Tag Archives: Iraq Inquiry

| Tony Blair: never in the field of human history has one man earned so much from deaths of so many!

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Tony Blair: never in the field of human history has one man earned so much from deaths of so many ~ Matt Carr, Stop the War Coalition, Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine.

Just as we learned that the US and UK governments were conspiring to stop us learning the truth of the Bush-Blair Iraq consiracy, Tony Blair picked up £150,000 for an hour-long speech in Dubai!

Blair war crimes

In the last fortnight a number of media commentators accused Russell Brand of naivete and political ignorance for his criticisms of the democratic system and the limitations of the right to vote.

This week however, the British public were presented with further evidence of how hollowed-out the democratic process has become, when the Chilcot Inquiry revealed that it was being denied access to 25 notes sent by Tony Blair to George Bush, and 130 documents relating to conversations between the two architects of the Iraq War, in addition to dozens of records of cabinet meetings.

There is no more serious decision that a government can take than a declaration of war, and there is no more serious test of a democracy than the ability to hold its leaders to account over why and how such decisions are taken, especially when a war is declared on false pretenses and results in a tragic and bloody disaster of the magnitude of the Iraq War.

The Chilcot Inquiry was established by Gordon Brown with the fairly mild remit to establish ‘lessons’ from the Iraq war, rather than ‘apportion blame.’ Much to its own surprise no doubt, it has shown more teeth than anyone expected, to the point when its investigations threaten the reputations – and the cash flow – of those responsible.

Today these noble statesmen have moved on. Bush now paints pictures of dogs and puppies, and makes donations to an organization that seeks to convert Jews into Christians. When he talks about Iraq at all it’s only to say that like Edith Piaf and Dick Cheney, he doesn’t regret anything.

Nor does his partner-in-crime, the Right Honorable Tony Blair, Peace Envoy and all-round money-making machine, who just gets richer and richer, and continues to urge on new wars with the same combination of bug-eyed fanaticism, pig ignorance and deference that once produced such sterling results in Iraq.

This week he picked up £150,000 for an hour-long speech in Dubai, whose subject, apparently, was something called ‘global affairs’. To paraphrase Churchill, never in the field of human history has one man earned so much from the deaths of so many.

And people are still dying in the broken country and interminable battlefield that Iraq has become. Yesterday, 67 Shi’ite pilgrims were killed and 152 more wounded in sectarian attacks on the Ashura celebrations in Karbala.

This year, more than 6,000 people have died in Iraq – exactly ten years after it was ‘liberated’ and its society effectively destroyed by the madcap free market experiment, the incredibly botched occupation, the lies and manipulations, the death squads, the suicide bombers and all the other disastrous consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

That matters, and should matter most of all in the countries that made it happen. Yet now we find that the inquiry established to ‘learn lessons’ from the war will not be able to know what the two men most responsible for this bloody debacle were saying to each other, or what Blair was saying – or not saying – to his cabinet.

If a democratic society cannot establish mechanisms to hold its elected officials to account over a war that amounts to one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in British history – a war that according to the Nuremberg process amounts to a war of aggression and the ‘supreme crime’ then it is not serious.

If such a society allows those responsible to cloak themselves in secrecy on spurious grounds of reasons of state that are designed to protect them from scrutiny – then such a democracy is essentially a simulacrum, an elite-managed spectacle, a Darren Brown magic trick that provides the illusion, but not the substance of public participation in the political process.

It means that democracy is a kind of theatre, in which the public is allowed to play a limited role, like the audience in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or Strictly Come Dancing, and press a buzzer for this party or that party, but it cannot be privy to the backrooms where politicians and civil servants take decisions without consultation and without explanation.

That is why it matters that the US State Department and Whitehall are conniving to keep Bush and Blair’s machinations under wraps. One of the key individuals who is blocking the Chilcot Inquiry’s access to key documents is Sir Jeremy Heywood, the UK’s most senior civil servant, formerly private secretary to Tony Blair during the lead-up to the Iraq War.

To expect such a man to behave otherwise is a bit like expecting MacBeth to hold a public inquiry into the murder of King Duncan.

But Heywood should not be allowed to get away with it, and nor should the Coalition, which is also complicit in this cover-up. All of them clearly hope that Chilcot will just go ahead without these documents and produce some polite and-all-very British pseudo-criticism that Blair can agree to and no one will pay any attention to.

Then everyone will agree that lessons have been ‘learned’, when we won’t have learned anything at all. We shouldn’t let this happen. Because it isn’t just about them and it isn’t just about Iraq. It’s also about us.

Because if a government can get away with this, it can get away with anything.

Source: Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine

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ON SELF-SERVING TONY B’LIAR + BLOOD-MONEY tr_newlogo-blogbg

Regarding the muppet called Tony Blair, 
Remember he had all Iraq bombed from the air. 
Then with great decorum, 
He set up a multi-faith forum, 
So now is a smug millionaire!

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| David Cameron blocks report that exposes Tony Blair’s Iraq war crimes!

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David Cameron blocks report that exposes Tony Blair’s Iraq war crimes ~ Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition.

David Cameron is blocking publication of the Iraq Inquiry report because it confirms a secret conspiracy by Bush and Blair to take the US and Britain into an illegal war. 

While David Cameron was laying wreaths of poppies at the Cenotaph this weekend, to remember the past war dead, he has been blocking an inquiry set up to tell the truth about the war in Iraq.

That is the meaning of the refusal of the Cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to release records of conversations between then prime minister and US president George Bush, in the run up to the war on Iraq.

Blair lied thousands diedDemonstration at Iraq Inquiry on 29January 2010 when Tony Blair gave evidence.

These records have been demanded repeatedly by the Chilcot inquiry, set up when Gordon Brown was prime minister, back in 2009. Chilcot said then that his inquiry would take a year and a half, or maybe a bit longer. That would have seen it report over two years ago. But now its publication date has been pushed back into 2014 at least.

While many people were always sceptical that Chilcot’s team, handpicked from the British establishment, would land a mortal blow on the former prime minister who now poses as envoy for peace in the Middle East, at the same time no one expected the report to take so long. The hold up will be because the aforementioned Tony Blair wants it to be held up, and he would not be able to do so without the collusion of Cameron.

So whereas the Chilcot Inquiry was set up supposedly to investigate what went wrong in the run up to war in Iraq, the very people responsible for what went wrong are blocking its publication. Tony Blair remains at large urging us on to further wars, most recently in Syria.

In the meantime, records of an estimated 130 conversations between Blair and Bush and then Brown and Bush are being blocked by this top civil servant. In addition there are 25 notes from Blair to Bush and 200 cabinet level discussions also being withheld. This adds up to a lot of conversations, the majority probably damaging to Bush and Blair.

There is a lot at stake here, because Chilcot is trying to get at the precise point at which Blair agreed to go to war alongside Bush over Iraq.

If, as many of us suspect, this deal was made early in 2002, a full year before the invasion actually took place, it would show a conspiracy to go to war which not only ignored its legality or otherwise, but also a wilful series of deceits carried out by Blair and his allies.

The whole charade of government actions in the months before the war would be shown to be just that: the 45 minutes dossier, the distortion of intelligence findings, the demands for a second UN resolution, the blaming of the French for scuppering such a resolution, the pretence of wanting peace if Saddam Hussein would give up his (non existent)weapons of mass destruction.

All these were just so much spin and softening up, trying to get the public and MPs to agree to a war which had already been decided on, and which was clearly about regime change.

Blair’s tactic now is to delay as long as possible in the hope that time will soften opinion against him, and that he will be able to continue in a highly political role. Compare Blair’s role in international politics to that of any previous modern British prime minister to see how centrally, lucratively, and damagingly, involved he still is. A hostile Chilcot report would make it impossible for him to continue that role, and would open up the long overdue possibility of his facing war crimes proceedings.

As government ministers huff and puff about whistleblowers’ revelations about state surveillance, we should remember that they have a lot to hide. All discussions between the main protagonists in taking us to war in Iraq should be made public so we can judge for ourselves who was at fault. There is no justifiable reason for secrecy except to save the faces of those involved, and to allow them to remain rich, powerful and protected.

We owe it to the millions who suffered from the Iraq war and to the millions who demonstrated against it, to ensure that the truth comes out.

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| Hubris: Iraq may be broken, but it is our political class that is bankrupted!

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Iraq may be broken, but it is our political class that is bankrupted ~ GEORGE GALLOWAY, The Independent.

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Virtually nothing has been learned, and now history is repeating itself.

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The finest of all journalists in the English-speaking world, Claud Cockburn, said:

“Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.” This basic rubric of the trade was all but abandoned a decade ago in the run-up to the war on Iraq, when every official claim was assumed to be true and those who denied it were treated as bad, or even mad. One honourable exception was Cockburn’s son, Patrick, in The Independent, an exception continued in his magisterial look back in anger in this newspaper over the past week. If journalism is history’s first draft, then Patrick Cockburn’s work on Iraq will prove to be close to the finished article.

I mention this not just because I remain bitter at the role of the fourth estate in helping to bring about such slaughter and, a decade later, such ongoing misery in Iraq. But because virtually nothing has been learned, and history is repeating itself over and over again – in Libya, Mali, Syria.

Bob Dylan said in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” that “you have to pay to get out of, going through all this twice…”. For the most part, the bill continues to be paid by others, and elsewhere. For now.

Even for someone with my experience, such militarised mendacity can still take the breath away. How many times did you read and listen in the past few days to pontificating pundits tell you that Hugo Chavez had “wrecked” the Venezuelan economy, without a whiff of self-consciousness about the state of our own and that of the United States? That Chavez’s Venezuela was a “divided” society; as if Bush, Obama, Cameron, and Osborne led governments of national unity?

To briefly recap; a huge right-wing conspiracy was mounted 10 years ago to manufacture a case to wage aggressive war (pace Nuremberg, the “ultimate crime”) upon Iraq. It involved government ministers (some still swilling around profitably in the detritus they created); intelligence agencies and the spin doctors controlling them; craven parliamentarians scarcely worthy of the name; and a veritable army of scribblers, autocue readers, laptop bombardiers and think-tankers.

Add a sprinkling of useful idiots calling themselves “liberals”, and the blue touchpaper was lit. A million died, thousands of them British and American. Millions spread as refugees around the world. A country was dismembered, never to be reassembled. Extremism cascaded around the world, blowing itself up even aboard London buses.

The whole “humanitarian” show is best remembered in the pictures from Abu Ghraib. A female American soldier, cigarette dangling from her curling lip, leading a hooded naked Iraqi prisoner like a dog on a chain. Piling naked helpless Iraqi prisoners on top of each other and forcing them to commit indecent acts, videoing it all for the entertainment of the barracks later. Those tempted to imagine this was American exceptionalism should read the proceedings of the London court this week where, inter alia, we learned of the Iraqi corpse who may or may not have walked into British custody alive, but who surely was handed back to his family minus his penis. It doesn’t get much uglier than this, especially when it’s all dressed up in the livery of liberal “intervention”.

Millions of us knew that it would end this way, even before it became clear that the entire conspiracy was built on the tower – bigger than Babel – of lies around “weapons of mass destruction”. There were none. But the weapons of mass deception deployed by the conspirators remain in fine fettle. And none of them has even been properly inspected yet. No one has been held to account; not a single head has rolled. Except those of a million Iraqis.

When the Chilcot Inquiry was announced, I denounced it in Parliament as a parade of establishment duffers, two of whom at least had been among the intellectual authors of the disaster, one of whom had described Bush and Blair as the Roosevelt and Churchill de nos jours. I pointed out that there was not a single legal personality on the Inquiry, or a soldier. And not a Douglas Hurd or a Menzies Campbell among them either. That no one could be summoned, nor their papers either. That no one would be testifying under oath. That must have been three years ago now. Little did I know that the Chilcot report would be as slow in coming as the judgement day.

Iraq is broken now, and as Cockburn’s recent reports show, Iraqi hearts haven’t mended either. It was a disaster, the greatest British policy failure since the First World War.

But for as long as its lessons are not learned, the Iraqis will not be the last such victims. The Iraq war bankrupted the British and American political class. They no longer speak for the people they claim to represent. Few believe any longer anything they say. Long before Leveson summed up the venality of much of the media – the echo chamber of that class – the people were abandoning that media in droves. Like our other institutions – the banks and the police, to name but two – their credibility stands in ruins. Devastated even more starkly than were Fallujah, Amariyah and Baghdad.

Saddam’s presidential palaces turned out to be bare, but not as bereft as the democratic political leaders who propelled him to the gallows. The trap door has opened for them. And they are still falling.

George Galloway is the Respect MP for Bradford West

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