Blair And Dubya Kept Brown Out Of Downing Street

Senior officials in the US administration sounded the alert after a meeting between Mr Brown and Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush’s secretary of state, in which Mr Brown “harangued” her over American policy on aid, development and Africa.

After the uncomfortable session, sources said she reported her misgivings to the White House, and they were sent on in turn to Mr Blair.

After taking the warnings on board, Mr Blair signalled his intention to stay on at No 10 until at least 2008, the year of the US election to choose a successor to Mr Bush.

However, he was forced to abandon this plan following a “coup” led by Mr Brown’s supporters. The “understanding” between Mr Bush and Mr Blair was revealed to the media by well-placed Whitehall sources. The fact that Mr Blair acted on US warnings over his likely successor will dismay many in the Labour party who were deeply unhappy about Mr Blair’s readiness to back Mr Bush at all times, particularly over the decision to wage war with Iraq in 2003. Following the meeting with Miss Rice, Mr Brown’s advisers were convinced that Mr Blair was starting to groom Mr Miliband, the then environment secretary, as his successor. They were particularly enraged when Mr Blair described Mr Miliband in an interview as “my Wayne Rooney”. However, Mr Blair also played what Brown allies now see as a “double game”, warning the then chancellor that he needed to adopt a different attitude towards senior American politicians.

From Here

Saddam and WMD - A Play in One Act

Dramatis Personae:-
George Bush - A doltish middle aged recovered alcoholic
Tony Blair - A sycophantic narcissist
Various other gullible or obsequious national leaders.

ACT 1, SCENE 1

Bush : Even if Saddam has no WMD the Iraqi army has devastating weapons systems, lethal.
Blair : How do you know?"
Bush : We looked at the receipts.

CURTAIN(S)

360 Degree Rotational Fire

From OpEdNews.com, Ross Sherwood adds further details to the story of a battalion commander in Iraq who ordered his soldiers to engage in "360 degree rotational fire" upon being hit by an IED, and to shoot "every motherf*cker on the street," including women and children. Roy Corcoles recounts the training which reinforced the reaction to obey the order. You were asked, if you saw an attacker with many civilians close by and it was certain some would be killed or hurt, would you fire your weapon? The correct answer was "yes." But if you did not answer yes fast enough, you were beaten.

This is a continuation of the underside of war now being revealed by Wikileaks, and of the training which is systematic and routine in the Army. It is intended to make you do things that the ordinary person, still sensitized to other human beings, could not do. Specialist Corcoles told the reporters, when the IEDs hit and it came time to shoot "every motherfucker on the street" as the Commander had ordered, he purposely turned his gun away from people. "You don't even know if somebody's shooting at you. It's just insanity to just start shooting people," he said.

What these soldiers are describing, tit-for-tat retaliation against civilians, is a clear war crime which has been successfully prosecuted after WWII in the case of German SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler. In 1944 Kappler ordered the mass execution of civilians in the ratio of 10 to 1 for every German soldier killed in a March 1944 hidden bomb attack by Italian partisans. The executions took place in the caves of Ardeatine in Italy. You may have seen a movie about it starring Richard Burton.

This is different from the usual atrocities we hear about in Iraq as it was ordered at a high level by a battalion commander as a "Standard Operating Procedure" in a cold-blooded and deliberate manner, and the order was carried out many times. Attempts to get the attention of Congress on this have so far fallen on deaf ears.

After the war Kappler stood trial for war crimes and was sentenced to life in prison. This dishonors the Armed Services and our servicemen and women, who are bound to abide by behavior specified in the US Military Code of Justice, and not start to resemble Saddam Hussein, who ordered the killing of civilian Kurds in retaliation for attacks on his troops.

OpedNews: "Army Ordered massive Return Fire When Civilians Present":

As Obama Pretends To Withdraw - Some Benefits for Iraqis To Be Grateful For

I would say this speaks for itself. It is a significant dip in quality of life for most Iraqis even compared to Saddam's time. Of course it only applies to those who have survived the Saddam years and (god help us) 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'.

Us Media Ignoring Explosive Testimony

h/t to After Downing Street.

Al Megrahi Release - US Hypocrisy

The US Senate are trying to coerce the Scottish First Minister to give evidence on the release as part of their inquiry. You may recall that the horrendous Lockerbie attack was linked, accurately, to the shooting down in July 1988 of Iran Air Flight 655 by USS Vincennes. Where is the US Senate inquiry into that massacre of men, women and children? 290 dead - an 'accident' the US said.

This affair also serves to reopen the Iraq debate, in a way that vindicates Blair's most severe critics. Tony Blair's remaining defenders say he was motivated in Iraq by a hatred of terrorism and tyranny and had no regard whatsoever for getting access to oil. Yet at the very same time the New£abour government was plotting in Libya to hand the worst terrorist in British history to a tyrant in exchange for oil. It's proof that oil and corporate power were a much bigger factor in driving foreign policy than the public rhetoric of opposing tyranny or terror.

David Cameron refuses to open an investigation. He says he will release all the relevant documents – but the Cabinet Office has quietly declared that Blair's permission will be needed before any records are shown to the public. For the families of all the innocent people slaughtered in Lockerbie, this has been a cold-water education in what their governments really value. Cohen, remembering her murdered 20 year-old daughter Theodora, says: "Western governments seem to be run by one thing now – the great God money."

There's a revealing postscript to this story. Last month, Blair went to Libya on behalf of the many mega-corporations who now employ him. He was greeted by Gaddaffi himself – who tortures dissidents and terrorises his population –"like a brother", according to the Libyan press. There has even been speculation that, now they need a CEO, Tony Blair will go to work for BP. In so many ways, it seems, he always has.

Iraq Casualties - A State of Ignorance

A new report has been published on the pathetic efforts of the UK Government to keep a handle on the scale of civilian casualties and carnage in Iraq. Link to the full report here

Iraq - Blair's Tunnel Vision

A few months later, in 2003, Mandelson challenged Blair on what would happen once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown. "You can go in there, you can take out Saddam, but what do you do with Iraq?" he asked Blair. "You're going to have a country on your hands. I don't know what your plan is. I don't know how you're going to do it. Who is going to run the place?"Blair replied: "That's the Americans' responsibility. It's down to the Americans''. Link

The New Iraq - Thanks, America

COURTNEY E. MARTIN | July 12,

From American Prospect

When Nation-Building Becomes Cowardly Escape

Americans should be outraged that shoddy infrastructure and broken promises will be our legacy in Iraq. If you walk down Falluja's busiest streets, you are likely to travel parallel with open trenches that smell of putrid waste. These trenches, vestiges of a planned but unfinished sewage treatment system, are more than an eyesore and an assault on the olfactory senses. They are a reminder of America's broken promises in the ongoing nation-building effort in Iraq.The New York Times reported last week that many of the most fundamental needs of the Iraqi people, the most vital infrastructure projects, have been abandoned. Of the long-planned sewage system, for example, theTimes reports, "After more than six years of work, $104 million spent, and without having connected a single house, American reconstruction officials have decided to leave the troubled system only partly finished, infuriating many city residents." The project was initially supposed to treat waste for Falluja's entire population (200,000 people), with room to grow by 50 percent. Now it will, at best, serve 4,300, before the Americans working on the project leave town.Iraqi citizens shouldn't be the only ones infuriated by our military's half-assed effort to rebuild a nation that we so righteously destroyed not so long ago. Americans should also be outraged. We should be fuming. This war was fought in our names, and now shoddy infrastructure and broken promises will be our legacy. We should be calling our political representatives and demanding that the U.S. military finish what it started in Iraq and implement a long-term plan for incorporating nation-building practices effectively and ethically.The RAND Corporation reports, "Nation-building has been a controversial mission over the past decade, and the extent of this controversy has undoubtedly curtailed the investments needed to do these tasks better. So has institutional resistance in both the state and defense departments, neither of which regards nation-building among its core missions. As a result, successive administrations tend to treat each new such mission as if it were the first and, more importantly, the last." In other words, we reinvent the wheel (badly), following every new conflict. We can argue the morality of wars, but as long as we keep participating in them, we must be committed to leaving them with dignity and integrity.In a study of the seven historical attempts by the U.S. to nation-build -- in Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan -- RAND found that "there is no quick-fix" and that "none of our cases was successfully completed in less than seven years." It's worth remembering that we started the Iraq War before finishing the job in Afghanistan. Now we want to bail before the job's done in Iraq, too, setting ourselves up for another half-cooked polity and a continued world of hurt.The financial costs are high, indeed, but the costs in terms of security and morality are potentially even higher. Our nation-building blunders are not just ineffective and embarrassing; they're downright dangerous. Leaving a taste like this in Iraqis' parched mouths is certainly not going to make Americans any safer. The president of the Falluja City Council told The New York Times: "I told the Americans if they want to leave a good impression ? and to erase bad feelings about the United States from the war, they should finish this project completely and properly. It was supposed to be finished in two years, then five years, and it still isn't complete. There's been no benefit to us."Even many of the projects that do look to be on the path to completion are being finished so quickly and haphazardly that engineering standards have been thrown out the window. Shaymaa Mohammad Ameen, who works with reconstruction officials as a liaison for the Diyala Provincial Council, told the Times that "American officials frequently threatened to leave when Iraqis questioned engineering standards and brought up other safety issues."The U.S. is slipping out of Iraq, base by base, soldier by soldier, not with a bang but with a whimper of unfulfilled promises and blatant denials. Sure it would be nice to just come home, as so many on the left have argued. No one wants our troops in Iraq any longer than is necessary. But what's even worse than prolonging their presence is undermining their work thus far by asking them to leave a job shoddily and incompletely done. Our troops' integrity -- and that of the country -- is at stake.When asked about the abandoned projects and dwindling quality of those that haven't yet been scraped, Col. Dionysios Anninos, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, told theTimes: "I am not aware of the Iraqis having any sort of hard feelings that we will not finish current projects." Really? You break a promise to five-sixths of Falluja's population and no one seems perturbed? And then, as if to add insult to injury, he enthusiastically added, "We will finish strong!"This isn't nation-building; this is cowardly escape. The American public shouldn't stand for it. Additional research by Krystie Yandoli.

Blair 'Legacy' Crumbling By The Day

Poor old Tone. He is even execrated for winning awards as per my previous post and the chorus of derision in just about every Sunday newspaper in the UK yesterday. Now it emerges he is costing us taxpayers £250K a year for his personal security. I'll tell you what - he won't be very secure, 250K or not, if he ever comes along my street.

Gaza Blockade 'Lifted'

In a dramatic new development, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would now allow essential Israeli troops to enter Gaza. He said 'The troops will bring with them much-needed bullets, tanks and supplies of white phosphorous.'

Said Israeli stoogePeace Envoy Tony Blair 'This is an important day for the peace process and road map. Do I get paid for this? Cherie would prefer cash.'

Help For Heroes Appeal

Grown men aren't supposed to cry. But if you have been through all that Alastair has, going to hell and back, crying is impossible to avoid. Alastair still has flashbacks to the war in Iraq and how he helped start it. It was his job. He was good at it. He sat up all night copying things from the internet to warn the nation that they were going to be blown up in 45 minutes. Now he sits alone staring out of the window trying to make a new life for himself as a diarist. But the past keeps coming back to haunt him. Even on Sunday mornings when he is tirelessly plugging his books on TV AM, memories of his former life can overwhelm him and he loses control. He will blurt out things like ' I lost my best buddy in that war. I owed him everything. Tony was a great guy. We covered each other's backs.'

DONT FORGET ALASTAIR AND GIVE GENEROUSLY NOW.

Help For Heroes

PO BOX 2003

Fallujah Industrial Estate.

Like To Buy a Murderous Gang of Mercenaries?

The security company formerly known as Blackwater is looking for new ownership, announcing Monday that it is pursuing a sale of the company that became famous for its involvement with the U.S. government in Iraq and elsewhere. The Moyock, N.C.-based company now called Xe Services announced its decision in a brief statement that gave few details.
"Xe's new management team has made significant changes and improvements to the company over the last 15 months, which have enabled the company to better serve the U.S. government and other customers, and will deliver additional value to a purchaser," the statement said.
Owner and founder Erik Prince said selling the company is a difficult decision, but constant criticism of Xe helped him make up his mind. "Performance doesn't matter in Washington, just politics," he said.
The private company became infamous as Blackwater, which provided guards and services to the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It became one of the biggest defence contractors in the world, but it also attracted criticism over its role in those missions.
It has been trying to rehabilitate its image since a 2007 shooting incident in Baghdad that killed 17 people, outraged the Iraqi government and led to federal charges against several Blackwater guards. The accusations later were thrown out on a technicality after a judge found that prosecutors mishandled evidence. In March, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin suggested the Pentagon should consider banning Xe from a $1 billion deal to train Afghan police. He said he thought the company's involvement was hindering the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The announcement comes less than 3 months after Xe sold its aviation division for $200 million to AAR Corp in a bid to boost Xe's balance sheet.
More recently, five former executives, including Gary Jackson, the company's ex-president, were indicted on charges of conspiring to violate US firearms laws. Jackson was among the top officials who left the company last year.

New Labour Let's Move On Mantra

This is worth reading just for the comments by the Guardianistas (of whom I am one). I am greatly reassured by these comments in the light of my own misgivings re Iraq which has haunted me, and I'm not exaggerating, since 2003. It bothers me that that the thought of the horrors perpetrated by the 'special relationship' should haunt me who marched against the proposed invasion and does not seem to bother the 'let's move on' brigade - Blair, Milliband, Balls, Brown, Hain, Harman....blah.. blah....bleurrrrrgh. I'll let the Guardianistas speak for me....;.

One Day To The Death of the New Labour Cult - Thanksgiving UK

Reasons to be grateful to Tony Blair and New Labour (hat-tip to William Burroughs):

Thanks for the 'special relationship'

Thanks for extraordinary rendition

Thanks for the 10p tax threshold

Thanks for the Private Finance Initiative(from an idea by M.Thatcher)

Thanks for the carnage in Iraq & Afghanistan

Thanks for the failed privatisation of the Post Office

Thanks for trying (and failing) to exclude the Gurkhas

Thanks for ID Cards by the back door

Thanks for the surveillance society

Thanks for schmoozing the bankers for years

Thanks for cash for honours

Thanks for Fred the Shred (Knighted by you)

Thanks, finally, to you and Brown for cleaning up British politics as you promised in 1997.

Four Days To The Death of The New Labour Cult

The canker that started to grow in the Labour Party since Blair tricked us into believing he was a ‘new broom’ when in fact he was a mercenary, warmongering spiv, has so devalued progressive British politics as to make it almost completely unrecognisable. Subsequently, one commentator has referred to Brown's Gollum-esque lust for power and submission to spin. Both faults have led to mistakes, deliberate deceptions, corruption, cheating and straightforward stupidity. The betrayal of Labour's founding fathers and principles (Hardie, Attlee, Foot -all totally honest men) has been so enormous, so grotesque, that it’s impossible to forgive. And how can we forgive and forget the war? Not just the sheer, repugnant scale of how wrong it was, but all the attendant lying, spinning and self-preservation that followed in its bloody wake. There can be no 'New New Labour'. We were fooled once with horrible consequences. I hope Clegg is able to revive and rebuild the left from a stronger Lib Dem position after 6th May. Goodbye New Labour and good riddance.

Kinnock on Iraq – ‘ Let’s Move On'

Lets move on, Neil? Move on from 1.5M people (low estimate) displaced? Move on from 300,000 men, women and children(very low estimate) dead? Move on from white phosphorous and depleted uranium-induced deformities in babies in Fallujah? Move on from Abu Ghraib, torture and rendition? Move on from the billions wasted in creating chaos and a Shiite theocracy in Iraq? Yes I bet you and your New Labour friends would like to move on. On the bright side, most of your candidates will be moving on to a career outside politics after the election on 6^th May and it will be largely as a result of the Iraq bloodbath and the other betrayals of everything that the Labour movement ever stood for. Why did they wheel you out to utter this crass, cynical garbage? Because Brown and Milliband and Mandelson don’t want their names in the same sentence as the word Iraq. You on the other hand are expendable to New Labour (and everyone else now). Roll on May 7^th. Clegg for PM.

Secret Jail Abuse In Iraq

They were held at al-Muthanna until the human rights ministry gained access to the prison and closed the facility.

"We were tortured for four long months continuously," another former detainee said.

"Whether you recognise or not, whatever they want you to say, they keep torturing you and the prisoners. They died in the torture."

Link To Short Video Here

Lobby Your Candidate on The War Debacles

Details of your candidate here. The occupations must be debated.

Iraq Death Squad

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying. Full Story Here.