Blair War Clique Runs
Anti-LaRouche Slander Drive
by Anton Chaitkin
'A Vote for Hogg is a Vote for Hitler.'
—old British election slogan
They wrote the lies Tony Blair used, to take Britain into the war catastrophe with Dick Cheney. When the British Broadcasting Corporation repeatedly put Lyndon LaRouche on the air to expose the Cheney-Blair lies, and when BBC reported on how this clique manufactured the "weapons of mass destruction" hoax, they reacted with fury. BBC's intelligence source against the liars, government weapons scientist David Kelly, died suddenly, a supposed suicide. They neutered BBC—Britain's national public network, purged BBC's leaders and acted to crush all media opposition.
Since then, still desperate to block LaRouche's persistent leadership aimed at bringing them down, this same tight-knit clique has operated an international slander campaign against LaRouche, managing the Jeremiah Duggan affair—a case which was cooked up during Spring, 2003, when LaRouche addressed Great Britain over BBC.
The slander case was built around the March 2003 suicide of a psychologically unstable British student Jeremiah Duggan, who had attended a conference of the LaRouche Youth Movement in Germany. German police said he had thrown himself in front of cars on a highway; but his mother was brought into contact with Blair circles, who promoted a media attack accusing murder.
The first Duggan slander was put through the London Guardian on July 12, 2003—one month after LaRouche's second (June 9) BBC broadcast calling for Vice President Cheney's impeachment in the faking of Iraq weapons intelligence.[1] Five days after the slander (July 17), David Kelly was treated savagely by Blair's goons during his forced testimony to Parliament. The next day (July 18), Kelly died suddenly. In this chaotic terrifying situation, three days later (July 21, 2003), BBC itself broadcast the Duggan slander.
An ongoing EIR probe into the London public relations firm managing the Duggan slander has led directly to the Blair terror clique that crushed BBC, and that runs this attack top-down nearly four years later.
The following are central to the story:
- The London crisis-management firm Luther Pendragon, a private arm of the Blair regime, which managed publication of a key 2004 report demanding BBC be dismantled. Luther Pendragon now officially manages public affairs for the Duggan slander campaign.
- Rightist media executive David Elstein, the author of that 2004 anti-BBC report. David Elstein is now chairman of the firm, Luther Pendragon, running the Duggan slander.
- Lady Sarah Hogg, the Blair ringleader on the BBC Board of Governors. Lady Hogg is David Elstein's financier, and the financial power looming behind the latest Duggan slander spread inside Germany.
- Greg Dyke, BBC Director General forced out in the 2004 terror. Dyke publicly identified Lady Hogg and her little gang in the Blair coup at BBC.
- Philip Bassett and Baroness Elizabeth Symons, husband and wife. Philip Bassett was co-manager of the Blair propaganda team that "sexed up" the Iraq WMD dossier. Baroness Symons was the Blair regime's military procurement chief, tied in with Mr. and Mrs. Dick Cheney and with Lady Hogg's little gang, in the Iraq war. She has been the highest ranking Blair-regime official personally directing the Duggan slander campaign against LaRouche.
The Hogg Ring
Baroness Sarah Hogg married into the notorious Hogg aristocracy in 1968, wedding Douglas Hogg (3rd Viscount Hailsham. Lady Hogg's father-in law, Quintin Hogg, brought the family peculiar notoriety due to his strong backing for Britain's September 1938 pro-Hitler deal at Munich. The next month Winston Churchill and others opposed Hogg's campaign for Parliament, on the slogan, "A vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler." The family's money, lands, and ugly reputation originated with "Hitler" Quintin's great grandfather, James Weir Hogg (first Baron Hogg), the long-time director of the East India Company, and the director when India's rebellion brought the Company down.
Lady Hogg went into action as the Blair government was being pounded in the wake of David Kelly's death. Alastair Campbell and Phillip Bassett had been forced out as Blair's number one and two communications chiefs for concocting the Iraq dossier. Blair commissioned an "Inquiry" into the Kelly death, chaired by Lord Hutton. The Inquiry's findings were leaked to media lord Rupert Murdoch, and disclosed prior to official release. Murdoch was demanding that BBC be destroyed.
The Hutton Report came out Jan. 28, 2004, whitewashing Blair in Kelly's death and blaming BBC in the scandal! The chairman of BBC's board of governors, Gavyn Davies, resigned immediately. The next day, Jan. 29, BBC board of governors member Lady Hogg led the board in forcing BBC director general Greg Dyke to resign.
Later that year, Greg Dyke wrote a column in the Observer (Aug. 29, 2004), on how "pillars of the establishment helped to engineer a very British coup at the BBC."
Dyke wrote,
"Sarah [Hogg] actively disliked me. The feeling was mutual.... Sarah Hogg never left her politics or prejudices at the door of governors' meetings. She was married to a land-owning Tory MP, Douglas Hogg, and lived in a political world. When we tried to update our political coverage, Sarah led the opposition: we shouldn't upset the politicians...."
"She ... lived on the family estate in rural Lincolnshire.
"Her term as a governor was due to finish, and she didn't want it renewed. Neither did [board chairman] Gavyn [Davies] or I. By the time Hutton published his report, Sarah's time was almost up.
"The day it appeared the governors ... began discussing what should happen to the management team. We had agreed with [board member] Pauline Neville-Jones [of Lady Hogg's ring] the previous night that it would be impossible for Gavyn and I to resign at the same time....
"Sarah Hogg had her last chance to settle old scores. I now know that she arrived determined to get rid of me.
"...Pauline [Neville-Jones] and the deputy [board] chairman, Richard Ryder [also in the Hogg ring, sent word they] wanted to see me.
"Ryder was pretty blunt. He said the governors had decided I should go.... I asked if this was the view of them all. Richard told me he ... was reporting the views of the rest. Pauline said nothing. .... I was completely shocked.... Gavyn [went] ... to say a final goodbye ... but ... he walked into the room he found the atmosphere had changed completely. It was a very hostile environment, with the aggression mainly coming from Sarah, who, he said, 'was seething.'
"I've since discovered that [Hogg] told Gavyn the day before that ... I should [resign]. He told her there were no circumstances in which he'd let me go while he stayed, and I think that was one reason Gavyn resigned: if one of us should go it should be him, and that way he would protect me. Others at that meeting say that when Gavyn walked in Sarah launched a ferocious attack.... [What the governors] did that January night was bow to pressure from a political thug called Alastair Campbell."
The Hogg ring traces back to the 1990-1995 period of the John Major Prime Ministry. Lady Hogg had been head of the Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street, designing the schemes for privatization and globalization, and was Major's main advisor at the time of the 1995 creation of the World Trade Organization. Husband Douglas Hogg helped run Major's Foreign Ministry, as did Pauline Neville-Jones. Richard Ryder was the Parliamentary "Whip" for Hogg's globalization policy, beating back a revolt in the Conservative Party against the Maastricht Treaty.
In 2004, as the Hogg ring was purging BBC, Pauline Neville Jones was enriched as chairman of QinetiQ, a giant defense company supplying Iraq War weapons, a firm jointly owned by the Blair government and the Bush family's Carlyle group. Neville-Jones personal QinetiQ shares were owned through Carlyle, whose European chairman was former Prime Minister John Major himself.
After Blair had "privatized" Qinetic, its armor and copters could be procured through Baroness Elizabeth Symons, the Minister of State for Defence Procurement from 1999 to 2003.
Hogg, Elstein and the Duggan Scam
On Feb. 24, 2004, 25 days after Greg Dyke's ouster as BBC Director General, the "Broadcasting Policy Group," chaired by David Elstein, issued its report calling for the dismantling of BBC as a public agency. The Conservative Party had commissioned the report and had selected Elstein (previously head of programming at Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting, then CEO of Murdoch's Channel 5 Broadcasting), while Murdoch was in a longstanding public drive to destroy BBC.
The London firm Luther Pendragon, which had been running crisis management cases for the Blair government Cabinet Office, handled public operations for the Elstein report, ratcheting up the repression of opposition to the Blair war policy.
In 2002, Baroness Hogg had joined the giant global private equity firm, 3i, as its chairman. Lady Hogg's 3i firm subsequently made a special project of investing its assets in Sparrowhawk Media, whose chairman is the same David Elstein who wrote the report against BBC. For example, in April 2005, 3i sponsored Elstein's purchase of the Hallmark Channel (TV).
In March 2006, David Elstein, still the chairman of Lady Hogg's Sparrowhawk project, became chairman of Luther Pendragon. The Guardian reported: "Mr. Elstein said he took up the position after being impressed with Luther Pendragon which handled his Broadcasting Policy Group report on the future of the BBC."
At Luther Pendragon, chairman Elstein could depend on the firm's partner Mike Granatt, whose background with the Blair/Campbell/Bassett liar brigade, the firm's website describes thusly: "Mike Granatt joined Luther as a partner in January 2004 after 25 years in Whitehall [i.e., the British government], 18 in top-level director of communications posts.... Mike was Director General of the Government Information and Communication Service (GICS) for seven years until he joined Luther Pendragon.... From June 2001 until late 2002, and alongside his GICS role, he devised and led the UK Government's civil crisis management unit, the Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat. He also developed the News Co-ordination Centre, the public information hub for national emergencies." Luther Pendragon partner Granatt is a "terrorism expert" broadcast by the new, tamed BBC.
The reader may now be able to properly assess the press release, issued by Luther Pendragon on behalf of, "Justice for Jeremiah," announcing an anti-LaRouche meeting to be held in the Parliament office building ("The Attlee Suite, Portcullis House, Westminster") on March March 27, 2007.
Luther Pendragon does not disclose when they officially took up management of the Jeremiah Duggan operation. But the trail leads back through Luther Pendragon's staff to 2004, the year of the BBC purge.
The press release for the March 27, 2007 Parliament-office meeting gives the phone number for Luther Pendragon consultant Andrew McGuinness to contact for the Duggan case.[2] There, Luther Pendragon reports that McGuiness joined the firm in June 2006, three months after Elstein took over as chairman. But they also report that McGuiness had earlier been editor of the independent University College Dublin newspaper, the College Tribune.
In fact, at that paper, in November 2004, editor McGuiness inserted his own long Duggan slander against LaRouche. McGuiness wrote that "Baroness Symons, the Foreign Office representative has been a real tonic to the family, assuring them from an early stage that she was very concerned about the case and that she was going to try and help them as much as possible, impressed by her industrious manner.... Symons was able to appoint an international lawyer, who in turn was very helpful in going to Germany and appointing a German lawyer."
On April 4, 2007, eight days after the Parliament-office session against LaRouche, the German-language Berliner Zeitung ran a stepped-up Duggan slander, attacking German authorities for reporting the suicide, and demanding murder charges.
That newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, had been bought up in the Autumn of 2005, by a British media company sponsored by Lady Hogg's 3i. The Hogg firm itself took part publicly in the initial purchase negotiations, alongside her investment vehicle, the Mecom media-takeover company, to which 3i has made repeated non-interest loans. After protests from the newspaper staff against the deal, Hogg's 3i dropped from view and Mecom completed the takeover in Berlin. Perhaps that German city was not prepared for its media to be run by the family, of whom it had been said 67 years earlier, "a vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler."
[1] First LaRouche program: April 3, 2003, BBC's "Live Five" news show, six-minute interview. Second LaRouche program: June 9, 2003, "Live Five," 12 minute interview.
