Voice of Russia
December 23, 2013
UK’s GCHQ doing the NSA’s heavy lifting – George Galloway
John Robles
Photo: Flickr.com
The United Kingdom has been co-opted by the United States to carry out illegal surveillance and spying on its own citizens and on European countries, their citizens and officials. According to UK Member of Parliament, George Galloway, the way that the UK spyies on and hacks the phones of European leaders, while being paid a very small amount, is a crime against the world. Mr. Galloway described the way imperial powers and capitalist countries pretend to maintain legality as “lipstick on a pig”. In an interview with the Voice of Russia’s John Robles, Mr. Galloway also discussed his upcoming documentary, financed by donations from common UK citizens, titled “The Killing of Tony Blair” in which he will exposewhat he claims are heinous crimes committed by the former prime minister.
PART 1
This is John Robles, you are listening to an interview with George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament. This is Part 1 of a longer interview.
Robles: Hello, Mr. Galloway. It’s a great pleasure speaking with you, I’m actually an admirer of yours from way back.
Galloway:Thank you! No, the pleasure is mine, thanks.
Robles: Thanks. First question I’d like to ask you about… if we could talk a little bit about your film that you are putting together regarding Tony Blair and his war crimes…
Galloway: Yes, not just his war crimes, but those will loom large in the charge sheet that the film intends to make.
It’s called “The Killing of Tony Blair,” it’s a triple entendre. It deals with his “killing of the Labor Party,” as we knew it, a party that working people in Britain had come to depend on for the best part of a century and which was murdered by him, and turned into quite the opposite of what it was intended to be.
The second “killing of Tony Blair,” of course, is the killing of a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan and by extension in Lebanon and in Palestine and other places.
And the third “killing” is the financial killing that he is making out of the previous two killings, having made the British economy more comfortable for the corporations, making their income tax bills shrink, easing their regulatory burden. He’s being rewarded by them now at vast eye-watering salaries as a consultant (whatever that means) for a variety of sundry corporations.
And of course having helped various tyrannies around the world he is now on the payroll of more countries than it is almost possible in one radio broadcast to adumbrate.
Some of them are very dodgy indeed, the Kuwait Royal Family for example, the previous Gaddafi dictatorship, and of course the government of South Sudan has also been the beneficiary of Mr. Blair’s “wisdom” and their country, the poorest in the world, the most corrupt in the world, just fell apart this very week and has collapsed as a state.
So, I’m not sure why these countries want to hire Mr. Blair. He did enough damage to the British economy. I don’t know why anyone else would want to employ him. But there you go.
Robles: I see. You mentioned Kuwait, Sudan, what about Saudi Arabia? Now there are coming out more and more revelations about their involvement with the 9-11 and terrorist groups in Syria, etc.
Galloway:Well of course, he is up to his neck with them, as the so-called “Peace Envoy,” and one of the objectives of our film is to have him dismissed from that position, which is I’ve said is the most inappropriate appointment since Caligula appointed his own horse as a Proconsul of Rome.
Mr. Blair is dripping in the blood of the people of the Middle East. And yet he’s employed by The Quartet as its Peace Envoy. But, so, he is up to his neck with the Saudis in that. I am not able to say at this point what if any financial involvement he has with them but of course he works for a number of corporations who do very big business throughout the Gulf, and that would not exclude Saudi Arabia.
Robles: I see. Now, you mentioned a number of a “million” people, I think it is purposefully obfuscated, the number of people that have died in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Libya, that are being killed in Syria, etc. Where did you get your number of one million?
Galloway:Well, the Johns Hopkins University, one of the world’s greatest, and the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, their estimation is that more than one million people have died in Iraq as a direct and indirect result of Blair and Bush’s invasion. And I think you don’t have to be Einstein to work it out: a vast number of people were killed in the “shock and awe” of the initial invasion,and then of course the “serpent” of sectarianism was unleashed by the war and occupation, and deliberately fostered by the occupation. And it’s now taking a daily death toll in Iraq, almost as high as it ever was, at the very highest point of the post invasion killing around 2006 and 2007.
And of course, you rightly say, the same mindset – although Mr. Blair had gone from office – the same mindset is involved in the imperial attacks against Libya and the one that was putative attack against Syria, and also those plans that definitely existed for an attack on Iran. All of these things run out of the same stable as the Bush and Blair stable.
Just a reminder, you are listening to an interview with George Galloway
Robles: You mentioned Syria, I’d like to complement you. I feel you were instrumental in preventing another invasion. I watched (we watched) your speech in front of the Parliament.
Galloway:Well, it is kind of you to say that. I must say that in a lifetime in politics I don’t think I ever experienced a better day, than the day that in our debate in the British Parliament, my own speech being one of two or three, perhaps four, taken at the very height of the debate definitely switched the audience, no doubt. And we only won by 13 votes, which means if we hadn’t persuaded 7 people,if those 7 had voted the other way, then Britain would now be at war with Syria, and Iran by extension, and with Russia and China on the other side. And that would be a catastrophe hardly worth thinking about.
Robles: Now, I’ve heard you speak about conspiracy theories before, and stuff,and I know you take a very realistic “show me the evidence” type of stand, I think, if I understand properly?
Galloway:Yes, yes, you are right.
Robles: Do you think…? This has been said several times by several people and some people I’ve interviewed that: they don’t care, they would love to start – “they” meaning the banksters, or the elites or the 1 percent or whatever you want to call them – it would be very profitable for them to start World War 3, and they don’t really care about anything?
Galloway:Up to a point, John. Because if there has been war throughout the region, all-out-war throughout the region, then you wouldn’t have been able to purchase a barrel of oil, not at $150, not at $550. And the British and other western economies would have slumped into collapse.
So, of course, there are always some who profit from war. But few would have profited from that war, which is one of the reasons why I think the imperial powers have stepped back from it.
It is a rather more complex matter. I don’t buy the thesis that the 1 percent are organized in a kind of Bilderberg type of formation. It’s rather more complex than that. The oligarchies and the political elites just all automatically face the same direction because they have the same interests, by and large. They don’t need a conference to discuss it, they don’t need even a telephone call between each other in order to coordinate it. They, as a matter of instinct know which way to face in any conflict, in any big issue.
And that’s not surprising because, well, on the other side I also instinctively know which way to face, I also can ask my question of “who benefits cui bono.” And that gives me a diametrically opposite conclusion to them.
So, and I don’t need to consult anyone, I didn’t need to consult Moscow in the old days, and I don’t need to consult anybody now. I know what is in the interests of the mass of the working people, and the poor and the downtrodden of the world, and I know what is in the interests of the rulers of the world. And I’m with the poor and the working people always.
Robles: Wonderful to hear that. Very few people will dare, especially with some sort of power, will dare to take that position. I think the record has shown that is entirely the case, and you should be commended for that.
Galloway:Well, I once said, John, to a certain Senator, now ex-Senator Norman Coleman in the US Senate in 2005, when he was trying to push me around procedurally before we got started. I said: “Senator, don’t make the mistake of imagining that I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid only of God.” And that is the way that I conduct my life.
Just a reminder, you are listening to an interview with George Galloway-
Robles: You are in the halls of power, I mean you are dealing with things and you are witness to things that most people don’t know about that are affecting everybody. I’d like to ask your opinion about all the illegality. I mean where do they get this carte blanche?
Galloway:Well, John, I never put much store in their faith, or faith in their attitude to legality. I think this is lipstick on a pig. The capitalist states and the imperial powers – this is all just window dressing – its cosmetic. They talk about Law, but they practice something completely different overseas, and now increasingly in their decline they are practicing that same something different in their own countries.
Let’s just take one example. Edward Snowden’s revelations which were a signal service to humanity, for which he should get the Nobel Peace Prize, were treated by the British State as an act of terrorism. And the British State then began acting like a pirate.
The Guardian Newspaper, one of the great liberal institutions in the land, was raided by the political police with sledgehammers; I’m not making this up. And with those sledgehammers they,by force and without the permission of the owners of the computers, namely the Guardian Newspaper, smashed the hard drives – smashed them into pieces – so as to destroy evidence of malfeasance and wrong doing on the part of the British State.
Now, such actions would have been caricatured in the past by the British State as being the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships and autocracies, the kind of thing that happens anywhere except Britain. But it did happen in Britain and it happened in 2013.
So, I’m afraid it’s all just a veneer, that is very easily shredded, and if the British State had to, it would cast that veneer aside altogether.
So, I never place much faith in laws and justice. At the end of the day all states will treat existential threats to their own continuance in exactly the same way.
Robles: Do you think that the UK has lost a lot of sovereignty to the US, especially with all this NSA spying and stuff? Or is that…?
Galloway:No, I do, I believe that the British State has essentially rented itself out, I don’t want to be too candid in the analogy, but it has …
Robles: I was going to say lapdog, but I tried not to.
Galloway:Well it’s worse than that. It has prostituted itself to the United States. The GCHQ at Cheltenham is doing most of the heavy lifting for the National Security Agency, in the illegal vacuuming of the spectrum, and is collecting uncountable scores of millions of telephone calls, texts and e-mails every day across Europe, and further beyond, as the fiber optics cross the British landmass, coming from the United States across the Atlantic and thence to Europe.
Now, the British State is doing this through GCHQ because of the fact that there are more restrictions on the American State – imagine – the American State is more circumscribed by law than the British State is.
So the British hire themselves out to the US to carry out those things which would be illegal in the United States and hand over the rest. And by the way, if we are talking of prostitution, the price is no more than a $20 hooker, metaphorically speaking. We get 120 million pounds per year for carrying out this crime against the world, hacking the telephone of other European state’s people. For £120 million a year – my goodness! How cheap do you think we are? Well, pretty cheap as it turns out.
END PART 1
That was the end of Part 1 of an interview with British Member of Parliament George Galloway. You can find the next part of this interview on our website at Voiceofrussia.com. Thank you very much for listening, and as always I wish you all the best, and Happy Holidays wherever you may be.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_12_23/UK-s-GCHQ-doing-the-heavy-lifting-for-the-NSA-George-Galloway-5123/