinct of the bird-flu panic has been that it tells us more about how we've industrialised food, and this has opened us up to some serious illness. Due to genetic selection and growth-promoting antibiotics, chickens raised for meat grow so fast that their hearts, lungs, and legs often can't support their unnatural bulk. Chicken faeces and bedding from poultry factory floors are common ingredients in animal feed. Hmm, sounds yummy. The whole thing is a food industry run for maximum profit which treat animals as a pure product. There's also the subtle racism of the coverage which portrays the pooor British farmer (always the victim) standing brave againt the foreign disease.
This report shows this to be exactly what's going on and suggests a completely different picture :
REPORT SAYS GLOBAL POULTRY INDUSTRY IS THE ROOT OF THE BIRD FLU CRISIS
"Small-scale poultry farming and wild birds are being unfairly blamed for the bird flu crisis now affecting large parts of the world. A new report from GRAIN shows how the transnational poultry industry is the root of the problem and must be the focus of efforts to control the virus. [1]
The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the H5N1 strain of bird flu. Once inside densely populated factory farms, viruses can rapidly become lethal and amplify. Air thick with viral load from
infected farms is carried for kilometres, while integrated trade networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old-chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eggs, chicken manure and animal feed.
"Everyone is focused on migratory birds and backyard chickens as the problem," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN. "But they are not effective vectors of highly pathogenic bird flu. The virus kills them, but is unlikely to be spread by them."
For example, in Malaysia, the mortality rate from H5N1 among village chicken is only 5%, indicating that the virus has a hard time spreading among small scale chicken flocks. H5N1 outbreaks in Laos, which is surrounded by infected countries, have only occurred in the nation's few factory farms, which are supplied by Thai hatcheries. The only cases of bird flu in backyard poultry, which account for over 90% of Laos' production, occurred next to the factory farms.
"The evidence we see over and over again, from the Netherlands in 2003 to Japan in 2004 to Egypt in
2006, is that lethal bird flu breaks out in large scale industrial chicken farms and then spreads," Kuyek explains.
[1] The full briefing, "Fowl Pay: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis", is
available here.
As Iraq descends in to Civil War, Robert Fisk takes a glance over Bush's pals in the Middle East:
"Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning "democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as "the greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that "contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States".
As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria's not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: "What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?" As Maureen Dowd, the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York Times, observed this month, Bush "believes in self-determination only if he's doing the determining ... The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react." And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might have added.
Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the "shock and awe" mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in the wastes of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa to consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret service in the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the best method of gleaning information from suspected "terrorists": to hold them down and stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until they have almost drowned.
The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the Algerians next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a few of the 150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The Algerian lads - and I've interviewed a few of them after their nightmares persuaded them to seek asylum in London - would strap their naked victims to a ladder and, if the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner swelled up like a balloon. There was a special department (at the Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld wants to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably raped before being dispatched by an execution squad.
All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the Algerians.
On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the United States and Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves political and economic as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very much value the co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..." Yes, I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to learn, the abuse of prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example, which now seems to have been the fault of journalists rather than America's thugs.
Read the full article here...
This Chris Floyd piece includes details of a new Amnesty report on the state of Civil Liberties in UK.
Read Blair's Dark Kingdom here...
