He sums up the problem with U.S. foreign policy nicely: "We don't mind our own business!"

Fun fact: U.S. military veterans have given more money to Ron Paul's campaign than all the other campaigns put together.

Faced with an ultimatum, the Taliban again refused to surrender Bin Laden, who initially denied involvement, and an American-led aerial bombing campaign followed.

In fact the Taliban publicly offered in October of 2001 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. Would they have gone through with the offer? We'll never know because Bush rejected it, 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 and Iraq, along with the millions who have lost their lives or had them destroyed as a result.

Update: Jason Burke says he'll correct obituary.

Understandably, Israel is very concerned when the president of a country, a large country near them, states that they should be wiped off the face of the earth.

Which is simply a lie. Is it any wonder Americans are so brainwashed?

The paradox for NATO and the Americans is that in September, 2010, they will have deployed the largest number of troops they ever had in Afghanistan, and yet that is when they are the most vulnerable, as the supply needs for this huge force are potentially crippling.

Dylan Ratigan interviews Daniel Ellsberg—the guy who blew the whistle on the Vietnam War in 1971—about WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning.

And Ann Wright, retired US Colonel and Diplomat, says Bradley Manning should be praised.

‘Mere mortals are still inspired by a certain awe,’ he gushes.

Bill Clinton is ‘an extraordinary mixture of easygoing charm and ferocious intellectual capacity. Probably . . . he is the most formidable politician I ever met.’ President Bush ‘has great intuition.’ And of Barack Obama, he says: ‘The personal character is clear: this is a man with steel in every part of him.’

Stay classy Blair.

Meanwhile he's been pelted with eggs and shoes at a book signing in Ireland:

Skirmishes broke out between protesters and police at the first public signing for Tony Blair's memoirs, with shoes and eggs hurled at the former prime minister.

Protesters shouted … "Hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?"

"It really is shameful that somebody can be responsible for the death and destruction that he was responsible for in Iraq and Afghanistan and walk away without any accounting for that and become a very wealthy man off the back of it."

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."

I felt very alone in the army. I couldn't talk about the things I felt were misplaced … I didn't have strong views but I felt uncomfortable about the talk, about soldiers hitting Arabs and laughing. I thought everyone else was normal and I was the one who wasn't. I felt an outsider to the group experience.

British taxpayers are paying a secretive lobbying firm $10,000 (£6,354) a month to push American politicians to award contracts to British defence companies.

The flotilla was carrying humanitarian aid, medical supplies, and construction materials, intent on breaking the Gaza Strip blockade being perpetrated by the apartheid state of Israel against the people of Palestine.

In the middle of the night on 30 May, while in international waters, they were forcibly boarded by armed Israeli commandos. The passengers defended their ship against the invaders and nine of them were murdered, most shot at close range in the back of the head.

Ken helped overpower two commandos and managed to disarm one of his pistol and empty it's ammunition. The commandos eventually overpowered the flotilla, then promptly kidnapped everyone, towing the ships to a detention camp. After stealing everyone's possessions and generally treating them like dogs the kidnappers relented to international pressure, releasing and deporting most of those they had kidnapped. Ken wanted to appeal his deportation to Ireland and instead go to Gaza, but, having already been seriously beaten twice by Israeli soldiers while captive, his solicitor advised him that for his own safety he should leave Israel.

For his troubles Ken was laughably listed on the IDF's official propaganda weblog—IDF Spokesperson—as "known to be involved in terrorist activity," and continuing with:

Ken O’Keefe (Born 1969), an American and British citizen, is a radical anti-Israel activist and operative of the Hamas Terror organization. He attempted to enter the Gaza Strip in order to form and train a commando unit for the Palestinian terror organization.

To form and train a commando unit? I've had some heated arguments with Ken over the years but 'terrorist commando'? Someone in the IDF propaganda unit's been telling porkies. (Note to IDF: when you're falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist try not to get their nationality wrong. Kind of makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about.)

So let's get this straight. They kidnap Ken (whose life story happens to be an open book). Then they deport him. And then they tell us he's a known terrorist? Wouldn't it perhaps be a little more prudent to hold onto a terrorist?

Someone in the IDF propaganda unit doesn't know how to tell porkies.

External links

• Ken's statement on the Israeli attack
• BBC HARDtalk interview with Ken, 28 June 2010

When I managed to get over the shock of that exchange, it struck me that the invocation of the Hitler era was actually a frighteningly apt and searing analogy, although not the one my friend intended. A million and a half civilians have been forced to live in an open-air prison in inhuman conditions for over three years now, but unlike the Hitler years, they are not Jews but Palestinians. Their jailers, incredibly, are survivors of the Holocaust, or their descendants. Of course, the inmates of Gaza are not destined for gas chambers, as the Jews were, but they have been reduced to a debased and hopeless existence. Fully 80% of Gaza’s population lives on the edge of malnutrition, depending on international charities for their daily nourishment. According to the UN and World Health authorities, Gaza’s children suffer from dramatically increased morbidity that will affect and shorten the lives of many of them. This obscenity is a consequence of a deliberate and carefully calculated Israeli policy aimed at de-developing Gaza by destroying not only its economy but its physical and social infrastructure while sealing it hermitically from the outside world. Particularly appalling is that this policy has been the source of amusement for some Israeli leaders, who according to Israeli press reports have jokingly described it as “putting Palestinians on a diet.” That, too, is reminiscent of the Hitler years, when Jewish suffering amused the Nazis.

"There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force"

—Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl,

spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad. (New York Times)

The reality is a bunch of coward rednecks flying around in helicopters committing murder from high above.

When the Nuremberg Tribunal described a war of aggression as the supreme war crime, because it "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole," this is the kind of thing they were talking about. These trigger happy rednecks flying around in helicopters just shouldn't be in Iraq in the first place.

And this redneck nation wonders why people want to fly planes into their buildings.

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?

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

Religion-free ways to donate to the relief effort:

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.

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.

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.

… 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 …

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.

US militarism has to be considered under three headings: First, the US military is the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the world. Second, the US economy, the largest national consumer of fossil fuel in the world, has shown that its primary mode of maintaining a supply of fossil fuel for itself is through military action (assault, intervention, occupation of other oil producing nations). Third, the US military operates in the interest of a corporate economy of which it (the military) is the foremost sector in the US.