Episode image for Eliza Manningham-Buller: Freedom
Biased BBC contributor Alan makes the following points.

“The BBC reports that the chairman of the Afghan High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, has beenkilled with several other people in a bomb attack in Kabul, officials say.’

Strange how the real world catchs up with us. Eliza Manningham Buller has beenlecturing us on the need to engage with the Taliban, to negotiate andpresumably compromise (as soon as we leave Afghanistan you can be sure theTaliban won’t be compromising or working in ‘coalition’) in the BBC’s ReithLectures.

Only today did she restate that position….’In this lecture I want to arguethat states should, wherever possible, seek political solutions andreconciliation.’….how negotiation brought peace to Northern Ireland….’Lookat Northern Ireland, where former terrorists are in government. We should welcome this, not damn it.’….only of course there is nopeace in Northern Ireland…the war continues, it just isn’t reported as muchand as with militant Islam, government ministers prefer to sweep uncomfortable,inconvenient facts under the carpet rather than have to deal with them….haveAdams and MacGuinness left the IRA?

I imagine it is quite hard to negotiate with someone whose only intention is tokill you and to re-take power. Why would the Taliban negotiate? If we are offering negotiations it can only bebecause we are ‘losing’…therefore if the Taliban are winning why compromise? Yet again she takes up the cudgel against our foreign policy (another BBCbete noir) saying it incites Muslims to radicalise….Muslims who are under thecosh of dictators in their own countries attack the West because we supportthose dictators.

Except that when we depose Saddam Hussein it is those very radical Muslims whofight to keep Saddam and his regime in power.

You must despair when you listen to Manningham Buller….a woman at the heartof the Establishment who is quite clearly so out of touch with reality….butunfortunately is so representative of much of the mentality within thatEstablishment….no less at the BBC with which her views chime and resonateexactly.”

Bookmark the permalink.


  1. matthew rowe says:

    What a incredibly stupid and childish outlook on the world this woman has!, this jolly hockey sticks politics that she preaches about how are enemies are only our enemies because we wont let them be our friends is the sort of trash spy book garbage that you find in airports, still like the BBC she is now so far into the establishment she ran out of string to find here way out again !


  2. sue says:

    Eliza Manningham-Buller’s name is doggedly repeated on the BBC to represent gold standard moral excellence. They adore her.
    The second of her Reith lectures where she reiterated her conviction that torture is unacceptable made me think. Her staunch belief is that one must possess the moral high ground at all costs. As soon as we resort to torture, she opines, we lose the moral high ground. Even though, she concedes, it can and does produce information that saves lives, we. Must. Never. Do. it.

    I don’t advocate torture. I don’t advocate violence. Or war. But as we live in dangerous times we have to admit we are under threat. We need to ask, is the threat serious enough to merit the introduction of emergency measures?  They issue various grades of alert. Yellow Orange Red. Is there a specific time to act as though we are not in a state of peace, but in a state of war?
    War is undoubtedly a bugger. In order to survive, and to protect your own, you must inflict pain and hurt upon your foe, and you must expect some suffering and pain yourself. Is there any moral virtue in handicapping yourself with peacetime rules, in times of war?

    “I’d rather lose my country than be called a racist!” Someone said in an online comment, neatly encapsulating a his opponent’s criticism of the EDL, and demolishing it, in one concise blow.
    In one less concise plagiarism, I encapsulate Eliza Manningham Buller’s Reith lecture thus:
    “I’d rather look down, from the moral high ground, at my country’s corpse, than be ‘brought down to the terrorists’ level’ by using torture.”

    Is there any moral high ground to be salvaged from defeat?
    Preaching morality from a deluded sense of invincibility while the enemy gathers strength seems complacent and short sighted. (I exaggerate to make a point.)
    Okay, so we don’t approve of torture. We advocate civil liberty, but we don’t wish for anarchy. We need rules.
    Rule number one is to keep our familes safe, keep our country safe; deliver us from evil;  That’s moral enough.

    If you stick, at all costs, to your moral high ground, and the enemy takes the low road, and barges his way to victory, having used every immoral, lowly trick in the book, how would things look to you then?
    You might think, then, that winning the war IS the moral high ground.

    This is not meant to be a plea for using torture. It’s just meant as a challenge to Eliza’s deification.


  3. George R says:

    Manningham-Buller: DHIMMI, par excellence.

    Perhaps she, like INBBC’s Humphrys, takes Mr. Tariq Ramadan’s word on Islam.


  4. George R says:

    A perceptive point re-Manningham-Buller (2006):-  
    Carol Sarler, writing in … ‘Times’, makes a good point about responsibility.  

    ‘CREEPING UP on us, almost as if we should not notice, is a perturbing growth in the use of transitive verbs unique to any discussion of Islamic terrorism. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, was among many when she referred to British Muslims “being radicalised, being groomed, being indoctrinated, being targeted”. Such language contains an implicit assumption of the neutrality of young men until they are done unto — and, by extension, it hints at mitigation. ‘  
    “Without wishing to quibble, I would say that the point is not that the verbs are transitive but that the voice is passive; British Muslims are being acted upon rather than being responsible for their own actions.”  


  5. David Preiser (USA) says:

    Negotiations brought a qualified peace to Northern Ireland by allowing violence to succeed.  Nice message.


  6. john in cheshire says:

    It’s a good job I have no power because there would be no socialists and no muslims in our country.


  7. Invicta 100 says:

    I remember it was her predecessor and first female head of MI5, Stella Rimmington who claimed the Muslim terrorist threat to the UK was exaggerated, and one of her first actions in office was to scale back the anti-terrorist budget and reduce staff numbers engaged in counter terrorism!
    This was against a background of Muslims businesses in the UK openly collecting money to support Saddam Hussein following the First Gulf War and those nasty ’right wing’ newspapers running articles about the real life threats we in the UK faced because we were so naïve .
    I remember the shocked look on Robin Cook’s face (Home Secretary) when on camera he was informed that some of the terrorists involved in the murder of tourists in the Yemen were ’’British’’ with links to a certain London Mosque.


  8. ian says:

    She wasn’t the only woman intelligence chief appointed under Labout. Gender more important than ability, I guess. Or in the case of John Scarlett, ability to lie more important than ability.