Election hustings 2017

I spoke in my 2 mins about the BCR; my own support of the NHS in funding RW NHS Trust to the tune of £9,600; my time as a social worker in protecting children more than protecting children services; how I failed the 11+ and went to a secondary mod and therefore, I was against anymore grammar schools; funding trams instead of returning the trains was no way to reduce poverty; the poor get austerity, the rich transport bosses get their grossly extravagant trams; foreign aid is better than foreign policy that brings war to foreign lands like Afgh, Iraq, Libya, Syria; Churchill in full support of using chemical weapons in the World War and between the two halves; JC of Nazareth as a great role model and JC of Islington as a man who put his conscience first in rebelling over 400 times while he was a backbencher.

Are our intelligence services as intelligent and as essential and as useful as they want us to think?

Dear Prof Richard

I was the guy who asked the question on Sunday morning, "Were we unnecessarily paranoid about Soviet Russia in the decades of MAD.  Why all the fuss and nonsense from our spies when it was MAD that just about prevented a nuclear holocaust?"

Please could you check, clarify and comment on my report, below of what you said on Sunday.  Ignore my rather jaundiced, unpatriotic, despairing and dissident interpretation over the usefulness of our secret services!

Very many thanks, if you are able to oblige.

Tim

Richard Aldrich replied and confirmed the facts as being correct.

​The offering, below is after his sub editing and that he called "a fiesty piece !!!!" The facts and annual costs of £2/3 billions are his; the conclusions I have drawn are mine:-​

​At the Wigtown Book Festival on Sunday, I heard Richard Aldrich, Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick, speak about his book about GCHQ.  From what I heard, our top ranking intelligent intelligence officers (probably mostly from Oxbridge) got things wrong over Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons at the time of the Gulf War in 1990/91.  They told the politicians that he did not have any WMD but, it seems that he did have them all the time, and lots of them!  So in 2002/3 there was not only political pressure on them "to bend the intelligence" towards invasion but, also a fear of getting it wrong a second time. Ironically, this led them to over-correct and, again to get things wrong, by telling Blair and Bush that this time they were fairly sure he had them.  Therefore, twice they have been mistaken in the case of only one country.  Aldrich said that "Saddam Hussein was deliberately ambiguous over his WMD" in order to keep his enemies, like Iran, guessing.

Therefore, are the 

​two or three ​

billions of pounds spent every year on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 worth all the money?  They all work so closely  with America's National Security Agency, too that there must be much duplication of wasted effort of finite resources and much hot air - of dangerous greenhouse gases.

It seems that all kinds of weird and wonderful shenanigans went  on over bugs in embassies during the Cold War that was all a complete waste of everyone's time and money.  Time and again, our intelligence officers were taken by surprise at what was known by the Russians despite exhaustive efforts to keep it all secret!  I can only conclude that it was mutually assured destruction (MAD) - and mutual destruction very many times over, too - that prevented nuclear annihilation.

Aldrich asserted in one slide that 'The Cold War was HOT!'  He explained that some of the submarines and aircraft used to collect intelligence near Soviet bases became involved in actual fighting.  Some of our submarines were depth-charged by the Russians while working on behalf of GCHQ. I noted down that he said, "GCHQ failed in its main mission to crack top level Soviet cyphers."

​

Aldrich gave so many examples of wasted effort by intelligent officers that I came away feeling that it was some sort of no expense spared, elaborate game that was played out between the secret services of both - the ever so virtuous Christian West and the very wicked Communist East.

I also came away thinking that the evil Communists did exactly what they liked and when they liked (just as our side did), without the West's secret service being able to stop them - even if they did know in time which, on so many occasions, they did not!​

Which power bloc of humanity does the most killings?

Many thanks, John.  Sorry for this length - I just love to crystalise my thoughts in writing!

Which power bloc of humanity does the most killings - the Christian capitalist West or the Communists and Muslim extremists in the East?

I particularly liked 'Drop Medicines, not Bombs'.  Not just medicines but, for Afghanistan and Iraq from the War of Terrorism started on 7 October 2001, we would have been better off dropping 'bikes' not bombs!  By bikes I mean everything but handing out death and injury.  Parachute humanitarian aid in to these poor countries and never death dealing devices, unless authorised by the Security Council and never Congress and the US President.

My Christian discipleship also means doing what Paul advised, "Think of others as better than yourselves."  Hence, I am very unpatriotic in mischievously delighting to point out how it appears that the Christian West, down too many centuries (not just the 20th) has been the worst offender in killing other humans.  Death by all kinds of horrendous means that the West got to do first. From, just 1945:- use of WMD, Korea, the Kenyan atrocities in the 1950s, the West's wars against the Communists in many countries of SE Asia, extra judicial killings but, good news, we do seem to refrain from suicide bombing (I wonder why?  Of course, no need to when we have drones to keep us safe when killing!)

It seems, that it was not the Arab Muslims or the Communists who did the most killings (even when remembering but, never verified, Stalin's millions that he killed*).  For me, this is because of the European nation's responsibility for rounds one and two of the industrialised scale slaughter.  Known, by me, as the wild West's World War 1914 to 1945, with the interlude between 1918 and 1939.  20 million godless Communist Russians were slaughtered to help the Christian West defeat Nazism.  Nazism that came out of a Christian country, too!

I think it is unlikely that the Nazis would have risen to power if the West had not started the 1914 war.  The victors saw to it that vanquished Germany was treated without Churchill's much vaunted magnanimity.  German reparations meant that they had their noses rubbed in the dirt.  It was all a breeding ground for very angry, very patriotic, right wing, National Socialism.  Thus, the sequel in 1939.

We persist in thinking that the violent Communists and the violent Islamists are worse than ourselves because, quite naturally, we more carefully keep a record of their killings of us than that of our own of them - and, we never really like violence, of course; it is forced upon us!  In the last century, the 'Christian' Europeans even got their colonies to help in the slaughter to defend their mighty empires in the (so worthy) West's World War.

Hence, my boring and constant theme:- that I would like - shock horror - to hear, occasionally, a Christian preacher exhorting their flock to avoid arms manufacturing and the armed forces when it comes to a job.  Actually, I did hear Tony Campolo (on Friday 6 Sept at B'ham Christian Centre) do just that in the context of President Obama wanting to punish Syria for using chemical weapons in August.  Praise the Lord - and pass the ammunition!**

NOTES *"Ralph Miliband was a supporter of Marxist ideology that was being used to run governments in other parts of the continent and other parts of Europe which was responsible for an awful lot of terrible things, including millions and millions of deaths."  (Jon Steafel, Dep Editor of Daily Mail, on 'Newsnight', BBC2 on 1 October 2013)

** Christians might only vote for political parties that try non-violence or, at least, non-aggression and who abide by Security Council wishes or UN resolutions.  That means, for me, voting for none of the major three war parties.  Therefore, abstaining. 

Syrian War fuelled by all sides, including us!

I am bothered about all the weapons our people produce in the UK and that get sold on to keep the civil war going in Syria.

We need to accept that our side was the first to use WMD in the Great (foolish) War, in the second round of the slaughter (on Japan in 1945) and, once more in Vietnam in that 16 years war. Our side - NATO and Israel - hardly occupy the moral high ground.  In fact, we have set Syria a very bad example to follow.

Now, on the 'Today' programme, 12 September 2013, I have heard Frank Gardner (BBC Security Correspondent) say, "Britain used chemical weapons (poisonous gas) soon after the First World War against rebels in Iraq and Afghanistan before they were outlawed by the Geneva Protocol of 1925."