Spy Blog does not usually get involved with blog tag memes, whereby one blogger nominates a few others to comment on a particular topic, and then to pass on the same meme to others, chain letter style.
However, we have been involved in the Streisand Effect, in defence of the right to free speech of political bloggers and the public in general, regardless of the fact that they might be expressing political views which we disagree with.
It appears that our previous support for Tim Ireland, Boris Johnson, Bob Piper and others affected by "collateral damage" aimed at former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, in the notorious Schillings / Alisher Usmanov affair (see also Matt Wardman's coverage of that issue) seems to has resulted in Spy Blog being put under a sort of geis, or obligation curse.
We have been challenged by the Miserable Old Fart blogger in Wales to support a Labour blogger Kezia Dugdale in Scotland, who has been forced to take down a blog article at short notice, as a result of bullying legal threats from Glasgow based "media lawyers" Bannatyne Kirkwood France & Co hired by a millionaire Scottish Nationalist Party Councillor Jahangir Hanif, even though there has, as yet, not been any libel action or court order.
This political censorship seems to have been as a result of Kezia being one several bloggers who published what seems to be the full letter from Noor Hanif , the 17 year old daughter of Jahangir Hanif, to the leader of the SNP Alex Salmond, which paints her father as a violent, devious, domineering bully, as well as puncturing some of the spin and gloss put out by him regarding the AK-47 incident in Pakistan, for which he has been temporarily suspended from the SNP. Parts of the letter have been quoted in National and Scottish newspapers and it has been referred to in debate in the Scottish Parliament.
This letter was removed from this site after Councillor Hanif's solicitors intimated their intention to raise a summons in the Court of Session for interim interdict. The firm of Bannatyne, Kirkwood, France and Co., gave this site 15 minutes to remove the letter.
15 minutes ? Such bullying is reminiscent of the notorious Schillings in London or Lavely & Singer in Los Angeles.
See Tim Ireland's write up of some the recent media coverage of the Jahangir Hanif scandals.
We are a bit unclear about the differences between libel law in Scotland and in England & Wales. There certainly have been cases where an English High Court Injunction has been perfectly legally broken by newspapers in Scotland, so, presumably, the reverse must also be true.
The libel laws in the United Kingdom, which allow expensive lawyers to bully poor people, especially those expressing their right of free speech on the internet, despite the guilt of their rich clients, must be reformed as soon as possible.
When will rich clients demand their money back, with interest and damages, after hiring "media lawyers" who only succeed in stirring up the Streisand Effect, and spreading the information which they are trying to suppress on the internet, to a much wider audience, than if they had simply ignored it ?
For experienced bloggers, especially those who use RSS or Atom syndication feed aggregators to read lots of blogs only when they get updated e.g. Bloglines, the original blog articles on Kezia Dugdale's Soapbox, on SNP Watch and by Jim Millar, are still easily available for now in the blog aggregator recent history caches (which will soon expire).
For those of you who cannot be bothered to do this, you can judge the Noor Hanif letter for yourselves, as it is available on the controversial WikiLeakS.org supposedly anonymous whistleblower publishing website.
N,B. the WikiLeakS.org website is currently was unusably busy as a result of an alleged leak of US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo emails.
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