In BAA's pocket

The Sunday Times story about Department for Transport officials colluding with BAA to fix the results of the consultation on a third Heathrow is a real scandal. Sadly, it doesn't look as if it will be picked up as such.

It's another example of how civil servants in the Labour government see themselves as there to do the bidding of big business. The Times also revealed last October that civil servants had conspired with mobile phone companies to stop the EU cutting charges for international calls.

Not Zimbabwe yet

The Independent reports that the Ministry of Defence, fresh from gagging SAS whistleblower Ben Griffin, has obtained a court order to stop the intermittent peace camp outside the Aldermaston nuclear weapons facility. The Indy criticises the move as another curtailment of the right to protest, which is true, but is that the intention? The monthly protests have attracted little attention but the story is now front page news and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is drumming up support for a day of action to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Aldermaston march.

Meanwhile the Indy has another story about how a Zimbabwean trade unionist was tortured and made to say 'Robert Mugabe is always right'. That's true big brother stuff and however obsessive and repressive Gordon Brown is becoming, we're not quite at that level yet.

'Monster' Hillary claims her first victim

Hillary Clinton has claimed the head of a key member of Barack Obama's campaign who called her a 'monster'. Samantha Power used the M-word in an interview with the Scotsman, apparently saying that the it was off the record.

The paper printed the insult, on the basis that the interview was said in advance to be off the record and therefore that anything Power said was fair game.

Hillary then jumped in and, to prove that she is not someone who eats people up and spits them out, called for Power to be sacked.

There are some challenging ethical issues here. I think when people try to spin things with off the record attacks, it's just hard luck when it backfires. But it doesn't look like Power was doing that. She was promoting her book in the UK with little expectation that anything she said would affect the campaign in the US.

Ironically, the New Statesman has a profile of Power.

For Iran, (don't) read Iraq

Today's Guardian has the type of story that preceded the invasion of Iraq, an anonymous source feeding a supposedly intelligence-based story about weapons of mass destruction. This time it's about Iran:

The British government said yesterday that Tehran could still be developing a nuclear weapon, and called into question a key American intelligence finding that work on building an Iranian bomb had stopped in 2003.

Apparently, the UK did its own intelligence assessment shortly after the US National Intelligence Estimate said that Iran had dropped its nuclear weapons programme. Was it the Joint Intelligence Committee by any chance?

The anonymous source appears to be Simon Smith, Britain's representative on the International Atomic Energy Authority board, who is quoted directly in the article. The Guardian tells us that:

The evidence has been met with scepticism by several members of the IAEA, who point to the debacle over WMD intelligence on Iraq.

The senior British diplomat said, however: "Just because we got it wrong on Iraq doesn't mean we're getting it wrong on Iran."

Or should that be, 'just because the stories we fed the press on Iraq were dodgy, doesn't mean they won't fall for it again'?

Ben Griffin speaks out

You can see Ben Griffin, now gagged by the government to prevent further claims about UK involvement in rendition/torture, on YouTube:

They believe we think

The Telegraph reports that:

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is escalating its probe into alleged bribery and corruption at BAE Systems, with one line of investigation being a series of commission payments personally overseen by chief executive Mike Turner during the late 1980s.

It's a good article, with some inside information. But this really spoils it:

It is thought the company, which has always maintained the commissions paid are perfectly legal, legitimate and not bribes, believes Turner is being unfairly smeared.

So Turner, who is still chief executive, wants to claim that he is being unfairly smeared. It's not unusual for such spin to be dressed up as 'X believes he is hard done by'. Of course, the journalist has no way of knowing what X really believes. Here the journalist put some small distance between herself and what Turner believes. But still, if she has to admit she doesn't know what Turner believes, she should leave the spin out altogether.

Was Harry at risk?

As the press continue to go ga-ga over prince Harry in Afghanistan, it's obvious that for the most part the government has achieved a huge propaganda victory with the help of a compliant media. Editors here are said to have unanimously agreed to a 'news blackout' (conspiracy of silence) over Harry's deployment on the grounds that publicising it would put his life and other lives 'at risk'.

But, as I pointed out the other day, the idea that people in a war can be kept entirely safe is a bit strange. Of course, to make Harry a hero we have to believe he was in some kind of danger. According to the Sunday Times, publicist Max Clifford thinks it was all just a PR stunt. Others praise Harry's bravery.

But if Harry was at risk in Afghanistan anyway, how can the media justify concealing his deployment? Perhaps he would have been more at risk had we been told the truth, but can a conspiracy of silence like this be justified on the grounds of relative risk. It looks more like the media engaged in the usual faustian pact of co-operation for access, access that means propaganda for the government. John Williams, the BBC's world news editor, admits as much here.

I think the media would have been more honest if they had said, 'OK we won't reveal his deployment but we won't join in the propaganda either.' But of course there would be no possibility of the media not breaking ranks on that.