Have you ever wondered why Blair Howard and Bush have ALL written their "autobiography"?... One could suspect a collusion. And there is. It is a well orchestrated way to frame the debate about the Iraq war in a sea of other titillating subjects — including the foetus of George W Bush's unborn sibling his mother kept in a pickle jar or the sexual celebration of Blair's political victory, with Cherie. Like in a well tuned orchestra, Blair, Howard and Bush, all play an Iraq tune, with counterpoints and slightly different notes BUT IN HARMONY... The theme tune of the song is that "Saddam deserved to be taken out" and the WORLD IS BETTER FOR IT. Conspiracy? You bet.

They have the knack to absolved themselves from the most heinous crime: an illegal war... And the worst part is that the media at large is letting them get away with it...

So far I haven't seen any serious journalists  — even the small gang of renegades, Fisk, Loyd, Pilger, whose works are sharp but not penetrating the main media stream and even Gore Vidal — explain like I have done here that the way the US, the UK and Australia attacked Iraq indicates that the weapons of mass destruction was a crock. My major premise as mentioned several times on this site, is that one does not attack a country that one claims to have strong armament when one knows zip about the position of such strong armament...

We also knew that Bush, Blair and Howard were lying before going to war against Iraq. The difficult part is to irrefutably prove this fact with proper DOCUMENTATION, and second, our debate "has been (still is)" framed by the mantra that Saddam was not a very nice fellow and that "we should be grateful" that Bush, Blair and Howard took him out.

Bollocks. The act is a war crime.

This was a very serious act. Many people died. A country got destroyed. Many people got exiled. For no other main reason than "for the oil" and a "we did not like the guy" whim. Super crock. Bush, Blair and Howard should be in the gallows.

Iraq was a sovereign country. There are very strong rules and regulations in regard to the "legality" of war. In the eyes of the United Nations, the war against Iraq was illegal — and was NEVER SANCTIONED. The war was never approved as a UN operation, even if some countries were swayed by the "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction supplied by the US. It was never sanctioned even if some Lord Whatisname in the UK gave a "legal" document to Blair who asked for one as he knew he was treading on very thin ice. The "facts" of weapons of mass destruction having been amassed by Saddam and the dangers these presented to the world did not stack up at any stage. There were never any facts, just conjecture and hear-say. On this alone, the war was illegal.

First, Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors could not find any weapons of mass destruction. Despite following the "detailed" CIA instructions as to where these where, the inspectors saw NOTHING, nothing even remotely like WMDs. Some of the CIA maps were deliberately badly drawn. The lack of success by Blix and his team was dismissed by the US with the explanation that Saddam kept moving the WMDs around or that they were very well hidden. Thus at any one time, the US "intelligence" had no idea where these weapons were — if these really existed.

Saddam did not want war, thus he had released to the United nations a full dossier (10,000+ pages) on the elimination of his WMDs in 1991 and wanted Blix to carry on inspecting ANYWHERE Blix wanted to go and prove he, Saddam, did not have any weapons of mass destruction. Blix asked for an extra six months of inspection since Saddam had been more co-operative — a request which was denied by the US as the US wanted to attack Iraq before the summer kicked in, but in reality the US told Blix and his inspectors to get out of Iraq because the US did not want Blix to find "nothing anywhere" — because this would have proven that the US intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was a total crock. The US wanted war.

The French and the Germans knew it was a crock. They knew Saddam had nothing for them to worry about. The reality too was that Bush, Blair and Howard knew Saddam had nothing for them to worry as well. But they had to make the story stick to frighten the masses of stupid people out there: us. THEY WANTED WAR. When Colin Powell did his PowerPoint presentation at the United Nations, the French (they were laughing) and the Germans had to guess that either Powell was stupid by not knowing he had been given bullshit evidence by his "intelligence" outfits or that he was in collusion with them by deliberately promoting bullshit as evidence. Any serious analyst of "deception" could have picked that what Powell was dishing out was bullshit.

Blair's bluff got nearly unravelled with the David Kelly affair. David was about to expose (he had made some tentative noise about this but a journalist too eager for sensationalism exposed him too soon) that, in his field of expertise, Saddam DID NOT have any chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. David HAD THE PROOF. This proof was going against the "sexed-up dossier" that Blair was collecting against Saddam. So, David Kelly was "intimidated" (taken to court), "dismissed" (belittled as not knowing what he was talking about) then "eliminated" (even if David committed suicide, which is highly unlikely, he would have been subjected to very covert powerful psychological manipulations) so no proof against the "sexed-up" dossiers could be ever be considered properly. And Blair-the-liar could get away with saying that the dossier was not "sexed-up" in a very convincing manner only professional sociopath liars can get away with. (see double crossed)

Bush's bluff got nearly unravelled by the Valerie Plame affair. Her diplomat husband had discovered that documents used by the US government, to "prove" that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, were fakes... She was exposed as a CIA agent by the said government as pay-back. That secondary event distracted the media away from the main game: in order to promote war, the US government was using fake documents — which the CIA and other spy agencies "had not found out they were fakes" — proving only three things: either the CIA and other agencies were STUPID OR they knew the documents were fakes but went along with them to promote the government's case OR they had created the fake documents in the first place. Either way, even before going to war, the "evidence" was that flimsy.

In Australia, Andrew Wilkie, a senior analyst at the ONA, was less than impressed with the "evidence". A career officer, he could see that most if not all "evidence" showed not a bit of evidence and only relied on HEAR-SAY from Iraqi "defectors" who were being coaxed and paid into saying what the governments of the US, UK and Australia wanted to hear. Most of these "defectors" were in the network of Ahmed Challabi, an exiled Iraqi, who was PAID $US350,000 per MONTH by the CIA for his good work of providing "defectors" who would say "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, BUT PROVIDED NO real PROOFS, no hard evidence of the WMDs (some provided "plans" but a solid analysis of these plans would have proven they were crap, old or fabricated for deception)... Some of these "defectors" were offered as "exclusive interviews" to a "naive" — mostly eager for war — media, via CIA's "front-shops". Often the journalists would have been cherry picked, even chosen for their anti-war attitude (in a media generally eager for war), so that the message would crush (or seed doubts in) this possible opposition to war. All cleverly done. Andrew Wilkie resigned and spilled as much of the beans as he could — placing his life on the line — revelations to which the Howard government dismissed him as a second rate underling with no access to the FULL PICTURE of intelligence. See how it's done? Wilkie was belittled into the ground. Had he revealed anymore, he would have spend the rest of his days in a prison for treason under the official secrets act.

When the "weapons of mass destruction" mantra started to loose a bit of traction, the conspirators added the new mantra of "regime change". A bit more sauce on the pie so to speak... That in itself is a no-no in the United Nations charter. That is fully illegal under international law and is punishable with 'war crimes" offence.

So how all this fudge came to be acted upon?

With 14 intelligence agencies, 175 governmental spy satellites and 88 "privately operated" spy satellites (citation to come), the US alone had an intelligence gathering facility of enormous clout. How could thereafter the invasion of Iraq and discover there was no weapons of mass destruction there, the US government blame this enormous "intelligence" apparatus for the complete failure? How can we be led to believe this massive "failure"? Such failure is not believable.

Any "intelligence" agency worth its salt is trained in the art of deception. That is the name of the game. Deception is their profession, whether in the analysis or the creation of. These agencies are geared to smell porkies 350 kilometres from above the earth. They are trained to flush a rat out of a sewer from 15,000 miles away. They have at least half a million of highly trained operatives with a skepticometer pushed to the max as not to be taken for fools... That one mistake is made is careless. That the "intelligence agencies" in three countries failed so miserably is a collusion of purpose. The brief from the US government was "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction — make it stick". They did, knowing well they were fudging beyond credibility.

One has to revisit these times in 2002, when standing on the ruins of the twin towers, Bush claimed with virulence that: "We will prove Saddam's guilt!". This of course was part of an orchestrated plot to claim that Saddam was involved in 9-11 — the destruction of the twin towers in New York and was friendly with Al Qaeda. Of course, while keeping a straight poker face, John Howard, tells us in his "memoirs" that Bush never claimed that Saddam was responsible for it. Bollocks! I have the front page of a reputable newspaper with the incriminating speech by Bush —also linking Saddam with Al Qaeda. Was Howard living on a different planet??? That is the kind of counterpoint that gives the other conspirators a bit of slack on the reality — all in order to sow doubt in our minds...

Nonetheless, the "anthrax affair" was also used by Bush to place more blame on Saddam while knowing within 24 hours that the strain of Anthrax came from US labs, not Saddam's labs. The investigation by the FBI led, several years later, to a lone weird guy who killed himself before the truth about the affair could come to light in court. How convenient. Although the FBI is nearly 90 per cent sure the fellow did it, there is no motive, nor reason for it to be done by him, especially in regard to provide an official tool for the government to link Saddam with 'evil" and terrorism... (see double crossed)

The last thing Saddam wanted was to promote terrorism on the US (or any other Western countries), as the US was his only safeguard against his "enemy" — Iran...

More to come... Please visit also double crossed... harlot's intelligence... and any other relevant posts on this important site.

------------------------

Note from double crossed:

A while after the beginning of the "war", Challabi was "tainted" by the CIA on false charges of fake currency dealing AND for "divulging sensitive information" to Iran (telling their codes had been broken by US intelligence —the Iranians knew that anyway but played along). In fact I believe the CIA was grooming him to become palatable in the eyes of the Shiite Iraqis so he could be elected to the Iraqi parliament and secretly carry on working for the US. The interesting factor here is that Challabi was tainted "TWICE" in order to reinforce his "liberation" from the exposed CIA clutches. To me it was a cheap trick. Sure, one needs more than one destructive aspect for a destructive attempt to be really successful. Striking from two directions at once, or in quick succession, is the way extinction works... Challabi's CIA's past was thus erased...

We have little chance of convincing enough "important" people in order for the UN to decide to charge Bush, Blair and Howard with war crimes. And the outcome may not be the one we wish for... "they could be exonerated... These three men are clever and sociopath enough to get away with it because the collusion was deep, very deep. To prove that they lied would involve exposing many CIA analysts and operatives, and wade through many complex legal arguments. More obvious criminals have escaped justice thus, especially when they are "powerful" and are well connected. Those who have supported them, would have to be charged as well as accessory to the facts... "Witnesses die". In the case of Bush, Blair and Howard, many witnesses have already died...
We cannot expect these former leaders to be repentant or to tell the truth anyway. They will lie till their grave and be lauded by many for what they say and did — despite being lies, lies, LIES and a useless war, as if lying and fighting like thugs were virtues. Their action stuffed up a country and there were other solutions to the problem they actually "invented" for a particular outcome: WAR.

So we have to live with these donkeys...

But we have to fight their exonerating lies.

We have to prevent the lies becoming legends or truths — or worse, historical facts, which these monkeys are trying hard to do in their fictitious memoirs on the subject...
Bush, Blair and Howard have to be exposed for what they are: ugly liars. Three world leaders who went to war under false pretences. We need to attack any journalist or publisher who gives any credence to these liars and their lies. We cannot allow Bush, Blair and Howard to carry on with lying as a way to absolve their sins. Not only they now lie about their lies, in their books, they want us to pay for the privilege of reading them lying to us again...
The duplicitous greedy bastards... Burn the books!

We need to convince at least some journalists, such as Laurie Oakes, those who claim to be serious journalists, to give up in believing these monkeys and say so openly: "you lied sir. YOU LIED, SIR!" and start doing a proper job: Investigative journalism... Dig deep, my friend, dig deep...

No more pandering, no more listening to the porkies... We need the truth. We need to throw shoes at them. They need to be in hiding... Then our memory of those who died, the 5,000 US soldiers and the hundred of thousand dead Iraqis can be laid in peace to rest. As well, those who have been maimed for life can become fiercely angry at these masters of deception and fudge...

We need to make sure they don't sleep at night anymore. Public exposure will be our weapon. Ridicule shall be thrown upon them and anyone with self-respect shall not buy their book of lies.

I believe one of the weak links in this conspiracy of lies is Dick Cheney. Dick was the conductor of the piece, while the composer was Paul Wolfowitz. But on his death bed, it's most likely that on his way to meet his maker, Dick, will demand a confessor to hear his sins in full... His lies and his actions that underpinned the lies of the "leaders", Bush, Blair and Howard.  He will spill the beans. He has too...
But then:
-----------------------
No criminal charges will be filed against CIA officials involved in destroying videotapes of harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects, the US justice department has said.

The CIA destroyed 92 tapes of al-Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri being waterboarded in 2005.

Jose Rodriguez, a former clandestine officer, approved the move out of concern the tapes could harm the CIA.

The investigation has spanned nearly three years.

Mr Rodriguez's order to destroy the tapes, which were held in a safe in a secret Thailand prison where the two al-Qaeda members were interrogated, countered instructions given to him by Central Intelligence Agency lawyers and the White House.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11723140

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http://www.cageprisoners.com/learn-more/news/item/803-bush-says-waterboarding-saved-uk-lives

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See toon at top...

in Verbatim, SMH 13-14 November 2010
George W Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard were largely in lockstep during a decade of momentous world events...

On Iraq and WMD
Bush: The reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false. No-one was more shocked or angry than I was when we did not find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do."

Howard: "After the regime was toppled I thought it would be only a matter of time before some WMDs were found. I had believe the intelligence which pointed overwhelmingly to Iraq possessing at least chemical and biological weapons. I and many others were disappointed."

Blair: "The intelligence on Saddam and WMD turned out to be incorrect. It is said — even if I have said — that how this came to be so remains a mystery. Why should Saddam keep the inspectors out for so long when he had nothing to hide?"

-------------------

Gus: THE LIARS... A Mystery???? More like a mastery... of deceit by Bush, Blair and Howard.

AS I HAVE MENTIONED ON THIS SITE MANY TIMES, THE US, THE UK AND AUSTRALIA WOULD NOT HAVE ATTACKED IRAQ, HAD IRAQ HAD WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION THE LOCATION OF WHICH WAS "UNKNOWN TO THE INVADING ARMIES".
The intelligence on Saddam's WMDs was deliberately flawed (concocted) to lead to WAR no matter what. Report on this WILL eventually emerge from the CIA, from Dick Cheney and from the US generals in charge of the invasion of Iraq. It is inconceivable that US generals (and UK and Aussie army chiefs) would send their troops into battle without knowing the full capability and deployment of the enemy's WMD — which was what the "intelligence" was suggesting: they had no idea of where these were... According to the "intelligence" Saddam had plenty of stockpiles of WMDs, but the "intelligence" could not find where these were "hidden". Had Saddam had "hidden" WMDs as inferred, US troops could not attack without loosing more than 15,000 personnel on the the first few days of invasion under a WMDs counter-attack. It's basic warfare 101. Loosing troops on such scale would have been an unacceptable catastrophic public relation disaster when "negotiations were still possible"... No-one, I repeat NO-ONE in their right mind, would have launched an offensive against Saddam without knowing he HAD NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

Blair is talking TOTAL CRAP. In November 2002, Saddam gave carte blanche to the inspectors to find anything anywhere they wished. When Blix (the chief weapons inspector) was about to take the opportunity to inspect everywhere, the US STOPPED HIM DOING SO. THE US DID NOT WANT BLIX TO FIND NOTHING because that would have exposed the intelligence was "flawed" (concocted) BEFORE the attack on Iraq.

For our little Ratbag Rattus to say he was "like many others" disappointed is disingenuous to say the least. As usual, John Howard likes to associate himself with many others... Some of his favourite cons were to justify his gross ineptitude and lies by prefacing them with "everyone knows that..." when many knew to the contrary...

These three rat-bags are LIARS and the world should know that. They should be charged with war crimes. We cannot let them get away with murder. We cannot let them get away with the privilege of making us pay for perpetrating their lies in fake "memoirs" on this subject...

from wilipedia:

A study coauthored by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the two years after September 11, 2001 the president and top administration officials had made 935 false statements, in an orchestrated public relations campaign to galvanize public opinion for the war, and that the press was largely complicit in its uncritical coverage of the reasons adduced for going to war.[60][61] PBS commentator Bill Moyers had made similar points throughout the run up to the Iraq War, and prior to a national press conference on the Iraq War[22] Moyers correctly predicted "at least a dozen times during this press conference he [the President] will invoke 9/11 and Al Qaeda to justify a preemptive attack on a country that has not attacked America. But the White House press corps will ask no hard questions tonight about those claims."[62][63] Moyers later also denounced the complicity of the press in the administration's campaign for the war, saying that the media "surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with [the U.S.] government in marching to war," and that the administration "needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on."[63]

Police have been urged to start a murder inquiry into Dr David Kelly's death following further allegations that he did not commit suicide. Officers have been told the government scientist could not have taken an overdose of painkillers. This overdose was found by the original pathologist to be one of the causes of his death.

Dr Andrew Watt, an experienced clinical pharmacologist, says he has told Thames Valley Police it is not possible Dr Kelly could have swallowed more than a 'safe' dose of two coproxamol tablets because there was so little in his system after death....

Drug expert claims David Kelly was murdered as he could not have taken overdose

Agreed without acception. 

 

I quote your truth [with my suggested substitutes] which have been acknowledged even by the criminals Blair, Bush and Howard.

 

“AS I HAVE MENTIONED ON THIS SITE MANY TIMES, THE US, THE UK AND AUSTRALIA WOULD NOT HAVE ATTACKED IRAQ, HAD IRAQ HAD WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION THE LOCATION OF WHICH WAS "UNKNOWN TO THE INVADING ARMIES".

[Would this world of ours (or is it?) believe another such US/Zionist attack on false and concocted claims?]

 

The intelligence on Saddam's [IRAN’S] WMDs was deliberately flawed (concocted) to lead to WAR no matter what. Report on this WILL eventually emerge from the CIA, from Dick Cheney and from the US generals in charge of the invasion of Iraq. Let’s play substitutes….IRAN for Iraq…..

 

It is inconceivable that US generals (and UK and Aussie army chiefs) would send their troops into battle without knowing the full capability and deployment of the enemy's WMD — which was what the "intelligence" was suggesting: they had no idea of where these were... According to the "intelligence’ [IRAN] had plenty of stockpiles of WMDs, but the same "intelligence" could not find where these were "hidden".

 

Had (IRAN) "hidden" WMDs as inferred, US troops could not attack without loosing more than 15,000 personnel on the first few days of invasion under a WMDs counter-attack. It's basic warfare 101.

 

Loosing troops on such scale would have been an unacceptable catastrophic public relation disaster when "negotiations were still possible"... No-one - I repeat NO-ONE - in their right mind, would launch an offensive against [IRAN] without knowing whether or not it had WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.  End of censored quote.

 

COMMENT: Or would they?  The Zionists have played the Nuclear “defence” card so many times to bluff; blackmail; invade; bomb; and commit many crimes against several nations without any retaliation, sanctions or resistance by the US/UN or the European Union.

 

If the principle above was applied equally to the situation in the Middle East, would the US stand by while the Zionists started a nuclear war by beginning an invasion against IRAN and the latter tried to defend itself with conventional weapons? 

 

Would the US take the “big stick” to the Zionists? And recover some dignity and pride in the so doing?  Or would they continue to back down and show the world who is really the Top Dog?  NE OUBLIE.

 

 

 

 

The Catholic Workers Movement is protesting against one of its own universities in Brisbane this morning.

They claim the appointment of Peter Cosgrove as Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University (ACU) is against the religion's morals and beliefs.

Spokesman Sean O'Reilly says as the former head of the Defence Force, General Cosgrove led troops into the Iraq war, but the Catholic Church was opposed to the conflict.

"He would have known quite well that the whole premise for invading Iraq - that there were weapons of mass destruction - was a lie," he said.

"So you know, he took our troops into a war that was immoral, illegal and had no support from his own church."

Another spokesman, Jim Dodrill, says the General ignored orders from churches in Australia and around the world.

"Pope John Paul II said that the war and attack or an invasion on Iraq was unjust, illegal and immoral," he said.

"Peter Cosgrove ignored those calls; he also ignored the warnings of international arms inspectors."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/28/3078564.htm?section=justin

Gordon Brown's Government secretly promised to limit the extent of the Iraq war inquiry to prevent damage to the United States, the leaked cables disclosed. The pledge – made last September as the Chilcot inquiry into the war started – threatens to damage the credibility of the investigation, which is due to report in the new year.

A message from Jon Day, then director-general for security at the Ministry of Defence, reassured American officials that "the UK had put measures in place to protect [US] interests during the UK inquiry into the causes of the Iraq war".

A separate document makes clear that Sir John Chilcot, who is chairing the investigation, felt his inquiries were being hampered. He expressed "frustration" that he was unable to refer to relevant documents during his questioning of Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General. British officials also warned the US there would be a "feeding frenzy" of interest in the UK about the inquiry, in contrast to the US, where the Iraq war was "no longer a major issue".

The disclosures will fuel charges that the inquiry, which has already heard evidence from Mr Brown and Tony Blair, is being constrained in its ability to gain the full intelligence picture. Originally, Mr Brown wanted the evidence to be heard in private, but he was forced to back down in the face of public and political anger. He had promised that the inquiry team would have full access to all the relevant intelligence material that did not jeopardise national security. But additional restrictions were imposed, including any disclosure of information that undermined Britain's economic interests.

There are also restrictions on data protection concerns, commercial sensitivities and fears that an individual's safety could be put in peril.

The move provoked fury, with Nick Clegg, who is now the Deputy Prime Minister, claiming that the inquiry had been "gagged". In angry Commons clashes, the Liberal Democrat leader protested that the list of restrictions "outrageously gives Whitehall departments individual rights of veto".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-put-limits-on-iraq-inquiry-to-keep-the-us-happy-2148010.html

see image at top.

The cable concluded that because of "Brown's abysmal track record", Labour MPs seriously considered staging a coup.

In another memo dated March 3, 2008, Mr Tuttle suggested that Labour MPs sensed the party was "rudderless" following Mr Blair's departure.

"Even though Blair ended up unpopular, he was the sun around which the party orbited, and his speeches, no matter the content, sparked an emotional response," Mr Tuttle said.

"Brown's earnest and praiseworthy vision excites no opposition and yet it seems to excite no great enthusiasm either," he added.

Mr Tuttle pinpointed former foreign secretary David Miliband as the most suitable replacement following an electrifying speech at the 2008 Labour Party conference.

Mr Miliband eventually lost out to his younger brother, Ed, in the September 2010 leadership vote after Mr Brown resigned following a crushing defeat in May's general election.

"David Miliband provided rare moments of star power for a party that seems increasingly to miss Tony Blair's charisma," Mr Tuttle said in the March cable.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/gordon-brown-abysmal-us-ambassador-20101203-18j8x.html

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Gus: now, was Murdoch working for the US, when he decided to "not support Labour" anymore and his rags started to support the conservative party, of Cameron.

What deals had Murdoch made with Blair and Bush (he used to visit regularly in person) especially in regard to (the non-existant) Saddam's weapons of mass destruction?. We have to consider the rabid Murdoch press in 2002 and early 2003, with its extraordinary well-designed graphics and articles supporting the all-out war.

 

The case against Blair: 15 charges that have yet to be answered

From misleading Parliament and the nation to marginalising his most senior legal adviser. The former PM faces the Chilcot Inquiry today...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-case-against-blair-15-charges-that-have-yet-to-be-answered-2190375.html

Rumsfeld remains largely unapologetic in memoir

By Bradley Graham

Washington Post Staff Writer

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that master of the tart zinger, now concedes he went too far with some. The man who more than any other in the Bush administration personified bravado and self-assuredness has come to regret saying "Stuff happens" about the early looting in postwar Iraq. He admits his quip about "old Europe" - meaning Germany and France - not supporting the use of force in Iraq was hardly deft diplomacy.

As for declaring, as he did in the first days after the invasion of Iraq, "We know where they are," referring to suspected stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction - well, Rumsfeld would like to take that one back, too.

But Rumsfeld still can't resist - in a memoir due out next week - taking a few pops at former secretaries of state Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice as well as at some lawmakers and journalists. He goes so far as to depict former president George W. Bush as presiding over a national security process that was marked by incoherent decision-making and policy drift, most damagingly on the war in Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/02/AR2011020205505.html?hpid=topnews

Gus: the privilege of the sociopaths and liars... no apology necessary... not even excuses, no regrets. STUFF HAPPENS...

George Bush, the former US president, has cancelled a planned visit to Switzerland next week.

While human rights groups have said the cancellation was due to the risk of legal action against him for alleged torture, organisers said they did not want to risk violence during protests by left-wing groups.

David Sherzer, Bush's spokesman, said the former president was informed on Friday by the United Israel Appeal that his February 12 dinner speech in Geneva has been called off.

Criminal complaints

Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned.

Pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

Criminal complaints against Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials say.

Keren Hayesod, the organiser, announced on Saturday that they were cancelling Bush's participation on security grounds - not because of the criminal complaints.

Saturday's edition of Swiss daily Tribune de Geneve quoted the Jewish charity's lawyer, Robert Equey, as saying the visit was canceled because of the risk that protests by left-wing groups could result in violence.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2011/02/20112663331735188.html

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Sure... blame the lefties for Bush having lied, being an idiot and having killed people by waging illegal wars... see picture at top...

"This is also where religious ideology comes to the fore. The role of religion has been both enormously positive, which a lot of people fail to appreciate, and negative, which more people are aware of. But the nature of the debate in both the secular and religious areas are ideological.

"You fight ideas with ideas. It is now up to institutions of higher education to engage directly on these issues - not only their students, but current world leaders in politics, finance, and international diplomacy, along with the general public.

"If universities begin to foster this kind of dialogue in the public sphere, they will create a safe and objective space for these questions to be addressed and explored, which will not only produce a better informed public but also force advocates of exclusive political or religious ideologies to support their positions with rigorous and convincing arguments - no small feat."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12597817

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"religious ideologies to support their positions with rigourous and convincing arguments"!!!!???? CRAAAAAPppp!... Bollocks!!! On the strength of this statement alone, Blair should be in prison for having told massive porkies that led to the massacre of thousands of people... Religious ideologies are pulled apart by science daily, but most reasonable people and most scientists are too afraid (and persecuted) to let the cat out of the bag... I despair... Whatever happened to "enlightenment". Hijacked by the force of "evil"??? CON-vincing arguments? Bloody con artists...

The truth in scientific reality is not designed to control people, while the religious porkies about our world are... While some people can use science to control other people, relatively speaking, science is liberating. Too many people, though, are afraid of the freedom of thought, thus they huddle together in the bosom of godly fairy tales — using their strength in number to rule the cuckoo's nest...

As usual Tony is highjacking the floor-space with a devious benevolence...

see image at top...

From a Twitter hoax claiming McDonald's was charging black customers extra to a woman getting all her Facebook friends tattooed on her arm and a phoney Texas mass grave - it's been a good week for hoaxes.

And that's not to mention the Gay Girl in Damascus, who has sent political and gay activists into a lather after "she" was outed as a 40-year-old American aspiring novelist. Or the eHarmony user whose love of cats drove her to tears in her dating video.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/maccas-jk-rowling-lesbian-bloggers-hoaxers-take-over-the-world-wide-web-20110614-1g127.html#ixzz1PDB67V8e
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AHah!!! ... And of course, the biggest hoax of the century was organised by Bush, Blair and Howard to go to war against Saddam... It would be so funny if no one had died... see article at top...

Tony Blair: New Labour died when I handed over to Gordon Brown

Former prime minister delivers harshest verdict yet on his successor and warns party to avoid 'politics of protest'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/08/tony-blair-new-labour-gordon-brown

------------------------------

 

No Tony... It died when you actually went to war in Iraq... and lied and lied and lied and lied.... see toon at top and story below it...

They've hacked into the voicemail of a murdered teenager and the relatives of dead UK soldiers. They've paid police officers for information. The charge sheet against News International is a long and serious one.

But as shocking as the allegations of illegal news gathering have been, the greatest crime of Murdoch's UK newspaper empire has gone largely unreported. Namely that no other newspaper group has as much blood on its hands when it comes to propagandising for illegal and fraudulent military conflicts.

There hasn't been a war - or potential war - involving Britain in recent years that Murdoch's British titles haven't been gung-ho about.

More than two years before the publication of the government's dodgy dossier on Iraq's non-existent WMD, News International papers were already doing their best to convince the public of the dire threat from Saddam Hussein.

On Christmas Eve 2000, the Sunday Times published a story headlined 'Saddam builds new atom bomb' in which it was claimed that the Iraqi leader "has ordered his scientists to resume work on a programme aimed at making a nuclear bomb".

A couple of months later the same paper ran another piece entitled 'Saddam has tested nuclear weapon' based on the testimony of a mysterious Iraqi whistleblower named 'Leone'.

"Personally, I think the evidence is compelling," wrote the article's author, film-maker Gwynne Roberts.

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/81718,news-comment,news-politics,oh-what-a-lovely-war-rupert-murdochs-other-legacy-sun-times-news-international#ixzz1S9tOXxjD
See picture and story at top... Since 2001, I have been very vocal about the way Uncle Rupe was spreading lies and crap, about Saddam, in his rags... Without Murdoch's support, Blair, Bush and Howard could not have gone to war...

There may never be another inside account quite like it: the first credible indications of how Rupert Murdoch encouraged Tony Blair to go to war; the most detailed version yet of one of those Iraq telephone conversations between President George W Bush and the British Prime Minister in the run up to the Iraq invasion; and a graphic if more fanciful portrayal of panic rising much later in Downing Street as the bankability of a key intelligence source for the presumed existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction begins to crumble.

Sarah Helm's play Loyalty, which opened in London this week, does not scoop the Chilcot inquiry into the war, due later this year. But it may tell us more about the atmosphere in which the invasion of Iraq was launched and sustained than Chilcot ever will. And all from the extraordinary vantage point of the wife of Tony Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell, his closest aide throughout his premiership. A former Independent journalist who had worked in the Middle East, she took her two children to join the million-strong march against the imminent war which Mr Powell was professionally engaged almost non-stop, at Mr Blair's side, in prosecuting.

She says her play is a "work of fiction" but has also acknowledged it was "drawn from real events". As a whole the play is not a historical record, especially since the final denouement in the second half is the fruit of dramatic imagination. But it is unlikely that the call from Rupert Murdoch in which she depicts the couple, Nick and Laura (based on herself and Mr Powell) listening in on – in her case notebook in hand – is entirely made up. Even if a composite, it has a distinct ring of authenticity, reinforced by the Cabinet Office's admission in July 2007, shortly after Mr Blair left office, that the News Corp chairman made three separate phone calls during the March run-up to the invasion.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/inside-the-court-of-king-tony-2318496.html

Chilcot to damn Blair on Iraq war

The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War is to "damn" then-prime minister Tony Blair on four main counts when it is published this autumn, reports the Mail on Sunday. They are: bogus claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, secretly promising George Bush to take the UK to war, making decisions without the Cabinet and having no plans for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/82411,news-comment,news-politics,chilcot-to-damn-blair-on-iraq-breivik-had-aryan-facelift-amy-winehouse-planned-to-adopt#ixzz1TfzF5927

* Bogus claims made about the weapons of mass destruction allegedly held by the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein;

* The failure to tell the British public about his "secret pledge" with President Bush to go to war;

* The operation of a "sofa government" style, which kept his Cabinet in the dark over the planning for an invasion of Iraq;

* The failure to foresee the chaos that gripped Iraq following the invasion, and to lay realistic plans to deal with it. Officials are currently writing the report and all witnesses will be given the chance to respond to any inaccuracies.

Mr Blair led the country to war eight years ago amid nationwide protests. His successor, Gordon Brown, set up the Chilcot inquiry after criticism of previous probes.

Mr Blair mounted a vigorous defence of the 2003 invasion of Iraq when he appeared before the inquiry for the first time, insisting that he had no regrets over removing Saddam and would do the same again.

But critics of the war and families of the 179 British troops who died in the conflict condemned his evidence, saying he evaded the panel's questions and refused to admit his mistakes. He gave evidence a second time and was jeered as he said he "deeply and profoundly" regretted the loss of life in the Iraq war.

In his memoirs, A Journey, he said he was angry at the way he was asked whether he had any regrets about going to war. He wrote that the Chilcot inquiry was supposed to be about learning lessons but had "inevitably turned into a trial of judgment and even good faith".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blair-to-face-withering-fire-in-iraq-report-2329361.html
see picture at top...

Leaks from Sir John Chilcot's Iraq war inquiry suggest that Tony Blair may be in big trouble when it publishes its findings in the autumn according to the Mail on Sunday. Let's hope so.

Ronnie Biggs would be envious of Tony's escape record. He bamboozled both Lord Hutton and Lord Butler as they compiled their solemn but uninquisitive reports. He evaded the formidable analytical skills of Michael Howard, and his then sidekick David Cameron, who between them could find no ammunition in either report with which to damage Blair in the Commons.

We should not perhaps get too excited. The public's expectations of the inquiry are so low, and our distrust of politicians so strong, that we are pathetically grateful for anything that does not look like an establishment whitewash. After all, Chilcot and his panel are only playing catch-up with the man on the Clapham omnibus.

Anyway, it looks as though Tony will come in for scathing criticism on four counts:

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/82426,news-comment,news-politics,tony-blair-to-stand-trial-for-iraq-war-not-after-camerons-libya-adventure#ixzz1TlRSEo2c

At the moment, a court in Australia is trying to pinch David Hicks' royalties from his book:

Guantanamo My Journey was released earlier this year and has sold 30,000 copies and describes David Hicks‘s five years spent in the US military prison and contains allegations of torture. The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has launched an action under the Proceeds of Crime Act in an effort to seize all money made from sales of the memoirs.

http://www.newsinsydney.com.au/3874/david-hicks-book-royalties-frozen-by-court/

---------------

In the same breath, one should also stop Blair, Howard and Bush profitering from their memoirs — whitewashing  their illegal war on Iraq... Sure some of these rich buggers may have given their royalties to charity (what's a few millions when one makes a killing) but a big wrong can never be rectified with a "generous" donation — especially when there is no mea culpa when there should be...

The crimes from Bush, Blair and Howard are FAR greater than that of Hicks. Hicks DIDN'T KILL ANYBODY...

Bush, Blair and Howard launched an illegal war that destroyed a country, killed many people and created a tidal wave of refugees — all for various concocted false excuses, when it was ABOUT OIL.

Their crimes are a billion time bigger that that of a silly young man who for whatever pigeon-shit was in his head at the time was prepared to fight alongside the Taliban (when the Taliban was STILL the official government of Afghanistan) but deserted like a scared rabbit at the first salvo... For this he was TORTURED and imprisoned ILLEGALLY and left to rot, by the HOWARD government, at Gitmo... Hicks pleaded guilty to anything under the sun (under specially newly created retrospective laws) so he could bargain an exit out the Gitmo illegal prison. The tribunal that "charged" him was since abandoned as it was deemed "unconstitutional"...

See toon at top...

Independent MP Andrew Wilkie wants former prime minister John Howard to explain to a parliamentary inquiry why Australia sent troops to Iraq in 2003.

At the time, Mr Wilkie was an intelligence officer with the Office of National Assessments (ONA) and resigned his post because he said the Government had no evidence Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

World leaders, including former US president George W Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair and Mr Howard all gave Iraq's possession of such WMDs as a reason for the invasion - a claim which was later discredited as no such weapons were ever found.

In March 2003 Mr Howard gave a major speech to the National Press Club saying with great force that the central issue in the case for disarming Iraq was the danger that it would provide Islamic terrorists with the means to attack with weapons of mass destruction.

But despite suggestions from within government that he would support the claim with evidence, he was unable to produce new intelligence.

Mr Wilkie, now a powerful independent MP, says an inquiry is needed to examine the "behaviour" of Mr Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer.

"They have never been made to sit down and explain why they, over many, many weeks if not months, argued about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism when it was very quickly apparent that that official case for war was a lie," Mr Wilkie told AM.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-11/wilkie-wants-iraq-inquiry/2834732

 

 

 

see picture at top and article below it.

The Government faces a legal challenge next week over its decision not to hold a coroner's inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly.

Attorney General Dominic Grieve ruled one out in June after conducting an investigation that concluded there was 'overwhelming evidence' the Whitehall weapons inspector committed suicide.

Now a doctor who is suspicious of the official account of Dr Kelly's death has started proceedings for a judicial review of Mr Grieve's decision.

After an appeal just a week ago, hundreds of Daily Mail readers have contributed £33,000 to a fund set up to help secure an inquest.

Using this money to cover legal fees, papers will be lodged at the High Court by Thursday - the deadline for launching a judicial review.

Dr David Halpin, who has been co-ordinating a group of doctors fighting for an inquest since December 2003, will be the claimant in the action.

Documents for the judicial review are being prepared by barrister John Cooper QC and solicitor Jennifer McDermott.

It is understood the judicial review is likely to focus on the actions of at least one senior member of Tony Blair's government involved in the initial decision not to have a full inquest into Dr Kelly's death.

Fight for inquest on David Kelly is going to court after doctor launches legal challenge

Who Won the Iraq War?

 
As the troops come home, it’s time to count the cost.

By Eric S. Margolis | November 21, 2011

In October, 2002 I wrote in the first issue of The American Conservative an analysis of the impending Iraq War entitled “The Road to Folly.”

I observed, “A war that fails to achieve clear political objectives is merely an exercise in violence and futility.” Having covered 14 conflicts as a war correspondent, I’ve seen a lot of violence and futility.

The White House launched a thunderous, utterly shameless propaganda campaign about phony threats to America and the world from President Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And on cue, U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003.

In America, the “bodyguard of lies” that Churchill said accompanies every war swelled into an army of liars. The Bush administration’s neoconservatives played a leading role in engineering the Iraq conflict. Media acted as megaphones for the war party. Thanks to the drumbeat of lies and insinuations, over 80 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/who-won-the-iraq-war/

 

Any political leader had to have a “solid media operation”, former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair told an inquiry into press standards.

But he doubted that his administration had been the first government to try to put a "gloss" on its policies.

And Mr Blair told the Leveson Inquiry in London that he had decided not to confront the issue of media relations when in office.

Mr Blair, prime minister between 1997 and 2007, made a written witness statement and answered questions from a barrister representing inquiry chairman Lord Justice Leveson.

He told the inquiry: "My advice to any political leader would be, 'you have got to have a very, very solid media operation'."

Mr Blair said he found the media issue "extraordinarily difficult" to be objective about - even though he left office five years ago.

He said he had decided that confronting the media issue could "push out" issues such as health, education and crime, which he "cared more about".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/relationship-between-media-and-politicians-inevitable-says-tony-blair-7793097.html

 

Blair needed the media on-side, so he could crap on and go to war against Iraq...

 

Much of the disinformation about Saddam was disseminated by an all too willing media.

 

Even when Brown took over the Labour leadership, most of the media — led by the Merde-och press was still pumping for Labour (UK). Then it turned on Brown, as it created new "more favourable" allegiances. The allegiances now being investigated for payments to police, phone hacking and god knows what else... Blair is morally corrupt as this opinionator is explaining:

...

His back is turned now and the plain speaking has gone. He won't explain why he's helping the Kazakh dictator present a better face to the west. Apparently, he has said that he is not personally profiting from appearing in a propaganda video praising the dictatorship's "progress" and hymning its "extraordinary economic potential". (I say apparently because his office would not respond to my repeated inquiries.) But it is beyond doubt that his commitment to democracy is now as flimsy as any relativist's: free elections may be good enough for the people of Britain, but the Kazakhs cannot expect to enjoy the same privileges.

Blair's mindless admiration of wealthy men explains his decline. In the 21st century, they tend to be dictators with sovereign wealth funds and tame oligarchs to command, or financiers. No surprise, then, that as well as advising Kazakhstan, Blair also advises JP Morgan.

His love of money has brought down the worst fate that could have befallen him. He now has the manners and morals of his opponents. He has become a George Galloway with a Learjet at his disposal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/27/nick-cohen-tony-blair-kazakhstan

see toon at top...

Now in the case of Julia Gillard, the Australian media has been the pits... The media has been following the lead from Tony Abbott... The media has been working hard at destroying the Labor brand... Any small ordinary problem is turned into a mountain of garbage... As I have mentioned before, the media won't rest until it sees the corpse of Julia Gillard. The media wants blood to prove it was was right, when it is so vendictively wrong... But who cares... As I have explained before apart from Tony Abbott and the media, there is another dark force working against Julia Gillard: Kevin Rudd. He and Tony Abbott, both hypocritical Cathoilics, work tirelessly below the plimson line to sink Julia. It is obvious for anyone to see that Bowen has been doing the bidding for Rudd...

 

 

 

Lord Justice Leveson has ordered an investigation into security procedures at his inquiry into the media after a protester burst into the courtroom to shout at Tony Blair while the former prime minister gave evidence.

The man, wearing a white shirt and chino trousers, entered from behind a curtain almost directly behind Leveson himself, inside court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice.

He shouted: "This man should be arrested for war crimes," before yelling allegations that the global bank JP Morgan paid Blair millions of dollars in connection with the conflict. As several security guards tackled him and dragged him away through the same door from which he entered, the man shouted: "This man is a war criminal."

Leveson, appearing shocked, stood up from his seat to watch as the protester was ejected. He asked the court how the man gained entry. "I'm sorry for that, Mr Blair," Leveson said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/may/28/tony-blair-protester-leveson-inquiry

---------------------

Why oh why, Mr Leveson, apologise to a war criminal?... Read all the comments carefully from the top...

 

from Crikey .....

Guy Rundle writes from London:

BRITISH LABOUR, JEREMY HUNT, LEVESON INQUIRY, PAUL KEATING, TONY BLAIR

Blair, tanned and fit, but having lost his strange US accent, never faltered. Nor was there any reason he should have. He was ostensibly being asked to describe politics as normal, the process by which the leader of a political party pays obeisance to Murdoch - and, in the UK to several other media tycoons - in the pursuit of victory.

There were embarrassing moments for Blair. He had to go through the time in 1995 when he schlepped to Hayman Island to attend the annual News Corp back-slapping whatever, and assure Murdoch's minions - or defendants 1-30 as they are now known - that he was busy curbing the Labour Party's vestigial desire to change anything. (And how weird it was hearing that place mentioned. Family holiday there in 1978, was it? We stayed in cabins. I drank my own weight in sarsaparilla and read the entire Stainless Steel Rat series. Happy days.)

He argued a pretty consistent line on that - to win, Murdoch had to be appeased, and once won, there was no point in making the curbing of media power into a centrepiece of the first Labour government in 20 years. He simply had to work with them. Other media organisations -- such as Associated Newspapers, publishers of the foam-flecked Daily Mail - were so hostile that they weren't even worth talking to. Did Blair speak to Rupert Murdoch three times in the 10 days before the start of the Iraq war? He did.

So far so realpolitik. Blair wanted to win, he said, to enact Labour's agenda: NHS waiting lists, minimum wage, better schools, etc. He never lobbied Murdoch. They just spoke constantly, it would seem. Blair repeatedly quoted Paul Keating on Murdoch - to the effect that Murdoch backs winners for business purposes. "That's not something I now agree with," he said. Fair enough, 'cos it's always been bullshit. Murdoch will desert the Right, but only when he has bullied centre-left parties into abandoning even the most vestigial progressive social program.

Which is really the nub of the issue. Because while it seems clear New Labour never tried to give News the same naked advantage as the Tories have - with their attempt to shoe-horn News into a majority ownership of BSkyB - the crucial issue is whether New Labour under Blair trimmed a progressive social program when it didn't need to. God knows UK Labour under Kinnock and then John Smith was hardly the Paris Commune during the Red Days, but there was something more there than the minimal program that Blair and his phalange ushered in following the early death of John Smith in 1994. But by 1996-97, the Tories were utterly exhausted and discredited. Labour's 160-plus seat victory suggests they could have won a comfortable majority without Blair's shit-eating-grin centre-right politics.

The Blairites' treatment of the situation in 1994-5 was a form of political shock doctrine: the 1992 result had demoralised everyone beyond description, the death of Smith had ushered in a leadership struggle, and the desperate desire to make victory utterly certain persuaded enough of the party to go with Blair - and also persuaded Gordon Brown that he could not win a leadership contest. Mr Tony was happy to dilate on how much he agreed with many of the reforms created by Margaret Thatcher; curbs on unions, etc.

At such times he glowed with his full narcissus halo, a satanic presence, the locus of hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, the man who tried to kill Iraq and tried to save Gaddafi. So it was inevitable that part-way through his evidence, someone would burst in and denounce him as a war criminal. David Lawley-Wakelin, tall, in a white shirt like a shroud, managed to get into the hearing with barely any preparation. He just went in the general entrance, down two floors and found the entrance used by Lord Leveson himself. Interestingly, his profession is as first assistant director - the one person on a film set who has to be totally, ceaselessly on the ball. He used his skills well. Had he been willing to do 25 in prison, for the rest of your life you'd remember where you were when it was late morning in the UK today.

Blair was unflustered - denying Wakelin's claims that he had taken millions from JP Morgan after the war. Well maybe he hadn't - just a directorship, and we'll never know how much that's worth. Wakelin's parting shot - "you're a war criminal!' - hung in the air for a long time, with everyone not knowing where to look. The more solicitous Leveson was to his suddenly defensive witness: "Mr Blair, you're not required to say anything." "No, but I want to ..."

It was a zen moment that made everything suddenly visible. Blair claimed he was glad the inquiry was on, as it could finally "drain the poison from the culture which ... I mean, phewwnughhhghack gaaak gaak gaak". Spending his time in Israel has certainly given him chutzpah. Had he shut up after Wakelin came in he would have won the day. Instead, he looked mewling and puking. His beefy bodyguards are useless hoons; his van was egged as he left.

Leveson left him untouched, Wakelin didn't.

MPs demanded an emergency recall of the Chilcot inquiry last night after new revelations that Tony Blair blocked the Government's most senior lawyer from explaining to Cabinet the legality of the war in Iraq.

According to the newly published full version of Alastair Campbell's diaries, the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wanted to "put the reality" to cabinet ministers that there was a case against, as well as for, military action in March 2003. But, according to his former spin doctor, the then Prime Minister feared that the legal opinion was too "nuanced" and would allow the war's ministerial critics Robin Cook and Clare Short to say that the case had not been made.

The disclosure is significant because, while it has long been suspected that Mr Blair and his inner circle put pressure on Lord Goldsmith to change his legal advice, this is the first evidence that the PM actively blocked the Cabinet from hearing the full details of the case for war.

MPs from all parties urged Sir John Chilcot, who has finished taking evidence and is now preparing his report into the Iraq war, to reconvene a special session to hear from Mr Blair, Mr Campbell and Lord Goldsmith. The former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said: "According to the diaries, Tony Blair was determined that the decision should not rest with the Cabinet and overruled his Attorney General. Sofa government prevailed at the expense of constitutional requirements. The diaries prove that once a decision to go to war against Iraq had been taken, intelligence and legal advice was manipulated to support that decision."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blair-blocked-cabinet-from-hearing-legal-advice-on-iraq-7878737.html

 

See toon at top and all stories below it...

Tony Blair dismissed his former spin doctor's account of what his Cabinet was told about the Iraq War's legality as "absolutely not true" yesterday.

 

In the latest volume of his diaries, Alastair Campbell claims Lord Goldsmith, then Attorney General, was prevented in 2002 from telling the Cabinet about his "doubts" on the legal basis for war.

 

But in an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr, Mr Blair denied he had intervened to stop Lord Goldsmith giving the Cabinet the "reality" of the legal position Britain faced if it went to war against Saddam Hussein's regime without the backing of the United Nations.

 

According to Mr Campbell's diaries, Mr Blair feared any nuanced evaluation would give too much ammunition to the Cabinet's leading anti-war critics, Robin Cook and Clare Short.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/alastair-campbell-reveals-tony-blair-did-hide-iraq-war-legal-advice-7879756.html

 

See toon at top and all stories below it...

 

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pulled out of an international summit because he doesn't want to share a platform with the "morally indefensible" Tony Blair, it emerged yesterday.

The retired archbishop, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaigning against apartheid, said that he had withdrawn from the event because he believed the former Prime Minister had supported the invasion of Iraq "on the basis of unproven allegations of the existence of weapons of mass destruction."

In a statement, Archbishop Tutu's office added: "The Discovery Invest Summit has leadership as its theme. Morality and leadership are indivisible. In this context, it would be inappropriate for the Archbishop to share a platform with Mr Blair."

A spokesman added that it was not a snap decision, saying that the Archbishop "thinks and prays and then acts". He added: "That's how he's always done things, including during the struggles."

Mr Blair and Archbishop Tutu, alongside the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, were due to appear at the leadership summit in Johannesburg later this week. The Muslim political party Al Jama-ah has already said that it will attempt to arrest Mr Blair when he arrives in Johannesburg for "crimes against humanity".

Mr Blair's office said he regretted the decision. In a statement, it said: "Tony Blair is sorry that the Archbishop has decided to pull out now from an event that has been fixed for months and where he and the Archbishop were never actually sharing a platform.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/desmond-tutu-quits-summit-with-blair-over-invasion-of-iraq-8084805.html

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war.

Tutu, a Nobel peace prizewinner and hero of the anti-apartheid movement, accuses the former British and US leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction and says the invasion left the world more destabilised and divided "than any other conflict in history".

Writing in the Observer, Tutu also suggests the controversial US and UK-led action to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003 created the backdrop for the civil war in Syria and a possible wider Middle East conflict involving Iran.

"The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain," Tutu argues, "fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us."

But it is Tutu's call for Blair and Bush to face justice in The Hague that is most startling. Claiming that different standards appear to be set for prosecuting African leaders and western ones, he says the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict is sufficient on its own for Blair and Bush to be tried at the ICC.

"On these grounds, alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague," he says.

The court hears cases on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. To date, 16 cases have been brought before the court but only one, that of Thomas Lubanga, a rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has been completed. He was sentenced earlier this year to 14 years' imprisonment for his part in war crimes in his home country.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/sep/02/tony-blair-iraq-war-desmond-tutu/print

See story at top...

 

When he was lambasted by Archbishop Desmond Tutu last week for the murderous debacle of the US-UK war of aggression in Iraq, Tony Blair pointed to the appalling human rights violations of the Saddam regime as one of his "justifications" for helping George W. Bush engineer the murder of a million innocent people. 

Of course, as we noted here earlier, Blair never evinced such concerns about, say, the extremist religious tyrants in Saudi Arabia (whom he protected by personally quashing a judicial case involving mammoth corruption in a UK-Saudi arms deal), or his later paymasters in Kazakhstan, or even his once-and-former hug-buddy Moamar Gadafy in Libya.

But putting aside this sinister hypocrisy for a moment, it might be instructive for those concerned about appalling human rights violations by the government of Iraq to take a look at the regime that the Anglo-American invaders built on the mound of corpses they left behind. And what would they find? Why, appalling human rights violations by the government of Iraq. As'ad AbuKhalil, the "Angry Arab," points us to this article by Halfa Zangana in the Guardian:

Three women were among the 21 people executed within one day in Iraq, last Monday. It was followed, two days later, by the reported execution of five more people. The number of people executed since the start of this year is now at least 96 and they are not the only ones. … There is also news of another 196 people on death row. According to Iraqi officials, they have all been convicted on charges "related to terrorism," but there is little information about their names, what crimes they committed or whether they have access to lawyers or not. 

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have previously documented the prevalence of unfair trials and torture in detention in Iraq. Confessions under torture are often the only evidence against a person who has been arrested following a secret informant's report. Parading the accused with their tortured, empty looks on Al Iraqiya, the official TV channel, is the norm. It took a court in Baghdad only 15 minutes to sentence Ramze Shihab Ahmed, a dual Iraqi-UK national, to 15 years' imprisonment after being found guilty of "funding terrorist groups".

Amnesty has obtained and examined court documents and said it believes the trial proceedings were "grossly unfair". Ahmed was held in a secret prison near Baghdad, during which time his whereabouts were completely unknown to his family. During this period Ahmed alleges he was tortured – with electric shocks to his genitals and suffocation by plastic bags – into making a false "confession" to terrorist offences.

So what kind of human rights are observed in the "new Iraq"? Hardly any. The list of abuses is long and the tip of the iceberg is waves of arbitrary arrests (over 1,000 monthly), torture and executions. All are barely noticed by the world media and the US and British official silence is rather convenient to cover up the crimes and chaos they created. …

The Nouri al-Maliki government in Iraq with its human rights outfits is following the same path [as Saddam]. … People who for years before the invasion of 2003 were highlighting human rights abuses as a reason to invoke war as a prelude to democracy and transparency are now either totally silent or actively covering up the current abuses, despite glaring evidence from international human rights organisations.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2278-immune-system-the-violent-afterlife-of-atrocity-in-iraq.html

We have to be relentless in our chase of the trio of liars... Eventually, like the Jews catch some of the Nazi criminals, we'll catch Blair, Bush and Howard... See image and article below at top...

 

 

Menzies Campbell: The Liberal Democrat conference was taking place in Brighton but Charles Kennedy and I returned to the Commons because it had been recalled. We were sent a copy of the dossier and Charles handed it to me on the train. If you get something like that put in front of you, which appears authoritative, the likelihood is that you will accept it at face value. I almost certainly did. But I had always argued that regime change, which was clearly what the Amercians wanted, was illegal under article two of the UN charter. So we were [already] taking a very strong legal stance. What we said effectively was that we had seen this dossier but it didn't really change our position.

Charles Falconer: I was then minister of state at the Home Office responsible for criminal justice. Re-reading the document, as I did last night, I think it pretty accurately reflects what people thought the position was at the time. Namely that Saddam Hussein wanted to have weapons of mass destruction [WMD] – he's had some and we knew from intelligence that he was prepared to use them.

MC: At that time, Charlie, we didn't know the genesis of this document, did we? That it started off in the security services, but then Alastair Campbell weaved his magic on it. One consequence of that, as I'm sure you'll remember, was the London Evening Standard headline "45 minutes to Armageddon". Government did not act to squash that and it became stuck in people's minds. The thing about intelligence is it's rarely unequivocal, you get bits and pieces of it. It was clear to me from conversations I had with journalists, some of whom were on speaking terms with people directly engaged in the assessment of the intelligence, that they were sceptical about the quality of the intelligence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/07/did-iraq-dossier-damage-democracy/print

---------------------------

Hello?... Listen to me carefully.... We knew that the "intelligence" was bogus...

This has been my point from the start, that is to say from around  the mid- 2002 — at least nine months before the attack on Saddam, we knew the dossier was crap... David Kelly knew the dossier was being tampered with crap... What these two people (Campbell and Falconer) don't seem to realise is that deep inside the bunkers of "intelligence" gathering, there were some boffins dedicated to MANUFACTURE fake (but plausible) intelligence. But the deed actually was far more complex and more secretive... it also involved manipulation of the media (which was not hard since Mr Murdoch wanted war to sell more papers). The deed also used that not so well-known tactic of "double-cross" (see double crossed on this site) but this time the target was not "the enemy". It was OURSELVES... It was designed to fool us, the public.... I mean by that, that some people were employed to also fool the higher echelons of intelligence gathering with bogus "defectors" and strong "claims" and other magic tricks, reported in the "press"... All this would have been done under specific instructions from 10 Downing Street and the White House (with a wink-wink nudge-nudge from the lodge in Canberra). This would have been performed with the secret directive from G W Bush: "We want war with Saddam, make it stick..." The rest was only a subterfuge of con tricks and fake documentation, with dubious interviews of "defectors" and totally dubious analysis from either lazy intelligence officers or complicit... 

See image and story at top...

 

Ken Clarke has blamed Tony Blair's "disastrous war on terror" for the need to introduce secret courts to protect sensitive intelligence material.

In a Guardian article, the former justice secretary says that armed conflicts begun under Blair have prompted a rise in compensation cases from former detainees who allegemistreatment.

The intervention by Clarke highlights Tory divisions over Afghanistan and Iraq after military action was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Clarke voted against the Iraq war in 2003 while David Cameron voted in favour.

Clarke uses language that is unlikely ever to be used by the prime minister. "Most people are aware that Tony Blair's disastrous war on terror has resulted in a substantial rise in individuals, often former detainees, bringing compensation cases against the UK government alleging mistreatment," he writes.

Clarke brands critics of the government's justice and security bill, which will usher in secret courts, as "reactionary parts of the human rights lobby". He says it is necessary to introduce the new measures to ensure intelligence material can be admitted as evidence without risk of exposing it to the public domain.

Under Clarke's plans such intelligence would be heard by a judge but not by claimants or their lawyers. The judge would in effect be obliged to obey a minister's request for information to be kept secret on grounds of "national security".

The bill was drawn up after the court of appeal agreed to disclose CIA information which showed that MI5 and MI6 knew Binyam Mohamed, a British resident was abused and subjected to inhuman treatment while held as a terror suspect. It was also prompted by UK citizens suing the government for compensation after being held in Guantanamo Bay.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/sep/19/secret-courts-tony-blair-wars/print

Iraq records huge rise in birth defects

 

New study links increase with military action by Western forces

 

Sarah Morrison

Sunday, 14 October 2012

It played unwilling host to one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war. Fallujah's homes and businesses were left shattered; hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed. Its residents changed the name of their "City of Mosques" to "the polluted city" after the United States launched two massive military campaigns eight years ago. Now, one month before the World Health Organisation reveals its view on the legacy of the two battles for the town, a new study reports a "staggering rise" in birth defects among Iraqi children conceived in the aftermath of the war.

High rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiralling numbers of birth defects ranging from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs have been recorded. Even more disturbingly, they appear to be occurring at an increasing rate in children born in Fallujah, about 40 miles west of Baghdad.

There is "compelling evidence" to link the increased numbers of defects and miscarriages to military assaults, says Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, one of the lead authors of the report and an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. Similar defects have been found among children born in Basra after British troops invaded, according to the new research.

US marines first bombarded Fallujah in April 2004 after four employees from the American security company Blackwater were killed, their bodies burned and dragged through the street, with two of the corpses left hanging from a bridge. Seven months later, the marines stormed the city for a second time, using some of the heaviest US air strikes deployed in Iraq. American forces later admitted that they had used white phosphorus shells, although they never admitted to using depleted uranium, which has been linked to high rates of cancer and birth defects.

The new findings, published in the Environmental Contamination and Toxicology bulletin, will bolster claims that US and Nato munitions used in the conflict led to a widespread health crisis in Iraq. They are the latest in a series of studies that have suggested a link between bombardment and a rise in birth defects. Their preliminary findings, in 2010, prompted a World Health Organisation inquiry into the prevalence of birth defects in the area. The WHO's report, out next month, is widely expected to show an increase in birth defects after the conflict. It has looked at nine "high-risk" areas in Iraq, including Fallujah and Basra. Where high prevalence is found, the WHO is expected to call for additional studies to pinpoint precise causes.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/iraq-records-huge-rise-in-birth-defects-8210444.html#

 

Ahmadinejad Visits Egypt, Signaling Realignment

By KAREEM FAHIM and THOMAS ERDBRINK

CAIRO — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled to Cairo on Tuesday, the first visit by an Iranian leader to Egypt since the two countries broke off diplomatic relations three decades ago and a barometer of the shifts in regional dynamics underway since the start of the Arab uprisings.

Relations between the two countries have warmed since the toppling of Egypt’s former president, Hosni Mubarak, who was deeply hostile to Iran’s leadership and portrayed himself to his allies, including the United States, the Persian Gulf monarchies and Israel, as a bulwark against Iranian influence.

Lately, though, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been promoting the idea that the recent Arab revolutions were inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

“Egypt is a very important country in the region and the Islamic Republic of Iran believes it is one of the heavyweights in the Middle East,” Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the state Islamic Republic News Agency in Munich on Tuesday. “We are ready to further strengthen ties.”

While Egypt’s relations with Iran remain limited, the scene on the tarmac at the Cairo Airport on Tuesday — Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, greeting Mr. Ahmedinejad warmly in a red-carpet ceremony — would have been unimaginable under Mr. Mubarak, and seemed likely to alarm the Obama administration.

Mr. Morsi and Mr. Ahmadinejad discussed “developments in the regional arena,” including the war in Syria and “means of enhancing relations between Egypt and Iran,” according to Egypt’s state news agency. Mr. Ahmadinejad is in Egypt for a three-day visit to attend an Islamic summit.

Since becoming president in June as the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi has framed his approach to foreign policy, including the thaw with Iran, as an effort to chart a more independent course than that of his predecessor and to reassert Egypt’s historical regional leadership role. Mr. Morsi has also tried to place Egypt at the center of negotiations to end the crisis in Syria.

In August, in another historic first, Mr. Morsi traveled to Tehran for the summit of the Nonaligned Movement, a visit that was seen as helping to ease Iran’s international isolation.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/middleeast/irans-president-visits-egypt-in-sign-of-thaw.html?hp       

 

I will say see story at top.. I will say as well that the elimination of Saddam Hussein in Iraq has actually been more influential on this international relations change... Iraq and Iran are now in each other's pockets, Egypt is to follow, though it's hard to know which way the "brotherhood" will go with the Syrian conflict where the Sunni (aligned with the Saudis) are fighting the Shia (aligned with Iran)...

 

As long as we all shake hands without a gun and/or a religious dictum, things should be fine...

 

 

Just about everyone now recognises the Iraq conflict as a moral catastrophe, a disaster on every conceivable level. Yet, curiously, no-one's responsible. Military conflict has been largely normalised, writes Jeff Sparrow.

In less than two weeks, we'll mark the 10-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, a milestone that should prompt some serious soul searching.

The war did, after all, result in hundreds of thousands of deaths - and the turmoil's still far from over.

Just about everyone now recognises the Iraq conflict as a moral catastrophe, a disaster on every conceivable level.

Yet, curiously, no-one's responsible.

Politically, it's almost as if the war launched itself, blowing in from nowhere like a natural disaster.

But, of course, even that analogy doesn't hold, since in the wake of genuine Acts of God, we spend considerable time analysing what went right and what went wrong and how reoccurrences might be prevented. That's why, at present, SPI Electricity's in court, defending its maintenance practices against a lawsuit from survivors of the Black Saturday bushfires.

Somehow, though, Iraq has always been different.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4564662.html

 

 

Read all articles from top... Hopefully one day, Blair, Bush (now an artist of dog paintings) and Howard will finish their days in prison... Same with their little helpers — from Mr Murdoch to Tony Abbott...

 

It won't happen of course, though we can hope that one day, their god will fry their balls for breakfast.

 

As Mr Greenspan admitted to, the Iraq war was about OIL....

 

US Private Bradley Manning is no longer the alleged source of all those documents to WikiLeaks. According to his own testimony, delivered before a military court on February 28, Manning was the source - nothing alleged about it.

In a pre-trial hearing for the first time, Manning admitted that he broke the law when he released around 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks but these lesser charges did not satisfy the United States government.

Calling more than 100 witnesses - some anonymously and in closed hearings - prosecutors will argue that Manning’s leak put national security and lives at risk by ‘aiding the enemy’.

If convicted, Manning - the traitor, could face life without parole but what of Manning - the whistleblower?

During his hour-long plea, Manning told the court that he first turned to the national press. Before approaching WikiLeaks, Manning says he contacted the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico - neither of which returned his calls. His testimony raises the question of whether the mainstream press was prepared to host the debate on US interventions and foreign policy that Manning had in mind.

Media outlets went on to draw on WikiLeaks for some of the biggest news stories of the decade. Manning’s leak meant millions of papers sold and pages viewed yet the story of the man himself has been pushed to the margins. Is this just ingratitude or something more sinister? Are important parts of the fourth estate signing up for a system of government-media relations that sees whistleblowers as enemies of the state?

To discuss Manning’s testimony and the implications for journalism and freedom of speech our News Divide guests this week are: Chase Madar, author of ‘The Passion of Bradley Manning’; Jesselyn Radack, whistleblower and activist; Ed Pilkington, a reporter for the Guardian; and Janet Reitman, a Rolling Stone columnist.

In NewsBytes this week: Two more journalists gunned down in Pakistan; the Somalian journalist on trial for reporting on rape gets six months in jail; Myanmar’s hopeful media opening under threat; and the French government in a flap over coverage of the war in Mali.

Our feature takes us to Ethiopia where the US ‘war on terror’ has provided cover for laws that are being used to silence dissident journalists. Reeyot Alemu is one of those journalists - she has been sentenced to five years in jail. Foreign reporters have also been charged under anti-terrorism laws for daring to communicate with opposition groups. The Listening Post’s Nic Muirhead takes a closer look.

We close with a musical take on the WikiLeaks story from a region that has been a better friend to Julian Assange than some other parts of the world. Perhaps Assange is tapping his toes to ‘El Son de los WikiLeaks’ while counting the days in the Ecuadorian embassy.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2013/03/201339107329512.html

 

 

FORMER prime minister John Howard has admitted that "mistakes" were made by the US-led coalition in Iraq, but he stands by his decision a decade ago to join friend George W Bush in invading the oil-rich nation.

And his foreign affairs minister at the time, Alexander Downer, has revealed the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, virtually blamed former Australian diplomat and chief weapons inspector Richard Butler for the war.

A decade on from the invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition of the willing and Australian special-forces troops and RAAF fighter jets in March 2003, Mr Howard said he had not changed his mind because Iraq was better off without Saddam Hussein.

"Post invasion, mistakes were made, most particularly the dismantling of the Iraqi Army," Mr Howard said.

He said most people believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and then Labor spokesman Kevin Rudd had even stated that it was "empirical fact".

Mr Howard denied intelligence on the matter was manufactured.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national-news/iraq-the-war-and-how-we-got-it-wrong/story-fncynjr2-1226598566259#ixzz2NeVmjy2J

---------------------------

 

It does not take an expert on deception to know with certainty that Bush, Blair and Howard were lying about their intelligence... And they still are lying about it... They still take us for morons... Read all articles from top and check with Mr Masterman's writings about double-cross deception... The major point is that the evidence was flimsy at best and inexistent at worse. The French and the Germans who had access to similar photographs and BETTER intelligence on the ground knew the Yanks, the Brits and the little Bleeder from down under were spreading porkies on toast, by using yet again the media as war trumpets, especially the merde-och press. 

Bush the dog painter, Blair the spruiker for cash and Howard-queen-medalist-retiree should be in front of an international war tribunal and their grand con exposed.

In this regard whatever Rudd said is irrelevant as he would have been shown the "evidence" without being shown how it had been concocted (arrived at), though I would say it was a poor show from his part not to challenge it.

We (Tom, Dick, Gus and Harry living in the street) knew with CERTAINTY the whole thing was a crock. AND WE DID LET IT KNOWN. A CROCK, we knew it was. A concocted pack of crafted lies. AND THE EVIDENCE, even studied PRIOR TO THE WAR, WAS THERE TO PROVE THE INTELLIGENCE HAD BEEN MANUFACTURED.

Howard still want us to believe that 24 (TWENTY-FOUR) spying agencies in the US — with 363 spying satellites at its disposal, three spying networks in the UK and one spying outfit down under (in which one of its analysts told us the "evidence" was crap: Wilkie) COULD GET THEIR INFORMATION WRONG... Who does he take us for? Imbeciles?...

 

Howard is a cunning idiot, Tony Abbott is a cunning iddiott...

And where else is Howard pushing his line?... In the merde-och press, of course...

 

The lies of two Iraqi spies were central to the claim - at the heart of the UK and US decision to go to war in Iraq - that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But even before the fighting started, intelligence from highly-placed sources was available suggesting he did not, Panorama has learned.

Six months before the invasion, then-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair warned the country about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

"The programme is not shut down," he said. "It is up and running now." Mr Blair used the intelligence on WMD to justify the war.

That same day, 24 September 2002, the government published its controversial dossier on the former Iraqi leader's WMD.

Designed for public consumption, it had a personal foreword by Mr Blair, who assured readers Saddam Hussein had continued to produce WMD "beyond doubt".

But, while it was never mentioned in the dossier, there was doubt. The original intelligence from MI6 and other agencies, on which the dossier was based, was clearly qualified.

The intelligence was, as the Joint Intelligence Committee noted in its original assessments, "sporadic and patchy" and "remains limited".

The exclusion of these qualifications gave the dossier a certainty that was never warranted.

Intelligence failure

Much of the key intelligence used by Downing Street and the White House was based on fabrication, wishful thinking and lies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21786506 

And, if one is astute enough, these "Iraqi spies" lies were sowed and cultivated by the US, the UK and Aussie intelligence agencies to suit the lies that the neo-cons under Bush were promoting with vigour. These bad monkeys wanted war NO MATTER WHAT, EVEN IF THEY HAD NO PROOF which they did not have, anyway... Bush, Blair and Howard were liars who went to war under false pretences... They knew it was a crock... (let's not forget Rummy, Wolfie and all the other cruds in this affair...)

If they did not "lie" then, they would have had to be the dumbest people on earth.... See story at top.

 

On Tuesday, exactly a decade from the start of the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld, the former defence secretary of George W. Bush, hit the social media.

"10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis,'' he tweeted. "All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation."

The response was swift and ugly. "Except you & your bosses, you blood-gargling psychopath," retorted a young man in New York. It went downhill from there.

Rummy was America's worst defence secretary since Robert McNamara dragged the US through the nightmare of Vietnam in the '60s. In old age, McNamara found the honesty to admit his errors. He had got Vietnam "wrong, terribly wrong", he confessed in his memoirs. No such doubts plague the odious Rumsfeld, who should have been charged as a war criminal. Stuff happens.

Americans have been counting the cost of the Iraq catastrophe all week. The figures vary, but they hover around 190,000 Iraqis dead and nearly 5000 Americans. Millions more Iraqis are refugees in their own land or around the world. The hit to the American taxpayer is in the trillions of dollars.

The intangibles are more devastating. Bloodshed continues as ever under a corrupt and incompetent regime in Baghdad. The removal of Iraq as a counterweight to Iran has emboldened the mad mullahs in Tehran to ramp up the threat to Middle East peace. American prestige, hit hard, will take a further blow with the imminent loss of the war in Afghanistan.

In Australia, there has been only silence to mark the anniversary. Not a peep from John "Man of Steel" Howard. Nothing, either, from the platoons of right-wing media toadies here who swallowed and regurgitated every lie the American neo-cons tossed up. "Weapons of mass destruction … shock and awe … the war on terror … welcomed like liberators … mission accomplished … we do not torture"; the litany goes on.

What brazen hypocrites they are, these high Tory hacks. Amazingly, many of them still have jobs. It must be hard to type with blood on your hands.

One reason the right hates the left is that, like the devil, the left has the best tunes. Rock'n'roll was subversive when it was "race music" and it got rougher when white boys picked it up. Elvis Presley's first pelvic thrusts on television in 1956 provoked a critic for The New York Times to rant that the "commercialised overstimulation of youth's physical impulses is certainly a gross national disservice".

The conservatives' tragedy is that they've never had anyone to sing for them. Bob Dylan would have disappeared without trace if he'd written ''The Times They Aint A-Changin'''. Jimmy Barnes never thought of doing Middle Class Man.

The revolution lives on in Bruce Springsteen, troubadour of love and hard times, poet laureate to Barack Obama. His concert at Homebush on Wednesday was astounding, the greatest I have seen - 3½ hours of musical genius emitting enough energy to power an aluminium smelter. I was staggered when he dived into the audience and then crowd-surfed back to the stage, borne aloft by a hundred ecstatic fans.

You've still got it, Boss, still got it. No retreat, baby, no surrender.

Mike Carlton 

Former prime minister John Howard says he has no regrets about the war in Iraq or Australia's involvement in it.

Mr Howard says he knew war was likely 10 months out from when Australia and the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq, but he maintains he did not commit troops until much later.

"I make no secret now nor did I make any secret of the fact 10 years ago that we had people involved and knowledgeable about the planning stages of any operation that might materialise," he told the ABC.

But he says his full cabinet was not brought into the loop until the decision was made to commit troops.

"The national security committee of cabinet met continuously throughout 2002, although in the end, when we decided to commit our troops I did have a full cabinet meeting," he said.

In an extensive interview with the ABC this week, Mr Howard reflected on the lead-up to the war, the politics surrounding it and the consequences of a conflict that many still believe was based on intelligence that was manipulated and misused in an effort to make it look like Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Ten years on, Mr Howard stands by his decision to send Australia to war.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-28/the-27difficult27-war3a-howard-reflects-on-iraq/4600672

-----------------------------

Still lying through his nose.... His Rattustry... Unless he is an imbecile... which is becoming more and more a solid proposition... Only idiots defend the indefensible. The evidence of WMDs was always bullshit from the start.

The Anthrax affair showed that someone in Washington was taking us for fools... Months after it was proven by the FBI that the Anthrax that killed a few people in the USA came from US labs, Bushit was still claiming it came from Saddam...

The claim that Saddam was building nuclear bombs was soon debunked by a US diplomat who could prove the document were forged. Soon after this debunking, the diplomat's wife was exposed as a CIA agent by her own people as payback...

David Kelly knew that Saddam did not have any "chemical weapons" and started to tell one journalist about it. David Kelly was soon hounded by courts and MI5 then "suicided" in a way that did not make sense, unless David Kelly was correct.

In Australia, Andrew Wilkie knew the "evidence" did not fit ANY of the criteria of "credible" evidence in Intelligence work... Even the fallacy that Saddam could bomb Cyprus within 45 minutes with WMDs had been suggested by a taxi driver...

The French and the Germans knew that the Bush administration "evidence" was NOT credible: They had the same "intelligence" but it did not fit their other sources that were far more "credible".

Chalabi was paid 350,000 a month to manufacture "evidence" by the US administration.

UN Weapons inspector, Hans Blix, knew the whole thing was a crock as he could not find one single trace of WMDs ANYWHERE in Iraq. He was ordered to leave Iraq by the USA so it could start the "war".

The WMDs were supposed to be on "moveable trucks" and the CIA did not where these were... Any army general, with half a brain, would tell you that one would be completely blotto to attack an enemy which you don't know the full strength off nor where its weapons are hidden... — this is warfare 101... Any army general about to attack Iraq had to know Saddam had zip WMDs... 

The whole thing was a crock concocted by three liars: Bush, Blair and Howard. Rumsfieldmarshal and all the other neo-cons were in on it as well... 

That Howard did not consult with cabinet before committing troops also shows it was a crock...

Howard, you are a disgrace to this fair county. So is Tony Abbott...

See toon and story at top...

The CIA has released documents which for the first time formally acknowledge its key role in the 1953 coup which ousted Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq.

The documents were published on the independent National Security Archive on the 60th anniversary of the coup.

They come from the CIA's internal history of Iran from the mid-1970s.

"The military coup... was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy," says one excerpt.

The US role in the coup was openly referred to by then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, and by President Barack Obama in a 2009 speech in Cairo.

But until now the intelligence agencies have issued "blanket denials" of their role, says the editor of the trove of documents, Malcolm Byrne.

This is believed to be the first time the CIA has itself admitted the part it played in concert with the British intelligence agency, MI6.

Mr Byrne says the documents are important not only for providing "new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency's actions before and after the operation", but because "political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23762970

Like Iraq ten years ago, it was ALL ABOUT OIL.... Read articles from top.

It wasn't only Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone that was on the NSA's target list. New German media reports claim the US spy agency also tapped Gerhard Schröder's phone calls in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

Edward Snowden appeared to come very close to announcing the news himself. During his recent interview with German public broadcaster NDR, he said: "I would suggest it seems unreasonable that if anyone was concerned about the intentions of German leadership that they would only watch Merkel and not her aides, not other prominent officials, not heads of ministries or even local government officials."

Now it appears that, in addition to eavesdropping German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile communications, the National Security Agency was also eavesdropping on Gerhard Schröder's phone while he was still chancellor. On Tuesday night, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and NDR reported that Schröder had appeared on the so-called National Sigint Requirement List, a list of people and institutions named for targetting by the intelligence agency whose telephone communications should be monitored. Schröder was reportedly assigned the number "388" in 2002, if not sooner.
The reports cite unnamed US government and NSA insider sources claiming that Schröder was declared a target for monitoring because of his critical position on US preparations for a war in Iraq. A person with knowledge of the action is quoted as saying that the US had reason to believe that Schröder would not help lead the alliance toward success.

Criticism from German Government

In Germany, the revelations appeared to create new tensions in German-American relations. Speaking to SPIEGEL ONLINE, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, of Schröder's center-left Social Democratic Party, accused the NSA of conducting indiscriminate mass surveillance. "Protecting safety appears to be a guise for the NSA to collect unlimited data," he said. "Eavesdropping on a chancellor's mobile phone in no way contributes to protecting against terrorist attacks."

Maas called for Germany to continue to push for a no-spy agreement with the US, despite resistance from Washington. "Even if it won't be easy for the Americans, we still need to continue pushing for an international agreement, because we cannot spare any effort to ensure the the data of people in Germany is better protected."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/nsa-reportedly-spied-on-former-chancellor-gerhard-schroeder-a-951628.html

 

Bush, Howard and Blair LIED AND LIED AND LIED.... See toon at top...

The BBC's Today programme is enjoying high ratings, and the Mail and Telegraph are, as usual, attacking the corporation as leftwing. Last month a single edition of the Radio 4 show was edited by the artist and musician PJ Harvey. What happened was illuminating.

Harvey's guests caused panic from the moment she proposed the likes of Mark Curtis, a historian rarely heard on the BBC who chronicles the crimes of the British state; the lawyer Phil Shiner and the Guardian journalist Ian Cobain, who reveal how the British kidnap and torture; the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange; and myself.

There were weeks of absurd negotiation at Broadcasting House about ways of "countering" us and whether or not we could be allowed to speak without interruption from Today's establishment choristers. What this brief insurrection demonstrated was the fear of a reckoning. The crimes of western states like Britain have made accessories of those in the media who suppress or minimise the carnage.

The Faustian pacts that contrived a world war a century ago resonate today across the Middle East and Asia, from Syria to Japan. Then, as now, cover-up was the principal weapon. In 1917 David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, declared: "If people knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know."

On Harvey's Today programme I referred to a poll conducted by ComRes last year that asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion. A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed: a figure so shockingly low it was a profanity.

I compared this with scientific estimates of "up to a million men, women and children [who] had died in the inferno lit by Britain and the US". In fact, academic estimates range from less than half a million to more than a million. John Tirman, the principal research scientist at the MIT Centre for International Studies, has examined all the credible estimates; he told me that an average figure "suggests roughly 700,000". Tirman pointed out that this excluded deaths among the millions of displaced Iraqis, up to 20% of the population.

The day after the Harvey programme, Today "countered" with Toby Dodge of the LSE – a former adviser to General Petraeus, one of the architects of the disasters in both Iraq and Afghanistan – along withMowaffak al-Rubaie, a former Iraqi "national security adviser" in the occupation regime, and the man who led Saddam Hussein to his lynching.

These BBC-accredited "experts" rubbished, without evidence, the studies and reduced the number of dead by hundreds of thousands. The interviewer, Mishal Husain, offered no challenge to their propaganda. They then "debated" who was responsible. Lloyd George's dictum held; culpability was diverted.

But for how long? There is no question that the epic crime committed in Iraq has burrowed into the public consciousness. Many recall that "shock and awe" was the extension of a murderous blockade imposed for 13 years by Britain and the US and suppressed by much of the mainstream media, including the BBC. Half a million Iraqi infants died as a result of sanctions, according to Unicef. I watched children dying in hospitals, denied basic painkillers.

Ten years later, in New York, I met the senior British official responsible for these "sanctions". He is Carne Ross, once known in the UN as "Mr Iraq". He is now a truth-teller. I read to him a statement he had made to a parliamentary select committee in 2007: "The weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions caused massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis, particularly children. We, the US and UK governments, were the primary engineers and offenders of sanctions and were well aware of the evidence at the time but we largely ignored it and blamed it on the Saddam government … effectively denying the entire population the means to live."

I said to him: "That's a shocking admission."

"Yes, I agree," he replied. "I feel ashamed about it ..." He described how the Foreign Office manipulated a willing media. "We would control access to the foreign secretary as a form of reward to journalists. If they were critical, we would not give them the goodies of trips around the world. We would feed them factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we'd freeze them out."

In the build-up to the 2003 invasion, according to studies by Cardiff University and Media Tenor, the BBC followed the Blair government's line and lies, and restricted airtime to those opposing the invasion. When Andrew Gilligan famously presented a dissenting report on Today, he and the director general were crushed.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/07/west-criminal-bloodbath-iraq-media-cover-up

-----------------------

 

Tony Blair has strongly rejected claims that the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq was to blame for the current crisis gripping the country, pointing the finger instead firmly at the Maliki government and the war in Syria.

In a passionate essay published on his Faith Foundation website, the former prime minister said it was a "bizarre" reading of the situation to argue that the US-British invasion of Iraq had allowed the growth of Sunni jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), whose fighters have swept through towns and cities north and west of Baghdad over the past week.

"We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not: and whether action or inaction is the best policy. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.

"We have to put aside the differences of the past and act now to save the future," says Blair, adding that force may be necessary. "Where the extremists are fighting, they have to be countered hard, with force."

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/15/tony-blair-iraq-essay

----------------------------------

Tony Weasel Blair is still at it, defending the indefensible.

Whatever you did in Iraq, Mr Blair, changed the the balance of power. That was the purpose of your little war (as well as getting the oil for the Americans). Before you and your mates destroyed the place — then had to create "green zones" and gated communities behind concrete walls to stop the in-fighting (which never ceased since the day you went there) — Al Qaeda had no footing in Iraq...

As soon as you invaded the place, you opened the door to resentment in the Sunni population and many became "rebels" and some became Al Qaeda in Iraq... That was the obvious flow on, even before you attacked Saddam... A dummy like me could even predict that things were not going to improve with your little war and that Al Qaeda was going to show up...

The flow on from your action are not just fermenting over three days, but over many years, and now it is showing more of its ugly head...

Saddam hated Al Qaeda who he knew were being financed by some Saudi outfits — all of whom, including Saddam were Sunnis. But Saddam was not a Wahhabi. Saddam was a "moderate" Muslim who accepted other religions in Iraq and he understood far better the dynamics of population in Iraq than you, Mr Blair, ever did.

The fundamental input, contrary to what Tony Blair says, is not just "regional" but part of a greater push for Wahhabism to ---infiltrate the world, including from within... All financed of course by some Saudi and other Wahhabi countries.

 

--------------------------

Read from top. and note: 

 

(Gus quotes Gus from a few years ago):

WE knew the evidence of WMDs in Iraq was rather flimsy at best and total crap at worse. In the comfort of our lounge rooms, we knew it was a lot of codswallop. So how come an educated man like John Howard tells us this shit and how do we know it's crap? When the first rumours of invasion of Iraq came up in 2001-2, we knew it was a crock because contrary to what Blair, Bush and Rattus were lying about we ALSO HAD strong evidence to the contrary (see this site for those)... We knew via many sources that the CIA and other "intelligence" organisms in the UK and the USA were collecting (fabricating) "evidence" that did not stack up.

And best of all, as J. C Masterman, Master of Spies, tells us:

..If the word "Military Intelligence " are flung at me, I respond immediately with "Valmy". Though only a canonade and not a battle, Valmy was a turning point in the history of Europe. The Duke of Brunswick, invading Revolutionary France, turned back—"he did not know what was on the other side of the hill."

   There is the classic example of the failure of military intelligence—the failure to know... ...the function of an intelligence service is to "know"—to know what are the intentions of the enemy, to know his plans and resources, the disposition of his troops and their morale.

(J. C. Masterman was the leader of the Double-Cross System in England during WWII.)

 

The SHEER FACT that the US were telling us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction but did not know where these were, TELLS US either Saddam was a formidable enemy that it would be very foolish to attack the way the US did OR that the commanders and the US government knew that Saddam had zip and was going to be a pushover... We knew — and Johnnee, Blair and Bush would have been silly fools not to know either — which it was: Saddam had ZIP.

Blair, Bush and Howard LIED big time and used a compliant public and private media to promote their lies.

 

-----------------

 

Now, Blair blames "inaction" over the conflict in Syria. Note that this inaction is still supplying weapons to the "rebels" who are the same Jihadists who have spilled into Iraq and are trying to take over that country as well as Syria... So what do we do, Mister Smartypants? Help Assad defeat the Jihadists? Help Maliki fight the Jihadists? Or support the Jihadists — friends of the Saudis — defeat Assad and help Maliki defeat the Jihadists? Do you think that the Jihadists having won Syria would leave Iraq alone?

This whole mess has been created by the flow-on from the war on Saddam, don't be deluded about it... 

 

 

Rebels’ Fast Strike in Iraq Was Years in the Making

By TIM ARANGO, KAREEM FAHIM and BEN HUBBARD

 

JUNE 14, 2014

ERBIL, Iraq — When Islamic militants rampaged through the Iraqi city of Mosul last week, robbing banks of hundreds of millions of dollars, opening the gates of prisons and burning army vehicles, some residents greeted them as if they were liberators and threw rocks at retreating Iraqi soldiers.

It took only two days, though, for the fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to issue edicts laying out the harsh terms of Islamic law under which they would govern, and singling out some police officers and government workers for summary execution.

With just a few thousand fighters, the group’s lightning sweep into Mosul and farther south appeared to catch many Iraqi and American officials by surprise. But the gains were actually the realization of a yearslong strategy of state-building that the group itself promoted publicly.

 

“What we see in Iraq today is in many ways a culmination of what the I.S.I. has been trying to accomplish since its founding in 2006,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation, referring to the Islamic State in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS.
read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/world/middleeast/rebels-fast-strike-in-iraq-was-years-in-the-making.html?hp&_r=0

 

Exactly...

This Bush prophecy business is b.s. through and through. It’s important to say that now, because Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of one of the worst disasters in US foreign policy and military history, is now making an “I Told You So” tour, back in Washington (a standing ovation at AEI!) spreading his wisdom to appreciative conservative audiences. It’s like they let Bernie Madoff work on Wall Street again, or returned the FEMA portfolio to Brownie.

This is Republican poison. And you watch: Rand Paul aside, the whole party is going to swallow it again, like dogs going back to their own vomit.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-absurd-bush-prophecy/

 

 

Former prime minister John Howard says he was "embarrassed" intelligence he used to take Australia to war in Iraq was inaccurate and denies it was a "deliberate deception".

In an interview broadcast on the Seven Network, Mr Howard said he and the then National Security Committee of Cabinet in 2003 sent Australian troops into Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to the West.

"I was struck by the force of the language used in the American national intelligence assessment late in November 2002," he said.

"It brought together all the American intelligence and paragraph after paragraph, they said, we judge Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-21/howard-embarrassed-by-intelligence-that-iraq-had-wmds/5759132

---------------------------------------

Obviously John Rattus Howard lies again. Many people, including some of his own intelligence analysts, such as Wilkie, could have told him that at best, the "intelligence" was very very very suspect, but at worst it was concocted to create an excuse for war... There is no two ways about that Bush, Blair and Howard lied about the reality of the "intelligence". Being "embarrassed" by it now is a complete whitewash of what was known at the time. It was a deliberate deception. Had a drover's dog questioned the "intelligence" for two seconds, it would have shown it was a crock, a lie, a porkie, a deliberate deception.

Even in 2002, old Gus knew that the "intelligence" against Saddam was CONCOCTED — NOT FLAWED. Most of it came from Chalabi and his network of liars all encouraged to lie by a small sub-section of the CIA under the command of the US neo-cons, otherwise know as the neo-fascist capitalists of the USA.

The French and the Germans knew that the US "intelligence" was complete BULLSHIT — especially designed to have war, no matter what. The UN never authorised the war...

Read from top article...

 

Independent MP Andrew Wilkie says John Howard should be "deeply ashamed" for sending Australian troops to Iraq in 2003, adding that the military action allowed for the rise of groups like Islamic State.

Mr Howard told the Seven Network he was "embarrassed" when he learned there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was the basis for his decision to back the invasion.

Mr Wilkie, a former intelligence analyst, today said the former prime minister should face prosecution in the International Criminal Court over the decision.

"Frankly, I'm disappointed that the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court hasn't thought to hold John Howard responsible for conspiracy to commit mass murder," he said.

"[It is] one thing to take Australia to war based on a lie. It makes it all the worse when that war has been so damaging to so many people and remains in the opinion of a great many historians as the darkest blot on this nation's history, at least in modern times, as far as foreign policy and security goes."

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-22/wilkie-says-howard-should-be-ashamed-of-iraq-invasion/5760136

 

A year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a postmortem of the media coverage of the so-called “Iraq war”. The conferenceincluded academics, journalists, UN weapons inspectors and diplomats.

UC Berkeley also invited Lieutenant Colonel Rick Long, whose job it had been to prepare journalists to be embedded with American forces as they rolled into Iraq. The invasion would soon be described as “the greatest strategic disaster in US history”, by no less than retired Lieutenant General William Odom, a former senior military and intelligence official in the Carter and Reagan administrations.

But, as Long told the gathering, the strategy for managing the media had been beautifully executed:

Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. Overall, we were very happy with the outcome.

When we needed them most, the Fourth Estate rolled overand let the military establishments of the belligerent countries tickle their tummies.

http://theconversation.com/when-governments-go-to-war-the-fourth-estate-goes-awol-32167

---------------------------------

Of course, the English hegemony media has been working together with governments ever since the disastrous revelations during the Vietnam War. The US vowed never to repeat the exposure of the real information — about the true reason for war and about the true cost of the war. Embedded means "sleeping" in the same bed. 

On this site we have not shied away from exposing this awful state of affair and ALL the MMMM (too often including the Sydney Morning Herald) sleep with the neo-fascists that try to make us swallow they are "Liberals" while in Australia they are ultra-CONservatives who lie and lie and lie to get in power and stay in power. Independent media? My foot.

I have been looking for an old Gus' post that did explain earlier (about 2005) on how the war deceptions were promoted by media and government but there has been some drop-offs when the site moved platform. Will carry on searching. See story and image at top.

 

 

6. BLAIR’S SECRET DEAL WITH SAUDI ROYALS
Tony Blair has agreed a secret cash-for-contacts deal with the Saudi royal family, says The Sunday Times. A leaked document reveals Blair has closed an agreement with an oil company founded by a senior member of the Saudi royal family for a fee of £41,000 a month and a 2% commission on any of the multimillion-pound deals he helps broker.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/daily-briefing/61250/ten-things-you-need-to-know-today-sunday-9-nov-2014#ixzz3IbhVV5O6

 

 

Former prime minister John Howard has joined former British prime minister Tony Blair on JP Morgan's International Council.

The council, which was founded in 1965, is an advisory group that provides advice to the bank's leadership team on global trends.

Mr Blair is the chairman of the council which also counts former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, China Investment Corporation's Gao Xi-Qing and India's Tata group's Ratan Naval Tata as members.

"I look forward to participating in thought leading dialogue around Australia's business and economic agenda and the opportunities and issues faced by JP Morgan and its clients," Mr Howard said in a statement on Monday.

JP Morgan declined to comment on what Mr Howard would be receiving by way of remuneration for the role. JP Morgan has $2.8 trillion in assets.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/john-howard-joins-jp-morgan-international-council-20141110-11jzan.html#ixzz3IebnOYN3


Read articles from top. These liars, Blair and Howard, should all be in prison. US Banks are the refuge of the English hegemony mongrels... The main problem is not on what these monkeys get for remuneration but on what stupid advice they can give a bank to boost profits and destroy the planet...
I am sure that Gus could provide FAR BETTER advice for the planet's longer longevity.

 

Amid widespread criticism on social media, many of the charity’s staff have complained that the presentation of the award has discredited Save the Children (STC). An internal letter, which gathered almost 200 signatures – including senior regional staff – in the first six hours of dissemination, said the award was not only “morally reprehensible, but also endangers our credibility globally”, and called for it to be withdrawn.

It said that staff wished to distance themselves from the award and demanded a review of the charity’s decision-making process.

“We consider this award inappropriate and a betrayal to Save the Children’s founding principles and values. Management staff in the region were not communicated with nor consulted about the award and were caught by surprise with this decision,” it said.

The move has also raised questions about Save the Children’s (STC) integrity and independence because of close links between the former British prime minister and key figures at the charity’s helm.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/25/save-the-children-furious-charity-global-legacy-tony-blair

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/01/without-fox-news-there-would-have-been-no-iraq-war

 

Read from top...

 

 

—By David Corn

 

Last week, Jeb Bush stepped in it. It took the all-but-announced Republican presidential candidate several attempts to answer the most obvious question: Knowing what we know now, would you have launched the Iraq War? Yes, I would have, he initially declared, noting he would not dump on his brother for initiating the unpopular war. "So would almost everyone that was confronted with the intelligence they got," Bush said.

In a subsequent and quickly offered back-pedaling remark—on his way to saying he would have made "different decisions"—Bush emphasized that a main problem with the Bush-Cheney invasion was "mistakes as it related to faulty intelligence in the lead-up to the war."

And as his Republican rivals jumped on Bush, they, too, blamed bad intelligence for causing the war. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), insisting that he would not have favored the war (if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction), commented, "President Bush has said that he regrets that the intelligence was faulty." And former CEO Carly Fiorina noted, "The intelligence was clearly wrong. And so had we known that the intelligence was wrong, no, I would not have gone in."

But here's the truth Jeb Bush and the others are hiding or eliding: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, & Co. were not misled by lousy intelligence; they used lousy intelligence to mislead the public.

Throughout the run-up to the war, Bush, Cheney, and their lieutenants repeatedly stated assertions to justify the war that were not supported by the intel. They also hyped or mischaracterized existing intelligence to bolster their case for war.

The book I wrote with Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, chronicles the elaborate Bush-Cheney campaign to misuse and misrepresent the intelligence. Certainly, there was some information within the intelligence community (which turned out to be wrong) indicating that Saddam Hussein was trying to revive programs to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. As the Bush White House was selling the possibility of war, the intelligence agencies did quickly produce a National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 that said Iraq had "continued its weapons of mass destruction program."

But there was other intelligence and analysis—some of it mentioned in that intelligence estimate—casting plenty of doubt on this. In fact, on many of the key elements of the Bush administration's case for war, the intelligence was, at best, iffy. Yet in this post-9/11 period, Bush and Cheney frequently declared there was no uncertainty: Saddam was pursuing WMD to threaten the United States, and, worse, he was in league with Al Qaeda.

Here are a few examples of how Bush and Cheney cooked the books:

• In an August 2002 speech that kicked off the administration's campaign for war against Iraq, Cheney asserted, "Simply stated, there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." But earlier in the year, Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had told Congress that Iraq possessed only "residual" amounts of WMD. There was no confirmed intelligence at this point establishing that Saddam had revived a major WMD operation. As Cheney made this claim, Anthony Zinni, a former commander in chief of US Central Command, was on the stage. He was stunned to hear Cheney say that Iraq was actively pursuing WMD. As he later recalled, "It was a shock. It was a total shock. I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program." In other words, bad intelligence did not cause Cheney to make this categorical, bold, and frightening statement. He just did it.

 

Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/jeb-bush-marco-rubio-iraq-war-intelligence

 

Read articles from top. Anyone with some brains — and not cocooned by a merde-och media — would understand Valmy. 

The situation is that no general worth his/her salt would attack an enemy without knowing its strength and position. Regardless of intelligence or not, it is thus deductible that the US army and their allies knew that saddam did not have any weapons of mass destruction. They knew that Saddam's army was ill-equipped with old clapped out weapons that would be no match for the uranium depleted shells and modern equipment.

Had Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, hidden where the US army had no knowledge thereof place (remember we were told they were on "moving trucks" that the CIA never knew where these were) the US army WOULD NOT HAVE ATTACKED. The US army could not have attacked without loosing 20,000 men within days. This would have been totally unacceptable to the American, English and Australian public. 

The intelligence was manipulated and used to fit a desire for war. A whim for oil. Bush Blair and Howard should be charged for war crimes. 

It won't happen. 

 

By JON BASIL UTLEY

The newest lie about the Iraq war is that the truth about Iraq was not known before the American attack in 2003. One needs only to search for “lies about Iraq” to see all the many links explaining evidence from before the war started that showed the Bush/Cheney/neoconservative claims to be false.

That false narrative is important to know because many of the same people are now promoting war with Iran, as they were before with Syria. Republican candidates are also stumbling over the question of whether they would have invaded Iraq because it undermines their present, ongoing promotion of an interventionist foreign policy.

Take just one example of such a false claim, which even reached Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address to Congress: “Saddam has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” It was a lie from the beginning. Bush had been informed that the Department of Energy and State Department intelligence had analyzed the tubes and found them to be useless for a nuclear program, rather being for conventional rockets.

I was very active in reporting on the lies, writing at the time for Antiwar.com, which every day had articles, news reports, and analyses exposing the misinformation. An article I wrote in 2002, well before the war started, “Eight Washington Lies About Iraq,” was at the top of a Google search for lies for 7 years. Even today it explains, with links, many of the lies made.

Iraq’s weaknesses were in fact easy to comprehend after nearly nine years of U.S. economic blockade following the First Gulf War. Iraq had been decimated by American bombing of its electricity, sanitation, irrigation, and transportation systems. Almost every bridge was destroyed. A half-million Iraqi children had diedof starvation and disease. It was also subject to United Nations (read American) inspectors going all over the country to verify that it was conforming to earlier UN demands for destruction of its nuclear and chemical warfare facilities.

All Americans should be reminded again and again that recent wars were based on lies. The First Gulf War was sold to Americans on the basis of the murder of“incubator babies” and an imaginary Iraqi threat to invade Saudi Arabia, including the assertion that satellite photographs showed the Iraqi Army massed on the Saudi border. The “classified” photos never existed. The Kosovo War was based on reports that 100,000 Kosovan Albanians had been murdered by Serbs, so America had to attack so as to stop the mass killing. It was also a lie.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-new-lie-about-iraq/

Read articles from top. Anyone with some brains — and not cocooned by a merde-och media — would understand Valmy. 

The situation is that no general worth his/her salt would attack an enemy without knowing its strength and position. Regardless of intelligence or not, it is thus deductible that the US army and their allies knew that saddam did not have any weapons of mass destruction. They knew that Saddam's army was ill-equipped with old clapped out weapons that would be no match for the uranium depleted shells and modern equipment.

Had Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, hidden where the US army had no knowledge thereof place (remember we were told they were on "moving trucks" that the CIA never knew where these were) the US armyWOULD NOT HAVE ATTACKED. The US army could not have attacked without loosing 20,000 men within days. This would have been totally unacceptable to the American, English and Australian public. 

The intelligence was manipulated and used to fit a desire for war. A whim for oil. Bush Blair and Howard should be charged for war crimes. 

It won't happen.

 

For a dozen years, the Bush-Cheney crowd have been trying to escape—or cover up—an essential fact of the W. years: President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants misled the American public about the WMD threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein in order to grease the way to the invasion of Iraq. For Bush, Cheney, and the rest, this endeavor is fundamental; it is necessary to protect the legitimacy of the Bush II presidency. Naturally, Karl Rove and other Bushies have quickly tried to douse the Bush-lied-us-into-war fire whenever such flames have appeared. And in recent days, as Jeb Bush bumbled a question about the Iraq War, he and other GOPers have peddled the fictitious tale that his brother launched the invasion because he was presented lousy intelligence. But now there's a new witness who will make the Bush apologists' mission even more impossible: Michael Morell, a longtime CIA official who eventually became the agency's deputy director and acting director. During the preinvasion period, he served as Bush's intelligence briefer.

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball on Tuesday night, Morell made it clear: The Bush-Cheney administration publicly misrepresented the intelligence related to Iraq's supposed WMD program and Saddam's alleged links to Al Qaeda.

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/michael-morell-bush-cheney-iraq-war

 

And so, as mentioned ad nauseam on this site since 2005 (and since 2002 to whomever listened to Gus's rants and saw his pre-yourdemocracy toons), Blair and Howard (and their minions such as "Lord" Downer — see Downer Lies?) ALSO MISLED THE UK AND AUSTRALIA. They all should be hung by the short and curlies for a while. 

 

The war in Iraq was a failure of policy, not intelligence. The Bush administration decided to topple Saddam Hussein and then concocted a bogus case to justify war. Blaming bad intelligence is just a smokescreen the war’s architects and cheerleaders now employ to evade blame for the debacle.

 

 

For starters, Bush and the neoconservatives mistakenly believed preventive war was justified because Saddam was undeterrable. But Saddam was not suicidal, and if he had ever obtained WMDs, he could not have used them or given them to others without facing devastating retaliation. It was always an unnecessary war.

Toppling Saddam was also unwise, as 33 security experts pointed out in a September 2002 New York Times advertisement (“War with Iraq is Not in America’s National Interest”). They warned an invasion could “spread instability in the Middle East,” noted “we had no exit strategy,” and said Iraq was a “deeply divided society that the U.S. would have to occupy and police for many years.” One did not need classified intelligence to spot these obvious dangers, but Bush and the neocons ignored them.

 

 

Similarly, when Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told a Senate committee in early 2003 that occupying Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz derided Shinseki’s assessment as “wildly off the mark” and promised the occupation would pay for itself. The cost eventually exceeded $3 trillion (along with many thousands killed or wounded) but it was hubris and arrogance that led Wolfowitz astray, not faulty intelligence.

 

 

The real “intelligence failure” is not heeding the lessons the Iraq war teaches. First, although military power is essential for protecting vital interests, it is a crude instrument that invariably produces unintended consequences (e.g., ISIS). Second, the U.S. military can defend our shores, destroy enemy armies and topple fragile governments, but it is largely useless for nation-building in distant foreign lands. When the U.S. attacks other countries and engages in social engineering afterwards, it ends up being resented if not hated by the people it sought to help. These realities explain why diplomacy is a better way to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, the conflict in Ukraine and other vexing international challenges.

After Iraq, anyone who still thinks preventive war can solve serious foreign policy problems has not been paying attention. 

read more http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/05/18/iraq-bad-intelligence-or-a-lesson-in-bad-policy/iraq-shows-that-preventive-war-worsens-problems-diplomacy-can-solve?smid=tw-roomfordebate

read from top

 

Revisionist history is en vogue among Republicans this summer.

As Ramadi falls, hawks offer comfort in the argument that at least Iraq’s current troubles with ISIS can all be laid at President Obama’s feet. In the face of well-documented Iraqi reality, they are reviving the stale Vietnam-era trope to say that—if only the United States had the conviction to stay a little longer—it would have “won.”

The reviser-in-chief is none other than Sen. John McCain. McCain was Washington’s greatest advocate for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and he hated that the U.S. ever left. No doubt he dislikes President Obama, who thwarted the elder man’s bid for the White House in 2008, even more.

Just last week he told reporters that President Obama’s strategy for curbing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, was “one of the most disgraceful episodes in American history.” McCain’s widely known and tolerated flair for the dramatic now places an “episode” that most Americans could not rightly pin down, much less explain without the aid of Google, alongside slavery, the Trail of Tears, the federal crackdown on World War I-era Bonus Marchers, and the entire Vietnam War.

His partner in this long-running routine, Sen. Lindsey Graham, also reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove’s Gen. Buck Turgidson (“Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”), laid out the latest talking points in an interview about the ISIS takeover of Ramadi in Iraq this month:

It’s a predictable outcome of withdrawing all forces back in 2011…The military advised [Obama] to leave 10,000 troops. When he refused to take their advice, everything you see before you is a result of that big mistake.

 

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/march-of-the-imperial-senators-2/

 

Idiots. The big mistake was to concoct some fake intelligence to go and destroy Iraq in 2003. Leaving 10,000 troops would not have changed much of the tactics of ISIL, except possible delay an offensive into Iraq by a few months. ISIL being also involved in fighting the Syria government, the US might have been sucked into helping ISIL and thus be conned easier in supplying weapons. As well the news of "more" US soldiers deaths would not have been welcome within the US. The US is still in Afghanistan 14 years after the invasion and the situation is still tenuous. The Taliban is patient. 

To some extend, had Saddam died of a natural death about like say this year (thus aged 78), a more massive civil war could start and more readily involve Iran and the Saudis... The situation would be complicated but diplomacy could still manage the situation. There was room for negotiations with Saddam then to make sure that Iraq was not going to destroy itself in the future, US troops or none. There is little room now, especially when the Wahhabi religious mob control ISIL and Saudi Arabia and is eager to take "territory"...

The war against Iraq was a giant mistake. Trying to rewrite history is puerile and imbecilic. ISIL is purely due to George W Bush and his little helpers... including McCain.

 

Read from top...

 

 

...

Again, why do these rebels seem willing to fight for what we see as antiquated beliefs, but all too often our friends do not fight? Perhaps the answer is found in Thomas Babington Macaulay: “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?”

Tribe and faith. Those are the causes for which Middle Eastern men will fight. Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists will die for the faith. Persians and Arabs will fight to defend their lands, as will Kurds and Turks. But who among the tribes of the Middle East will fight and die for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom, and marriage equality?

“Expel the Crusaders from our lands!”—there is a cause to die for. Go back to 1983. A jihadist of the Amal militia drove a bomb-laden truck into the Marine barracks in Beirut. In 2000, two suicide bombers steered a tiny boat up alongside the USS Cole in Aden harbor, stood, saluted and blasted a hole in the hull, almost sinking the warship.

Nineteen young men volunteered to ride those planes into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers on 9/11. The “underwear bomber” and “shoe bomber” were prepared to go down with those planes. Murderers and would-be murderers all. But according to a new Al-Jazeera poll, the warriors of the Islamic State have many Muslim admirers.

In Afghanistan, we have fought the Taliban for 13 years. Yet still they fight. And many fear the Afghan army we trained and armed at a cost of tens of billions will disintegrate when we go home. Why do the Taliban seem to have in abundance a will to fight that appears far less present in the Afghan army units we have trained?

 

read more http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/why-american-allies-wont-fight/

 

Kelley Vlahos reminds us that the U.S. would have faced an insurgency from Shi’ite militias if a residual force had remained in Iraq beyond 2011:

The war hawks argue that if Obama had renegotiated the SOFA (basically forced a longer occupation), the U.S. would have helped the Iraqis repel growing al-Qaeda elements before they morphed into the Islamic State. This completely ignores the fact that it was our friend Maliki’s suppressive and discriminatory treatment of the Sunnis that empowered the extremist elements. It also ignores the very real possibility that al-Sadr’s Shia army, which had been standing down per agreements, may have re-emerged to fight the Americans themselves, along with the Iranian-backed militias that are now fighting ISIS in places like Ramadi.

“Sadr said he would put his army back on the streets if we were to stay,” Hoh said. Furthermore, “even if we put troops back there, the Islamic State and the Sunni were going to fight against the Shia-dominated military anyway. So we would have our troops in the middle of a civil war.”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-revisionism-of-iraq-war-dead-enders/

 

 

It is scarcely surprising that Tony Blair gave a half-hearted apology for the way he dragged Britain into a disastrous invasion of Iraq. What is more surprising is that he had not done it much sooner – and that he did it to an American broadcaster.

Blair knows full well that he will be heavily criticised by the Chilcot inquiry for the way he joined George Bush’s invasion without properly informing his cabinet, let alone parliament and the public, and for rejecting advice from his government’s law officers.

There are some who held very high office at the time who have said Blair could be charged under international law, in particular over the obligations placed on occupying powers under the Geneva conventions to protect civilians, and “ensure public order and safety”.

Blair apologised “for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong”. He knows full well MI6 is an easy target.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/26/chilcot-report-likely-to-cast-net-of-criticism-far-and-wide

 

As we all should know, the intelligence that Blair received was the "one he asked for". That is to say that the intelligence was not wrong but was FAKE, concocted and MANIPULATED TO SUIT the decision to go to WAR. It is all explained in these pages, columns and other articles on this site: the "intelligence" was deliberately manipulated BY THE BLAIR GOVERNMENT, BY THE BUSH GOVERNMENT AND THE HOWARD GOVERNMENT to go to war. And all of them told massive porkies based on this fake "intelligence" to the public in order to go to war.

Blair is a liar and a poor apologist. He should have gone away fishing in Siberia rather than carry on doing more diplomatic damage as envoy of whatever. But it's all about the cash. Hopefully Howard will have the decency at this stage to shut his trap. But you never know, these guys always want their names in lights.

 

Read from top.

 

 

At some point during this film from deep inside Iraq’s many wars, one asks oneself, shattered: “Do I need to watch this?” Jihadi executioners clear a pavement opposite a marketplace and shoot a suspected informer while he kneels, hooded, then kick the body casually. Next, the Islamist fighters are hanging alleged looters from a rafter by their bound wrists so that their quarry dangles there – “like piñatas”, says the commentary – before bullets rip through them. And there is worse to come, in a different way, from the less fervent but more arrogant cruelty of American soldiers.

And the answer is: yes, we absolutely do need to watch this film. For the violence is not gratuitous, quite the reverse: it propels a searing film-essay by the cameraman and subject of the piece, Australian reporter Michael Ware, who is unique among we correspondents who covered that carnage, for having actually lived in Iraq for seven bloody years, after which he suffered what can only be called a breakdown before mustering the courage to make his “video-diary”. Unique too for having penetrated deep within first the insurgency loyal to Saddam Hussein, then the Islamist genesis of what is now Isis. “I witnessed the birth of what is now Islamic State,” says Ware. “It’s there in the film.”

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/28/i-wintessed-birth-of-birth-isis-iraq-michael-ware-only-the-dead-documentary

 

See image at top and read articles below it. Tell your friends...

 

 

Summary

1. Sir John Chilcot's Iraq War inquiry report published after seven years
2. UK went to war "before peaceful options for disarmament exhausted" - military action was "not last resort", it finds
3. Invasion in 2003 was based on “flawed intelligence and assessments” that went unchallenged
4. Threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were "presented with certainty that was not justified"
5. Ex-PM Tony Blair says decision for action made "in good faith" and he will take "full responsibility for any mistakes"
6. Families of Britons killed during Iraq War say conflict was "a fiasco" and do not rule out legal action
7. PM David Cameron tells MPs sacrifice of war dead will never be forgotten
8. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says war was act of aggression launched on false pretence
9. Iraq Inquiry says invasion 'not last resort'

read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-36714717


Boloney. The "intelligence" was not flawed. THE INTELLIGENCE WAS ACTUALLY MANUFACTURED TO SUIT WAR. It was not intelligence but a fabrication of deceitful lies according to the wishes of Bush, Blair and Howard. This is the crux of the matter. There were no flaws in the intelligence, because THERE WAS NO INTELLIGENCE — only well-constructed fake reports. This has been the point reported since the beginning of this website more than ten years ago as a public access site and 13 years ago as a wiki site. Blair, Bush and Howard demanded that the intelligence analysis and collection be manipulated or be CREATED to suit WAR. 
Corbyn: the false pretence is correct. Read from top.

 

 

A group of Federal MPs and former military chiefs is ramping up calls for an inquiry into the decisions that led to Australia joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, with some pushing to change the war powers invested in the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Key points:

• Prime Minister and Cabinet can decide whether to send troops to war
• Call to broaden powers so parliament must also vote on decision
• Some MPs and former military chiefs also want inquiry into Iraq War

 

Currently, the Prime Minister and Cabinet can decide whether or not to send Australian soldiers to war, but some want to broaden those powers to a parliamentary vote.

Just a month after Britain handed down the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, there are also calls for Australia to hold a similar investigation.

Britain's seven-year inquiry found the UK joined the US-led military action before peaceful alternatives to war had been exhausted.

Labor MP Mike Kelly, a distinguished former Army Veteran, says now is the right time to revisit Australia's role in the conflict.

"It's not too late. In fact I think some distance now behind us will give us an even better perspective and better opportunity to do that analysis properly," he told Lateline.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-25/mps-call-for-iraq-war-inquiry/7786424

 

read from top...

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31417

 

Tony Abbott was prime minister when Australia’s last combat troops in Iraq returned in 2013. The whole campaign had been based on an error: “No one in the Coalition realised the war with Saddam was nothing more than a prequel,” as a secret Australian Army report put it. Less than two years after the troops returned, Abbott was removed from office by politicians who repeated the same strategic blunder. Toppling a leader, they discovered, is just the beginning.

The Army’s report was revealed by Fairfax over the weekend after a Freedom of Information request. It found that Australia’s contribution was shambolic, with strategy steered by domestic politics and public perception. The operation was intended to strengthen our alliance with the US, but even that was a failure at a military level, because “the three services reverted to their traditional role as competent subordinates”. In short, our defence forces were “lucky” to face an opponent as incompetent as the Iraqi Army. And as the post-Saddam chaos and violence erupted, the Australian government made an explicit decision not to take part in any counterinsurgency.

Our prime minister does not have a similar luxury. Abbott has stepped up his attacks on Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, as Elle Hardy noted on Friday. Today the PM attempted a feeble comeback, blaming Abbott for the government’s poor standing in the polls, and criticising the media for focusing on personalities. “I am not going to be distracted”, he announced distractedly.

read more:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/jamie-hall/2017/27/2017/1488171931/p...

 

It was not an error, it was a massive deception... read from top.

 

The Chilcot inquiry’s conclusion that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and undermined the United Nations requires the prosecution of Tony Blair, the high court has heard.

In his opening argument calling for a war crimes trial in Britain, Michael Mansfield QC said that the offence of waging an aggressive war has effectively been assimilated into English law.

The attempt to bring Blair – with the former foreign secretary Jack Straw and the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith – to court has been launched by the former Iraqi general Abdulwaheed al-Rabbat.

Rabbat, said Mansfield, was motivated by last year’s publication of the report of the Chilcot inquiry into the 2003 Iraq war.

Mansfield summarised the report’s findings as: “Saddam Hussein did not pose an urgent threat to the UK, intelligence reporting about [Iraqi] weapons of mass destruction was presented with unwarranted certainty, that the war was unnecessary and that the UK undermined the authority of the UN security council.”

“Nothing could be more emphatic than these findings,” he said. “It was an unlawful war.”

Mansfield argued that when British prosecutors had opened their cases at the Nuremburg war crimes trials at the end of the second world war, they had acted as though the crime of aggression had already been assimilated into English law.

An initial application to launch the prosecution was dismissed at Westminster magistrates court on the grounds that Blair enjoys immunity and that the crime of aggression does not exist in English law.

The high court appeal is being heard by the lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Mr Justice Ouseley.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/05/tony-blair-should-be-pr...

read from top

 

Bush's daughter Jenna Bush has called Clinton “Uncle Bill.”

“I love you”

Last Thursday was not Clinton's first chummy visit to Bush's presidential library. The last time, the two men slumped back in their chairs like old friends after dinner, occasionally leaning over to share a laugh or grasp wrists.

“Presidential bromance,” CBS News quipped then. Maybe.

“I love you,” Clinton told the elder Bush in 2011 at a ceremony in honor of the man he once beat for president. “This man whom I'd always liked and respected, then run against in a painful campaign, in some ways I literally came to love,” Clinton explained. “Then I realized how much energy we waste fighting with each other over things that don't matter.”

The junior Bush and much of the rest of the family listened to these words from the audience. After the event, according to “The Presidents Club,” the Bushes all gathered for a family photo.

Clinton watched, standing around with the family of another former president, Jimmy Carter. Then a Bush called out: “Bill! Bill!”

So Clinton took his place in the photo — near the back, with the grandkids.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/15/how-bill-clint...

 

Read from top...

 

BAGHDAD — Walk into almost any market in Iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from Iran — milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran.

A new building goes up? It is likely that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous Iranian border.

And that’s not even the half of it.

Across the country, Iranian-sponsored militias are hard at work establishing a corridor to move men and guns to proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. And in the halls of power in Baghdad, even the most senior Iraqi cabinet officials have been blessed, or bounced out, by Iran’s leadership.

When the United States invaded Iraq 14 years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic and Western-facing Middle East, and vast amounts of blood and treasure — about 4,500 American lives lost, more than $1 trillion spent — were poured into the cause.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-iraq-iranian-power.html?mcubz=0

 

So this is why:

 

The White House, responding to pressure from the Pentagon, is asking Congress to grant permission for the construction of more “temporary” US military bases in Iraq and Syria.

In what is seen as a deepening of the Pentagon's commitment to waging war in the devastated region, US Defense Secretary James Mattis has convinced the administration of President Donald Trump to seek permission from Congress to expand military operations into Iraq and Syria, even as Daesh is being destroyed and Mosul has been retaken.

 

The new "temporary facilities" will increase the likelihood of a longer, more expensive and ultimately more deadly war in a region that is suffering the most dire human rights crisis since the end of World War II.

Trump's White House issued a policy statement on Tuesday suggesting that legal requirements currently in place prevent the Pentagon from expanding into more of Syria and Iraq, even as costly base "repair and renovation" will also include "temporary intermediate staging facilities, ammunition supply points, and assembly areas that have adequate force protection."

These additional requirements to cover the cost of expanding the war in Syria and Iraq will pay for "facilities, supply points, and assembly areas," according to the White House statement, cited by al-Monitor.

Tuesday's Statement of Administration Policy from the White House will see deliberations in the US House of Representatives on Wednesday.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/military/201707151055580633-pentagon-wants-expan...

 

Read from top...

 

 

 

 

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr Justice Ouseley, dismissed the general’s application. They said there was “no prospect” of the case succeeding.

The general wanted to see the prosecution Blair and two other key ministers of the time - Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General.

His lawyers asked London’s High Court for permission to seek judicial review in an attempt to get the Supreme Court, now the highest court in the land, to overturn a ruling by the House of Lords in 2006 that there is no such crime as the “crime of aggression” under the law of England and Wales.

Westminster Magistrates Court refused to issue summonses in November last year on the grounds that the ex-ministers had immunity from legal action - and in any event, the current Attorney General, Jeremy Wright QC, would have to give permission.

Wright intervened in the case and his legal team urged the Lord Chief Justice to block the challenge. He said the private trial of Blair could "involve details being disclosed under the Official Secrets Act." 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/uk/398050-tony-blair--prosecuted-iraq/

-------------

Tony Blair cannot be prosecuted — not because Aussie Tony is not guilty of crap and lied through is teeth with Bush and Howard, but because this would actually reveal that the "intelligence" against Saddam HAD BEEN 100 % FABRICATED.  Read from top.

 

The US defence department knew that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction but kept Britain in the dark, according to an explosive new claim from Gordon Brown.

In an extraordinary allegation, the former prime minister states that a secret US intelligence report into Iraq’s military capabilities was never passed to Britain and could have changed the course of events. The revelation leads Brown to conclude that the “war could not be justified as a last resort and invasion cannot now be seen as a proportionate response”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/05/iraq-weapons-mass-destruct...

Unfortunately, all the evidence points to the fact that Tony Blair knew there was no WMDs in Iraq as well. Read from top, carefully.... That Tony Blair misled the Poms could be another story, but by no means could the intelligence UK dossier fabricators not know that there was no WMDs in Iraq. This was the point of the "sexing-up" of the dossier that David Kelly objected to. 

 

Slowly the lies are being unravelled... READ FROM TOP...

I hate to blow my cover, but I fear the Iraq war may have been my fault.

I was in high school in early 2002 when military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan began winding down (or so we thought at the time). Assigned to write a current events report for my civics class, I decided to research five seemingly terrorism-plagued nations and consider which one was ripest for American intervention. The conclusion I came to, inflamed little post-9/11 thing that I was, was that it had to be Iraq, fiefdom of America’s iconic foe Saddam Hussein, who, after all, probably had weapons of mass destruction and would crumple easily before our vastly superior military and his own people’s thirst for liberty. My teacher agreed and gave me an A+. He never told me that he passed off my report to the Bush administration, but you know how these closet Straussians are about their noble lies.

I was 14 when I handed in that assignment; I am now 30 and American troops are still in Iraq, despite the Bush administration’s promise of a short war. And while, of course, my homework assignment did not have all the geopolitical significance of the Zimmerman Telegram, I still find it revealing that the rationales dashed off by a freshman as the clock ticked down to third period were nearly identical to the ones posited by the most powerful men on earth in support of the heaviest mobilization of military power in a decade. Plenty of wars haven’t been premised on such woolly-headed swagger, but Iraq was. Remember the unicorns that passed as post-war planning? Donald Rumsfeld’s lighter, nimbler military would have the place licked in a matter of months. The country’s vast oil wealth would cover the expenses. The Sunnis and Shias would be too busy frolicking through their newfound emerald libertyscape to start a sectarian war. Some fellow named Ahmed Chalabi who had left Iraq 45 years ago would be lowered via crane into Baghdad and established as the country’s new president. The state would be cleansed of Baathists without serious consequence. All of Iraq would be fortified into a liberal outpost from which our values could be spread to its neighbors.

 

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-iraq-wars-age-of-mad...

 

Read from top.

The Iraq War architects have been thoroughly rehabilitated and are planning their next adventure, even as the catastrophic ramifications of their crimes continue to reverberate around the world.

Last week marked the 15th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. April 9 will be the 15th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. The consequences of these events are still playing out today, from Mali to Niger, to the Philippines. Iraq has never recovered and is only beginning to emerge from the trauma, while American officials plan the next military adventure.

Writing in the New York Times, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon observed: “The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a ‘blunder,’ or even a ‘colossal mistake.’ It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry.”

The rehabilitation of the neocons

Indeed, the rise of Trump has provided the cabal of Iraq War architects with a rebranding opportunity. After their utter failure in Iraq, these people were largely disgraced and no longer taken seriously outside of right-wing circles. But Trumpism, and the desire of liberals to oust the current president, has led to an anti-Trump coalition which includes at its helm many of the instrumental figures behind the Iraq invasion. The list includes David “axis of evil” Frum, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush and now a senior editor at the Atlantic, as well as neoconservative think tanker Bill Kristol, and George W. Bush, who is now celebrated as a pragmatic leader – even by nostalgic Democrats who contrast him with Trump.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/422380-iraq-war-isis-iran/

 

Read from top and see:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11668

It was gratifying to see Little Winston once more bursting into print in the Fairfax press, addressing Kevin from Heaven’s claim that Howard lied about the invasion of Iraq. 

Winston says this is a baseless claim and went on to split the hair on the head of an angel while it danced on a pin. 

His government relied on intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and on the strength of that it decided to invade.

“In the event,” wrote Howard, “this proved not to be the case. That does not mean, as claimed by Mr Rudd, that my government had misled the Australian people. Rather it meant the intelligence was wrong.” 

This takes semantics to a new and exciting place. Using incorrect intelligence to justify a catastrophic invasion doesn’t mean the public was misled. Try to get your head around that.

 

This was a titbit from the Gadfly on Saturday (March 31-April 6 2018)... Please (carefully) read from top. The main point that should come out is that "the intelligence against Saddam HAD BEEN FABRICATED to suit going to war". Why and how is explained carefully by studying the Double-Cross System expert Masterman and other war techniques.

So, Winston John Howard is lying once more about this war though he is telling the truth: the intelligence was wrong, but Howard deviously avoids telling the truth: the intelligence was designed to be deliberately wrong. THE PUBLIC WAS MISLED by Blair, Bush and Howard who had to know in advance that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, otherwise THEY COULD NOT ATTACK.

The public was sold a pup...

 

Read from top!...

 

 

 

15 years of TAC

...

We’ve had plenty of incentive to project our views on the subject these many years because the questions surrounding the war never seem to get resolved in the national consciousness. We debate endlessly how the government could have been so wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. We argue over whether the ongoing chaos of the region stems from the invasion itself or Barack Obama’s decision to pull from Iraq the last troops left by Bush (who, incidentally, had agreed to the withdrawal timetable executed by Obama). We’re still squabbling about the essence and actual impact of Bush’s 2007 troop “surge.”

But one element of the issue never seems to get adequately aired—the matter of whether humanitarian interventionism ever really makes much sense for a government whose first responsibility is to its citizens. Much of the lingering discussion on Iraq focuses on the second Bush’s insistence that Saddam had to be eliminated because of his WMD and ominous ties to al Qaeda terrorists (both untrue). But he also hailed the great good works America would perform through his invasion. The humanitarian impulse was on full display in the war’s runup.

Perhaps that isn’t surprising since that impulse has never been far from the surface when America has sent troops into the world. The country’s first great imperialist president, William McKinley, loved to talk about America’s civilizing mission in the Philippines—even as he sent in more troops to quash the indigenous folk who didn’t view America’s colonial leaders as liberators.

• Beware the Good Intervention
• The Ideologues Who Wrecked Libya

But fundamentally America’s overseas adventures had a primary rationale of national interest. Everyone knew America took the Philippines to exploit its untapped resources, project military power into Asia, obtain coaling stations for the country’s burgeoning navy, prevent Germany or Japan from getting those islands, and generally to make America great. The humanitarian aspect was always secondary.

Now it is primary. Americans see agonizing video of struggling children following chemical weapons attacks, and the nation’s anguished leadership rushes to a military response before there’s been any chance of determining even provisionally who actually perpetrated the atrocity. The nation applauds. Hardly any debate ensues.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-humanitarian-trap/

 

Western media keeps referring to an alleged chemical attack on Douma, Syria, as an established fact, but have yet to produce one iota of evidence from the town that, until recently, was controlled by Jaysh al-Islam.

Unverified videos, emanating from the Western-funded  propaganda construct the White Helmets, do not constitute evidence, nor do testimonies taken in Turkey or Idlib, Syria, which is under terrorist rule.

On the other hand, there are many testimonies that contradict the accusations, including those of 17 Syrians from Douma (among them doctors and medical staff), who, on April 26, spoke at the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague, stating that there was no chemical attack.

The leaderships of the US, UK, France and their lapdog media, unsurprisingly, dismissed the Syrian testimonies as “obscene” and a “masquerade”. It should be noted that the same media took as utterly credible the words attributed to a then-seven year-old girl named Bana al-Abed, living in eastern Aleppo, before it was liberated. Corporate media and Western leaders had no issues with the credibility of Bana, who was living surrounded by twenty-five terrorist cells in her district alone. But the testimonies of Syrians from Douma are “obscene.”

There are other statements by civilians that contradict the accusations, given to journalists who bothered to go to Douma and listen to them, like Robert Fisk, Germany’s ZDF, One American News, and Vanessa Beeley.

In fact, it was the Syrian and Russian governments who called for the OPCW to investigate, and it was the US, UK, and France which illegally bombed Syria with 103 missiles, including 76 missiles on Damascus itself, before the OPCW inspectors could investigate.

None of the accusations have been “proven” and, when the OPCW does eventually issue its report, it is worth recalling that their report in the previous year, on the allegations of a chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib, contained “irregularities,” to put it mildly. The most glaring irregularity (mentioned in the annex section of their report) was the admission of 57 “victims” to hospital before any alleged attack even could have occurred. Another unexplained irregularity was sarin showing up in urine but not in blood tests from the same sample.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/428514-douma-civilians-chemical-hoax/

 

The Ideologues Who Wrecked Libya?: they were not ideologues... Plain and simple thieving thugs, including Obama and La Madam Clinton.

Read from top.

 

watch also:

https://www.corbettreport.com/911-suspects-philip-zelikow/

 

The name Tony Blair is synonymous with lies, deceit, warmongering and mendacious manipulation of information to create a false but deliberate narrative.

I rage whenever I am forced to listen to Blair’s pontifications but despite his despicable political record he is still guaranteed friendly media airtime whenever he chooses to bump his gums in pursuit of more lucrative speaking tour contracts or Saudi Arabian blood money for services rendered. Tony Blair should be prime time news but the story should revolve around his trial in The Hague as he sits in the dock accused of war crimes and complicity in the loss of up to one million lives on the back of his Iraq war adventure in 2003 that was based on lies.

...

 

Read Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Seymour Hersh and many of the other investigative journalists and websites that seek to find truth within the government propaganda which is so often an elaborate tissue of lies and distortions. Always remember the words of Dom Helder Camara the courageous and wise Brazilian Archbishop and liberation theology advocate:

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist”.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201809281068415970-always-ask-why/

 

Read from top.

 

Sixteen years on from the start of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, further evidence has emerged that the war was planned long before the attack took place and that the stated reason for it, ie 'Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction' was bogus.

Speaking before the Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee this week, the former head of the Royal Navy, Admiral The Lord West of Spithead, revealed that he was told in June 2002, 'that we would be invading Iraq with America at the beginning of the following year'.

"It was quite clear that the Government were thinking we have to get Parliament and others on side. But what was interesting was that as it developed, there was all this stuff on weapons of mass destruction and everything, and it did seem to me that people were looking for a casus belli that they could discuss in Parliament," Lord West said.

Let's think back to what we — the public — were actually told in 2002/3.

Bush and Blair and their acolytes repeatedly said that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could prevent war by admitting he had WMDs and disarming. As late as 25th February 2003, Blair was saying that 'even now' Saddam could avoid war by 'accepting the UN route to disarmament' 'I do not want war', he told the House of Commons. 'I do not believe anyone in this House wants war. But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation."

READ MORE: 16 Years Later, Legacy of US War in Iraq is Destruction, Lies, Not ‘Misjudgment'

But it's clear that whatever Saddam did, he and his country were going to be hit with Shock and Awe. The whole charade of weapons inspectors, sent in to search for weapons that were not there, was designed to try and convince people that war was a last resort and not the first option.

Crucially, the invasion had to come before the weapons inspectors finished their job and gave Iraq a clean bill of health- as then the pretext for war would have gone.

Admiral West's revelations, which follow on from similar comments he made in  2016, are not the only ones we've had from Inside the Tent figures about what was really going on in 2002/3.

In his memoir My Life, Our Times, published in November 2017, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2003, admitted that the Iraq War was 'not justified'. He also said 'we were all misled on the existence of WMDs'. According to Brown, a key US intelligence report which not only refuted the claim that Iraq was producing WMDs,  but also their 'current ability to do so', was not seen by the British government. An attempt to pass the buck? You make your own mind up.

READ MORE: Pence Clashes With Iraq War Architect Cheney Over Trump-Obama Comparison

Earlier, the former British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, said thatPresident Bush had first asked Tony Blair for his support in a war against Iraq at a private White House dinner just nine days after the 9-11 terror attacks, which had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq.

We also know from the Chilcot Inquiry that on 28th July 2002, Tony Blair sent Bush a memo in which he pledged 'I will be with you, whatever'. He went on: 'the military part of this is hazardous but I will concentrate mainly on the political context for success'.

That involved trying to 'encapsulate our casus belli in some defining way', with weapons inspections the chosen route. ' If he (Saddam) did say yes, we continue the build-up and we send teams over and the moment he obstructs, we say: he's back to his games. That's it. In any event, he would probably screw it up and not meet the deadline, and if he came forward after the deadline, we would just refuse to deal."

As for timing, Blair says 'we could start building up after the break. A strike date could be Jan/Feb next year'.

Blair continued to scare us witless right up to the launch of the invasion in March 2003 about Saddam's deadly arsenal. A critical claim, contained in the so-called 'September Dossier', was the one that Iraq possessed chemical weapons which could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes.

This led to the infamous 'Brits 45 minutes from Doom' headline in Rupert Murdoch's Sun and similarly terrifying headlines in other newspapers. Yet in 2004, Blair said that he had not realised before the war that the alleged weapons were not missiles but only battlefield munitions.

Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote in the Guardian ': 'I was astonished by his reply as I had been briefed that Saddam's weapons were only battlefield ones and I could not conceive that the prime minister had been given a different version.'

In July 2003 a Foreign Affairs committee report declared "We conclude that the 45 minutes claim did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier, because it was based on intelligence from a single, uncorroborated source."

It is clear that the Iraq War was a plan hatched by neocon extremists in Washington and lurid claims of Iraqi WMDs, which did not exist, were made to justify it.

READ MORE: Drug War, War Against Iraq: The Legacy of George H.W. Bush

The Nuremberg Judgement of the trial of the WW2 Nazi leaders stated: '"War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.".

The Iraq War was clearly a war of aggression, and as such, an example of 'the supreme international crime', yet, sixteen years on, no one has been held accountable for it.  That's in spite of over 1m people losing their lives following the invasion and the war greatly increasing the threat from terrorist groups. Even Tony Blair himself has conceded there were 'elements of truth' in the claims that the Iraq War led to the rise of Daesh/IS.

Worse still, the war on Iraq was followed by more aggression against Libya, in 2011, and Syria, wars which like the invasion of Iraq, have helped provoke a refugee crisis of Biblical proportions. Let's go back to 27th January 1998, more than three and a half years before 9-11.   It was on that date that a letter was sent to President Clinton, on behalf of the neoconservative 'Project for a New American Century'. The letter called for 'removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now has to be the aim of American foreign policy'.

READ MORE: Decorated US Navy SEAL Under Investigation for Committing War Crimes in Iraq

Among the signatories to the call to arms were Elliot Abrams and John Bolton. Abrams is now the US special envoy to Venezuela- and seeking regime change in Caracas, while Bolton is President Trump's National Security Advisor and warning us about Iran's 'nuclear weapons program'.  

It's as if the Iraq War never happened.

The views and opinions expressed by the contributor do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66 and @MightyMagyar

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201903291073653332-iraq-war-bush-blai...

by Joe Giambrone, The Political Film Blog

...

Every subsequent action was the direct fault of those who initiated the war, every atrocity, every evil, every consequence, every kidnapping, every maiming, every rape, every murder. These people are monsters towering well above and beyond the Saddams or Qaddafis of the world.

By their own logic, as they are immoral and gleefully evil, other nations now have a right to invade America and install a new regime. That’s not the way international law works. It’s the way imperial war propaganda works, however.

SPINNING THE INDEFENSIBLE

Now onto the fiasco depicted in the film. We have a cast of self-styled do-gooders participating in a major war crime, desiring to stabilize the country and rebuild it (after their own military destroyed it). 

They are prevented from doing so by a series of seemingly incomprehensible bad decisions from Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Bremer and their gaggle of incompetent lackeys.

1. Upon the fall of Saddam, no law is enforced, allowing complete chaos and looting all over the country.
2. The Iraqi army is disbanded leaving hundreds of thousands of armed, trained men, with no income and nothing to do.
3. The Americans refuse to even speak with Iraqis as their stormtroopers raid and kill and torture their family members.

I’m of the mind that all of this was intentional, and that the PLAN A was never to win the peace in Iraq. Wars are so difficult to launch, they wanted Iraq to descend into region-wide chaos engulfing Syria (done) and Iran (still very much on the agenda).

General Wesley Clark divulged the Bush Junta’s plans, which were to attack “seven nations in five years,” barely a week after they allowed the 9/11 attacks to succeed. That’s another story, and America has yet to recover a modicum of self-respect and demand justice.

What No End in Sight captured was a small part of this large imperial agenda for a “new American Century” of aggression and the seizing of vital resources, particularly oil and gas

 

See more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/06/29/watch-no-end-in-sight-2007/

 

 

Read from top.

In 2003, Katharine Gun, a young specialist working for Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, exposed a highly confidential memo that revealed the United States’ collaboration with Britain in collecting sensitive information on United Nations Security Council members in order to pressure them into supporting the Iraq invasion. Gun leaked the memo to the press, setting off a chain of events that jeopardized her freedom and safety, but also opened the door to putting the entire legality of the Iraq invasion on trial. 

Acclaimed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg described Gun’s action as “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen.” Gun’s incredible story is depicted in the new film “Official Secrets,” which premieres in the U.S. August 30. We speak with Katharine Gun; the British journalists who reported on Gun’s revelations in The Observer newspaper, Martin Bright and Ed Vulliamy; and Gavin Hood, director of “Official Secrets.”

TranscriptThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As the British government says it’s identified the person who leaked cables that forced out the British ambassador to the United States for calling President Trump “inept,” we look at the real-life political thriller of a British intelligence specialist who risked everything to blow the whistle on U.S. dirty tricks at the United Nations in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.

In 2003, Katharine Gun was working for Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, the intelligence agency similar to the National Security Agency here, when she opened a top-secret NSA memorandum. The highly confidential memo revealed the United States was collaborating with Britain in collecting sensitive information on United Nations Security Council members in order to pressure them into supporting the Iraq invasion. Guided by her conscience, Katharine Gun defied her government and leaked the memo to the press, setting off a chain of events that jeopardized her freedom, her safety, but also opened the door to putting the entire Iraq invasion on trial.

Acclaimed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg described Katharine Gun’s action as “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen.” Dan Ellsberg said, “No one else—including myself—has ever done what Katharine Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.”

Well, now Katharine Gun’s story is being told in the new film Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley. This is the trailer.

TINTIN: [played by Peter Guinness] Katharine Gun? What were you employed to do?

KATHARINE GUN: [played by Keira Knightley] I translated signals intelligence, and I reported anything of interest to my clients.

TINTIN: You’re a spy.

KATHARINE GUN: Did you get this email?

ANDY DUMFRIES: [played by Jack Farthing] The Americans want us to help them get a U.N. resolution for war.

TINTIN: So, you work for the British government.

KATHARINE GUN: No.

TINTIN: No?

UNIDENTIFIED: This proposed war is historically unpopular.

KATHARINE GUN: I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.

JACQUELINE JONES: [played by Katherine Kelly] Intelligence may be being manipulated to take this country to war.

KATHARINE GUN: I could get you a copy.

JASMINE: [played by MyAnna Buring] You’re asking me to collude in a breach of the Official Secrets Act. Some call that treason.

BRITISH INTELLIGENCE OFFICER: Someone has betrayed their government and their country.

BEN EMMERSON: [played by Ralph Fiennes] You might need our help.

KATHARINE GUN: If we do not go public, we would be conceding that no one can ever tell the people when their government is lying.

BEN EMMERSON: Your marriage will be interrogated.

KATHARINE GUN: My husband had absolutely nothing to do with this.

JERRY: [played by Chris Reilly] He’s a Muslim.

KATHARINE GUN: I’m sorry?

BEN EMMERSON: You chose loyalty to your country over loyalty to your government, your marriage and yourself. I think that speaks rather highly of you.

JUDGE HYAM: [played by Kenneth Cranham] Katharine Teresa Gun, you’re charged with an offense of the Official Secrets Act.

BEN EMMERSON: Do you want to risk it all?

JUDGE HYAM: How do you plead?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the new movie Official Secrets, based on the true-life story of whistleblower Katharine Gun. At the time, her actions received very little attention from journalists in the United States—unless you were watching Democracy Now! In 2004, Democracy Now! interviewed Katharine Gun. I asked her why she decided to leak the memo.

KATHARINE GUN: When I saw this email asking GCHQ’s help to bug the six swing nations to gather a vote for war with Iraq, I was very angry at first and very saddened that it had come to this, and that despite all the talk from both Tony Blair and George Bush about how important it was to get the U.N. on board and to legitimize any kind of aggression, that they were actually going around it in such low-handed manner. So, I decided that the risk to my career was minute compared to the upcoming war in Iraq, and the best thing to do for me was to leak this information to the press, so that everybody else could have the information, and hopefully it could avert this disastrous course of events that have occurred.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Katharine Gun back in 2004. It’s 15 years later.

For more on this incredible story and the real-life thriller that is coming out on August 30th in movie theaters around the country—our guest, Katharine Gun, is played by Keira Knightley—we’re joined by Katharine Gun herself, the whistleblower, former employee of Britain’s global surveillance center, GCHQ, played by actress Keira Knightley, yes.

We’re joined also by Martin Bright, who is the journalist who reported Gun’s revelations in The Observer, as well as Ed Vulliamy. He was the Observer journalist who was working in Washington on this story, as well, with Martin. At the time, the paper, their paper, The Observer, was openly supporting the Iraq invasion, leading up to it. Also with us, the director of Official Secrets, Gavin Hood.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! And it’s so relevant to be talking about this today, as the British government is talking about cracking down on the leaker of the memos of the British ambassador to the U.S. that forced him out. He was forced to resign, because it showed that he called President Trump “inept,” and he said, you know, the singular reason that the Trump administration pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal was because it was signed by President Obama, and other issues. But they not only are saying they are going to crack down hard on the leaker, but they’re also saying they will crack down on the press, any press that reports this in Britain. We thought it was really interesting to talk to you at this time. But, Katharine, how old were you in 2003? Again, this is before the Iraq War. What? January of 2003. Iraq War was in March. Tell us the moment. You’re sitting at the equivalent of the NSA. You worked for GCHQ in Britain. And you were what? A Chinese translator?

KATHARINE GUN: Yeah, Mandarin Chinese, linguist.

AMY GOODMAN: So you had nothing to do with what was going on, covering stuff in Iraq or working on that issue.

KATHARINE GUN: No, no.

AMY GOODMAN: But what did you see in your email?

KATHARINE GUN: Well, it was a memo from a chap called Frank Koza, who worked at the NSA. And yeah, it was just a request from the NSA to—for GCHQ to assist them in bugging the domestic and office communications of the six U.N. Security Council delegates.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait a second. In bugging, in spying on, in eavesdropping, wiretapping, whatever?

KATHARINE GUN: Right. Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And who were these six countries?

KATHARINE GUN: You’re putting me on the spot now.

AMY GOODMAN: I know. Gavin, who worked on the screenplay and is the director.

GAVIN HOOD: Yes. Angola, Cameroon, Bulgaria, Chile—

MARTIN BRIGHT: Pakistan.

GAVIN HOOD: —Pakistan and Mexico. Yeah, and those are the—

AMY GOODMAN: So, bugging these six countries.

GAVIN HOOD: Who were the nonpermanent members on the U.N. Security Council at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: And the idea was they would figure out which way they were going to vote, so that they could sway them.

KATHARINE GUN: Well, no, more than that.

GAVIN HOOD: More than that.

KATHARINE GUN: The idea was to gather information that they could use to bribe them or, you know, threaten them into voting yes for the resolution.

GAVIN HOOD: So, yes, tremendous amount of pressure coming down on these countries, because if Blair and Bush had been able to get that U.N. resolution for the invasion, the weapons of mass destruction issue would have been almost pretty much irrelevant, because there’s two legal ways to go to war. It’s you either go to war based on a U.N. resolution—we’re all going together—or you’ve got to prove, you know, a genuine threat to your—you know, it’s a self-defense argument.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Katharine, you read this memo. You’re working on translating Mandarin. But you see this memo that went out to everyone in your area. And what did you think?

KATHARINE GUN: Well, I was just appalled. I mean, my first reaction was shock and anger. And I felt it was explosive information. You know, I thought it was something that people needed to know about, because it was basically exposing what was going on behind the scenes and the fact that, you know, all the flowery words that they used in front of the cameras about doing everything diplomatically was a sham.

AMY GOODMAN: Tony Blair was the prime minister of Britain at the time.

KATHARINE GUN: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what did you do?

KATHARINE GUN: Well, I didn’t do anything immediately, but I went home. It was a Friday when I saw the email. And I went home and thought about it over the weekend. And then, on Monday morning, I went back into my workplace, and I just photo—well, I made a copy of it, and I printed it out and folded it up into my handbag and put it for the end of the day to take it out of the office.

AMY GOODMAN: You took it out.

KATHARINE GUN: Yeah, I took it out.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you do with it?

KATHARINE GUN: And then I mailed it to a contact, who then passed it on to a journalist, who then passed it on to Martin Bright.

AMY GOODMAN: Which takes us to Mr. Martin Bright. But we’re going to go to a break, and then we’re going to come back to this discussion. And, guys, you do not want to miss this story and what would then take place. We’re talking about Official Secrets. Yes, it’s a new Hollywood movie that’s coming out, but it is the real-life story of Katharine Gun. How old were you at the time?

KATHARINE GUN: I was 27.

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty-seven years old, working for the—well, for British intelligence. And she sees this memo that says that the evidence for going to war would not be based on intelligence of whether there were WMD, but on trying to get something on the U.N. Security Council members, personal or whatever, to get them to vote for the invasion, to back President George W. Bush. This is Democracy Now! Back in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. We’re looking at the real-life political thriller of a British intelligence specialist, Katharine Gun, who risked everything to blow the whistle on U.S. dirty tricks at the United Nations in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003. Yes, in 2003, Gun was working for British intelligence—that’s GCHQ, the intelligence agency similar to the NSA, the National Security Agency—when she leaked a memo revealing the United States was collaborating with Britain in collecting sensitive information to hold over U.N. Security Council members to get them to support the Iraq War. Gun’s story being told in Official Secrets. This is a clip.

TINTIN: [played by Peter Guinness] Your supervisor speaks highly of your integrity. She says this breach was a foolish one-off. Was it?

KATHARINE GUN: [played by Keira Knightley] Do you mean have I leaked anything else? No.

TINTIN: Do you intend to?

KATHARINE GUN: No. I’ve always been very proud to work at GCHQ.

TINTIN: Until now.

KATHARINE GUN: Yes, until now.

TINTIN: What were you employed to do?

KATHARINE GUN: I can’t be specific.

TINTIN: Be general then.

KATHARINE GUN: I translated signals intelligence, and I reported anything I thought might be of interest to my clients.

TINTIN: Your clients?

KATHARINE GUN: The Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense.

TINTIN: So, you work for the British government.

KATHARINE GUN: No, not really.

TINTIN: No?

KATHARINE GUN: Governments change. I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.

TINTIN: With respect, Mrs. Gun, you’re a spy.

KATHARINE GUN: Yes.

TINTIN: You gather information from people’s phones and computers, and you feed that to your clients.

KATHARINE GUN: Yes.

TINTIN: You eavesdrop on private conversations.

KATHARINE GUN: Yes.

TINTIN: And now you’re upset at being asked to do that to members of the Security Council.

KATHARINE GUN: Detective, I don’t object to being asked to collect information that could help prevent a terror attack. What I object to is being asked to gather intelligence to help fix a vote at the U.N. and deceive the world into going to war.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip from Official Secrets. The film is coming out August 30th in theaters around the country. That’s Keira Knightley playing Katharine Gun, who’s in our studio now, the whistleblower, former British spy, worked for British intelligence, explaining why she leaked this memo, which would get to the press, which would get to The Observer, which brings us to our next two guests, Martin Bright and as well as Ed Vulliamy. Martin, talk about how you got this memo. You actually, at that point, had never met Katharine Gun.

MARTIN BRIGHT: No, it was a very unusual situation. We were handed a simple sheet of A4 paper that had a series of words typed on it. And whereas usually with a whistleblower, you would work very closely with them directly, Katharine didn’t come to me. She had passed the memo to one of her contacts. That contact had connections with the antiwar movement. Someone within the antiwar movement, who was a former journalist, took the memo initially to another newspaper. And then, finally, it came to me.

And on the face of it, it looked like an extraordinary story. You know, it’s not every day you get a top-secret memo, and not just a top-secret memo from GCHQ, but a top-secret memo from the NSA sent to GCHQ. It looked like a very exciting story. But the difficulty was that it was just words typed on a piece of paper. We had no idea where it had come from. And that’s really where the story started for Ed and myself on The Observer, was process of verification.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you go to your top editors, and you say, “I’ve got this piece of paper.” In fact, Katharine had ripped off the top. Is that right, Katharine?

MARTIN BRIGHT: The top had been ripped off of the memo. And so, all the header information that you would usually have was not there. So, when I met Yvonne Ridley, who is the former journalist who handed me the document, it was immensely infuriating. And I said, you know, “So, what is this? I mean, what are you doing here? This is of no use to me at all.” And she turned the piece of paper over, and on the back someone had written the header information. So we at least had—we at least had a lead.

AMY GOODMAN: So it was sort of chicken scratch on the back.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Katharine—

KATHARINE GUN: It wasn’t me, actually.

AMY GOODMAN: It wasn’t. It wasn’t.

MARTIN BRIGHT: We have to—we have to protect the innocent in the [inaudible].

GAVIN HOOD: We have to protect the innocent and source, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, but talk about this, your argument to the editors. You think this is real, but you do have to track it down. And explain what the header said, who you had to verify this with.

MARTIN BRIGHT: So, the header information included the name Frank Koza, who was the NSA’s head of regional targets at the time. And so we had at least that. We had at least a name. And also, the memo itself contained language that was consistent with intelligence service language, so we had experts look at that, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you call Ed, and you say, “Can you track down this guy?” Among many other things.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yeah, so, initially, we were quite nervous. I was quite nervous. I talked to a couple of colleagues about it, about even taking it to the editor, because you don’t want to take a half-baked story to your editor, particularly at the time of intense prewar preparation. The drums of war are rolling at that period. But we were—within The Observer—

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, that’s the time you should run the fastest to the editor, but—

MARTIN BRIGHT: Well, but only with a story that you know is true. And so, we knew that time was short. And at the time, The Observer newsroom was—and The Observer itself was split, because some people supported the war, some people didn’t. But there were a group of journalists within the newsroom who trusted each other, had worked together previously.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the paper had come out supporting the war. That’s the critical point.

MARTIN BRIGHT: The paper—the editorial line was supporting the war, but obviously there were those of us within the paper who didn’t. And it was a very collaborative—it was a very collaborative place. And I knew that I needed help. And I knew that Ed was an extremely experienced journalist. So, I called him and asked him if he could do anything to help track down Frank Koza, or the reality or otherwise of this individual.

AMY GOODMAN: The guy at the NSA. And, Ed, you’re played by Rhys Ifans brilliantly in this movie, Official Secrets. But, so you have to track down Frank Koza. What do you do?

ED VULLIAMY: Well, oh, indeed, brilliantly played his subject. These actors are so clever, Amy. It’s like he’s more me than I am. And likewise the other performances, extraordinary in this film.

Yes, I mean, these were, as Martin has suggested, divisive, divided, bitter, difficult times. Sound familiar? Plus ça change… The war—I mean, our obligation is not whether we support or are against the war. Our obligation is to the truth. And truth was having a hard time at The Observer at that point.

There’s a back story. This is Katharine’s story we’re talking about, but there is a back story in the film, which plays its part, which is mine, and I’ll be quick on this. I had found a source called Mel Goodman, namesake of yours, who was the ex-head of the Soviet desk at the CIA, had kept his clearance. Wise man. And he had told me over two meetings, A, we know that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction. The CIA knows it. Everybody knows it. Two, there is a shadow intelligence operation going on through the Pentagon, all your favorite names on this program—Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle. Your viewers will recall them; I hope not, for their sake, but some of them will. They’re basically cooking it. They’re cooking this up. It’s not true.

I filed that story seven times to The Observer. I could not get it in the paper. I didn’t know why, but I was going nuts. And Rhys Ifans plays the outraged insanity rather well, to my embarrassment, but he does a good job. And so, I was going crazy. It later emerged that the newspaper was collaborating very, very closely with Tony Blair and his sort of enforcers to keep this kind of thing out of the paper. So, where I had failed with my whistleblower, Mr. Goodman, Martin, with brave and extraordinary Katharine Gun, succeeded.

But this needed finding Koza. Now, I asked around. I asked Mr. Goodman, I asked others, “Can you help me find this guy?” Because you had to get an extension number. They won’t just put you through to a man who doesn’t exist in a place that doesn’t exist.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Martin, you tried that. You tried to call.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Well, I did. I did, rather naively, try calling the press office and getting an interview.

AMY GOODMAN: Press office at?

MARTIN BRIGHT: At the NSA, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You said, “May I please speak to Mr. Koza?”

MARTIN BRIGHT: “May I please speak to Mr. Koza?” And they said, “We don’t give out names.” And he says, “Excuse me, Mr. Bright.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, you find—

ED VULLIAMY: Yeah, I came upon an extension number. And that’s where you get through. I tried, too, without success.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you say?

ED VULLIAMY: Well, I put on an American accent, and I said, “Can I have Mr. Koza’s office, please? Could you put me through?” “Who’s talking, sir?” “I can’t say. Just put me through.” And, sure enough, “Frank Koza.” That was a good brain moment. I was like, “Mmm. Mr. Koza?” “Yeah, who’s that? Who’s that?” I said, “I’m ringing about the GCHQ memo that you sent.” Click.

AMY GOODMAN: Hang up.

ED VULLIAMY: But at least he exists.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’ve got it proved. Martin Bright, you’re able to move forward with this story.

ED VULLIAMY: Yeah, exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: And it is explosive. What was the headline?

MARTIN BRIGHT: It was ”NSA 'dirty tricks' at the U.N.” Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what happened then. I mean, you were the man of the hour. You walk in. People are cheering you. You’ve got CNN, you’ve got BBC, you’ve got everyone on the line. They want to interview Martin Bright, because you’ve got the story of this memo. You didn’t know who Katharine Gun was, who had leaked it, but you had the story of the memo that was going to get the goods on these U.N. Security Council members, which would force them to vote for the invasion of Iraq.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Everyone’s booking you.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And then everyone—FOX, CNN—and then they all cancel.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yes. It was an extraordinary moment. I mean, it’s every journalist’s dream to have these, you know, front-page splash stories that get followed up around the world. It was particularly explosive in Chile, which has obviously been used to American intelligence—

AMY GOODMAN: Because Chile was one of the six.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Was one of the six nations. We were getting calls from all over the world. And it was—

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got to make this fast; we have three minutes.

MARTIN BRIGHT: It was one of those huge, huge, huge stories. And then, one by one, the American networks pulled out. We still don’t know, to this day, why they did that. Some of it was to do with complications over an unfortunate spell check within the memo.

AMY GOODMAN: Wll, this is the key, absolutely astounding moment.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You print the memo.

MARTIN BRIGHT: In its entirety, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But the spelling of it is British spelling.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yes. So, we had a terrible moment where we had seen organizations follow the story up. The Drudge Report, famous right-wing website, had followed the story up. And then they changed their headline, from “Condi Rice orders operation at the NSA and GCHQ” to “British newspaper prints fake memo.”

AMY GOODMAN: Right, because it said like F-A-V-O-U-R, instead of V-O-R.

MARTIN BRIGHT: Yeah, these details on—

AMY GOODMAN: And so that proves it’s a fake memo, they think. But it’s just because the copy editor ran it through spell check.

MARTIN BRIGHT: It was cock-up rather than conspiracy. And it was a terrible moment when I had to look in my drawer and find it.

AMY GOODMAN: But, Katharine Gun, you’re home. You see this headline splashed across the front page. And your memo, that you had leaked, was right front and center.

KATHARINE GUN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You promptly threw up?

KATHARINE GUN: Well, no, I was in a shock when I saw it. But I felt like straightaway it was emblazoned across my forehead: “It’s me! You know, look at me. Target. Right here.” And I was petrified. I was trembling like a leaf. And I pretty much ran home. And my husband Yasar was still in bed. And I just—you know, I just collapsed. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what—I mean, you risked everything. In fact, your husband—would they attempt to deport him?

KATHARINE GUN: Well, it’s just serendipitous, fortuitous, whatever it is, but his asylum case was coming to an end at the same time that my case began. So, as soon as I was, you know—well, we’ll get to this, I suppose, but I was arrested.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have 30 seconds.

KATHARINE GUN: I was arrested. And the whole process, I think, was just a parallel process that didn’t have a—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what’s astounding is—

KATHARINE GUN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —GCHQ leads an investigation. They question you. But then you turn yourself in. And tell the final results of what happened. When you go to court, you face years in prison. And what happened?

KATHARINE GUN: Well, they dropped the charges against me.

AMY GOODMAN: But this was how long after you were picked up?

KATHARINE GUN: It was a full nine to 10 months after the event.

AMY GOODMAN: And the U.S. went to war—

KATHARINE GUN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —with Iraq.

KATHARINE GUN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a remarkable story. We’re going to do Part 2, and we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org, to talk about these—the courage Katharine Gun had in revealing this information, and then what this means for whistleblowers today and for U.S.-British policy today. That does it for our show. Katharine Gun, Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy and Gavin Hood. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

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Tulsi: A Living Reminder of Iraq’s Liars and Apologists

Gabbard calls out the betrayers; Dems try to forget their heroes Mueller and Biden are among them.

By DAVID MASCIOTRA • August 2, 2019

Estimates of the number of civilians who died during the war in Iraq range from 151,000 to 655,000. An additional 4,491 American military personnel perished in the war. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, toxicologist at the University of Michigan, has organized several research expeditions to Iraq to measure the contamination and pollution still poisoning the air and water supply from the tons of munitions dropped during the war. It does not require any expertise to assume what the studies confirm: disease is still widespread and birth defects are gruesomely common. Back home, it is difficult to measure just how many struggle with critical injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The gains of war in Iraq remain elusive, especially considering that the justifications for invasion—weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s connection to al-Qaeda, the ambition to create a Western-style democracy at gunpoint—remain “murky at best.” That’s a quote from the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion on the so-called evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden’s group, which actually did carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history.

As far as stupid and barbarous decisions are concerned, it is difficult to top the war in Iraq. It is also difficult to match its price tag, which, according to a recent Brown University study, amounts to $1.1 trillion.

Gore Vidal once christened his country the “United States of Amnesia,” explaining that Americans live in a perpetual state of a hangover: “Every morning we wake up having forgotten what happened the night before.”

The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans dread trying to sleep through the night, America’s political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans.

As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical assessment of Trump’s unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq.

Mueller testified to Congress that “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security.” He also warned that Saddam could “supply terrorists with radiological material” for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving aside any speculation about Mueller’s intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous, to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question.

Far worse than the worship of Mueller is the refusal to scrutinize the abysmal foreign policy record of Joe Biden, currently the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the Democrats in the Senate at that time, Biden was the most enthusiastic of the cheerleaders for war, waving his pompoms and cartwheeling in rhythm to Dick Cheney’s music. Biden said repeatedly that America had “no choice but to eliminate the threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his blustering was uniquely influential.

The former vice president now claims that his “only mistake was trusting the Bush administration,” implying he was tricked into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question—can’t we nominate someone who wasn’t tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden’s recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, as his campaign’s foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes?

Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism of Biden’s “inappropriate touching” has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The moral standards of America’s political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic war.

Polling well below Biden in the race is the congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard. She alone on the Democratic stage has made criticism of American militarism central to her candidacy. A veteran of the Iraq war and a highly decorated major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, Gabbard offers an intelligent and humane perspective on foreign affairs. She’s called the regime change philosophy “disastrous,” advocated for negotiation with hostile foreign powers, and backed a reduction in drone strikes. She pledges if she becomes president to end American involvement in Afghanistan.

When Chris Matthews asked Gabbard about Biden’s support for the Iraq war, she said, “It was the wrong vote. People like myself, who enlisted after 9/11 because of the terrorist attacks, were lied to. We were betrayed.”

Her moral clarity is rare in the political fog of the presidential circus. She cautions against accepting the “guise of humanitarian justification for war,” and notes that rarely does the American government bomb and invade a country to actually advance freedom or protect human rights.

Gabbard’s positions are vastly superior to that of the other young veteran in the race, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend recently told New York that one of his favorite novels is The Quiet American, saying that its author, Graham Greene, “points out the dangers of well-intentioned interventions.”

Buttigieg’s chances of winning the nomination seem low, and his prospects of becoming a literary critic appear even lower. The Quiet American does much more than raise questions about interventions: it is a merciless condemnation of American exceptionalism and its attendant indifference to Vietnamese suffering.

Americans hoping for peace won’t find much comfort in the current White House either. President Trump has made the world more dangerous by trashing the Iran nuclear deal, and his appointment of John Bolton, a man who makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Mahatma Gandhi, as national security advisor is certainly alarming.

America’s willful ignorance when it comes to the use of its own military exposes the moral bankruptcy at the heart of its political culture. Even worse, it makes future wars all but inevitable.

If no one can remember a war that ended merely nine years ago, and there’s little room for Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primary, how will the country react the next time a president, and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declare that they have no choice but to remove a threat?

Norman Solomon, journalist and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, knows the answer to that question. He provides it in the title of his book on how the media treats American foreign policy decisions: War Made Easy.

David Masciotra is the author of four books, including Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky) and Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishing).

 

 

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/tulsi-a-living-reminder...

 

 

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THE DECEPTION OF INTERNATIONAL PENAL JUSTICE

The ICC intends to violate the decision of the Security Council and try Bachar el-Assad

by Thierry Meyssan

Everyone believed it to be impossible for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to try the Syrians, since China and Russia exercised their vetos against a Western draft resolution to do so. But no! A piece of legal sleight of hand may make it possible to dodge the decision of the Security Council. The Court hopes to incriminate President Bachar el-Assad, not for the murder of Rafic Hariri (that lie fizzled out some time ago), but for « crimes against humanity ».

In 1998, the United Nations convened the Conference of Rome, which created the International Criminal Court (ICC). Of course, the aim was not to to create a super-Tribunal which would legislate, on behalf of the member-states, in the name of humanity, but to possess a tool capable of judging criminals at the end of a war, when the institutions of the vanquished are diminished or destroyed.

Thus the statutes of the Court emphasise that it may only accept a case with the agreement of the local Justice system. But these same statutes also state 

- that it may take on the case of a crime committed by a citizen of a non-member country, inside a member country, in place of the victim country; 

- as well as a crime committed by anyone, anywhere, as long as it is handled by the Security Council of the United Nations.

In both cases, the Rome Statute, developed within the UNO and signed by a few States, may apply to all States, even that of non-members.

This why the three greatest world States - China, the United States and Russia - refused to ratify it. They saw in it – quite rightly - a violation of the principle of sovereignty, formulated in the 18th century by the legal expert Emer de Vattel, and voted into action by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties [1].

Last September, the ICC declared admissible a complaint against the authorities of Myanmar, despite the fact that it is a non-member, because it was said to have committed atrocities which provoked the exodus of the Rohingyas. The Court considered itself competent because the victims fled to Bangladesh, which is a signatory of the Rome Statute [2].

On this model, a family of the Muslim Brotherhood recently filed a complaint against President Bachar el-Assad and the Syrian representatives, although the Syrian Arab Republic is not a member of the Court. The family claims to have witnessed various atrocities and was obliged to flee to Jordan. The Court would have to ignore the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is the heart of Islamist terrorism and that it is listed as a terrorist organisation in many countries. Logically, though, it could declare itself competent, since Jordan is a signatory of the Rome Statute.

However, on 22 May 2014, when the Western powers and their Gulf allies sought to engage the ICC via the Security Council in the context of the events in Syria, both China and Russia exercised their veto [3].

However, it makes no difference – the Court has acquired autonomy. It no longer pretends to help states render Justice, but has proclaimed itself the defender of humanity against states.

It is important to understand what is happening – over the last few years, the ICC has mainly been financed by the European Union, and has drawn up its own Code. Until 2016, it tried only African defendants under its own laws, and found them all guilty [4]. After a vote by its Parliament, Burundi then decided to withdraw from the Rome Statute, on the motive that the ICC had become « an instrument of pressure on the governments of poor countries, or a means of destabilising them according to the desires of the great powers ». Three other states then followed - Gambia, the Philippines and South Africa. However, South Africa and Gambia changed their minds after Gambian Fatou Bensouda was named as the new Prosecutor General for the Court.

Nonetheless, until the nomination of Madame Bensouda, the ICC offered none of the guarantees expected from an impartial legal system. Thus, during NATO’s attack on Libya in violation of the Security Council’s mandate, the « proof » tabled by the General Prosecutor, Argentinian Luis Moreno Ocampo, against Mouamar Kadhafi, his son Saïf el Islam and his brother-in-law Abdallah Al-Senoussi, was limited entirely to Press cuttings from the invading states. Worse – when NATO bombed Tripoli, the prosecutor declared that Saïf el-Islam Kadhafi had been arrested by the Western powers and that his bureau was organising his deferment to The Hague. By doing so, he was guilty of a bare-faced lie, and demoralised the Libyans to the point where they no longer resisted the aggression of NATO. In reality, Saïf el-Islam was safe and sound in the cellars of the Hotel Rixos, where I was myself.

The same Luis Moreno Ocampo raped a female journalist in his Court office, but escaped Justice only by his immunity as an international prosecutor [5]. Corrupt, he demanded secret payments for prosecuting individuals who were marked for elimination [6]. The Prosecutor’s secret bank accounts were later revealed by journalistic investigations in Panama and the Virgin Islands [7]. Luis Moreno Ocampo has never had to answer to these charges.

Certainly, his successor, Fatou Bensouda, is more presentable. But the structure has not changed. The magistrates of the Court are so aware of this that on 15 January 2019, they revolted and acquitted Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Ble Goude - two defendants whose alleged « crimes against humanity » had served to justify the « régime change » imposed by France in the Ivory Coast. It was the first time that the ICC abandoned the political role with which the Europeans had tasked them.

On 29 July 2015, the Western powers attempted to pass a resolution at the Security Council intended to divest the Ukrainian Justice of the destruction of flight MH17 and transfer the affair to the ICC. This was a strategy aimed at preparing the indictment of President Vladimir Putin, although Russia is not a signatory of the Rome Statute. The question here is not to determine who destroyed the plane, but to observe the political manipulation operated by the international penal Justice system. Russia exercised its veto against the Western resolution.

The Syrian President, Bachar el-Assad, will therefore probably be tried in absentia by the ICC. He will appear in abstensia with other Syrian representatives whose names have not yet been released. He is used to this. In 2005, he was accused of ordering the assassination of ex-Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, this time with the complicity of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. An international enquiry was led by a German/ Israeli team [8]. Then a pseudo-tribunal was created on the initiative of the US ambassador US to Beirut, Jeffrey Feltman. A treaty was signed by General Secretary of the UNO – with the approbation of the Security Council - and by the new Lebanese Prime Minister – without the authorisation of either the government or the Parliament.

At that time, the West had persuaded itself of the guilt of the accused. Alas! After a year of sensational accusations, Prosecutor Detlev Mehlis resigned in the midst of a shattering scandal – the witnesses on whom he relied were imposters paid by his friends. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon pursued its malicious work by accusing Hezbollah this time, although this organisation published recordings of an Israëli drone over the site of the assassination. The Tribunal persisted in pretending that Rafic Hariri had been killed by the explosion of a van, despite the fact that the forensic records were formal – this was impossible [9]. They spent millions of dollars reproducing the scene and attempting to validate their theory, but in vain. They are therefore working on a thesis that everyone knows is false.

The Syrian Arab Republic fought for eight years in order to preserve its sovereignty. It should therefore not allow its representatives to go to The Hague. But it can still contest the validity of the procedure.

It was initiated by the British lawyer for the plaintiffs, Rodney Dixon, known for also being the lawyer for Qatar against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He had a long experience of « international Justice » since he had been one of the councillors for Canadian Louise Arbour, the General Prosecutor for international Justice for ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda - two institutions which failed to find the truth about the crimes with which they were tasked.

Mr. Dixon had already declared that he intended to pursue the Syrian leaders for « crimes against humanity ». He based his case on the Caesar Report [10]; a document made public by Qatar, via the London cabinet Carter-Ruck, on 20 January 2014, two days before the peace negotiations of Geneva 2. The report was a collection of 55,000 photographs of torture victims taken by a photographer of the Syrian Arab Army. According to the accusation, they represented the victims of the « régime », while according to the Syrian government, they were on the contrary photos of the the victims of the jihadists. The report was authenticated against Syria by three international prosecutors with a shameful past, since they had worked at the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Penal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia.

- Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva is the author of a report ordered by the British Prime Minister concerning the death of an Irish lawyer, qualified as « shameful » by the victim’s family. He recognised the responsibility of the authorities, which no-one could hide any longer, but blurred the proof against the Crown. 

- Sir Geoffrey Nice made himself famous by pursuing Slobodan Milošević for two years, without ever managing to find the slightest proof of crimes against humanity. The trial ended with the death of the prisoner, who, according to Russia, was assassinated in prison. 

- David M. Crane is an ex-representative of the CIA and the DIA who, since the beginning of the war against Syria, has been running a programme designed to drag Bachar el-Assad in front of any special international court at all for any reason at all.

In September 2012, the US State Department, on an idea by ambassador Jeffrey Feltman who had become an assistant to the Secretary of State, created an association, the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), tasked with collecting proof of the crimes of the Syrian government. He financed it to the tune of 5 million dollars annually, the rest being at the charge of the « Friends of Syria », especially Morocco. Two years later, Washington ended their use of this tool. However, ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, who had since become the Director of Political Affairs for the UNO, relaunched the SJAC, this time with European funds.

There exists no control of the ICC, even when its general prosecutor is a corrupt criminal. The Court is reserved exclusively for the service of those who pay for it – the European Union.

In the past, war was considered as a means of conquest or defence. Today, on the contrary, we like to pretend that it is an illegal act in itself, even in legitimate defence. Thus, the party that decides on war must not declare it, but establish the proof a posteriori that by committing the crime of war, it is defending Good. Which the victor can always claim.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 

Pete Kimberley

Source 

Mint Press News (USA)

 

 

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https://www.voltairenet.org/article202014.html

 

 

Should the ICC go ahead with this venture, it should charge Bush, Blair and Howard, Cheney, Volfowitz, Rumsfeld and many other "criminals" FIRST. The Saudis are also in line WAY BEFORE ASSAD. Sarkozy and Obama are also way ahead...

 

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...

Biden’s address contained echoes of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in particular, Lincoln’s characterization of the motivation of those remarks: “With malice towards none, with charity for all.”

The Civil War ended 165 years ago but has never been laid to rest. Biden seems to recognize the dreadful extent to which Trump had revived, massaged and exploited its continuing fault lines and, the need for them, particularly systemic racism, to be defeated.

He has a massive job on his hands. Vice President Kamala Harris will help.

 

Richard Butler AC Former Ambassador to the United Nations, Executive Chairman of UN Special Commission to Disarm Iraq, Professor of International Affairs.

--------------------

 

Aussie Richard Butler either lied or was incompetent in regard to "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction". All in all all, he was part of the conspiracy to remove Saddam, through war. This war was a tragedy that killed a lot of innocent people (possibly more than one million plus 5500 US soldiers) and led to the USA indulge in torture... Even today, some prisoners are about to face a court of US "justice", more than 17 years after been kept in captivity at Guantanamo prison in isolation...

With malice towards none, with charity for all? We know that this is BULLSHIT as the Democrats, under Joe Biden, are going to persecute the supporters of Trump and Donald himself. Words are cheap.

 

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Next month marks eighteen years since the US-led offensive descended on the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, with Australia’s involvement continuing to serve as a reminder of how centralised our war powers are. Then Prime Minister John Howard and a select group of ministers made that fateful decision without a parliamentary vote. The war power as exercised by the prime minister in the National Security Committee of Cabinet imposes no accountability on governments or on individual MPs or Senators.

In her recent book entitled ‘The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia go to War’, co-author Judith Betts analyses and contrasts the lead up to the conflict and subsequent methods of inquiries in the two coalition nations. From her experience as an academic specialising in political communication at the University of Technology Sydney, Betts examines the role of the media, political parties and the reliance on respective relationships with the United States.

The findings from the in-depth research on how Australian troops were sent to fight in Iraq demonstrates significant relevance in the ongoing push for war powers reform, amid the war crimes allegations in Afghanistan, the recent heightening of tensions in the Middle East and an uncertain geopolitical future in the Asia-Pacific region.

I had the opportunity to ask Judith about her research, its application in the current political environment and the Australian Parliament’s prolonged unwillingness to decentralise war powers.

TM: What were the main motivations behind this book and your preceding PhD thesis on Australia’s role in the Iraq War?  

JB: When I was considering doing a PhD I was advised to consider a topic about which I was passionate: one that would keep me interested for the long grind.  The Iraq war fitted the bill and my thesis examined the role of Australia’s media in holding the Government to account over our involvement.

I think my motivation was to understand how John Howard got away relatively unscathed with taking Australia to its first war of aggression, especially given the failure to find WMD.

The book draws on my thesis but has a broader focus.  It is co-written with Mark Phythian, a British academic, and looks at governance issues in Australia and the UK in relation to both countries’ involvement in the war.  The book contrasts the ways in which Blair and Howard managed the US Alliance and their ‘special’ relationships with Bush; the degree to which each ‘sold’ the war; their distinctive leadership styles; and their relationships with their parties, Cabinets, Parliaments and media.  Finally, the book examines the post-war inquiries, the degree to which they held Blair and Howard to account, and the political price each leader paid.

TM: What have been your main discoveries since publishing the book last year?  

JB: Researching the book opened my eyes to differences in the ways the Australian and UK media covered the war.  Blair in the UK faced a much more exacting media than Howard in Australia, where there was only one major newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, that opposed the war. Both Howard and Blair were masters in managing the media, but in the end Blair paid the greater political price.

In the UK, there were five inquiries into their involvement in the war. The media and the public did not give up until they had the answers they wanted and were finally delivered in the Chilcot Inquiry report in 2016.

In Australia, there were two inquiries and the first, the Jull Committee (the Joint Parliamentary Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD) reached conclusions similar to those reached by the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK, 13 years later: namely that the government’s argument for war overstated or exaggerated the threat identified in intelligence reports.

Had it not been for Howard’s masterful management of the media (select sections of the report were leaked to the media two weeks prior to the release of the official report), the findings of the Jull Committee might have been deeply damaging.  For two weeks, media coverage was dominated by a narrative that the report had somehow exonerated the government.  When the report was released, it did no such thing, but few in the media had the time or inclination to take a fresh look at the document.

But it was not just a lack of curiosity on the part of the media that got Howard off the hook. Senior members of the Labor Party decided that they were never going to win in a battle with Howard over national security, in large part because Howard would turn any debate into a battle over the US Alliance, and Labor would emerge looking anti-American. So there was little political will to hold Howard to account.

TM: In your research, what accounted for the key differences between the evolution in war powers reform in the UK and Australia?   

JB: Blair found himself in different political circumstances to Howard. In the UK, the Labour Party was split on involvement in the Iraq conflict and Blair needed the legitimacy that a debate and decision in Parliament could afford. He had resignations from his cabinet on the issue. As a result, use of the Royal Prerogative to deploy armed forces overseas came to be replaced by the convention that the House of Commons be given the opportunity to debate any decision to go to war, the exception being in case of an emergency. The UK Parliament, for example, rejected Prime Minister David Cameron’s bid to send troops to Syria.

Australia’s Constitution vests the Queen’s Executive power to declare war in the Governor-General on the advice of the Federal Executive Council.  This means, effectively, that the decision resides with the Prime Minister and Cabinet.  Successive prime ministers on both sides of politics have resisted any change to that arrangement.

The Greens, and before them the Australian Democrats, sought on at least six occasions since 1985 to introduce a new s.29A of the Defence Act to require parliamentary approval for Australian troops to be sent overseas.  All attempts to require Parliamentary approval have failed because of a lack of support from the major political parties.

TM: In describing Prime Minister Howard’s political damage from the post-invasion inquiries, you argue this was minimised due to a “skilful agenda management and defensive spin”, supported partially by a “Murdoch-dominated media landscape”. If a similar situation unfolded today, is there a risk of history repeating itself?  

JB: I would hope that a current or future prime minister would have learned from the Iraq disaster, and would think very carefully before following our US allies into another war.  But there is a risk of history repeating itself.

The hollowing out of the media and the lack of transparency in government decision-making has made it harder for investigative journalists to shine a light on government decisions.  And the Australian media remain dominated by News Corp and Murdoch’s agenda.

As has always been the case, politics is a game of agenda management and spin, with the strongest performer, rather than the best ideas, winning out.  And who knows if, after years of politicization, our public service chiefs have the courage to provide frank and fearless advice.

There are no new or additional means of holding the government to account.  Howard showed how defensive spin could be used to change the narrative and effectively manipulate the debate when a parliamentary inquiry came up with findings that were potentially damaging.  Not all, but some in the media allowed themselves to be manipulated.

So, yes, there is a danger of history repeating itself.

 

TM: Could you envision a scenario where legislative reform is not required for a change in Australia’s long standing convention of not requiring parliamentary approval?  

JB: I am not a Constitutional expert, but I don’t believe that there is any legal impediment to an Australian Prime Minister putting a decision to go to war to the Parliament.  It would create a precedent and could become a convention in the same way it has in the UK, when Blair put the Iraq decision to the Parliament.  Were a convention to be established, it might prove difficult, politically, to ignore in any future conflict.  But this route would involve an Australian Prime Minister voluntarily giving up power and neither side of politics has expressed interest in going down this path.

The Australian Democrats and the Greens have sought to reform war powers through legislative change.  They have proposed changes to the Defence Act to require Parliamentary approval before Australian troops are deployed overseas.  Every attempt has been stymied by the lack of political will on the part of the major parties.

TM: The book concludes by raising the possibility that the fallout from the failures in Iraq may “be seen as significant but not transformative”. In your view, what barriers are present in today’s political climate for substantial reform?  

JB: I cannot see the political will on the part of the major parties for war powers reform.  The Greens have long agitated for reform, as has Andrew Wilkie, but neither Labor nor the Liberals have shown any inclination.  The main political parties clearly do not see it as an issue that would influence anyone’s vote. Despite strong public support for a parliamentary say in the deployment of troops, mobilising the public remains a challenge, especially while there is no specific conflict on the horizon.  Should the possibility of future conflict arise, for example with China over Taiwan, then that would be the time to pull out all stops and mount a public campaign.

In the meantime, it is worth identifying and working with potential strategic partners and planning the messaging and campaign that would swing into action.  It is also worth thinking outside the square when it comes to potential advocates.  For example, how do members of the military or their families feel about the issue? Are there groups, like GetUp! or Avaaz, that might be potential allies in a campaign?

TM: How do these factors differ from the hurdles faced by the Australian Democrats or the Greens in their original/earlier attempts at reform?  

JB: While the Iraq war is a strong example of the need for robust decision-making when it comes to war, I think the hurdles to reform are the same as those faced by the Democrats and the Greens.  It boils down to a lack of political will.  Only a surge in public support for a parliamentary role in a war decision could change their minds.

TM: Do you believe these will be influenced at all by the recent Roy Morgan opinion poll showing overwhelming public support for parliament voting on military deployments?    

JB: It always helps to remind politicians when there is strong public support for a particular policy initiative.  But strong public support does not always translate into policy change.  With issues like marriage equality and climate change, for example, we see that public opinion can be way ahead of our politicians.  The parties need to be convinced that if they take a stand on an issue, it will translate into votes at the ballot box. We live in hope that they will eventually catch up.

The Roy Morgan opinion poll cited in the interview indicated that an overwhelming majority of Australians (83%) favour policy change that would require parliamentary approval of military involvement overseas. The increase in support since 2014 represents a unified position from voters of the major political parties and represents a clear discrepancy with politicians’ views.

This crucial decision-making power controlled by the Prime Minister is likely to have an increasing consequence on the domestic political landscape and how Australians view potential military interventions moving forward. A continuing reliance on our military relationship with the US may see this power placed under substantial pressure.  Questions remain over how the incoming Biden administration handles matters such as the future of the Iran nuclear agreement, China’s growing power in the world and the governance of Taiwan.

Late last year, a private Member’s bill introduced by the Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John placed the issue of parliamentary war powers reform back on the agenda in Canberra. It won’t be long until we see if history repeats itself yet again or if the will of the public is respected and proper debate ensues.

The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia go to War is published by Palgrave.

 

 

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On the 18th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq

 

 

by Chris Floyd

 

For months before the Iraq War began, I and many others wrote, in print and on-line, about the outrageous lies that were being told by the US government and its media sycophants to bring about this mass-murdering act of aggression. How did we know they were lies? Not from any secret knowledge or insider info, but simply by reading the mainstream media stories of previous years, especially the ones from the mid-1990s that detailed how Saddam's regime had destroyed its WMD program, and how the US and UK governments always had the evidence for this, and knew there were no Iraqi WMDs throughout the propaganda build-up to the war.

We also read the current news of that time, which detailed how Iraq had completely opened itself to the UN inspectors that the US/UK demanded in early 2003, how these inspections were going forward and finding nothing (or rather, confirming what had been reported and what US/UK leaders had known since the mid-1990s.) And we read how the UN inspectors were ordered by the US and UK to leave Iraq in March 2003 -- before they had completed their UN-mandated inspection -- because Bush/Cheney and the Pentagon had already decided the attack must begin in mid-March.

None of this was secret. All you had to do was read the mainstream stories all the way through. (And ignore cable and network TV news, which essentially did nothing but regurgitate a few seconds of Pentagon and White House talking points each night about the "imminent danger" of the non-existent WMDs.)

But the war came. Thousands upon thousands of innocent people -- whose lives were worth just as much as those of anyone reading these words right now -- were murdered, slaughtered, destroyed. Millions of lives were ruined. Many, many thousands were tortured. Whole nations were destabilized. The American occupiers recruited, armed and paid local militias of extremists to help them brutally repress the victims of the invasion. Many others were radicalized by their torture in US and UK prisons. The US invasion directly gave rise to ISIS and a whole decade of unimaginable horror and conflict across the region.

Again, all of this was based on demonstrable lies, which many of us called out at the time as lies, using freely available, perfectly "respectable" press reports as the foundation of our opposition to this war crime. Every single person in power who supported the war in Iraq at that time knew everything we ordinary citizens knew at that time. Every US senator blustering for war knew of the long-standing evidence that Iraq had destroyed its WMD program in the early 1990s and had never re-started it. (They also knew that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had been instrumental in Iraq's earlier WMD program, and had assisted Saddam in conducting WMD attacks in his war against Iran and the Kurds.) If any person in power at that time tells you they didn't know all this -- that they didn't know what ordinary citizens could read in the papers -- then they are lying through their teeth.

So what happened to the perpetrators of this monstrous, murderous atrocity? Nothing. What happened to those in power, both in politics and media, who supported this mass murder? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What would you do if the most beloved person in your life was viciously, brutally murdered – and nothing was done, if the murderer went free, went on to live in wealth and comfort and privilege and power? How would you feel? Imagine that for a moment – then extrapolate it by tens of thousands. THAT is what those in positions of power in 2003 did with their instigation or support of a war based on lies which they KNEW at the time were lies, just as all of us who read ordinary press reports knew they were lies. They helped murder someone just like the most beloved person in your life.

Look, I recognize the realities of life. I know we live in a fallen world. I know that we are often faced with choosing what we hope will be the lesser of the evils that confront us. I don’t demand perfect moral purity in the reeking, blood-choked cesspool of our power systems. But I cannot and I will not forget what these people have done, what they have countenanced, what they have championed. I will not ever in my heart absolve them of their evil. And even if I am forced by the corrupted currents of this world to choose any of them over some even greater evil, I will never stop seeing the blood dripping from their hands. I will never stop despising them with every fiber of my being.

 

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