Blair War Crimes Foundation

Go have a look @ BlairFoundation

It is necessary to make leaders hesitate before indulging in “the paramount war crime” to quote the judges of Nuremberg, of “unprovoked aggression against a defenceless country”. Unless leaders fear that they might be tried for their war crimes, we will live in an increasingly violent world, where The Geneva Conventions are treated as a joke, the UN is of no account, and death, destruction, torture, and repressive policing are commonplace. At the moment such leaders enjoy more and more trappings of power, and retire with vast sums of money, houses, medals and lucrative contracts. A group of UK Citizens have therefore set up an organisation, “The Blair War Crimes Foundation”, to initially bring one such leader to justice as an example.

Read their Letter of charges and Join the signatories (ht2 Craig Murray). Signatories already include- John Pilger, David Halpin, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Ken Loach, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Lindsey German, Ben Griffin, Dr Nawal Saadawi, Haifa Zangana, Dr Kamil Mahdi, Bruce Kent.

PS. A good answer to Blair’s $1 million ‘Leadership Award‘ from…well Israel for all intents & purposes, a rather obvious bribe.

Irony Still Dead

Religion must be rescued from extremism and irrelevance, the former prime minister Tony Blair said tonight when he made his first major speech in Britain since stepping down last year.

Yes, people who pray daily while lying a country into a bloody war of aggression really are a fucking menace.

Blair, His Masters Voice

In an appearance before a European Parliament panel, Blair did not call for direct talks with Hamas, which seized Gaza in June and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

But he said it was urgent for more food and other goods to reach Palestinians living under desperate conditions in the Gaza strip.

“If we have learned anything from the past few months it is that the present strategy in Gaza is not working,” said Blair. The former British prime minister is now a special envoy for the so-called “Quartet” of Mideast peacemakers, comprised of the United States, the EU, Russia and the United Nations.

“We need a strategy which isolates the extremists and helps the people,” he added. “At the moment, if we are not careful, we got the opposite …. That is not intelligent.”

The former British prime minister also suggested the current peace process — launched at a summit in Annapolis, Md., last fall — was starting to run on empty.

He said the Middle East was “approaching crunch time,” adding there must be visible results by May if there is to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal by year’s end, as planned.

The former EU President Josep Borrell did less of a ventriloquist act-

“The politics of isolating Hamas has not brought any benefits. You cannot make arrangements with just one part of the other side,” said Spanish lawmaker Josep Borrell, former president of the European Parliament who now presides the assembly’s development committee. 

‘Peacemaker’ yeah and I squirt chocolate fudge out of my bum, have a nice big bowl Tony.

Standards Decline At Failing Universities

Sadly struggling US institutions are not getting the help they need and continue to speed their own decline with poor decisions and failure to recruit capable staff. Worse is that many graduates of these failed institutions go on to a life of crime at a huge social cost to the nation. Surely the time is coming when people must take the matter in hand and close down these intellectually bereft disasters. As their existence is prolonged it appears they are becoming hotbeds of dangerous ideologies that call for violence to reshape the world to their narrow fundamentalist vision, exporting this dangerous cancer overseas further destabilising countries already racked by vicious dictatorships.

Still at least I think he’s given up on the EU job. (ht2 Chicken Yoghurt)

Lies Deployed In Under 45 Minutes, Truth- Not So Much

Chris Ames in The New Statesman-

The government has been forced to publish the secret first draft of the Iraq WMD dossier written by a Foreign Office spin doctor…The secret first draft of the Iraq WMD dossier written by Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams has finally been published after a ruling back in January under the Freedom of Information Act. The document contains an early version of the executive summary of the next draft, which was attributed to Intelligence chief John Scarlett. The document places a spin doctor at the heart of the process of drafting the dossier and blows a hole in the government’s evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.

Last month the Foreign Office was ordered by the Information Tribunal to hand over the Williams draft, which I first requested under the Freedom of Information Act in February 2005. From the time that the row first erupted over Andrew Gilligan’s allegations that the dossier had been sexed-up, the government has claimed that Scarlett’s draft, produced on 10 September 2002, was the first full draft and produced without interference from spin doctors. But the Williams draft, dated a day earlier, shows that spin doctors were sexing up the dossier at the time the notorious 45 minutes claim was included.

Initially the government withheld the draft from the Hutton Inquiry. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s director of communications, denied its existence. But when Scarlett admitted that Williams had done some early drafting, the BBC asked to see it. The government then supplied a copy of the draft to Lord Hutton but told him that it was “not taken forward” because a “fresh start” was made with Scarlett’s draft. Confirmation that Scarlett took up elements of Williams’s drafting shows that the government misled Hutton…

The draft also shows that Williams was responsible for a number of key changes that strengthened the dossier’s claims. His executive summary claimed that Iraq had “acquired” uranium. Previous versions only alleged the material had been “sought”. Scarlett’s draft also alleged that Iraq had got hold of uranium, stating that it had “purchased” it. Williams appears largely to have been working on a version of the dossier that was produced during the summer of 2002, before Tony Blair announced in September of that year that a dossier would be published.

So Gilligan was right, Hutton was a wash and in other reporting David Kelly is referred to as a suicide, which apparently must be the sexed up version of assassination these days. The uranium claim we know was part of a grift cooked up by neo-cons, co-ordinated by Michael Ledeen and perpetrated in Italy. It was laundered by them into UK intelligence so the Bush could then say the source was British intelligence. At no point was this ‘faulty’ intel, or a ‘mistake’ this was cold, calculated, malice aforethought, deliberate fraud to enable an illegal & immoral war of aggression. So when do we take these crooks down? When?

Stop Blair!

Via (fittingly) Blairwatch– Stop Blair ! Petition against the nomination of Tony Blair as “President of the European Union.

www.stopblair.eu

Blair & Co-conspirators Are Being Investigated By Scotland Yard Over War Crimes

Fuck Yeah! All hail Landsker who alerted me to this in comments and to whom I must beg forgiveness for not blogrolling him, but not anymore! And now the news-

Press Release: Scotland Yard to investigate Tony Blair and ex-Attorney General Peter Goldsmith for war crimes

Press Conference,
Room C, 1 Parliament Street
Tuesday 15th January 2008 3pm

John McDonnell MP, Chris Coverdale: International War Law Expert and Annie Machon of the Campaign to Make War History brief MPs and the media on allegations of war crimes committed against the people of Iraq by Britain’s former Prime Minister and former Attorney General.

Officers from Scotland Yard have commenced a criminal investigation into the deaths of Iraqi citizens killed during the armed invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Metropolitan Police are acting in response to crimes reported by peace activists from We Are Change UK and The Campaign to Make War History. In an unprecedented step, the case was handed to the War Crimes division of the Counter Terrorism branch who are now investigating allegations of 14 criminal offences committed by Tony Blair, Lord Goldsmith and others. The offences are under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which came into effect under English common law, just two days before 9/11.

Two Members of We Are Change UK and a representative from the Campaign to Make War History were interviewed for six hours at Belgravia Police station on the 20th December 2007. Evidence was provided to the police relating to the crimes of:-

• genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and conduct ancillary to these crimes under Sections 51 and 52 of The International Criminal Court Act 2001.
• a crime against peace and complicity in a crime against peace under Articles 6 and 7 of The Nuremburg Principles.
• murder, incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.
• conspiracy to commit genocide, a crime against humanity and war crimes under the Criminal Law Act 1977.

Video of press conference-

makewarshistory.org.uk

It’s a start, I can imagine even now senior officers are being co-opted to strangle the investigation, that’s if anyone is taking it seriously in the first place, but it does not have to be that way. These people lied, most deliberately in order to kill and steal. The first thing to do is report this far and wide, to force it to be taken seriously. Pressure and support for the investigation would help, how might we go about that? More in time, for now let’s put this onto the agenda and into people’s minds.

Xposted @ Mask of Anarchy, Ruins of Empire & Stop the Second Holocaust.

By All That Is Holy, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tony Blair has been holding discussions with some of his oldest allies on how he could mount a campaign later this year to become full-time president of the EU council, the prestigious new job characterised as “president of Europe”. Blair, currently the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, EU and the UN, has told friends he has made no final decision, but is increasingly willing to put himself forward for the job if it comes with real powers to intervene in defence and trade affairs. (ht2 at-Largely)

Hell NO! No fucking way! He was instrumental, one of the inner cabal that lied the US & UK into the Iraq war, not only should he not be EU president, he should be prosecuted for his war crimes. His messianic greed for power is astonishing, no wonder he was so close to Bush. Speaking of which-ish

As Bush tries to stave off disaster in Afghanistan, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, flies to London next week to talk to Gordon Brown — George Bush’s closest ally — to find a way to send more troops to Afghanistan. With UK defence minister Des Browne saying recently that Britain could be in Afghanistan for decades (http://tinyurl.com/2lhmqj), Rice will try to get Gordon Brown to commit more troops now, as a lever to get other countries to increase their deployment.

Stop the War Coalition is calling an emergency protest on Wednesday 6 February. We do not yet have details of Rice’s meetings with Gordon Brown but we anticipate that our protest will be at Downing Street, the timing to be announced as soon as her plans are known.

The army have cut basic training by half, to thirteen weeks, to get more soldiers to Afghanistan 

The Secret Atrocity- UK War Crime Cover Up Fails

The High Court today lifted a gagging order stopping the media reporting allegations of torture and brutality by British troops in Iraq.  Soldiers are said to have captured 31 Iraqis following an ambush in May 2004 before killing 22 and leaving only nine injured survivors after detaining them at military headquarters in Abu Naji. However reporting restrictions imposed earlier on by the court have now been lifted following a petition by several national newspapers and the BBC.

It has been claimed the men were seized by the British Army following a firefight on the road from Amara to Basra, near Majar al-Kabir in south-east Iraq. Iraqi families and survivors are seeking compensation and a ruling at a High Court hearing, due to start in the near future, that the Government is legally obliged to set up an independent inquiry into the incident. Death certificates to go before the court are said to state that corpses of Iraqis rounded up showed signs of “mutilation” and “torture”.

Lawyers investigating the allegations say the testimonies of five witnesses to the events “combine to give a harrowing account of what took place”. The Ministry of Defence has denied there was evidence of wrongdoing by soldiers, including the deliberate mutilation of corpses.

Lawyers Phil Shiner and Martyn Day of Leigh Day are representing the Iraqis. They travelled out to Istanbul earlier this month to meet with some of the alleged survivors and the other witnesses to the events. Mr Shiner said today: “The testimonies of these five men taken over five days in Istanbul by myself and Martyn contain shocking material and combine to give a harrowing account of what took place. I have never heard such evidence in nearly 30 years of being a solicitor.”

Martyn Day said: “Phil and I are clear that what took place in Majar is of massive consequence not just for the British Army and the British Government but for the British people. Today is the first step in ensuring what happened in Majar is brought out into the open.”

The fresh allegations of brutality by UK forces come after it was announced that no one will be held responsible for the killing of Iraqi civilian Baha Mousa who was beaten to death in Army custody five years ago. The decision was branded a shameful indictment of the way politicians, the military and its prosecuting authority dealt with the tragic case. And now the MoD faces further pressure after it failed to keep secret these new alllegations of abuse by British troops.

The gagging order blocked the naming of any of the Iraqi claimants, or the telling of their stories, until a final decision was taken on whether there will be any criminal prosecutions against any soldiers. The ban was imposed last December by Lord Justice Thomas, sitting with Mr Justice Silber, after the Ministry of Defence confirmed the possibility of criminal prosecutions.

Lord Justice Thomas said “adverse publicity” arising from the civil High Court case would be “highly undesirable”. But today, in an extraordinary judicial clash of views, another senior judge, Lord Justice Moses – also sitting with Mr Justice Silber – overturned the ban “in its entirety”. He ruled there was “ample material” to support the proposition that the proceedings to be brought in the High Court should be “in the public domain”, and ample authority “for the good reasons why that should be so”.

The MoD had wanted to keep secret the names of the Army regiments allegedly involved. But Lord Justice Moses ruled there was no basis for keeping secret the names of those who were subject to investigation. The possibility of there being any prosecution was “far too remote”, said the judge, and there was certainly no statutory prohibition on the publication of names.

Mr Justice Silber said: “For the reasons given by (Lord Justice Moses), I agree with him.” The BBC’s Panorama programme, which is preparing an item on the Majar incident, welcomed today’s ruling. Deputy editor Frank Simmonds said: “Panorama is very pleased with the judgment as it clears the way for a more constructive dialogue with the MoD on matters of clear public interest.”

During the hearing, Lord Justice Moses said it was “barmy” that it had taken so long for the military authorities to investigate what had happened at Majar in 2004. He said: “It is not fair on them (the soldiers) as well as on everybody else.”

Jonathan Swift, appearing for the MoD, said fresh investigations had become necessary as a result of the witness statements made by the Iraqi claimants in the pending High Court hearing. He said he was only seeking to uphold the gagging order in so far as it prohibited the naming of the regiments involved. The judge said: “It is not the way it works. If you are right then it is one rule for the MoD and another rule for the ordinary citizen.”

Mr Swift said he was not suggesting there should be different rules for different categories, but a no-names order was necessary in the present case “on a precautionary basis” because possible criminal proceedings could be undermined by publicity.

But the judge said: “There is nothing unusual in this case in relation to the disclosure of the identity of someone who is being investigated and where there remains the possibility of future criminal proceedings.” There was no basis for an order that there should not be disclosure of those who were subject to investigation.

So the cover up has failed, what else remains hidden by the establishment? This is war, this always happens. This is what was chosen, this is why Blair must be prosecuted.

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;  {Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace}

Why Am I Not Surprised?

Graham Dow, the Bishop of Carlisle, has come to public notice for suggesting that the recent floods were God’s judgement on a sinful nation, but not only is he not alone – perhaps just naive to speak so openly about it to a friendly journalist from the Sunday Telegraph – but they are not his weirdest views. An earlier book he wrote on demonic possession shows he believes devils enter up the anus (something Freudian here perhaps) and the signs of possession include wearing black, inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, Scottish ancestry or relatives who have been miners. You may laugh – inappropriately – but Dow used to be an Oxford college chaplain, indeed once prepared Tony Blair for confirmation, and has risen to be a diocesan bishop.

No Iraq Inquiry From Brown Government

The British government has backtracked over demands for an independent inquiry into the mistakes made in the run-up to and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.

Ministers have hinted repeatedly that an investigation would be held after British forces leave the country. But they have now changed tack in the hope of “moving on” in Iraq rather than looking back at what went wrong.

Mr Blair argued that there had already been four separate inquiries into Iraq, including Lord Butler of Brockwell’s 2004 report on the flawed intelligence on which the case for war was built. But the Tories and Liberal Democrats, who want a full-scale inquiry, argue that there has been no overarching review, particularly into the lack of planning for the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.

In November 2006, Des Browne, the defence secretary, said there would be an inquiry “when the time is right” after the British government defeated a proposal calling for one in the House of Commons.

Margaret Beckett, the then foreign secretary, assured MPs: “I have no doubt there will be a time when we want to learn lessons.”

Asked if an inquiry would take place after British troops withdraw, the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, replied: “I am obsessed with the next five years in Iraq, not the last five years in Iraq. And I think that the best inquiry is putting the best brains to think about how to make sure the next five years in Iraq get that combination of political reconstruction, economic reconstruction and security improvement that are so essential.”

Right on Dave, I’m ‘obsessed’ with the next five years too, how after withdrawal the billions in reparations are paid to Iraq and all those who lead and enabled the war are put on trial for war crimes. Yeah, it’s no good going over the mistakes of the past in some toothless spectacle, we should be prosecuting political leaders for those very deliberate ‘mistakes’. Hey you don’t know where Tony Blair is? We should start with him in your forward thinking future vision, bringing “political reconstruction, economic reconstruction and security improvement” by showing the Iraqi’s we do not tolerate lying mass killers nor those who profit from war and inciting sectarian hatred. And as you seem so all fired up big D let’s go for it, send in the SAS to render Bush and Cheney to the Old Bailey, believe me America will breathe a sigh of relief with that regime change, they might even welcome you as a liberator with chocolates and flowers. ‘Thanks Dave, thanks for looking to the future and showing the world old school imperial war warmongering is simply unacceptable, that in the resource scarcity to come we will cooperate not murder the weaker groups as we face the challenges. We will no longer reason profit being a justification for genocide and a government that only answers to corporations and who lies, spies & steals will be a government that is immediately removed from office and then prosecuted. Golly gosh Dave, you’re just great’

Yes I can see it all now, the best brains improving not just Iraq but the whole world as the criminal justice system finally incorporates the ruling classes into its jurisdiction and the search for clean energy resources is no longer hamstrung by tradition, vested interests and jealously guarded revenue streams. Wealth, resources and land are distributed equitably as is power and psychopathic white men no longer rule the earth as they at last get the hospital treatment they so desperately need. Well Dave it’s a pretty tall order but it seems that is the obsession you are choosing because otherwise I’d have to conclude you are complicit in the covering up of war crimes and that seems a very much backwards looking way to behave. Hiding the past is not dealing with the past, doomed to repeat etc. y’know, all that stuff. Which does make the next five years and the next five years after that and the next five years after that and the next five years after that and the…more likely to look like the past than any positive improvements “that are so essential”.

Ow, I think I broke my sarcasm bone.

Poodle

You can’t make this shit up.

Please *God* Make It Stop

I blame Blairwatch for leading me to this article-

The former prime minister’s comments came as he admitted for the first time that his faith was “hugely important” in influencing his decisions during his decade in power at Number 10, including going to war with Iraq in 2003. Mr Blair complained that he had been unable to follow the example of US politicians, such as President George W. Bush, in being open about his faith because people in Britain regarded religion with suspicion.

“It’s difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system,” Mr Blair said. “If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘yes, that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally.

“You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter. I mean … you may go off and sit in the corner and … commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say ‘right, I’ve been told the answer and that’s it’.”

Peter Mandelson, one of Mr Blair’s confidants, claimed that the former premier “takes a Bible with him wherever he goes” and habitually reads it last thing at night. 

“To do the prime minister’s job properly you need to be able to separate yourself from the magnitude of the consequences of the decisions you are taking the whole time. Which doesn’t mean to say … that you’re insensitive to the magnitude of those consequences or that you don’t feel them deeply.

“If you don’t have that strength it’s difficult to do the job, which is why the job is as much about character and temperament as it is about anything else. But for me having faith was an important part of being able to do that… Ultimately I think you’ve got to do what you think is right.”

Which bible was it? Because the one I have read and had to study came off as a tad disapproving of liars and warmongers but clearly that was the bad bible, no Tony had the good bible where geopolitical game playing and resource grabs are noble godly pursuits especially when you get to kill a million people. And so glad to see he can divorce himself from the magnitude of the consequences of his actions, it does rather prove that those with psychopathology’s either end up in jail or at the top of business or politics. Except I’m not so sure about Anthony, this sounds like an ad hoc assemblage of platitudes to fend off the screaming demons he sees closing in on him sometimes from the corner of his eye. This is a man grabbing at straws and happy American christianist dominionism passes him a big handful, but he’s on the run, he’s put thought into this defence which means he thinks he needs one, which means somewhere he knows he has done great wrong. Although it looks like his aim now is to hunt down that shred of conscience and waterboard the motherfucker to oblivion, which explains why he looks to Bush and his messianic sadism with such admiration.

Hagiography Of A War Criminal

In the words of Ian Brown- So what the fuck is pro-war hack Aaronovitch doing being paid by the BBC to interview Blair? So we get further iteration of what we already knew, but erm… we already knew that. For all the fanfair it is too soon, his influence still entails truths are concealed and what this mostly does is swell idiots bank balances and probably will be used to embed fictions that still obscure the only thing worth broadcasting, (and it won’t take several hours or episodes)- Anthony Blair broke international law, he chose a preemptive war and he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The other detail is over on the right, which today stands at 1,112,745 murdered humans. See? I managed all that in less than a minute and it didn’t cost a fucking thing, but then the establishment always was about getting rich by lying…and killing.

Spreading Hypocracy

Yes you read that right, we profess invading and killing to spread democracy, but it’s just Hypocracy baby. Case in point Iraq- I remember Blair extremely smugly saying several times that as ‘we’ were there by invitation of the ‘democratically’ elected govt (puppet administration as installed per any invasion and I think he whimsically fancied that this ‘invitation’ somehow traveled back in time and invited us to invade in the first place) thus he shrugged his wee little shoulders, any disagreement with our forces being their should be taken up with the Iraqis -apparently begging us to be there- nothing to do with me guv. Thus Blair glided on with the aspect of someone who had just slam dunked (oh the intelligence!) the questioner and their evil anti war impertinence AND the responsibility was not his, no blood on his hands, this is a humanitarian mission mate, you want us out, why you’re as bad as Saddam! You hate democracy, the UN says it’s legal, you democracy hater, h8tr, h8tr, ner ner nerner ner!

Except…when the parliament want a say in the occupation and ending it, puppet Maliki, the US, the UK using the UN security council cut the parliament out so no embarrassing actual democracy interrupts the occupation. Spreading hypocracy-

The United Nations Security Council, with support from the British and American delegations, is poised to cut the Iraqi parliament out of one of the most significant decisions the young government will make: when foreign troops will depart. It’s an ugly and unconstitutional move, designed solely to avoid asking an Iraqi legislature for a blank check for an endless military occupation that it’s in no mood to give, and it will make a mockery of Iraq’s nascent democracy.

In 2006, Maliki’s office requested the renewal of the U.N. mandate without consulting the legislature, a process that many lawmakers maintained was a violation of Iraqi law.

In June, we reported that the parliament had passed a binding resolution that would force Maliki to go to the parliament and give Iraqi lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the mandate. It was signed by the majority of the 275-seat legislature, then sent to the president. According to the Iraqi constitution, the president had 15 days to veto it by sending it back to the parliament; otherwise it automatically became a ratified law. The 15 days passed without a veto and the resolution became the law of the land in mid-June 2007.

Something happened, however, between the passage of that law and the latest report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. According to Moon’s latest report to the Security Council (PDF), dated Oct. 15, the law that had been passed by the duly elected legislature of Iraq became nothing more than a “nonbinding resolution”

One might have believed that the disconnect was a simple mistake, if not for the fact that members of the Iraqi parliament, still fuming over being cut out of the process the year before, sent a letter to the U.N.’s special envoy for Iraq back in April clarifying the situation in very clear terms.

According to sources within the Iraqi delegation to the United Nations, the letter, signed by 144 MPs –more than half of Iraq’s legislators — was received in good order by the special envoy, Ashraf Qazi, but never distributed to the Security Council members, as is required under the U.N. resolution that governs the mandate. The parliament, and indeed the majority of the Iraqi population, had been cleanly excised from the legislative process.

This U.N. mandate issue is not occurring in a vacuum. When it comes to the nascent Iraqi government, supporters of the occupation have long had their cake and eaten it too. On the one hand, they deny that the U.S.-led military force is an occupying army at all, maintaining that all those foreign troops are there at the “request” of the Iraqi government. That’s an important legal nicety — occupying forces have a host of responsibilities under international law and acknowledging the reality of the occupation would result in more legal responsibilities for the administration to ignore. At the same time, when the only people who all those purple-fingered Iraqi voters actually elected to office try to attach some conditions to the U.N. mandate, demand a timetable for withdrawal or come out against privatizing Iraq’s natural resources, then somehow the legislature magically disappears and the hopes and aspirations of its constituents are discarded as if they never existed.