Back in 2003 and 2004 over 70% of American’s polled were telling pollsters not only that they believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs but that he was personally involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre.
Now they’re at it again, with over 70% telling pollsters that they think Iran has nuclear weapons.
Should this country really be allowed to deal in international politics?
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.
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.
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.
This might sound a strange thing to say but let’s not delude ourselves, the disaster in Haiti is largely a man-made one. And it’s down to the usual suspects:
Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums.
As one commenter notes:
Now is exactly the time to inject some realism into the discourse. I’ve been reading/listening to reports from the Western media, and they are full of revisions and distortions concerning our historical role there. ‘Haiti is a failed state,’ ‘Aristide ‘fled,’ was ‘forced out by a rebellion,’ etc., ignoring the deliberate campaign of destabilisation and coup d’etat against the democratically elected government in 2004.
To donate to the relief effort in a religion-free way and help counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans you can donate at SHARE or Non-Believers Giving Aid.
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.
Obama accepting his Nobel prize:
… perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek …
Except that America did seek armed conflict with Afghanistan.
In October of 2001 the Taliban publicly offered to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third country, provided the U.S. halted the illegal bombing of Afghanistan and produced the necessary evidence about involvement of bin Laden or any of his associates in the 11 September attacks. Bush rejected this, putting an end to any possibility of a potentially peaceful, legal resolution to the events of 11 September 2001, and opened up the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq and the threat of invasion of Iran, along with the millions who have lost their lives or had them destroyed as a result.