The blogosphere has played a key role in developing the story surrounding the UK government's alledged involvement in redition and torture in the War on Terror.J.J. King reviews the progress online.

Not Leaking, But Blogging

What to do if you can't get your damning documents picked up by the mainstream media? The answer, it seems, is to take it to the blogs -- from whence, if the story has 'legs', it may eventually get dragged into the press.

That is precisely what has happened in the case of Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray lost his position after he defied a Foreign Office prohibition on publishing documents concerning the UK's use of information obtained by rendition and torture (inlcuding, incidentally, boiling alive) in the War on Terror.

On Murray's request, bloggers reproduced his documents online, making further suppression practically impossible. The mainstream, now assured that it was not breaking a story that might cause it trouble, ran the Murray story in due course.

Murray's 'Damning Documents':
craigmurray.co.uk
Wikipedia on Murray:
wikipedia.org
Mainstream (AP) Coverage:
latimes.com

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The 'Moonbat Craze'

Murray may have a book to promote, but that doesn't make a rightwing blogger like Michelle Malkin look any more convincing when she calls the furore around his published telegrams a 'Moonbat Craze'. The documents on offer may not quite be the 'Smoking Gun' Murray claims, but they are certainly significant.

Whereas the Bush regime tacitly condoned torturous methods in February 2002, when it indicated the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to captured members of al Qaeda and Afghanistan's Taliban, the UK had taken no such public stance. In fact, as blog BlairWatch points out, the government has been holding steadfastly, if increasingly unbelievably, to the line that they knownothing about Extraordinary Rendition or torture used to obtain information for the War on Terror.

As a result of Murray's blog publication, such claims now appear 'superlatively disingenuous', as John Lettice puts it for The Register. 'In order to sustain the "see no evil" policy in the face of these,' the telegrams appear to show, Lettice argues, 'Jack Straw must presumably also now claim to have been entirely unaware of what one of his own ambassadors was telling him, repeatedly and at some considerable length.'

'A New Moonbat Craze In Britain':
http://michellemalkin.com
Torture And The Diplomat's Role:
www.barder.com
Blog Based Attack On UK's Torture Domains:
www.theregister.co.uk
Blair on Extraordinary Rendition:
www.blairwatch.co.uk
Ex-envoy unleashes blog-based attack on UK's torture denials:
theregister.co.uk

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From The Blog To Beyond

Murray's use of blogs to disseminate these documents has been seen by many bloggers as a breakthrough for freedom of information -- people's freedom, that is, to know some of the information that our leaders argues should be kept secret from us.

As the last three consecutive weeks of WATBs have shown (see below), the public is under great pressure to give up more personal information than ever to governments as the intensity of surveillance increases on all fronts. One or two telegrams in return doesn't seem a great deal to give, especially when the stakes are so high. While ex-diplomat and current blogger Brian Barder might argue cogently that it is acceptable to use information obtained under torture in some cases, that does not mean that it is acceptable to farm out torture, via rendition, in order deliberately to step around the Geneva Convention as the United States did first at Guantanamo Bay. That is the implication at stake here, and that is why bloggers have helped Craig Murray to take his story to the mainstream.

Ephems of BB (note -- excellent discussion here):
http://www.barder.com
Big Brother Is Watching... Your Car:
channel4.com
Who's Watching Your Data?
channel4.com
Your Right To Remain Spied On:
channel4.com