Last Straw

Great piece by George Monbiot on the campaign to arrest Tony Blair:

Already the campaign has borne fruit. Outside the Chilcot inquiry a woman called Grace McCann, inspired by the website, tried to apprehend Mr Blair, before she was restrained and removed by the police. She qualifies for the first bounty: one quarter of the total pot at the time of her attempt. She has pledged to give the money to relevant charities. The fund will remain open until Blair is officially prosecuted, and we will keep paying out to those who follow Grace’s example.

You can donate here.

Press TV:

Iraq’s Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says.

According to Iraqi experts, the U.S. and Britain, being the lovers of freedom and democracy that they are:

… bombed the country with nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs during the early years of the Iraq war. Atomic radiation has increased the number of babies born with defects in the southern provinces of Iraq.

Finally. Let’s hope this guy is good.

Here’s another reason why I opposed the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Give war criminals like Blair an inch and they’ll take the rope and go on to invade the rest of the world:

Wood told the inquiry that some ministers and even the then prime minister, Tony Blair, used to privately claim that the Nato bombing of Kosovo in 1999 provided a useful precedent for going to war in Iraq.

Solicitor Daniel Machover, after politicians—including Gordon Brown—hatch a plan to insulate fellow politicians from universal jurisdiction:

I feel honest revulsion at the idea of a case where a judge has granted an arrest warrant and a politician gets on the phone and apologises. They have got to stay out of individual cases and legal decisions.

Of course Gordon Brown and the government he is a part of played an integral role in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s just looking out for his own kind.

Ken MacDonald, Director of Public Prosecutions between 2003-2008, writing for the Times:

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 and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. 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.

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.

Tony Blair has admitted on TV his intention was to commit the international crime of unilateral war for regime change. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Asked if he would have gone on had he known there was no WMDs, he replied:

I would still have thought it right to remove [Saddam Hussein]. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.

Two world wars, tens of millions dead, the subsequent entrenchment of international law under the Charter of the United Nations and Tony Blair thinks that the decision to go to war should come down to his own personal beliefs about right and wrong.

Click through to read more and view a video excerpt of the interview.

There have been a number of inquiries into the 2003 invasion of Iraq but as someone commenting on the European Tribune website put it, they

… are not intended to reach a finding that the public find credible, they exist to provide a smokescreen for a few years to cover the establishment for a few years in the hope everyone forgets about it.

The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war is already running a propaganda campaign that it “won’t be a whitewash.”

But you only need to realise that its members were appointed by Gordon Brown—one of the perpetrators—and read the terms of reference to realise this is a whitewash before it even starts.

For those of you subjected to the unfortunate idea of having Tony Blair as first president of the EU you’ll pleased to know the war criminal never came close.
No Right Turn:
The European Union has its first permanent council president—and its not Tony Blair. Instead, EU leaders have chosen Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy for [...]