Craig Murray – by Mr. Fish

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Blackburn, England: I am standing with Craig Murray who is running for Parliament in this gritty former mill town. We are on a narrow street with brick row houses that jaggedly descend down a hill. The sky is overcast. There is intermittent rain.

Craig, portly, his white hair unkempt and dressed in a clashing checkered shirt with a paisley tie, is handing out leaflets at the entrance of the Masjid e Tauheedul Islam, Blackburn’s largest mosque. He introduces himself politely to those leaving the midday prayers. 

I speak with about half a dozen of the worshippers, who like most of the Muslim community in Blackburn, are of Indian and Pakistani origin. They curtly dismiss the leaders of the ruling Labour and Conservative parties as out of touch with their lives and concerns, including their outrage over the genocide in Gaza.

Craig’s central campaign issue, like that of George Galloway — who was recently elected as MP for Rochdale — is ending the genocide in Gaza, including the halting of all arms shipments to Israel. Craig is running on the ticket of Galloway’s socialist Workers Party of Britain, to counter what he says is the “appalling pro-genocide stance” of the opposition Labour Party, which looks set to win the British elections on July 4, ousting the Conservative Party government led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The Labour Party has won the parliamentary elections in Blackburn for the last 69 years. The socialist crusader, Barbara Castle — instrumental in exposing the British atrocities in Kenya, including the deaths of perhaps 300,000 Kikuyu people and the detention of up to 320,000 more in over 100 camps, where prisoners were tortured, murdered and died of disease — previously held this seat, as did the former foreign secretary Jack Straw. Straw was decidedly less progressive. He was one of the architects of the 2003 war in Iraq under former prime minister Tony Blair. Craig challenged Straw for the seat in 2005 on an anti-war platform. He received five percent of the vote.

The Labour MP for Blackburn, Kate Hollern, in the last election in 2019, won 64.9 percent of the vote. She deviates from the Labour Party line on Gaza, calling for an immediate ceasefire and a suspension of arms shipments to Israel. She was one of the few party members who remained loyal to Jeremy Corbyn when his campaign to run for prime minister was sabotaged by party apparatchiks close to Blair, who accused him of being an anti-Semite because of his defense of Palestinians.

“I have nothing bad to say about the woman really, except that if elected, she would be part of putting Keir Starmer into Number 10 and I have a very great deal against Keir Starmer,” Craig says of his Labour opponent.

Straw, although out of Parliament, casts an ominous shadow over Craig’s campaign. For, as in most of the constituencies where Labour is being challenged by candidates that oppose Labour’s support for Israel, a second well-funded independent, devoid of political experience or a public record on nearly all issues, is also running on an anti-genocide platform. In the case of Blackburn, this person is Adnan Hussain. While Hussain spends much of his campaign attacking Craig, Craig has held a series of meetings on Palestine, including one where he, Richard Medhurst and I spoke to a packed hall at Saint Paul’s Methodist church in Blackburn. Craig has also hosted campaign events with Professor David Miller, who was fired in 2021 from the University of Bristol for his criticisms of Israel, and Dr. Bob Gill, who has documented the defunding, outsourcing and marketization of Britain’s National Health Service by all ruling parties since Margaret Thatcher. Roger Waters is scheduled to hold a campaign rally in Blackburn for Craig on July 2.

The Muslim media site, 5Pillars, proposed that Craig and Hussain toss a coin to see who should run as an independent against the Labour Party. Craig agreed. Hussain, a 34-year-old lawyer, refused.                                                         

“The people behind Hussain’s campaign are Jack Straw’s people,” Craig says. “The people financing and organizing his campaign are Jack Straw’s people. The Labour Party is splitting the challenge. It’s not only here. It’s happening around the country.”

Craig’s cluttered second floor campaign office sits on a narrow street above the Mi Chaii cafe on Whalley Range. Covering the windows outside are huge posters and billboards with pictures of public figures, including George Galloway, Roger Waters and Stella Assange, with their brief endorsements supporting Craig’s candidacy.

Nearly half of Blackburn’s constituents are Muslim. The town is reputed to have more mosques than any town in Europe. British Muslims, like Muslims in the U.S. who have abandoned Joe Biden, have walked away from the Labour Party because of Starmer’s unequivocal support for Israel. In Blackburn’s local council elections in May, Labour suffered a significant decline in votes.

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Craig, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, was pushed out of the Foreign Office after leaking to The Financial Times, in 2004, a memorandum he authored that detailed the CIA torture and extraordinary rendition program in Uzbekistan. Craig says his internal protests to the Foreign Office were ignored.

He exposed practices in Uzbek black sites of sexual humiliation, genital mutilation, the rape of men and women, cutting and the dousing of prisoners with boiling liquid, including the death of a prisoner who was immersed in a vat of boiling water.

“The Uzbeks were doing it on behalf of the CIA,” he tells me one morning as we sit in his campaign office. “At first, the prisoners were mostly Uzbeks who had been captured in Afghanistan. But latterly, people were being brought in from all over the place.”

According to the Council of Europe report on extraordinary rendition, of all the CIA flights that stopped in Poland, 50 percent went to Uzbekistan.

Straw, at the time of Craig’s revelations, was the foreign secretary. He pushed for Craig’s prosecution, something the Foreign Office decided against. Caught in a “cash for access” sting, Straw was forced to retire from politics. But he remains a powerbroker in the Labour Party, especially in Blackburn.

“This is entirely prompted by the genocide in Gaza,” Craig says of his parliamentary campaign. “I wouldn’t have come back were it not for the genocide in Gaza. Starmer’s attitude to the genocide in Gaza reminds me of Straw’s attitude to torture, extraordinary rendition and the Iraq war. The Labour Party is corrupt. It doesn’t stand for any of the principles the Labour Party is supposed to stand for.”

“Gaza represents the dislocation of the political class from the people,” he says. “The people want to stop it, certainly here in the U.K., but they have no leverage. The political class is no longer connected to the people. It is connected to the arms industry, to the lobbyists, particularly the Zionist lobby. That’s where the interests of the political class lie. They don’t care about the people. That’s true of both of the main parties. They suffer no hardship because there’s nobody else likely to be elected. Western democracy has become meaningless. The political class is homogeneous. All of them could move from one of the main parties to the other main party without changing anything. If we’re going to save democracy, we have to offer an actual democratic alternative. Gaza brought that home to people.”

Craig, an ardent supporter of Julian Assange, who produced the most erudite reporting on Julian’s many court hearings, spent four months in prison in Edinburgh in the summer of 2022.

He was found in media contempt of court for his reporting on the trial of the Scottish independence leader Alex Salmond, who was accused of sexual assault.

“It was another example of the state using sexual allegations to undermine and wreck the reputation of an opponent,” he says of Salmond and Julian.

The group of women who brought the charges against Salmond were closely connected to the then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. It included her chief of staff. Craig was jailed for hinting at this fact in his court reports. 

Salmond was found not guilty.

“Over 5,000 individuals wrote to me in jail,” he says. “I answered all those by hand, 50 or 60 letters a day.”

“There were quite a lot of illiterate prisoners,” he says. “If you want anything in jail you have to fill in a form. If you cut your foot and need a sticking plaster, you have to fill a form. If you want a family visit you have to fill in a form. Forms would appear under my cell door. Someone would shout through the door what they wanted filled in. A majority of prisoners are there because of poverty. Their crime is poverty. They’ve all been born into deprivation. They’ve had a very poor education. Most of them were born into addiction. The number who are not addicts is tiny. On my entire block, which would be 120 people, there were two people who weren’t addicts and one of them was me.” 

“Most of them are in jail for very, very petty crimes,” he continues. “They shoplift or burgle or deal small amounts of drugs in order to feed their addiction. And then they get put in jail. They get no treatment for addiction in jail. They get prescribed drugs daily because the guards want to keep them dazed. Every morning they get their fix. They serve two years. They’re released back out again. They go and burgle someone else and get caught and then they’re back in again. Most of them have been in jail five or six times. The number of real criminals, as in violent people or people who have done large scale crime, is tiny. Most of them are very, very sad, incapable people who need help with their lives. They don’t need locking up.”

“I hadn’t realized so many people have abject, bleak lives, lives without hope,” he says softly. “Their whole life has been without hope from the day they were born. They never had a chance, never had direction. I thought I was socially aware. I realized I’m not. I didn’t know what it was like at the bottom of society.”

“The state has a monopoly on violence and uses it,” he says. “It used extreme violence against Julian Assange, which had a deleterious effect on his health, both mental and physical.”

On October 16, 2023, as he was returning from a WikiLeaks meeting in Reykjavik, where he also attended a pro-Palestine demonstration, Craig was detained and interrogated in Glasgow airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was questioned about his relationship with WikiLeaks and his support for the Palestinians. He later received a letter informing him that he was under investigation under the Terrorism Act and that his electronic devices, which had been confiscated at the airport, would not be returned. 

The Terrorism Act 2000 is often used to detain and interrogate politically active individuals, members of “suspect communities” such as Muslims, Tamils and Kurds, and journalists, such as David Miranda, for carrying the Snowden files. Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone was detained under the 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, after his report revealed journalist Paul Mason’s close ties to British intelligence.

“I’m a traitor in their eyes,” Craig says of the ruling class. “I was an insider, a member of the establishment who turned against the establishment.”

“It’s empathy,” he says when I ask him what drives him, “empathy for the people being tortured in Uzbekistan and for their families, for all those who suffer. I was driven by horror at what happened to the victims of the Iraq war. I am driven by horror at what I see happening to the children of Gaza. I hate human suffering. I do my best to alleviate it.”

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For thirty years, federal law has required commercial fishing boats to include a trained observer to ensure the vessel does not engage in overfishing or other prohibited practices. The law specifies that certain classes of boats pay the costs of their own monitors. But, it is silent on herring boats. For many years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) picked up the cost of the monitors for herring boats. 

In 2020, however, the federal government began to run out of money for the monitoring program, and the Trump administration started requiring herring boats to share the costs of the federal monitors, which is about $700 per day. The herring boat operators sued, saying that the NOAA had exceeded its authority. 

The Biden administration soon reversed the regulation and reimbursed 100% of the costs incurred by the herring boat operators under the Trump-era rule. Nevertheless, the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Gina Raimondo, made it all the way to the Supreme Court. There were simple, narrow ways to resolve the case:

1. The Supreme Court could have found that the case was moot because the herring boat operators had been fully reimbursed, and the rule had been reversed.

2. The Supreme Court could have found that charging the herring boat operators for federal monitors violated the clear language of the statute, which specified which types of boats could be charged. 

Instead, on Friday, the Supreme Court used the case as a pretext for overturning a landmark decision, Chevron, that has been a cornerstone of federal regulation since 1984. This has been a longstanding priority for right-wing ideologues seeking to dismantle regulations protecting the environment, curbing abuses in financial markets, and ensuring the safety of consumers. 

Why Chevron matters

Under amendments to the Clean Air Act passed in the 1970s, companies that modified or constructed a “stationary source” of air pollution were required to obtain permits. But a key question was left unanswered. What counts as one “source”? Is it an entire industrial complex? Or is it each individual source of air pollution within the complex?

The Reagan administration’s EPA issued a rule allowing companies to consider a grouping of industrial sources of pollution as a single stationary source. This allowed companies to create new sources of air pollution within a “bubble” as long as it was offset by reductions in admissions — or the decommissioning — of another source. The Reagan administration’s interpretation would make the process of reducing air pollution slower because companies could create new sources of air pollution without going through the permitting process. 

An environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), sued, arguing that the EPA’s interpretation of the statute was impermissible. The case, known as Chevron v. NRDC, reached the Supreme Court in 1984. 

In Chevron, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that when a statute contains an ambiguity, courts should defer to the judgment of the federal agency in resolving the ambiguity, as long as the agency’s action is “reasonable.” The Supreme Court found that the EPA acted reasonably and upheld its interpretation of the Clean Air Act. 

Over the next 40 years, the Chevron decision has been cited over 18,000 times by federal courts. As the Chevron decision itself illustrates, it is not a particularly ideological decision. But Chevron deference is a critical tool that allows the government to address important and complex problems. 

For example, in 1987, Congress, through the National Parks Overflights Act, directed the Department of the Interior, in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, to “provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet and experience.” As Justice Kagan noted in her dissent in Loper Bright, the law left some important questions unresolved: “How much noise is consistent with “the natural quiet”? And how much of the park, for how many hours a day, must be that quiet for the “substantial restoration” requirement to be met?” Under Chevron, federal courts defer to the expertise of the people at the Department of the Interior who understand the nature of the park and what it would take to restore “natural quiet” — as long as the decisions made by the Department of the Interior were “reasonable.” 

Other questions are even more technical. Kagan cites the Public Health Service Act’s requirement that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological products,” including “proteins.” A recent lawsuit challenged the FDA’s determination that an “alpha amino acid polymer” is considered a “protein.” Chevron recognizes that the FDA has the expertise to make these kinds of determinations, not the courts. 

Further, federal agencies like the FDA are accountable to the administration, which can be replaced by voters. Federal judges, on the other hand, receive lifetime appointments.

“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris”

In Loper Bright, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, casts aside 40 years of judicial precedent. “Chevron is overruled,” Roberts declares.

This is fundamentally a power grab. Instead of deferring to the expertise of agencies to implement statutes in the face of inevitable ambiguities, the Supreme Court has empowered itself, and other federal courts, to do the job. “Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” according to the majority. “Courts do.”

As a practical matter, it empowers any federal judge — including hundreds appointed by Trump — to strike down regulations by asserting that an agency misinterpreted a statutory ambiguity. Chevron itself is neutral because it protects the statutory interpretations of liberal and conservative administrations. But if your goal is to dismantle as many regulations as possible, getting rid of Chevron makes your task much easier. 

The decision to overturn Chevron is particularly remarkable because it was based on a statutory interpretation. Roberts found that Chevron deference was actually prohibited by the Administrative Procedure Act, a law passed 80 years ago. But if Congress wanted to empower the courts, not agencies, to resolve statutory ambiguities, it could have passed a law repealing Chevron at any time between 1984 and today. But Congress chose not to do so. But the Supreme Court decided to award itself this power anyway. 

The farce of Supreme Court nomination hearings

The decision to overturn Chevron was formally made on Friday. But the writing has been on the wall since former president Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court Justices who were part of the ideological campaign to kill Chevron. Trump’s nominees were all asked about Chevron during their confirmation hearings, and all deliberately gave the impression that they would respect Chevron as precedent. 

Chevron “is a precedent of the Supreme Court entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis,” Justice Barrett said in response to written questions. Barrett refused to elaborate in any detail, claiming it “would not be appropriate for me to offer an opinion on abstract legal issues or hypotheticals.”

“As a Supreme Court Justice, if you were to make this decision to overturn Chevron, would you consider the implications on all of the cases in the U.S., and the rules and the uncertainty that it would create?” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Justice Neil Gorsuch during his confirmation hearing. “Goodness, Senator, yes,” Gorsuch replied. Klobuchar asked Gorsuch about a previous opinion he wrote as a circuit court judge that criticized Chevron. Gorsuch insisted that he had not “prejudge[d]” the case and would “come at it with as open a mind as a man can muster.” He then signed onto a ruling that stated Chevron was wrong from the moment the decision was issued. 

Justice Kavanaugh wrote a Harvard Law Review article in 2016 harshly criticizing Chevron. But during his confirmation process, he insisted that he respected Chevron as precedent. “Chevron is a precedent of the Supreme Court entitled to the respect due under the

law of precedent,” Kavanaugh wrote in response to written questions. “As I explained at the hearing, I have applied the Chevron doctrine in many D.C. Circuit cases over the last 12 years.” Kavanaugh then signed onto the majority opinion overturning Chevron, which cited his law review article.