David Blunkett, the UK's former home secretary, has said that during the 2003 invasion of Iraq he suggested to Tony Blair that Britain's military should bomb Aljazeera's television transmitter in Baghdad.
Aljazeera television said on Thursday that Blunkett's claims - made in an interview with Britain's Channel 4 television to be aired on Monday - support its belief that the US and Britain deliberately bombed its Baghdad offices during the war.
wtf?
The chief of Britain's army says that the presence of British troops in Iraq is exacerbating the security situation on the ground and they should, therefore, be withdrawn soon.
General Sir Richard Dannatt also said in an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper on Friday that Britain's Iraq venture was aggravating the security threat elsewhere in the world.
....Putting himself directly at odds with Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and George Bush, the US president, the general criticised the post-invasion planning by the US-led coalition.
"I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning."
Rights groups have criticised the UK after it published a report in which it condemned Hezbollah attacks on Israel, but did not mention Israel's military actions in Lebanon.
http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage
Rights groups said the omission was "inexusable"
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I'm not really shocked -nothing my Government or the British press did could shock me now.
General Sir Richard Dannatt on the other hand - that is a severe blow to Blair and I have to say - many have been asking for a long time now, how much longer this farce would be allowed to go on, before the military decided to stand by its men, and not by its obedience to Government - which cannot be right, if it turns out that your leaders are damaging not only their own country, but the world's interests.
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Busy fondling their self-esteem
12 Oct 2006
John Pilger
As the news reveals a study that puts civilian deaths in Iraq at 655,000, John Pilger recalls the words of a song by the great Chilean balladeer, Victor Jara, to describe those who see themselves as rational and liberal are, in fact, complicit in an unrecognised crime.
The great Chilean balladeer Victor Jara, who was tortured to death by the regime of General Pinochet 33 years ago, wrote a song that mocks those who see themselves as rational and liberal, yet so often retreat into the arms of authority, no matter its dishonesty and brutality to others. He sang:
Come on over here
where the sun is nice and warm.
Yes, you, who have the habit
of jumping from one side to the other...
[Over there] you're nothing at all,
Neither fish nor fowl,
You're too busy fondling...
Your own self-esteem.
The past few weeks have seen a fiesta of these rational, liberal people who dominate British mainstream politics. For them, the most basic forms of morality and shame, the kind you learn as a child, have no place in public life. On 27 September, the Guardian published a front-page photograph of Tony Blair, a prima facie war criminal, his arms outstretched, his grin fixed. Beside this was a headline, "Charm and eloquence. But a missed chance". Beneath this, Polly Toynbee wrote: "There were some damp eyes dabbed with hankies and men blowing noses. 'Don't go,' someone said."
Consider such vomit against the facts of Blair's actual crime - the unprovoked invasion of a defenceless country, justified by lies now voluminously documented, and causing the violent deaths of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children. The word "crime" is verboten among those about whom Victor Jara sang. To spell out the truth would illuminate the collusion of an entire political class.
Instead, the shameless neither-fish-nor-fowl tribunes speak and write incessantly of a "mistake", a "blunder", even a Shakespearean tragedy (for the war criminal, not his victims). From their studios and editorial offices, they declare the mendacious and dishonest banalities of their unclad emperor "brilliant". Al-Qaeda, said Blair in his speech to the Labour party conference, "killed 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of". The breath is swept away by this one statement. Half a million infants lie dead, according to Unicef, as a result of the Anglo-American siege of Iraq during the 1990s. For Blair and his rational, liberal, neither-fish-nor-fowl court, these children never lived and never died. Clearly, the Emperor Tony was a leader for his time and, above all, clubbable, whatever the "mistakes" he had made in Iraq.
A parallel world of truth and lies, morality and immorality dominates how the crime in Iraq is presented to us. In recent months, the invaders have vanished. The US, having murdered and cluster-bombed and napalmed and phosphorus-bombed, is now a wise referee between, even a protector of, "warring tribes". The buzzword is "sectarianism", blurring the truth that most of the attacks by the resistance are against the foreign military occupiers: on average, one every 15 minutes. That the majority of Iraqis, Sunni and Shia, are united in their demand that US and British forces get out of their country now is of no interest. Has journalism ever been so voluntarily appropriated by black propaganda?
The confidence in the Blair regime that this propaganda will see them right (if not re-elected) is expressed in striking ways. The former Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, the epitome of neither-fish-nor-fowl, who supported a piratical attack on a Muslim country, now aims his liberal, rational remarks at the most vulnerable community in Britain, fully aware that the racist subtext of his words will be understood in "Middle England" and hopefully further what is left of his contemptible career. It was Straw who let Pinochet escape justice for fraudulent reasons of ill-health. Victor Jara's song is an ode to Straw, and to the authoritarian, twice "retired" David Blunkett, now elevated by the Guardian as "one of the most brilliant, natural politicians", on a mission to ensure that a higher form of corruption, mass murder, does not blight "Tony's legacy".
The Tory leader, David Cameron, the former public relations man for the asset-stripper Michael Green, will follow this legacy, should he become prime minister. Standing on the Bournemouth seafront with his family, including three young children, he emphasised his support for the crime against the Iraqi people, whose children, says Unicef, are now dying faster under Blair and Bush than under Saddam Hussein.
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The lunatic is on the grass
The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path
The lunatic is in the hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forbodings too
Ill see you on the dark side of the moon
The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me till Im sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
Theres someone in my head but its not me.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band youre in starts playing different tunes
Ill see you on the dark side of the moon
***
All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel.
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save.
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy,
Beg, borrow or steal.
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All thats to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
There is no dark side of the moon really. matter of fact its all dark.
Pink Floyd - Brain Damage and Eclipse lyrics
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Strange that it is often the warriors of the world who end up saving the world - not by fighting, but by refusing to engage in moronic acts of war.
The Russian nuclear sub captain who refused an order to fire nuclear weapons on the US fleet during the Cuban missile crisis (after coming under attack himself) springs to mind.
Saved the God Damn world - and I don't even know his name.
General Dannatt I shall not be forgetting. How f...ing right he is! If Bush does enough to provoke Iran - our lads are dead out there - and for what? Why?
Iraq is FUBAR and we don't want to admit it - but the longer we stay, the greater becomes our guilt and the more we will have to pay for our mistakes, our naivety and stupidity.
Bush must and will be stopped. Who knows? Perhaps a US Naval Officer will save the world this time - because if the US do bomb Persia, we (Brits and Americans) will loose everything. I'm convinced of this, because I believe that in the end the nazis war mongers always loose. But it will not just be us that pay the price - many will die around the world - and for many reasons.
As an Englishman, I have learned something quite profound because of all this - and that is a better understanding of how the Germans came to be sucked into one megalomaniac's fantasy and how dearly they paid for believing in him .... 1939 and on the brink.
If you have a religion, please
Pray for Peace,
Endy
