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War and Terror: The politics of the U.S. envoy for war crimes
Monday, December 14 @ 15:31:04 UTC |  “Some senior British military officials…suggested privately that Blair, Donald Rumsfeld and others should be charged with war crimes…” [1]
By Stephen Gowans
December 14, 2009 - gowans.wordpress.com
Through countless wars – Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and yes, even WWII – the United States has amassed a long record of war crimes, from the abuse and torture of prisoners to the bombing of civilians and the deliberate destruction of hydroelectric dams, sewage and water treatment facilities, factories, bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, and dwellings.
The United States has also played an active role in facilitating Israel’s war crimes, while at the same time obstructing efforts to bring Israeli war criminals to account.
But not only is the United States one of history’s boldest war criminal states, it is also one of the most brazenly hypocritical.
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War and Terror: Radar Love: Robbing the Cradle to Pay War Profiteers
Monday, January 29 @ 18:59:59 UTC | By Chris Floyd, chris-floyd.com
January 27, 2007
I. Out of Africa - Into Corporate Coffers
Another day, yet another scandal involving the saintly Tony Blair and highly connected Anglo-American arms peddlers. The British prime minister, who, like George W. Bush, has made his sleeve-worn Christianity a major component of his political persona, is knee-deep in a corruption probe once again, just weeks after peremptorily quashing an official investigation into bribes, kickbacks and influence-peddling allegations involving his government, his corporate cronies and the Saudi royals. (See "War Profits Trump the Rule of Law," Truthout.org, December 22).
The new arms scandal is possibly even more morally egregious than the Saudi deal. While the latter involved backroom baksheesh between two wealthy governments and a fat-cat corporation, the latest imbroglio literally tore desperately needed aid from the hands of some of the world's poorest children. And as with the Saudi bribefest, it was Blair's personal intervention that put the profits of an arms dealer above all other considerations.
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War and Terror: Entrapment in Miami, More Patsy Arrests in London
Monday, September 04 @ 07:53:09 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
September 02nd 2006
For AG Gonzales and the Federal Bureau of Precrime, Narseal Batiste was a threat because he was delusional and talked of waging jihad against the United States with a bow and arrows. "Our philosophy here is that we try to identify plots in the earliest stages possible, because we don't know what we don't know about a terrorist plot," said Gonzales. "It's dangerous to evaluate in advance whether 'this is a really dangerous group; this is not a dangerous group,'" in other words, all are suspect, especially when they have an FBI agent provocateur to nudge them along.
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War and Terror: Terror Plot Cooked by US and UK Operatives
Monday, August 14 @ 15:56:31 UTC | By Wayne Madsen
Former NSA Official
waynemadsenreport.com
August 11 2006
According to knowledgeable sources in the UK and other countries, the Tony Blair government, under siege by a Labor Party revolt, cleverly cooked up a new "terror" scare to avert the public's eyes away from Blair's increasing political woes. British law enforcement; neo-con and intelligence operatives in the United States, Israel, and Britain; and Rupert Murdoch's global media empire cooked up the terrorist plot, liberally borrowing from the failed 1995 "Oplan Bojinka" plot by Pakistan- and Philippines-based terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef to crash 11 trans-Pacific airliners bound from Asia to the United States. In the latest plot, it is reported that liquid bombs were to be detonated on 10 trans-Atlantic planes outbound from Britain to the United States.
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Invasion of Iraq: The Hardest Word
Sunday, May 28 @ 03:01:09 UTC | by Scott Ritter, guardian.co.uk
One has to wonder as to what must have been going through the minds of those who were advising George W Bush and Tony Blair to "come clean", so to speak, about their respective shortcomings regarding the conduct of the war in Iraq. With over 2,460 American and 106 UK soldiers killed in Iraq (not to mention untold thousands of dead Iraqis), the two people in the world most responsible for the ongoing debacle in Iraq displayed the combination of indifference and ignorance that got them neck deep in a quagmire of their own making to begin with.
President Bush kicked himself for "talking too tough", while the British prime minister ruminated on the decision to disband the Ba'athist infrastructure that held Iraq together in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein. Neither expressed any regret over the decision to invade Iraq in the first place.
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War and Terror: They Did it Their Way
Tuesday, May 16 @ 10:57:23 UTC | So They Have No One To Blame But Themselves
Bush and Blair are trying to offset the unpopularity of their chosen war by appealing to a verdict of history we will never hear
by Gary Younge, guardian.co.uk
If democracy is supposed to represent the will of the people, then there is either something wrong with the democracies or something wrong with the people on both sides of the Atlantic. Less than two years ago George Bush was re-elected president of the United States. His pitch: "Stick with me, I have not done a thing wrong." His promise: "I will do more of the same." Six months later Tony Blair went to the polls with a similar message.
Both were elected. Both have since been as good their word. With the exception of Dick Cheney's poor marksmanship and John Prescott's priapism there have been no real surprises since then.
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World Focus: Gilding imperialism's friendly mask
Thursday, January 29 @ 08:13:25 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
January 25, 2004 www3.sympatico.ca
Sweep away the mendacity of all the high-faulting pretexts for war, and still life goes on as it always has. Bush and Blair are liars, but so what? Anyone who had as few as two functioning neurons banging around their cranium could figure out that Saddam's cupboard was bare of weapons of mass destruction, and that the secular Baathists had no time for the religious fanatics of al-Qaeda. Besides which, who were the US and UK, two countries stuffed to the gunnels with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, which have never seen fit to be bound by international law, to say Iraq, or anyone else, couldn't have the weapons they themselves can't seem to get enough of? Is it that Washington and London and their imperialist rivals seek to preserve their monopoly over devastating weapons so they can push other countries around, without having to face stiff resistance -- that is, so they can continue to be imperialist powers, reaping imperialism's full rewards? North Korea's possible possession of nuclear weapons is hardly a threat to the world; it's a threat to US plans to make over the northern part of the Korean peninsula into a workshop for US capital. Since a new crop of sweatshops is hardly going to make my life, yours, of those of Koreans, any better, and is likely to make them poorer and more insecure, climbing aboard the "north Korea must irrevocably and verifiably dismantle its nuclear weapons program" bandwagon, hardly seems to be an act of enlightened self-interest.
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Pandora's Box: A Destiny Linked to Iraq is the Only Thing They Share
Thursday, November 20 @ 12:10:19 UTC | Bush and Blair could not be further apart on all aspects of social reform
by Polly Toynbee
November 19, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
The spectacle over the next few days of Tony Blair and George Bush beaming and backslapping remains as puzzling as ever. Is this just realpolitik business-as-usual, putting out more flags in the Mall for another necessary but unsavory foreign leader? If so, Blair plays his part well, his energetically sincere smile never faltering.
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Racism Watch: The US, race and war
Monday, August 11 @ 01:35:23 UTC | Most African-Americans didn't support the war on Iraq - with good reason. But they ended up fighting it
by Gary Younge, The Guardian
As America's most eloquent minister for war, Tony Blair has often taken it upon himself to placate criticism of United States military aggression abroad by pointing to its social achievements at home. And there can be few greater American accomplishments, in his mind, than race.
Quite how he came to this ill-informed conclusion, and why he would choose to share it, is not entirely clear. He rarely mentions race domestically - the last time there were riots in the north he didn't even venture up there to see what had sparked them. So when he raises it about America, it exposes both his weakness on the subject in Britain and his ignorance of its dynamic in America.
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World Focus: A tale of two leaders
Monday, July 28 @ 01:34:51 UTC | by Gary Younge, The Guardian
They fought the same war and both lied about why, yet Bush marches on while Blair has been fatally wounded
Were politics on either side of the Atlantic burdened with such notions as shame, integrity or even results, both British prime minister Tony Blair and American president George Bush would be struggling for their political survival. Both lied to their electorates in order to prosecute an illegal war against the will of the international community. Neither has a clue how to rebuild the country they have just destroyed - other than with more force, which is resulting in greater loss of life on both sides. Both have now defended their dogged pursuit of this course on the grounds that even if they were wrong about the pretext for doing it they were right to do it anyway.
True, both have their own specific local difficulties that are related to, but deflect from the big picture. Bush has the 16 words in his state of the union address that everybody knew were untrue and almost everybody but himself will take responsibility for. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Blair has the death of Dr David Kelly on his conscience and Kelly's ghost to haunt him in the form of the Hutton inquiry.
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How Howell Raines Enables Journalistic and Presidential Lying
Friday, May 16 @ 13:05:23 UTC | By Dennis Hans, May 15, 2003
www.democraticunderground.com
We learn in the May 11 New York Times that, since 1999,
America's newspaper of record has regularly published reporter
Jayson Blair's flights of fancy as straight news.
"He fabricated comments," the Times reports.
"He concocted scenes. He lifted materials from other
newspapers. . . and selected details from photographs to create
the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when
he had not."
Blair now acknowledges "personal problems" and
has expressed contrition. Let's hope the 27-year-old gets
his act together and leads, from this point forward, a long,
happy, honorable life.
Let us also thank Blair for humiliating an editor, Howell
Raines, who richly deserves it. The Times executive
editor has a history of enabling liars. In Blair's case, Raines
should have removed him from reporting duties long ago, when
mid-level editors had already found many fallacious "facts"
in Blair's dispatches.
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War and Terror: A morally hollow victory
Sunday, April 06 @ 13:21:51 UTC | by Mary Riddell, The Observer
No amount of PR will disguise the fact that this war is an outrage against humanity
The showdown approaches and the propaganda war moves on. Do not linger on images of a shroud-wrapped infant with a dummy clamped between grey lips. Do not think of a mother clasping the broken bodies of her two children in the car shot up at a military checkpoint. Or, if you cannot remove them from your memory, see such killings as the necessary price of liberation.
Be mindful, as the endgame plays out, of the Home Secretary's guidelines on war coverage. Some British journalists, he complains, are reporting the conflict in a manner that lends 'moral equivalence' to the Iraqi regime and encourages a 'progressive and liberal public' to believe this distorted version. Mr Blunkett, who yesterday embellished his assertions, is doubly wrong. There is no bias, nor the slightest hint that Bush, Blair and Saddam register equally on the weighbridge of tyranny.
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War and Terror: The Blair-witch project
Saturday, March 29 @ 10:24:31 UTC | By Terry Joseph, Trinicenter.com
It is more than merely uncanny how Operation Iraqi Freedom so eerily resembles Hollywood's 1999 amalgam of fact and fiction-The Blair Witch Project.
For openers, there is phonetic exactitude in the last name of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose zealous support of war proposed by American President George W Bush has stirred massive protests on both sides of the Atlantic.
Then, for the occult element, there was last year's virtual witch-hunt for the yet elusive quarry, the evil Osama bin Laden, a project for which Bush and Blair also teamed.
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War and Terror: Blair, the War Criminal
Friday, March 28 @ 07:18:34 UTC | Tam Dalyell, The Guardian
LONDON, 28 March 2003 - My constituency Labour Party has just voted to recommend that Tony Blair reconsider his position as party leader because he gave British backing to a war against Iraq without clearly expressed support from the UN. I agree with this motion. I also believe that since Blair is going ahead with his support for a US attack without unambiguous UN authorisation, he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague.
I have served in the House of Commons as a Labour member for 41 years, and I would never have dreamed of saying this about any one of my previous leaders. But Blair is a man who has disdain for both the House of Commons and international law.
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War and Terror: A Coalition of the Villains
Friday, March 21 @ 19:43:18 UTC | by Ben Roberts
Any chance George Bush gets he describes himself, Tony Blair, and the Spanish
leader as 'A Coalition of the Willing.' I beg to differ. A more appropriate
designation is 'A Coalition of the Villains.' Less than forty-eight hours ago the
President of the United States told his citizens, and the world, that United States
forces would attack Iraq 'at a time of its choosing.' He went on to demand that
the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and his sons, leave that country in forty-eight
hours. Bush statements, which boil down to a declaration of war, has effectively
ushered in a new era in how nations deal with each other. It is called preemptive
strike doctrine, and is based on the premise that if you suspect someone might
attack you, you can attack them first. This is nothing short of absolute madness.
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