In an interesting week for sleazy political happenings, the liar & war criminal Tony Blair reappeared infront of the Chilcot cover up harbouring “regrets” while the tory phone hacker Andy Coulson finally got his marching orders.
Although sorry seems to be the hardest word to say for Bliar, he took centre stage to make grandstanding remarks to “stand as firm against Iran as he did with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail focuses on the “fury of families” saying tearful relatives at the inquiry shouted it is too late while others left in disgust.
The Tory spin doctor Andy Coulson was finally kicked out for his involvement in phone hacking whilst editor of Murdochs News of the world rag. A lot of the press took a strange approach on the story, how Coulson was not one born of privilege (like the rest of the silver spooned Tory haw haws) and his everyday man approach of not being in Cameron’s “Notting Hill Set” will be missed.
The Akh saw the game & had to give props to referee’s assistant for getting the crucial offside call right in the build-up to Liverpool’s opening goal.
In terms of textbook male “banter”, having a moan about women not knowing the offside rule is up there with discussing what you drive in between awkward silences at a wonderful weekend soiree that the bloody wife’s dragged you along to.
So take a bow Keys and Gray, who no doubt went on to complain about shoe shopping and being forced to watch Dancing On Ice despite the fact that they’re real men who would much rather watch Top Gear.
You would have thought that with several homes, highly-paid careers as war profiteers with a multi-million-pound fortune, the Blair’s don’t need the cash, but Cherie has been hawking her husband’s autograph on fleabay.
More cringe worthy behaviour from the Blairs, who have shamelessly cashed in on warlord Tony’s prominence as Prime Minister.
Earlier this month a Freedom of Information request revealed that Mr Blair had chosen to take a number of items, given to him by world leaders and celebrities, with him when he left Number 10. The presents included nine watches from Silvio Berlusconi and a guitar signed by U2 frontman Bono.
No mention was made of the gifts sent by Rupert Murdoch or the American administration of George W Bush.
The only thing The Akh wants to see his autograph on is a confession statement to the international criminal courts in The Hague for the war crimes he committed during his tenure.
It’s easy to confuse the UK with the “Third World”, after all they were landing in Glasgow. A more miserable airport stuffed with staff that can’t speak properly, bungling baggage handlers that will lose your gear, perhaps the cardinal was being kind in his words, oh and that’s before I even speak about the city of Glasgow itself.
The Akh suggests that Bliar should get down on his knees, confess all and ask for forgiveness. Could you find two more unpopular people in the same room together, hell, just go get Gary Glitter and you have the perfect triumvirate.
World renowned war criminal Tony Bliar has shat himself and has run off scared to whatever little money making venture he has lined up next by cancelling his “how I killed a million Iraqi’s & still don’t regret it” autobiography book signing in London.
Did you notice how he mentioned the BNP & the idiotic media swallowed it hook line and sinker.
Yeah, real famous anti-war campaigners the BNP are.
Perhaps he was petrified that a protester would breach police lines and perform a citizens arrest on him – what a turn up that would be for the British legal system!
More than one million dead people on his conscience and he’s still acting like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
War criminal Tony Blair was pelted with eggs and shoes at a book signing appearance in Dublin.
Protesters shouted “Whose cops? Blair’s cops!” as they taunted the gardai while Blair remained inside the bookshop. They also shouted: “Hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?”
The Akh feels that a war criminal like Bliar should not be allowed to make a profit off the deaths of over a million Iraqi citizens, whilst getting paid silly money from uber zionist rupert murdoch whose company Random House (imprint of Hutchinson in the UK), who is pimping his story to the world.
I couldn’t help but comment on Tony Blair’s new book, A Journey, extracts of which have been published online here.
But for me, it’s the extracts from the Iraq chapter that caught my sleepy eyes (and not just became A Journey is being published on the day after the last US combat troops left that war-torn country). TB continues to distort, evade, pretend and mislead on the issue of Iraq. He is the ultimate Bliar — and so I couldn’t help but fisk the available extracts from his Iraq chapter.
“I can say that never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded, and that too is part of the responsibility”
Never did you guess?
But why did you have to “guess”?
Six of the country’s top academic experts on Iraq and international security warned TB, in a face-to-face meeting in November 2002, that the consequences of an invasion could be catastrophic. Cambridge University’s George Joffe, one of the six invited to Downing Street, got the impression of “someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people, no interest in social forces, political trends, etc”. Meanwhile, the Joint Intelligence Committee warned TB in February 2003 that the threat from Al Qaeda “would be heightened by military action against Iraq”.
“Why should Saddam keep the inspectors out for so long when he had nothing to hide?”
TB knows perfectly well that Saddam did not “keep the inspectors out”, and nor did he expel them, as TB claimed in the run-up to war in early 2003. The truth is that the UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 on the orders of the chief weapons inspector, Richard Butler, in anticipation of the US/UK air attack on Baghdad. Jane Arraf’s CNN report, filed on December 16, 1998, said: “This is the second time in a month that UNSCOM has pulled out in the face of a possible US-led attack. But this time there may be no turning back. Weapons inspectors packed up their personal belongings and loaded up equipment at UN headquarters after a pre-dawn evacuation order. In a matter of hours, they were gone, more than 120 of them headed for a flight to Bahrain.” “Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad,” said the Washington Post on December 18, 1998. While it is true that relations between the Saddam regime and the UN weapons inspectors had already broken down, TB glosses over the fact that the inspection teams had been infiltrated by US and UK intelligence agencies and, in the words of the former inspector and hawk-turned-dove Scott Ritter, “Inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis.”
“Even when he let them in, why did he obstruct them?”
Obstruct them?
That wasn’t the view of Hans Blix, the top UN weapons inspector in Iraq, or Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA. Verifying Iraqi disarmament, said Blix on 7 March 2003, “will not take years, nor weeks, but months.” ElBaradei offered a less specific forecast but nonetheless pointed out that “the recently increased level of Iraqi cooperation should enable us in the near future to provide the Security Council with an objective and thorough assessment of Iraq nuclear-related capabilities.”
“Why bring war upon his country to protect a myth?”
Saddam did not “bring war upon his country” — the US and the UK invaded Iraq, in defiance of international law. And the Iraqi dictator, as we now know, made several desperate, last-ditch attempts to avoid war, including the use of back-channel approaches to (of all people!) Richard Perle.
“The caveats entered by Dr Kay were largely overlooked, including his assertion that Saddam was possibly a greater threat than we had known, a remark seen at the time as inexplicable, given the primary finding.”
Dr David Kay? TB looks for support from a man who, as the Guardian’s Julian Borger once pointed out, was far from impartial: “Before the war, Kay was one of the most fervent supporters of military action.”
“The second report from Charles Duelfer was not published until September 2004. It received far less attention, yet this was the complete analysis”
Yes, and the complete analysis from Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group concluded that, at most, Saddam’s Iraq had been engaged in “WMD-related programme activities”. Get that, Tone? Not WMDs. Not even WMD programmes. But “WMD-related programme activities”, whatever they happen to be. I wonder: can a WMD-related programme activity be activated within 45 minutes of an order to do so?
“The constraint became even tougher when revelations from Saddam’s son-in-law about his continuing interest in development of WMD were broadcast to the world in 1996.”
TB, like George Bush, trumpeted the alleged “revelations” from Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, in the run-up to war as well (for example, in a speech to the Commons in February 2003). But TB conveniently omits to mention here what Kamal told UN weapons inspectors in 1995, while being debriefed in Jordan (and first reported in Newsweek on 24 February 2003, three weeks before the invasion): “All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons – biological, chemical, missiles, nuclear were destroyed.”
“This conclusion on nuclear weapons was actually endorsed by the Butler Report of July 2004, though that was written prior to the full ISG Report of September 2004. The Butler Report concluded…”
TB chooses to selectively quote the Butler Report. Surprise, surprise! No mention from our former PM of the Butler Report’s conclusions that “more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear”, and that judgements had stretched available intelligence “to the outer limits”. No mention of the view expressed by Lord Butler himself, in the House of Lords, in February 2007, that TB was, at the very minimum, “disingenuous” about the Iraqi “threat”.
“As Saddam came to power in 1979, Iraq was richer than either Portugal or Malaysia. By 2003, 60 per cent of the population was dependent on food aid.”
No mention here of the sanctions on Iraq, imposed by the United Nations, and enforced by the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sanctions caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, and were described by the former UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, Dennis Halliday, as a form of “genocide”. As even the Humanitarian Panel of the Security Council noted in March 1999: “Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of the war”.
“Millions were malnourished, and millions were in exile.”
How is that different to the situation produced by TB and GWB? The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq produced, at the height of the conflict, the Middle East’s largest refugee crisis since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948. Inside Iraq itself, according to the UN, more than 1.5 million people remain displaced.
“One statistic above all tells us what Saddam’s Iraq was like. According to the UN, by 2002 the number of deaths of children under the age of five was 130 per 1,000, a figure worse than that for the Congo.”
Again, no mention of the impact of UN sanctions.
“Before anyone says ‘Ah, but it was sanctions’, it should be remembered that Saddam was free to buy as much food and medicine as he wanted”
This is untrue. As Professor Karol Sikora, then the chief of the cancer programme of the World Health Organisation, wrote in the British Medical Journal: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee]. There seems to be a rather ludicrous notion that such agents could be converted into chemical or other weapons.” Professor Sikora added: “The saddest thing I saw in Iraq was children dying because there was no chemotherapy and no pain control. It seemed crazy they couldn’t have morphine, because for everybody with cancer pain, it is the best drug. When I was there, they had a little bottle of htmlirin pills to go round 200 patients in pain.” As Benon Sevan, the executive director of the UN Office of the Iraq Programme, said in 2001: “The improvement of the nutritional and health status of the Iraqi people . . . is being seriously affected as a result of [the] excessive number of holds placed on supplies and equipment for water, sanitation and electricity.”
“In the Kurdish area, despite Saddam and despite sanctions covering them too, the death rate for children was half that of central and southern Iraq.”
Apples and oranges, Tony, apples and oranges. As a Unicef document in August 1999 on the differences in the levels of child mortality between the autonomous northern governorates in the Kurdish areas and the rest of Iraq pointed out: “… the difference in the current rate cannot be attributed to the differing ways the Oil-for-Food Program is implemented in the two parts of Iraq… We need to look at longer-term trends and factors including the fact that since 1991 the north has received far more support per capita from the international community than the south and center of Iraq. Another factor maybe that the sanctions themselves have not been able to be so rigorously enforced in the north as the border is more “porous” than in the south and center of Iraq.” And as Hans Von Sponeck, the former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, pointed out in 2001: “The northern part of Iraq, where the Kurds live, is getting a disproportionate amount of oil revenue for the humanitarian program. Thirteen percent of the population living in that area is getting 20 percent of the oil revenues.”
“The origins of this figure lie in the Lancet report published in October 2004 which purported to be a scientific analysis of deaths in Iraq. The figure they gave – 600,000 – led the news and became dominant, repeated as fact.”
“Purported to be”?
What does that mean?
That the Lancet authors were pretending to offer “scientific analysis”? Sorry, are we now supposed to take the word of our former prime minister, a law graduate from Oxford, over the word of a peer-reviewed study produced by world-renowned epidemiologists and published in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal?
“Later the methodology on which this report was based was extensively challenged; its figures charged with being inaccurate and misleading; and the assessment made comprehensively questioned by other publications.”
Eh? Did John Rentoul ghost-write this portion of the chapter? “Extensively challenged”? Here’s Lila Giterman writing on the first Lancet report in the Columbia Journalism Review: “I called about ten biostatisticians and mortality experts. Not one of them took issue with the study’s methods or its conclusions. If anything, the scientists told me, the authors had been cautious in their estimates.” Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method “tried and true,” and added that “this is the best estimate of mortality we have.” In a letter to The Age, 27 epidemiologists and health professionals defended the methods of the study, writing that the study’s “methodology is sound and its conclusions should be taken seriously.” But, best of all, the chief scientific adviser to TB’s own Ministry of Defence said the survey’s methods were “close to best practice” and the study design was “robust”. Did Number 10 not get his memo?
“Friends opposed to the war think I’m being obstinate; others, less friendly, think I’m delusional.”
No, I just think you’re being dishonest, Tony. Seven years on from Iraq, nothing has changed.
The former head of Mi5 stated that Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the UK, but since Britain joined America’s war for regime change in Baghdad, the knock on effect of the “terror threat” to our shores has increased significantly.
Manningham-Buller undermined the case for the illegal war presented by the former prime minister Tony Blair, she was asked whether it was feared Saddam could have linked terrorists to weapons of mass destruction, facilitating their use against the west.
“It certainly wasn’t of concern in either the short term or the medium term to me or my colleagues,”
she replied.
Asked by Sir John Chilcot if she had any general reflections, she replied:
“The main one would be the danger of going to war on fragmentary intelligence.”
This was a war for regime change and to have hegemony over a large, proven energy resource.
It was illegal from day one and has cost the lives of over a million Iraqi civilians, seven million people have left the country, while a further seven million are internally displaced refugees.
The cradle of civilisation is rocked by a intercine theocratic civil war, in which the American occupiers play one side off against the other.
Birth defects are running off the charts thanks to uranium tipped ordnance used by the occupying forces.
The infrastructure of the country is ruined, there is intermittent water and electricity supplies, yet the biggest construction project in the world – America’s green zone has the best amenities available in the world.
Ask them if the price was worth it and they’ll say yes everytime.
This isn’t just a war on Iraqis or Afghanis or even Arabs or Muslims. It is ultimately a war on us all.
Back in October 2009, I pointed out how Rupert Murdoch and his News International media empire were switching their alliance from the Labour Party to the Conservatives.
David Yelland was Murdoch’s editor at The Sun The Scum between 1998 & 2003. In a recent article in the Guardian, Yelland described the threat posed to his former bosses at News International by the Lib Dem “surge” whilst taking shots at the media’s Tory bias propaganda.
Yelland went on to state:
“Make no mistake, if the Liberal Democrats actually won the election – or held the balance of power – it would be the first time in decades that Murdoch was locked out of British politics.
In so many ways, a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote against Murdoch and the media elite.
I can say this with some authority because in my five years editing the Sun I did not once meet a Lib Dem leader, even though I met Tony Blair, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith on countless occasions. (Full disclosure: I have since met Nick Clegg.)”
The “King-Maker” role of the Pro Zionist Murdoch-owned media should be apparent to everyone, it is one that has supported the Labour-Tory nexus in recent decades.
Murdoch’s continuous switch hitting from Conservative to Labour back to Conservative, reflects the corrosive power that lends itself to British journalism.
Yelland continued:
“Over the years the relationships between the media elite and the two main political parties have become closer and closer to the point where, now, one is indistinguishable from the other. Indeed, it is difficult not to think that the lunatics have stopped writing about the asylum and have actually taken it over.
We now live in an era when very serious men and women stay out of politics because our national discourse is conducted by populists with no interest in politics whatsoever. What we have in the UK is a coming together of the political elite and the media in a way that makes people outside London or outside those elites feel disenfranchised and powerless. But all that would go to pot if Clegg were able to somehow pull off his miracle.
The fact is these papers, and others, decided months ago that Cameron was going to win. They are now invested in his victory in the most undemocratic fashion. They have gone after the prime minister in a deeply personal way and until last week they were certain he was in their sights.
I hold no brief for Nick Clegg. But now, thanks to him – an ingenue with no media links whatsoever – things look very different, because now the powerless have a voice as well as the powerful.
“The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in the any country.”
I was there at all the Anti War demo’s, and I remember hearing George Galloway’s speech.
I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this was Murdoch’s payback to Blair for services rendered. After all there is no other way this can be viewed, other than with the greatest of suspicions.
"Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil & believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks. And Allah hears & knows all things."
(The Qur'an, Al-Baqara, 2: 256)
“Political authority & religion are kin brothers, neither would stand but by its companion; because religion is the foundation of political power & its pillar, & political power is the guardian of religion; political power is not established with a foundation & religion cannot be implemented without authority.”
- Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi
"War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means" - Clausewitz
"O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other). Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you. And Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things)."
(The Qur'an, Al Hujurat, 49: 13)
* Al-Quran.
* The Sealed Nectar - Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum.
* Muhammad: As a Military Leader.
* The rare and excellent history of Saladin, or, al-Nawādir al-Sulṭāniyya waʾl-Maḥāsin al-Yūsufiyya.
* Islam in Britain, 1558-1685.
* Hadji Murat.
* Imam Shamil The First Muslim Guerilla Leader.
* The Autobiography of Malcolm X
* Manufacturing consent : the political economy of the mass media.
* Unspeak : words are weapons.
* The bear trap : Afghanistan's untold story.
* Soldiers of God: Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
* Unholy wars : Afghanistan, America & international terrorism.
* Orientalism.
* Bad news from Israel.
* Image and reality : the Israel-Palestine conflict.
* American dream, global nightmare.
* The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy.
* The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
* The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
* The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
* McMafia : crime without frontiers.
* Confessions of an economic hit man.
* Freakonomics.
* The Watchmen.
* Footnotes in Gaza.
* Safe area Goražde: The War in Bosnia 1992-1995.
* Palestine forward by Edward Said.
* Pride of Baghdad : inspired by a true story.
* Shooting War.
* Islam, the West & the challenges of modernity.
* iMuslims - Rewiring the house of Islam.
* Yo, Blair!
* Churchill and the Jews.
* The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000.
* Weimar and the rise of Nazi Germany 1918-1933.
* The Invention of the Jewish People.
* The Middle East since 1914.
* Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos.
* Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century.
* Strategy and History.
* Energy Security and Global Politics.
* The State of the World Atlas.
* The Prophet.
* Warrior of the Light: A Manual.
* Art of War.
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