Israel/Palestine

Conflicts Forum’s Alistair Crooke: Wanted by the Palestinian Authority

The Guardian is very coy:

A senior Palestinian official today said he has asked the US, Britain and France to help bring three of their nationals for questioning about the huge leak of confidential documents relating to peace talks in the Middle East.

Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said the three include a former British intelligence officer, a US employee of al-Jazeera TV and a French citizen. He said he is not accusing them of wrongdoing, but would like them to appear before an investigative committee.

However, Haaretz names the suspects:

Erekat said the secret Mideast documents were leaked by U.S. citizen Clayton Swisher, who currently works at Al-Jazeera as a reporter, and used to serve as a bodyguard in the U.S. State Department during the Clinton administration.

The second person Erekat blamed for the leak is British citizen Alastair Crooke, who was a ranking figure in the British intelligence (MI6) as well as an adviser to the European Union’s High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy. Crooke is considered close to officials in Hamas.

Here’s Swisher

Here’s Crooke

Alistair Crooke is a nasty piece of work, who has devoted years of his life to facilitating the rehabilitation of Hamas and Hezbollah on both the progressive Left and also in Government circles, through his Conflicts Forum project. He proves that it is possible to convert to the political ideology of Islamism – which he lauds and lionises – without actually converting to Islam.

I don’t know if he has a hand in this latest attempt to promote the genocidal racists and rejectionists of Hamas. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Who’d have thought it. A rogue MI6 man trying to engineer a coup in somebody else’s country!

(Also, see Just Journalism)