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This is the key section from my new book which the publisher is
unwilling to publish due to legal threats from Schillings libel
lawyers, acting on behalf of the mercenary commander Tim Spicer:
" Peter Penfold was back in the UK. He was interviewed
separately. Both Penfold and Spicer were interviewed under caution,
as suspects for having broken the arms embargo.
Then, suddenly, Tony Blair intervened. On 11 May 1998, without
consulting the FCO, he gave a statement to journalists. Penfold,
Blair declared, was “a hero”. A dictatorship had been successfully
overthrown and democracy restored. Penfold had “Done a superb job in
trying to deal with the consequences of the military coup.” All this
stuff about Security Council Resolutions and sanctions was “an
overblown hoo-ha”.
I believe this episode is extremely important. In 1998 the
country was still starry-eyed about Blair, but with the benefit of
hindsight, this intervention points the way towards the disasters of
his later years in office. It is extraordinarily wrong for a Prime
Minister to declare that a man is a hero, when Customs had
questioned him two days earlier under caution over the very matter
the Prime Minister is praising. It shows Blair’s belief that his
judgement stood above the law of the land, something that was to
occur again on a much bigger scale when he halted the Serious Fraud
Office investigation into British Aerospace’s foreign bribes. But of
course Blair's contempt for UN security council resolutions on the
arms embargo, and the belief that installing democracy by invasion
could trump the trivia of international law, prefigures precisely
the disaster of Iraq. As with Iraq, Blair was also conveniently
ignoring the fact that Sierra Leone was left a mess, with Kabbah in
charge of little more than Freetown.
In the FCO we were astonished by Blair’s intervention, and deeply
puzzled. Where had it come from? It differed completely from Robin
Cook’s views. Who was drafting this stuff for Blair to the effect
that the UN and the law were unimportant? For most of us, this was
the very first indication we had of how deep a hold neo-con thinking
and military interests had on the Blair circle. It was also my first
encounter with the phenomenon of foreign policy being dictated by
Alistair Campbell, the Prime Inister’s Press Secretary, The military
lobby, of course, was working hard to defend Spicer, one of their
own.
A few days later Customs and Excise concluded their
investigations. A thick dossier, including documentation from the
FCO, from the raid on Sandline’s offices, and from elsewhere, was
sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The Customs and Excise team
who had interviewed us told me that the recommendation was that both
Spicer and Penfold be prosecuted for breach of the embargo. The
dossier was returned to Customs and Excise from the Crown
Prosecution Service the very same day it was sent. It was marked, in
effect, for no further action. There would be no prosecution. A
customs officer told me bitterly that, given the time between the
dossier leaving their offices and the time it was returned, allowing
time for both deliveries, it could not have been in the CPS more
than half an hour. It was a thick dossier. They could not even have
read it before turning it down.
I felt sick to my stomach at the decision not to prosecute Spicer
and Penfold. So were the customs officers investigating the case; at
least two of them called me to commiserate. They had believed they
had put together an extremely strong case, and they told me that
their submission to the Crown Prosecution Service said so.
The decision not to prosecute in the Sandline case was the first
major instance of the corruption of the legal process that was to be
a hallmark of the Blair years. Customs and Excise were stunned by
it. There is no doubt whatsoever that Spicer and Penfold had worked
together to ship weapons to Sierra Leone in breach of UK law.
Security Council 1132 had been given effect in British law by an
Order in Council. I had never found in the least credible their
assertions that they did not know about it. I had personally told
Spicer that it would be illegal to ship arms to Sierra Leone, to any
side in the conflict. Penfold’s claim never to have seen an
absolutely key Security Council Resolution about a country to which
he was High Commissioner is truly extraordinary.
But even if they did not know, ignorance of the law is famously
no defence in England. Who knows what a jury would have made of this
sorry tale of greed, hired killers and blood diamonds. But I have no
doubt at all – and more importantly nor did the customs officers
investigating the case – that there was enough there for a viable
prosecution.
The head of the Crown Prosecution Service when it decided not to
prosecute was Barbara Mills. Barbara Mills is a very well-connected
woman in New Labour circles. She is married to John Mills, a former
Labour councillor in Camden. That makes her sister-in-law to Tessa
Jowell, the New Labour cabinet minister with a penchant for taking
out repeated mortgages on her home, and then paying them off with
cash widely alleged to have come from Silvio Berlusconi, the friend
and business colleague of her husband David Mills, who according to
a BBC documentary by the estimable John Sweeney has created offshore
companies for known Camorra and Mafia interests. Tessa Jowell and
David Mills were also both Camden Labour Councillors, and are close
to Tony Blair. Blair is also a great friend of Berlusconi, despite
the numerous criminal allegations against Berlusconi and his long
history of political alliances with open fascists. Just to complete
the cosy New Labour picture, another brother-in-law of Barbara Mills
and Tessa Jowell is Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.
Did any of those relationships of Barbara Mills, the Director of
Public Prosecutions, affect the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision
not to proceed with the case, and to take that decision in less time
than it would have taken them to read the dossier Customs and Excise
sent them?
Barbara Mills was to resign as Director of Public Prosecutions
later that year after being personally criticised in his judgement
by a High Court judge who ruled against the Crown Prosecution
Service for continually failing to prosecute over deaths in police
custody. That has not stopped the extremely well connected Dame
Barbara from being appointed to a string of highly paid public
positions since then. "
It is infuriating that, Maxwell style, Spicer (who has made
millions form the war in Iraq) is using the prohibitive costs of
defending a libel case to intimidate my publisher. The result is
that important information I received at first hand, and an account
of events to which I am eye-witness, is being repressed, as is an
important independent critique of early Blair foreign policy.
I am not currently confident the book will get published at all -
I am not prepared to put out anodyne pap, which hides the truth,
under my name.
Posted by craig on
October 1, 2008 2:34 PM in the category
The Book
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