Tony Blair – praag.org

Landmark case exposes ArcelorMittal pollution

In 1994 a number of people bought property in a farmland area of the Vaal known as Louisrus and Steel Valley, in the south of Johannesburg.

They bought property close to the Iscor steel plant, which has now become part of ArcelorMittal South Africa (Amsa).

Two years later residents noticed oil in their borehole water and a strange, chemical smell.

When residents started to complain, Iscor engaged in a series of tests and studies to determine if their plant was causing any harm.

The reports formed part of Iscor’s environmental master plan, which was completed in 2003 but kept secret from the public until Monday.

Samson Mokoena’s father was one of the people who bought a smallholding in Steel Valley.

He grew up farming with his family, but today he is leading the cause to find out the truth about the pollution as co-ordinator of the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (Veja).

On Monday the alliance released the 8,000-page environmental master plan to the public after a long struggle to get access to the document.

Representing a coalition of community organisations, the alliance fought a 12-year battle to get access to environmental reports about how the steelmaker was polluting their community through wastewater and air pollution.

“The people of Steel Valley believe that Iscor and Amsa held information from the public deliberately. To us it meant that there was something fishy about the document if they were refusing to make it available in a free democratic society,” said Mokoena.

He explains that the community suffered a long time from what they believe was effects of pollution.

“People were sick with cancer, some had kidney failure. People lost their livelihoods, animals were deformed and died, crops didn’t grow properly,” he said.

The Integrated Report of January 2003 included in the plan notes that there was substantial pollution at the Vanderbijlpark plant.

“Groundwater chemistry results obtained from boreholes confirm elevated concentrations of calcium, magnesium, sulphate, chlorine, potassium, sodium, nitrate, fluorine, iron and manganese within both the perched and shallow weathered zone aquifers…” notes the report.

There were also high levels of cadmium noted which are especially harmful to the kidneys.

The alliance says it had met with Amsa for years to try to gain access to the document.

Only in 2011, when the alliance in partnership with the Centre for Environmental Rights requested the document through the Protection of Information Act (Paia), that things started to change.

Amsa refused the Paia request, which resulted in legal action and both the South Gauteng High Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that Amsa should release the report to the alliance last year.

In Amsa’s 2014 consolidated financial statements it stated that they decided not to challenge the matter further and it handed over the information on December 17, last year.

“The company seeks to pursue a path of open and transparent engagement with the Veja and all other stakeholders for that matter,” noted the statement..

The environmental centre’s attorney, Robyn Hugo represented the alliance in legal action against Amsa and said the case will change the way environmental rights are defended in court in future.

“This is a leading case on access to environmental information and we’re going to rely on it. All industries should take note that secrecy is no longer acceptable,” she said.

Dr Victor Munnik, of the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, has been studying pollution in Steel Valley for 15 years.

Source: eNCA

Tony Blair could face war crimes charges

Tony Blair could face war crimes charges as a result of the Iraq war inquiry report, the House of Lords has been told.

Lord Dykes of Harrow Weald, a Liberal Democrat peer, claimed that the publication of the inquiry by Sir John Chilcot was being delayed “to prolong the agony” of the former Labour Prime Minister.

Lord Hurd – who as Douglas Hurd was Conservative foreign secretary from 1989 to 1995 – said the delay was now “becoming a scandal”.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire, a Government minister, disclosed for the first time that talks over the publication of the gist of conversations between Mr Blair and George W Bush, the former US president, were now completed.

These talks have held up the publication of the report. But he said that if the report is not published by the end of February, it will be delayed until after the general election.

Speaking in the House of Lords, Lord Dykes – who as Hugh Dykes was a Tory MP from 1979 to 1997 – asked: “Is not this continuing delay an utter and total disgrace and so much time has elapsed.

“Is my noble friend aware that more and more people think it is some kind of attempt to prolong the agony of Mr Blair facing possible war crimes charges?”

Lord Hurd added: “This has dragged on beyond the questions of mere negligence and forgiveable delay – it is becoming a scandal.

“This is not something which is of trivial importance, it is something which a large number of people in this country look anxiously for truth.”

Source: The Telegraph

Put Blair and Straw on trial for torture

By Craig Murray

Former British Ambassador To Uzbekistan

In the summer of 2004, I warned Tony Blair’s Foreign Office that Britain was using intelligence material which had been obtained by the CIA under torture. Two months later I was sacked as the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan on the orders of Downing Street, bringing to an end my 20-year diplomatic career.

When I then went public with the news that Uzbek territory was part of a global CIA torture programme, I was dismissed as a fantasist by Mr Blair’s henchmen. Now finally, a decade later, I have been vindicated by last week’s shocking Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Over 500 pages it details the CIA’s brutal abuse of Al Qaeda suspects, who were flown around the world to be tortured in a network of secret prisons. One of these was in Uzbekistan, where the US had an air base.

The CIA programme included both torture they conducted themselves and torture conducted for them by allies. Shamefully, the torture-by-proxy details remain classified to protect America’s gruesome ‘allies’.

The CIA were flying people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, usually via their secret prison at Szymany in Poland. The Uzbeks were doing the actual torture, sometimes with CIA members in the room.

Aside from the moral dimension, the Senate report confirmed my repeated view that intelligence gleaned from torture is useless. When I was Ambassador, one secret file I was sent contained CIA information which named a member of Al Qaeda. The man turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness.

In 2003, I attended a meeting at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), where I was told by officials that it was not illegal for us to use intelligence from torture as long as we did not carry out the torture ourselves. I was also told at the meeting that this intelligence was ‘useful’ – and that policy came directly from the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

I have a copy of a note signed by the Foreign Secretary’s private secretary which says that Mr Straw had seen the minutes of the meeting and thought it had been ‘handled well’.

I was specifically told by a very senior FCO manager that there was a deliberate policy of not writing down anything about this because there should not be evidence of the policy.

Meanwhile, the FCO was churning out speeches which claimed we opposed it. On July 22, 2004, I sent that telegram to Mr Straw complaining about the fact we were using intelligence material obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA.

His silence in response didn’t surprise me. I was gone soon afterwards. Strange then that when he sacked me – on the express orders of Mr Blair’s Downing Street, I was later informed – Mr Straw claimed to Parliament that the existence of a CIA torture programme was only ‘Mr Murray’s opinion’.

He claimed the Government knew nothing of any torture by the CIA, and still today denies knowing anything about it.

My career had been destroyed by leftist politicians who wanted to hide their complicity in human rights abuses.

To complete the process, they then trashed my reputation with smears: the stressful end to my first marriage, and the start of my relationship with my current wife, Nadira, found its way into the press in the most lurid terms. False stories about my drinking and fabrications about sleeping with prostitutes also appeared. All of this was to distract from the truth: that hundreds of British members of the security services, diplomats and civil servants co-operated with the CIA torture programme.

It is a terrible indictment of our society that I was the only person in a position of authority who was trying to stop it.

Now that I have been vindicated, it is time for a formal Government apology for the way I was treated. But it is not just past UK governments which were complicit in both the torture and the cover-up. For the past year, the British Ambassador in Washington and his staff have regularly been lobbying the US authorities not to reveal facts about the UK’s involvement in the CIA torture programme.

That lobbying has been successful, and is one of the reasons that most of the Senate report has not been published.

The British Government continues to cover up the truth even today. We should not forget that the climate of public and media opinion which made it possible for this US Senate report to be published at all was generated entirely by the work of whistleblowers. I was the first of these, but at least I remain at liberty: two subsequent whistleblowers – soldier Chelsea Manning and CIA agent John Kiriakou – are serving long stretches in prison.

Although it is in no way comparable to the horrifying abuses suffered by the torture victims, we truth-tellers have also been through hell.

It is very strange to now hear Westminster politicians calling for a judicial inquiry into our involvement in rendition.

There has already been one, headed by retired judge Sir Peter Gibson. He started to gather evidence, and ordered the Foreign Office to give me full access to all the classified documentation on the subject from my time as Ambassador. Indeed, Gibson gave every appearance of being a man of integrity, appointed to lead an investigation into governmental wrongdoing.

It was therefore no surprise when the Gibson inquiry was cancelled and his duties handed to politicians on the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee. Incredibly, its members include Hazel Blears, one of Tony Blair’s Ministers at a time when the Government had a policy of using intelligence from torture. She is therefore investigating herself.

No wonder a source on the Intelligence and Security Committee told journalists last week that they would only scrutinise members of the security services, not the politicians who instructed them.

There is, at least, an ongoing Metropolitan Police inquiry, called Operation Lydd, into whether the criminal law was broken by Britons implicated in the rendition programme.

Complicity in torture is a crime in the UK. I have given sworn evidence to the detectives involved, who recently passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Astonishingly, at the CPS the dossier has been given not to the branch that deals with misconduct in public office, but to the counter-terrorism division. This focuses attention away from the crime of torture and on to the alleged criminal intentions of the actual victims of the crime they are supposed to be considering.

The police think it will all be quietly swept under the carpet by the CPS.

Recent scandals, such as the alleged cover-up of an Establishment paedophile ring, highlight the apparent impunity of our political class in the face of the honest forces of law and order.

We don’t need an inquiry into British complicity in torture. We need a trial. And it should be Tony Blair and Jack Straw in the dock.

Source: AP

War criminal Blair, corrupt Europeans spared in arms inquiry

An arms deal critic has said that Tony Blair should have been summoned to testify at the Seriti commission.

Former British prime minister and war criminal Tony Blair should have been summoned to testify at the Seriti commission of inquiry, arms deal critic Terry Crawford-Browne said on Monday.

“Judge Seriti will recall that in August 2012 I requested that the former British prime minister Tony Blair be subpoenaed to testify about the bribes and pressure he exerted on behalf of BAE Systems,” he told the inquiry in Pretoria.

“Regrettably, the chairman ruled that it was premature to subpoena Mr Blair, the man who is widely regarded internationally as a war criminal.”

He said the opportunity of investigating the role of the British arms manufacturer and the Bank of England “in the destabilisation of resource-rich Asian and African countries” was lost. “Not only is Mr Blair remembered for his lies in 2003 about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but he is now closely associated with the wars both in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Palestine,” Crawford-Browne wrote in his affidavit.

President Jacob Zuma established the inquiry, chaired by Judge Willie Seriti, to probe alleged corruption when government acquired, among other hardware, 26 Gripen fighter aircraft and 24 Hawk lead-in fighter trainer aircraft for the air force, and frigates and submarines for the navy. Crawford-Browne said the Sunday Times report of September 28, about bribes allegedly paid to Zuma, highlighted the abuse of state institutions. “Although it may not have been illegal in 1998/99 in Britain or Germany to bribe foreigners, it has long been illegal in South Africa to receive bribes,” he said.

The finance minister at the time of the arms deal, Trevor Manuel, should have investigated the alleged bribery and corruption. “Instead, and in gross abuse of those responsibilities, Mr Manuel actively engaged in cover-up of corruption and fraud associated with the arms deal,” Crawford-Browne said. He said the allegations in the Sunday Times, though not new, confirmed the malevolent roles of European governments in fostering corruption in countries such as South Africa.

Crawford-Browne said in 2012 Swedish TV4 exposed the role of newly elected prime minister Stefan Lofven in facilitating payments of R30-million to ANC MPs. The money was allegedly laundered via Swedish trade unions as funding for an industrial training school. “Mr Lofven in 1998 was the international officer for the Swedish Chemical Workers Union and the bribes were alleged to be laundered via Sanco [the South African National Civic Organisation] and Moses Mayekiso.

“This illustrates the extent of corruption in the international arms trade even in squeaky clean Sweden,” Crawford-Browne said. Mayekiso is a former ANC and Congress of the People member who was the Workers and Socialist Party’s presidential candidate. He served as the inaugural secretary general of the National Union of Metalworkers of SA and was among the first leaders of Sanco. Last month, the Sunday Times newspaper detailed allegations that in 2000, Zuma accepted a R500 000-a-year bribe from Ajay Sooklal, a “fixer” for French Arms company Thales.

Zuma apparently signalled his acceptance of the bribe by remarking during a meeting with Alain Thetard, the then-head of Thales’s South African subsidiary Thint, that “I see the Eiffel Tower lights are shining today”.

Thint is one of the companies linked to the country’s arms-deal controversy. In 1997 Thint was awarded a multibillion-rand contract to equip four new navy frigates with combat suites. The claims alleged in the Sunday Times emerged from transcripts a confidential arbitration hearing between Sooklal and Thales over a fee dispute. The presidency said there was “nothing new in the allegations”.

Source: Sapa

NATO, an idea whose time has gone

By Craig Murray.

In the past dozen years, the armed forces of NATO countries, whether operating under the NATO banner or in related ad-hoc coalitions, have killed many hundreds of thousands of people. Of those hundreds of thousands of people, only a few hundred at most ever had any connection to any attack on a NATO country.

Whatever modern NATO has become, a defensive alliance it is not; that fact is beyond rational dispute.

It is also the case that the situation in countries where NATO has been most active in killing people, including Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan, has deteriorated. It has deteriorated politically, economically, militarily and socially. The notion that NATO member states could bomb the world into good was only ever believed by crazed and fanatical people like Tony Blair and Jim Murphy of the Henry Jackson Society. It really should not have needed empirical investigation to prove it was wrong, but it has been tried, and has been proved wrong.

The NATO states as a group have also embarked on remarkably similar reductions in the civil liberties of their own populations during this period. NATO to me is symbolised by the fact that its Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as Danish Prime Minister blatantly lied to the Danish parliament about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. When Major Frank Grevil released material that proved Rasmussen was lying, it was Grevil who was jailed for three years.

NATO’s attempt to be global arbiter and enforcer has been disastrous at all levels. Its plan to redeem itself by bombing the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria is a further sign of madness. Except of course that it will guarantee some blowback against Western targets, and that will “justify” further bombings, and yet more profit for the arms manufacturers. On that level, it is very clever and cynical. NATO provides power to the elite and money to the wealthy.

NATO is by far the largest danger to world peace. It should be dissolved as a matter of urgency.

Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. – http://www.craigmurray.org.uk

Apocalypse Blair

Mr Blair paid a singer to sing If I Ruled The World to him

While Gaza writhes in agony, Middle East Peace Envoy Tony Blair’s private jet last week was in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Two months earlier Blair had certainly visited Las Vegas and Los Angeles on the same journey. In Las Vegas Blair was paid a large but undisclosed sum to attend a conference of hedge fund managers. His meetings in Los Angeles were “private”.

I have been unable to discover whether Blair was on his jet last week, or it was Cherie shopping or Alistair Campbell following up on the “business opportunities” for Blair from the July meetings. But he was evidently not in the Middle East. Just before the jet left for the USA he was in Britain hosting a lavish and deeply tasteless birthday party for his wife, two months before her birthday.

From the Daily Mail:

Guests sang Happy Birthday to Cherie, as waiters brought a garish pink-coloured cake into the marquee.

Mr Blair, whose role is to hammer out a ceasefire in times of conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, spent large sums of money to have celebrities perform to Ma Cherie Amour. Bobby Davro then impersonated a blushing Mr Blair, and sang If I Ruled The World, from the musical Pickwick.

Yesterday the Guardian announced Blair’s new role as adviser to the Government of Azerbaijan, to add to the money he gets from advising Sisi of Egypt, Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, numerous Gulf despots and any other dictator who does not realise that the Blair brand has become even more toxic than their own.

Blair’s attendance at the July conference of hedge fund managers was appropriate, as they are the epitome of the heartless irresponsibility and short term financial outlook of the new capitalism which Blair so heartily embraced. His fellow guest speaker at that conference was Francis Ford Coppola. I went to bed last night mulling this article and the aptness of combination of Tony Blair and Apocalypse Now.

Then I woke up this morning to the news that after twenty years of peace fighting had broken out between Blair’s brand new client, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. The man really is cursed. Perhaps once you voluntarily brought so much war and terrible death, there is no way to stop. Apocalypse Blair. He should rename that private jet The Four Horsemen.

Source: Craig Murray

Obama announces sending US troops to Iraq

Tony Blair now tells the world that Western “inaction” in Syria has produced the Iraq crisis.

But since bombing Syria would have brought to power in Damascus the very Islamists who are now threatening Baghdad, it must therefore be only a mad person who considers his views.

President Obama certainly did not wince. He announced on Monday that US ground troops ‘equipped for combat’ are being sent to Iraq – just days after claiming that no American soldiers would be deployed to the war-ravaged country.

In a letter to Congress, the president said American troops will be returning to Iraq only three years after they left and their deployment began on Sunday.

The president told Congress that American military personnel in Baghdad will be ‘equipped for combat.’

It is instructive to contemplate what Blair’s rebel friends in Syria are up to.

Assad’s enemies are the same Nusra and al-Qaida fighters whom Blair’s bombing of Damascus would have helped and who now threaten Iraq’s existence.

Not to mention the recent attacks in Kenia.

Televangelist Pat Robertson on Monday blasted former President George W. Bush for selling Americans the Iraq invasion, which led to the violence that is currently sweeping across the country.

During his Monday broadcast, a viewer asked Robertson if there was a solution to the ongoing violence caused by an al Qaeda splinter group, ISIS, threatening to take over Iraq.

“Right now, what we did — and it was a great mistake to go in there,” Robertson explained, pointing out that Saddam Hussein’s “bomb maker” had said that the then-dictator “doesn’t know how to make an atomic bomb.”

And so to sell the American people on weapons of mass destruction, he had WMD and was getting [concentrated uranium] yellowcake out of Africa and all of that, it was a lot of nonsense,” the TV preacher said. “We were sold a bill of goods, we should never have gone into that country!”

“As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he held those warring factions in check, and he contained those radical Islamists,” he continued. “Fix it, no? It’s too late to fix it. It’s unfixable. Those simmering animosities have been there for centuries.”

Most people outside the US knew this before the ill-fated invasion.

The sudden implosion of the vast Iraqi Army of the Baghdad Puppet Regime constructed by the US is a timely warning of the fates of the other puppet states in the Muslim World: Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE and lesser ones.

The whole Muslim World of one and a half billion people have turned overwhelmingly against the US and support guerrilla groups against the US.

Pakistan, a huge nuclear state with about 150 millon people quickly went from pro-US to fiercely anti-US over the annihilation of Afghanistan and the systematic drone attacks on Pakistani civilians.

Clearly American politicians understand money and funding, but have no grasp on geography or identity.

John Major puts Blair on the spot over Iraq

Former Tory prime minister John Major insists his New Labour successor Tony Blair’s notes to president Bush should be released without being edited

Tony Blair was yesterday put on the spot over the Iraq inquiry by the man he defeated in 1997.

Former Tory Prime Minister John Major said Mr Blair should demand the release of all his secret notes to former US President George Bush in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

And he insisted Mr Blair alone had the power to make them public.

Sir John said censoring the papers meant suspicions about the Iraq War would “fester.” His intervention came after Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the invasion was branded a “whitewash” because it will only publish the “gist” of 25 notes and 130 taped talks between Mr Blair Mr Bush .

He slammed the Cabinet Office for withholding the documents, telling the BBC: “Firstly, it will leave suspicions unresolved and those suspicions will fester and maybe worsen. Secondly, withholding them is going to be very embarrassing for Tony Blair, not least because he brought in the Freedom of Information Act.”

He said rules keeping the papers secret could only be overturned if the former administration led by Mr Blair agreed. “I suppose it could approach them and say ‘we think it better if they release the papers,’ but the Government can’t do that, Mr Blair could.”

The release of the documents has delayed publication of the report which finished its public hearings in 2011.

At first the Government tried to block all papers between Blair and Bush amid fears it would upset the US and break a rule that Ministerial papers can only be published after 30 years.

After months of wrangling, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood said the inquiry can release extracts of Blair and Bush’s correspondence. Mr Bush’s views will not be revealed.

The move sparked fury, with Labour MP John McDonnell saying it confirmed “suspicions of a whitewash.”

Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon, 19, was killed in Iraq, said: “How will the families get to know the truth? We are just shoved aside. I think Tony Blair has a lot to do with the decision. He is laughing at us”. Tony Blair’s office refused to comment.

Source: The Mirror

Blair denies plotting to oust Mugabe

Struggling with the natives — Struggling to influence the natives

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister denied on Wednesday that he put pressure South Africa while he was in office to remove Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe in a military operation.

Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s ex-president, said in an interview that Britain wanted to topple Mugabe during the political and economic crisis of the late 2000s.

A spokesperson for Blair’s denied the charge.

“Tony Blair has long believed that Zimbabwe would be much better off without Robert Mugabe and always argued for a tougher stance against him, but he never asked anyone to plan or take part in any such military intervention,” he told AFP in London. Blair stepped down in 2007.

This was not the account Mbeki gave to Al-Jazeera news channel, in the interview published on November 23

Mbeki said: “Tony Blair… was saying to the chief of the British armed forces: ’You must work out a military plan so that we can physically remove Robert Mugabe’. We knew that because we had come under the same pressure, that we need to cooperate in some scheme. It was a regime-change scheme even to the point of using military force.”

Mbeki’s spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga told AFP the ex-president stood by his words.

Mbeki, who led South Africa from 1999 to 2008, was the head mediator between Mugabe and his arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai after violent attacks followed disputed polls in 2008.

Mugabe and rival Morgan Tsvangirai formed a power-sharing government which ended with Mugabe’s election victory on July 31 this year.

Mbeki had always called for a negotiated solution, resisting neo-colonialism.

“Why does it become a British responsibility to decide who leads the people of Zimbabwe?” he told Al-Jazeera.

In November 2007 Zimbabwe put its military on high alert after retired UK army chief Lord Charles Guthrie said London had discussed invading its former colony during Tony Blair’s premiership.

Mugabe, 89, has governed since former Rhodesia won its independence in 1980.

Relations with Britain turned sour after land reform programmes seized farms from white farmers without compensation — the majority of them of British descent — to give to black farmers.

On the same day stories of an affair between Blair and Wendy Deng, the Chinese wife of press mogul Rupert Murdoch, also surfaced again. Sources close to Murdoch in London claim that Blair, 60, and Deng, 44, had ‘multiple encounters’ without 82-year-old Murdoch’s knowledge.

Blair denied an affair with Deng. A ‘terminal’ rift has severed relations between Murdoch and Blair however over reports of Blair’s friendship with the entrepreneur’s wife.

A friend of Murdoch said: “Rupert Murdoch will have nothing more to do with Tony Blair. Not ever.”

The Iraq disaster haunts America

By Eric Margolis

March 2013 the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.

In October, 2002, I wrote a cover-story about Iraq for the first issue of American Conservative magazine, entitled “The March to Folly.” My article predicted the impending invasion of Iraq would be a disaster for all concerned.

The only victor of war with Iraq War, I wrote, would be Israel, whose nuclear monopoly and regional domination would be assured. So it has come to be.

Iraq was split into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. Anger against the US reached new intensity. The titanic bill for the Iraq War was $1 trillion, all of its hidden in the ballooning US national debt. Nearly 5,000 US soldiers were killed; some 50,000 wounded, many with grave brain injuries. Iraqi casualties are uncertain, though the total is likely over one million.

Parts of Iraq are contaminated by US and British depleted uranium munitions. Diseases, wiped out under the late Saddam Hussein, have returned. Saddam’s sadistic secret police have been replaced by almost equally cruel security forces of the US-backed Baghdad regime. Once among the most advanced Arab nations, much of Iraq today is ruined. At least it no longer threatens its neighbors.

Amazingly, America’s right wing and media still hails this disaster as a victory. Many Americans still believe the Bush administration’s lies that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. Some also still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that threatened North America.

The politicians who concocted this war, namely George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, have escaped any criminal censure for misleading their people into a conflict whose goal was to grab Iraq’s vast oil reserves and crush an enemy of Israel.

Similarly, the many print and TV journalists and commentators who acted as cheer-leaders for the war and its bodyguard of lies remain prominently in public view today. So too the so-called military experts who championed the war. Instead of slinking away after the war, they simply switched their aim to Iran.

Most shockingly, the insidious role of the pro-war neoconservatives in promoting the war was never fully revealed to Americans. Yet for a time, a pro-Israel neocon cabal linked up with aggressive big oil men like Cheney and Rumsfeld to drive the US into a totally unnecessary war against former US ally, Saddam Hussein. Israel’s leader, Ariel Sharon, thundered, “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.”

The small number of American journalists, Mideast analysts, CIA and State Department experts who dared challenge Bush’s absurd claims about Iraq’s supposed nukes and “drones of death” lost their jobs and have been sidelined to this day.

This writer, for example, was one of the first to assert in public that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no means of delivery even if it did. For my pains, I was blacklisted by a major US national TV network for whom I had regularly broadcast. Other blacklistings followed.

Bush’s modern-day Crusade against Iraq discredited the mainstream media in the eyes of many younger Americans and led to their growing reliance on their internet. Polls showed that only 24% of Americans trusted media to tell them the facts. The US media, with key exceptions, had followed the old Soviet media in acting as a mouthpiece for the government instead of a tribune for the public.

The Iraq War accelerated the militarization of US society and conduct of foreign affairs, and further curtailed individual freedoms endangered by the attacks of 9/11. It left the US saddled with a crushing debt. While bridges and roads across America were crumbling, the US was spending $80 billion on “rebuilding” Iraq. Nearly all this money was stolen and never seen again.

The crushing of Iraq, a small nation of 24 million rent by rebellion and wrecked by sanctions, was shamelessly trumpeted by the US media and politicians as a titanic victory for American arms akin to World War II. The aged US Republican leader John McCain, made giddy by the jolly little war in Iraq, sang, “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

As King Pyrrhus exclaimed in 279 BC after a brutal, bloody battle, “one more such victory and we are lost.”

The great ‘non-story’ of Iraq

By Neil Clark

Another day and yet more death and destruction in the Middle East country.

The latest violence has killed at least 54 people and injured over 100 others. In July, over 1,000 people were killed and over 2,300 wounded.

You probably think I’m talking about Syria. But I’m not. I’m talking about Iraq. The country that George W. Bush and Tony Blair ‘liberated’ in 2003. The western military intervention was, we were told, going to usher in a wonderful era of democracy, freedom and human rights. Instead, it has ushered in an appalling decade-long blood-fest, with ordinary Iraqis having to endure a living nightmare of life in what has become one of the most dangerous countries on earth.

Rather like Sherlock Holmes’ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the silence of pro-war commentators and politicians when it comes to the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq is most revealing.

The same elite figures in the West who couldn’t stop writing or talking about Iraq in 2002 and early 2003, telling us what a terrible threat Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were to us all, and how we needed to go to war with Iraq not only to disarm its evil dictator but to ‘liberate’ its people, are now silent in the light of the continuing bloodshed and havoc that the illegal invasion caused. In the run up to the invasion of March 2003, you couldn’t switch on a television news program in Britain or America without seeing a neo-con or ‘liberal interventionist’ obsessing about Iraq. In the lead-up to war, these great ‘humanitarians’ feigned concern for the plight of Iraqis living under Saddam’s dictatorship – but today show little or no concern for the plight of Iraqis being blown to pieces by bombs on a regular, almost daily basis. There are no calls from the ‘usual suspects’ for a Western ‘humanitarian’ intervention to stop the killing in Iraq. For these serial interventionists, Iraq, post-invasion, has become the greatest ‘non-story’ of the modern era. Instead, the same people who couldn’t stop talking about Iraq in 2002-2003 now can’t stop talking about Syria – feigning concern over the plight of Syrians in the same way they shed crocodile tears over Iraqis in early 2003.

It’s interesting that when it comes to casualty tolls, pro-war politicians can tell us exactly how many people have died in Syria since the violence started there in 2011, (and of course for them, all the deaths are the personal responsibility of President Assad), whereas when it comes to Iraq and the number of people who have been killed there since March 2003, there’s a great deal more vagueness. “We don’t do body counts on other people” Donald Rumsfeld famously declared in November 2003. The Iraqis killed since March 2003 (and casualty figures vary from around 174,000 to well over one million) are, for our political elite, ‘non-people.’ In 2013, it’s only dead Syrians (and Syrians whose deaths can be blamed on Syrian government forces) that matter – not dead Iraqis.

Because Iraq is deemed a ’non-story’ and our leaders never talk about the situation there, it’s no surprise to see that public perceptions of the death toll are way below even the most conservative estimates. Sixty-six percent of Britons in a poll earlier this year estimated that 20,000 or fewer Iraqis had died since the invasion of 2003. Donald Rumsfeld would no doubt be delighted to hear that.

If they had any sense of shame, the people who have destroyed Iraq would at least have had the grace to retire from public life. But neo-cons and liberal imperialists don’t do shame or remorse. The same bunch of ’humanitarian’ interventionists and hawks who urged the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have spent the last two years propagandizing for an attack on Syria. These manic warmongers would rather we ‘move on’ from Iraq to focus on the next Middle Eastern country on their hit list. But we must never ’move on’ from Iraq until those who destroyed the country are put in the dock. The chaos and bloodshed we see in Iraq today is a direct consequence of the destabilizing and destructive neo-con policies of the US and Britain and those responsible for ‘the supreme international crime’ of waging a war of aggression against a sovereign state must be held to account for the enormous amount of human misery they have caused.

Malawians offered cash to arrest visiting Blair

Until recently, Tony Blair had never visited Malawi. Last summer there was a lot of international press coverage on the discovery of oil under Lake Malawi. Since then he’s developed an interest in the country’s “governance” and has visited twice in nine months.

He arrives in Malawi today, having successfully shoehorned a couple of staffers from his “Africa Governance Initiative” into high-level advisery roles with Joyce Banda’s government.

It’s anyone’s guess why Blair still believes he and his cronies are worth listening to. Presumably for the same reason he saw fit to rack up bills of £1m a year at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem while working as a “peace envoy”. (He’s obviously doing a terrific job and no doubt the Middle East will be at peace any time now). Egyptians know him as an astute analyst of international affairs — remember how he pointed out that Mubarak was “an immensely courageous and a force for good” in, ahem, February 2011?

One thing Blair is very good at is getting large amounts of cash out of governments (just ask Kazakhstan) by riding the global gravy train for all it’s worth. He’s also good at setting up mystifying financial structures so nobody knows where he’s channeling his money.

It will certainly be a boost for him to be photographed with Malawi’s president, Joyce Banda, who despite facing a vigorous opposition at home nonetheless has far greater credibility on the international scene than he does (just last year Desmond Tutu called for Blair to be tried for his crimes at the Hague).

Malawians should protest against Blair’s visit and show Banda that she shouldn’t welcome such a person to Malawi, still less take any advice from him. The man who led the disastrous New Labour project in the UK, as well as waging two catastrophic wars, can have nothing useful to tell Banda. Malawian readers will understand what I mean when I say that Tony Blair is a stupid man. He will have plenty to say about things like “strengthening capacity” but it seems that the only thing Blair has shown a consistent commitment to is exploiting his former office in order to accrue vast personal wealth.

It should be noted that anybody who attempts to arrest Tony Blair during his Malawian safari can receive approximately 1.1 million Kwacha (£2,150), thanks to the Arrest Blair campaign established by British journalist George Monbiot. Here’s a helpful guide to making a citizen’s arrest, and the rules about how to make sure you get the cash.

Malawians like to reflect on their history by observing that they are a peace-loving people. As Blair arrives in the country, they should tell him only one thing: Choka! – The Guardian

Libya, Syria, Lies, Perfidies and Tony Blair

by Felicity Arbuthnot

Having learned nothing from the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, it seems President Obama, the equally clueless UK Prime Minister Cameron and his culturally challenged Foreign Secretary William Hague are cheerleading another bloodbath in formerly peaceful, secular, outward looking Syria.

Having covertly provided arms and equipment to insurgents from numerous different countries for over two years, they have now moved to the overt stage, a move over which even arch hawks such as former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former Republican Senator Richard Luger, six term leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged caution.

Luger said such action would boost extremists, with Brzezinski dismissing Obama’s talk of “red lines” as thoughtless and risking “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”

During Brzezinski’s time as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter the decision was made to finance the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to Soviet deployment there. He’s had a bit of time to reflect on blowback and perhaps the 2,243 wasted US lives in that “graveyard of empires” – so far.

It seems, however, the Washington and Whitehall regimes remain increasingly disconnected from reality. In spite of the plethora of gruesome images circulating on the internet of grinning terrorists holding up severed heads, cannibalising body organs and summarily executing, they are to provide further arms to insurgency’s Hannibal Lecters. This, also regardless of the fact that Riad al-Assad, founder of the so-called “Free Syrian Army” is quoted as saying that suicide bombing is “an integral part of revolutionary action, of Free Syrian Army action.”

Meanwhile, less than a month after the murder of a soldier in London’s Woolwich by wanna be jihadists (with reported relationship to hard drugs) Britain’s increasingly rudderless ship of state allows entry to a controversial Saudi preacher, Muhamed Al Arefe, alleged to have made anti-Shia and anti-Semitic exhortations and who argues that a husband “may use beatings to discipline his wife” as long as he beats her “lightly.”

Informed friends from the Middle East charge bluntly that he recruits jihadists, as last week in visits Riyadh and Cairo. One added:

David Cameron may as well stand at the gate (of the Mosque) and hand out arms for the ‘good freedom fighters’ who will be heading to Syria after hearing Arefe’s sickening lies, sectarian incitement and calls for jihad against the ‘infidel regime’.

This was not a low key occasion. Arefe spoke at the London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre, built on land donated by King George V1 to the Muslim Community of Britain. The Cultural Centre was officially opened by the King in 1944. The Mosque, completed in 1978, which can hold over five thousand worshippers in the main hall alone, was designed by renowned architect Sir Frederick Gibberd. Quite a platform for any recruiter.

However, Obama and Cameron hardly need to arm terrorists. They are seemingly doing fine, via the US-UK-NATO last mega screw up: Libya.

This week it was reported that weapons are flooding in to Syria from a Libya awash with weapons, “with spy chiefs saying” that the country has become a supermarket “of the world’s illegal arms trade.”

“Up to 3,000 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) have gone missing since the conflict” with more than “one million tonnes of weapons belonging to Colonel Quaddaffi” looted after his terrible death at the hands of NATO’s “allies”.

Potentially that is enough SAMs to down 3,000 airliners.

The Daily Mail understands that, unsecured “ … there are now more weapons in Libya than in the entire arsenal of the British Army” according to MI6 estimates.

One internet video showed a stockpile of SAMs, which can hit an aircraft flying at 11,000 feet, in the hands of the Syrian insurgents. Used from airport perimeters anywhere, the result could be tragedy.

However, Akhbar Alaan TV reports Benghazi has been supplying weapons to the Syrian terrorists for “over a year.” With pictures they “show the shipments from Libya, via Turkey to the Syrian opposition.”

The TV station’s reporter states:

Their own Libyan revolution was supported by NATO … But these former Libyan rebels say the world is abandoning the Syrian opposition. And because of that Benghazi decided to act …

Further:

All these weapons are donated by former rebel units in eastern Libya … According to the Libyan organizer they also have shipped around 120 SAM 7 surface to air-missiles to Syria.

Rebel units were, of course, aided by US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, who arrived in a cargo ship loaded with arms (news, websites) and was murdered with colleagues in Benghazi on 11 September 2012.

According to the New York Times, Qatari C-17 cargo planes, capable of carrying a payload of over 70 tonnes, have picked up a weapons shipment at least three times this year, which were then delivered to the Turkish-Syrian border to be handed on to the “rebels”.

British-Libyan arms dealer Abdul Basit Haroun – who was a property developer in Manchester, UK for twenty years, until 2011 – has told Reuters that weapons are reaching Syria not alone by numerous flights, but on ships, concealed amongst humanitarian aid. Haroun has claimed that the authorities know about the shipment, “everybody knows”.

Further, Libyan Assembly Member Tawfiq Shehabi has said he supports the activitites of people like Haroun, who was a brigade commander during the Libyan uprising: “After the end of the (uprising) he became involved in supporting the Syrian revolution … he does a good job of supporting the Syrian revolution.”

Claims are that permission for shipments is sought from, and sanctioned by, Turkey. The UN has criticized Libya for proliferating weapons at an “alarming rate” and for “enriching the arsenals of a range of non-State actors, including terrorist groups.”

Reuters interviewed Haroun and a reporter was taken to a container of weapons being prepared for delivery to Syria “… stacked with boxes of ammunition, rocket launchers and various types of light and medium weapons.”

Arms are flown in to “neighbouring countries on chartered flights”, several to Jordan as well as Turkey, “weapons were then transferred over the border.”

In Libya, the versatile Mr Haroun “helps the government with state security, according to interior ministry spokesman Majdi al-Ourfi.”

Quite an own goal, NATO.

But no lessons have been learned. On Saturday (22 June) the ridiculously named, eleven nation “Friends of Syria”, meeting in Qatar, agreed to supply “all the necessary material” to the insurgents. Britain, with the US, is, of course, cheerleading.

This in spite of warnings from such as Charles Lister, analyst at HIS – Jane’s Terrorist and Insurgency Centre – of the danger that weapons “almost invariably end up in the hands of” terrorists and extremists, and possibly even back in Britain.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the army, said last week he was “very much in the camp of those who would not wish to be involved and intervene in any shape or form”, with Major General Julian Thompson, who commanded British forces in the Falklands War in 1982, saying it was “absolutely ridiculous” to contemplate another intervention …and getting involved with something else” whilst still mired in Afghanistan after nearly twelve years.

“Our information from Doha says that five countries have decided to start arming us immediately, and four other countries will give us logistical and technical support and, at a later stage, arm the Free Syrian Army,” a spokesman for the opposition fighters, Loay Al Mikdad, said in an interview with Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV.

Incredibly, with not a glance towards legality, the Doha plotters “repeated their call for the establishment of a transitional governing body to which full executive powers would be transferred … Bashar Assad has no role in the transitional governing body or thereafter.”

However, Syria is a founding Member of the UN, one of the fifty one countries who signed to the Charter on 26 June 1945. Member States of the United Nations are bound by the UN Charter.

Article 2 (4) states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Article 2 (1) The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

Article 2 (2) All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

Further:

The UN’s 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States directs:

No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.

Consequently, armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the state or against its political economic and cultural elements are in violation of international law.

Recalling the duty of States to refrain in their international relations from military, political, economic or any other form of coercion aimed against the political independence or territorial integrity of any State,

Considering it essential that all States shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations,

In accordance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations, States have the duty to refrain from propaganda for wars of aggression.

Every State has the duty to refrain from organizing or encouraging the organization of irregular forces or armed bands including mercenaries, for incursion into the territory of another State.

Every State has the duty to refrain from organizing, instigating, assisting or participating in acts of civil strife or terrorist acts in another State or acquiescing in organized activities within its territory directed towards the commission of such acts, when the acts referred to in the present paragraph involve a threat or use of force.

End note. That Middle East “Peace Envoy” Tony Blair who lied his way into the destruction of Iraq, kissed his welcoming host Colonel Gaddafi then betrayed him worthy of any Judas, has entertained President Assad.

In 2002, when Bashir al Assad visited Britain, met the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and dined with Blair at Downing Street, it was considered bestowing an honour on the President.

According to documents, on November 14, 2002, a desk officer covering Syria and Lebanon at the Foreign and Commonwealth office wrote:

You should be aware that President Bashar of Syria will visit the U.K. as a guest of government … This will include an audience with the queen. I have been advised that we need to consider whether the queen should bestow an honor on him.

Blair is, of course, cheer leading for Syria’s destruction: “A spokesperson for Tony Blair defended the actions of the government under the former PM, stating, “Engagement with Syria and Assad in 2002 was absolutely right … Mr. Blair has said many times since that the situation has changed and Assad now has to go.”

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in the Great City series for World Almanac books

Mandela too soft on whites, says Mugabe in documentary

by Johannes Myburgh

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe criticises Nelson Mandela for being too soft on whites, in a documentary giving a rare and intimate look into the family life of one of Africa’s longest serving and most vilified leaders.

In a cosy lunch setting with his wife and children, the 89-year old speaks on a wide range of issues from his controversial hold on power, to his relationships with former British premiers Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.

The two-and-a-half hour interview, described in detail by British and South African media ahead of its airing, shows the usually bellicose and sharp-tongued Mugabe as a loving family man.

Dali Tambo, the son of South African anti-apartheid hero Oliver Tambo, produced the documentary, which will be broadcast on South African public television next Sunday.

In the programme Tambo dines with Mugabe’s family at his wife Grace’s dairy farm.

The interview comes just months before crucial general elections in the country which in recent decades has gone from being the breadbasket of southern Africa to its biggest problem child.

One of Africa’s most popular liberation leaders, Mugabe has clashed with the West over controversial policies which saw white-owned farms violently seized over a decade ago.

In neighbouring South Africa, where white land ownership is still a flashpoint, Mugabe says former president Nelson Mandela was not hard enough.

He said former colonial masters Britain — with whom he has had a fraught relationship over the land grabs — “will praise you only if you are doing things that please them”.

“Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of (blacks),” Mugabe said of his former South African counterpart.

“That’s being too saintly, too good, too much of a saint,” he is quoted from the documentary in South Africa’s Sunday Independent.

Despite Mugabe’s disagreements with former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who died in April, he says he preferred the Iron Lady to her later successor Tony Blair.

“Mrs Thatcher, you could trust her. But of course what happened later was a different story with the Labour Party and Blair, who you could never trust,” said Mugabe.

“Who can ever believe what Mr Blair says? Here we call him Bliar.”

But despite having governed for 32 years, Africa’s oldest ruler also insists on staying in power.

According to The Guardian in Britain, the topic of the upcoming vote unleashes Mugabe’s fiery rhetoric as he bangs his fist on an armrest and insists: “There is a fight to fight.”

“My people still need me,” he told Tambo.

“And when people still need you to lead them, it’s not time, sir, it doesn’t matter how old you are, to say goodbye.”

Mugabe is currently sharing power with his rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai after violent disputed polls in 2008. No date has yet been set for this year’s elections although Mugabe is pressing for them to go ahead as soon as possible.

Tambo, 54, brushed off criticism that the programme — which will air as part of his “People of the South” television series that profiles celebrities and public figures — polishes Mugabe’s image ahead of the vote.

He told the Sunday Independent that he had also interviewed Rhodesian leader Ian Smith for a previous series.

Mugabe was “warm, charismatic and very humorous”, Tambo said.

According to The Guardian, Mugabe pours out his heart during the meal on his love for his wife and their “oneness”.

In unusual candour Mugabe also explains his affair with Grace while still married to his sickly first wife Sally — he wanted to give his mother grandchilden.

“As Sally was still going through her last few days, although it might have appeared to some as cruel, I said to myself ‘well, it’s not just myself needing children, my mother has all the time said, ah, am I going to die without seeing grandchildren’.”

He married Grace, his secretary over 40 years his junior, after Sally Mugabe died in 1992.

The couple have three children. – Sapa