The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions... It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible...
Hindsight is a great temptress. But we needn’t trouble her on the way to a confident conclusion that Mr Blair’s fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power. Perhaps this seems odd in a man who drank so much of that mind-altering brew at home. But Washington turned his head and he couldn’t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him. In this sense he was weak and, as we can see, he remains so. Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgment: it is certainly no answer to death. “Yo, Blair”, perhaps, was his truest measure.
These are not my words. Nor are they the words of veteran warriors of truth and justice such as John Pilger or Robert Fisk. They are the words of – hold your breath – none other than Ken Macdonald QC, Britain's director of public prosecutions from 2003 to 2008.
Alas, there are men of courage and integrity among the native Britons. I implore you to read the full article from which the quotes above are taken.
Is this an aberration or a sign that perfidious Albion is at last embarking on the long journey towards becoming straight and honest? I am not optimistic but to read words such as Mr Macdonald's – the "Establishment's" very own – is heartening, if only for a few seconds.
It would have been right to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein even without evidence he had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Tony Blair has said.
The former prime minister said it was the "notion" of Saddam as a threat to the region which tilted him in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
via news.bbc.co.uk
Who the hell is Blair – or Britain for that matter – to think they have a right to remove any regime, no matter how bad that regime might be?
I don't like the UK government or the thoroughly rotten British "Establishment" but does that give me the right to blast Whitehall out of existence or stalk and blow Blair's brain out (assuming he has a brain)? Surely, getting rid of Saddam Hussein is a matter for the Iraqi people.
The clue to Blair's real thinking is his saying that it was the "notion" of Saddam as a threat to the region which tilted him in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. For "threat to the region" read "potential threat to Israel". That's what Blair – and every senior British politician – all care about.
Britain is the enemy of all Arabs. Make no mistake about it.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says Washington does not know where the al-Qaeda leader is hiding, implying that the Afghan mission has been an abortive attempt.
"Well, we don't know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is. If we did, we'd go get him," Gates said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday.
via www.presstv.ir
The alleged search for bin Laden has become akin to the search by some sad folk in the USA for Elvis. Created by the Americans and their British underlings, bin Laden has filled in the vacuum left by the Cold War. Without him and his Al-Qaeda, NATO, the CIA and their like would have had a job justifying their existence in their present form.
I suspect that bin Laden will never be found – assuming he is still alive, which is by no means certain. And the search for him will continue until the US and its satellites find another bogeyman.
For OpEdNews: Paul Craig Roberts - Writer
It didn't take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel's.
Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so. The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can't do anything about it.
President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.
Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.
via www.opednews.com
This is what I thought all along. But there's also the big question of whether Barack Obama ever intended to do anything other than what the Israel lobby wanted anyway. After all, while still campaigning did he not repeatedly pledge his allegiance to the racist state of Israel and did he not maintain strict silence while Israel massacred Gaza's civilians last winter?
Obama's – and every US president's – contempt for Arabs and dismissal of their rights will remain just as it is right now until they follow Iran's example, ignore the US and its toadies in the UK and Europe and try to acquire a nuclear weapons capability – and I sincerely hope that the Iranians want nuclear weapons.
The Jewish Chronicle, the mouthpiece of Britain's Jews and a supporter of the State of Israel, seems to have become unhinged by an article published by Gilad Atzmon in which he viewed how Israel propagandist David Aaronovitch is whipping up British public opinion against Iran in a manner that is reminiscent of his role in advocating war on Iraq.
Isn't it just amazing! The UK mouthpiece of "the only democracy in the Middle East" is finding free speech just a little bit too much to bear, especially when free speech gets too close to the truth.
Well, not to worry, sons and daughters of Zion. With so many British MPs in your pockets maybe soon you'll be able to legislate so that it becomes a criminal offence to criticize Israel or its propagandists.
THE man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was implicated in the purchase and development of chemical weapons by Libya, according to documents produced by the American government.
The papers also claim that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi sought to buy 1,000 letter bombs from Greek arms dealers while working as a Libyan intelligence officer.
The documents, prepared by the US State Department, raise further questions about the wisdom of the Scottish government in releasing the convicted bomber on compassionate grounds in August.
Oh dear me! Back in the days of the Cold War, we used to contrast the subtlety of Western propaganda with the crude propaganda of the Soviet Union but it seems that nearly two decades as the world's only superpower has taken its toll on the Americans. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
What a pathetic exercise by the Americans! No doubt soon it will be parroted by their obedient poodles in Westminster, the BBC and the rest.
Shame on the lot of them!
Iran's government has ordered its atomic energy organisation to build 10 new uranium enrichment plants, state media has reported.
And why the hell not? Here's a reminder of why Iran should indeed do whatever it wants in the nuclear sphere, courtesy of the website What Really Happened:
The corporate media have been given their orders to throw the focus back on to Iran.
Here is a recap of what they are trying to make you forget.
1. Last Spring, Rose Gottemoeller, an assistant secretary of state and Washington's chief nuclear arms negotiator, asked Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel refused.
2. The United Nations passed a resolution calling on Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to submit to inspections. Israel refused.
3. The IAEA asked Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to submit to inspections. Israel refused.
4. Iran's formal notification to the IAEA of the planned construction of the backup fuel-rod facility underscores that Iran is playing by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which Iran has signed.
5. Iran allows IAEA inspections of all its facilities.
6. Contrary to face-saving claims, it appears that the US and Israel were both caught off guard by Iran's announcement. The reasoning is simple. Had the US or Israel announced the existence of he new facility before Iran's notified the IAEA, it would have put Iran on the defensive. As it is now, the US and Israel seem to be playing catch up, casting doubt on the veracity of Israel's claims to "know" that Iran is a nuclear threat.
7. The IAEA and all 16 United States Intelligence Agencies are unanimous in agreement that Iran is not building and does not possess nuclear weapons.
8. In 1986, Mordachai Vanunu blew the whistle and provided photographs showing Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons factory underneath the reactor at Dimona.
9. Israel made the same accusations against Iraq that it is making against Iran, leading up to Israel's bombing of the power station at Osirik. Following the invasion of 2003, international experts examined the ruins of the power station at Osirik and found no evidence of a clandestine weapons factory in the rubble.
10. The United Nations has just released the Goldstone Report, a scathing report which accuses Israel of 37 specific war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza earlier this year. Israel has denounced the report as "Anti-Semitic (even though Judge Goldstone is himself Jewish), and the United States will block the report from being referred to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, thereby making the US Government an accessory after-the-fact.
We all need to be Joe Wilson right now. We need to stand up and scream, "LIAR!" at every politician and every talking media moron that is pushing this war in Iran. And we need to keep dong it until they get the message that we will not be deceived any more.
Israel wants to send your kids off to die in Iran, and YOU are the only one that can stop them.
Voters in Switzerland have approved a ban on the construction of minarets on mosques, official results show.
I agree that this is discriminatory and likely to fuel Islamophobia in Switzerland, but I cannot help feeling that this is an own goal by Muslims.
I don't know what the different parts of the Muslim community in Switzerland have been saying and how they have been behaving but if they are anything like Britain's Muslim community then the conclusion must be that they have brought this onto themselves.
In Britain, most Muslims keep to themselves – many are integrated into British society and many others are not and live in semi-ghettoes in places like Leicester, Bradford and parts of Birmingham and East London. On the whole, they are apolitical, just like the native Britons.
However, a very small minority of Muslims – small but vociferous – now and again utter nonsense, like wanting Sharia law in the country. They already have a kind of Sharia if they want to use it, in the form of Sharia courts with powers to rule on Muslim civil cases. These idiots are not content with these courts – they want them for everybody, Muslims and non-Muslims, even though the vast majority of the country is nominally Christian.
Now, I don't know anything about the politics of the Muslim community in Switzerland but if the Swiss have their own equivalent of those in Britain who advocate Sharia, then I can understand – not agree with, but understand – why 57 per cent of the Swiss voted in favour of a ban on the construction of minarets on mosques, which they see as a symbol of the perceived threat of Sharia.
I was born a Muslim and I am no Islamophobe. But most enlightened Muslims will probably agree with me that Sharia is a bad thing and, whether in the Muslim world, the West or elsewhere, we should all work together to exorcise it from our societies. Sharia was good and progressive 1,500 years ago. But it is the law of one-and-a-half millennium ago, not of the 21st century.
One last word about the hypocrisy and double standards of the British media when it comes to Sharia. The largely racially-prejudiced and Judaeo-centric British media can prattle on endlessly about the "threat" of Sharia in Britain but who is talking about the Jewish Beth Din, the rabbinical courts set up by a UK statute more than 100 years ago and still recognized within the legal system? Anyone who knows anything about the Torah will tell you stories that will make you cringe with horror. But who would dare say anything when most British politicians and media are in the pockets of the Jewish lobby!
This has been a month of shame for Arabs and Britons alike.
For the Arabs, a sign of how low they and their governments have sunk has been the violence between Algerians and Egyptians over their FIFA World Cup qualifying matches in Cairo and the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. (See "Egypt and Algeria: much more than a football match".)
Weeks of mutual recriminations between the two countries' football supporters prior to the matches descended into mindless acts of hoologanism, of the type that Britons are only too familiar, and then, most sickening of all, into a political row between two bankrupt regimes yearning for "legitimacy" by capitalizing on the sentiments of the low-life among their peoples. (See, for example, "Egypt-Algeria World Cup violence used to rally support for Mubarak regime" and "The political fallout of Egypt's soccer war".) Although there have been some voices of sanity ("Open letter from Egyptians and Algerians on football row"), there is still no sign that either regime is ready to forego milking this shameful and pathetic episode in the history of Egypt and Algeria for whatever cheap "popularity" they might get.
Meanwhile, Britain has also had its fair – and well-deserved – share of national shame. On 16 November Channel 4 TV's Dispatches programme ventured into where no other British mainstream media had ever dared with an expose of Britain's Israel lobby. The Dispatches episode, "Inside Britain's Israel lobby", revealed to Britons and the world at large what campaigners for justice for the Palestinians have known all along: that British politicians – left, right and centre – are not only stooges of the racist state of Israel, but are actually in the pay of Israel lobbyists! (For the details of what was revealed, click here.) In fact, the programme showed that almost anyone who is anyone in the Conservative and Labour parties is in Israel's pockets. Surely, by any standard, in any lexicon, this is high treason pure and simple.
One would expect that in a democratic society such shocking revelations would generate widespread public debate and lead to questions as to why the elected politicians of "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" have been bought – literally bought – by what a French ambassador to London once rightly described as "a shitty little country". But, alas, no. Having been exposed, Britain's Israel lobby has opted for a strategy of silence, in the hope that everyone will forget all about it and the issue would just go away.
Reading through some of the comments on the Dispatches website left by members of the public, I was struck by this remark: "It [the Dispatches programme] won’t change anything. Most of the British public are too stupid to realize how important this programme is."
Indeed.
So much hullabaloo and so much hypocrisy.
The BBC has invited Nick Griffin, the leader of the racist British National Party (BNP), to its "Question Time" programme, where members of the audience question a panel of politicians and other public figures on topical issues.
Ever since Mr Griffin's invitation became public, a variety of voices have been getting themselves in a muddle over the wisdom of the invitation. Some feared that the appearance of the leader of this racist party would give him respectability and his vile party publicity, while others argued in favour of the sanctity of free speech.
In the end, Mr Griffin appeared on the programme, despite noisy and mildly violent protests outside TV Centre, BBC Television's headquarters. It was an anti-climax, big time. And this is not just because of Mr Griffin's uncharismatic, lacklustre and somewhat unintelligent performance.
First, Mr Griffin, his repulsive political views aside, was never given a chance explain what he believed in and did not believe in. The audience was handpicked and hostile, and the other members of the panel were markedly reluctant to debunk his "arguments" in a logical and rational manner, opting instead to hound him.
But for me what was far worse was the sheer hypocrisy of the other politicians on the panel. One, the Conservative Dame Sayeeda Warsi, hailed from a party 80 per cent of whose MPs are affiliated to Conservative Friends of Israel, yes, Israel, the country whose racism is far more profound and deadlier than anything to do with the BNP. The other, Jack Straw, is not only a Judaeo-centric Labour apologist of the racist state of Israel, but is also an accessory to war crimes, having been Britain's foreign secretary at the time of the aggression against Iraq.
So, two friends of the world's most racist state ranged against the leader of a non-entity. And they dare talk about the respectability that Mr Griffin might acquire by sitting on the same panel as these two scoundrels.