Four Charged Over Blair Protest

So it seems we live in a world where peace activists are considered a danger but narcissists responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths are driven around with armed guards.

Al Meghrahi Release - Smoke and Mirrors

This affair helps to reopen the Iraq debate, in a way that vindicates Blair's most severe critics. Tony Blair's remaining defenders say he was motivated in Iraq by a hatred of terrorism and tyranny and had no regard whatsoever for getting access to oil. Yet at the very same time the New£abour government was plotting in Libya to hand the worst terrorist in British history to a tyrant in exchange for oil. It's proof that oil and corporate power were a much bigger factor in driving foreign policy than the public rhetoric of opposing tyranny or terror.

David Cameron refuses to open an investigation. He says he will release all the relevant documents – but the Cabinet Office has quietly declared that Blair's permission will be needed before any records are shown to the public. For the families of all the innocent people slaughtered in Lockerbie, this has been a cold-water education in what their governments really value. Helen Cohen, remembering her murdered 20 year-old daughter Theodora, says: "Western governments seem to be run by one thing now – the great God money."

There's a revealing postscript to this story. Last month, Blair went to Libya on behalf of the many mega-corporations who now employ him. He was greeted by Gaddaffi himself – who tortures dissidents and terrorises his population – "like a brother", according to the Libyan press. There has even been speculation that, now they need a CEO, Tony Blair will go to work for BP. In so many ways, it seems, he always has.

Get Those Old 'Grim Milestone' Articles Dusted Off

As the 300th British Military victim awaits his pointless fate in Afghanistan in the next few days, the tabloids are polishing up the old 'grim milestone' and 'noble sacrifice' phraseologies to mark the occsasion. The Sun will already have an 'Our Boys' editorial on the desk ready to publish. As Craig Murray has pointed out on numerous occasions, this kind of flatulent patriotism a la Wooton Bassett is nothing less than the music hall jingoism songs (We're Taking The Flag Back To Majuba was one) of the Victorian era. The same hapless British Tommies were being slaughtered then by the Boers, the Zulus and, yes, the Afghans.

Tony Blair And 'The Politics of Condemnation'

In the days of the long war in Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for years used the same response when asked to condemn IRA bombings and killings. They would say 'we are not going to indulge in the politics of condemnation'. Since the Good Friday Agreement the phraseology had become redundant. But Tony Blair, US Middle East Puppet 'Peace Envoy' (God help us) courtesy of George Bush, dusted it off and trotted it out as his weasel worded whitewash for the phosphorous bombing of civilians in Gaza in 2009 by his Israeli friends. Within hours his New Labour acolytes were trotting it out on the BBC and Channel 4 news. The same, exact phrase. Where is the 'Peace Envoy' now that his chums have innocent blood on their hands once again? A deafening and eloquent silence. Surely it merits at least a quote for the Murdoch media along the lines that we shouldn't indulge in the 'politics of...........' Well, you know the rest.  

Bomb Disposal Deaths (2 in a year) 'Unacceptable' Says Coroner

Oh yes? Try 2 deaths among Afghan civilians every half an hour on average as a death rate which is unacceptable, Mr. Coroner? Thought about that?

Jim Cousins, Labour MP, We Salute You

Mr Cousins, who has represented Newcastle Central as an MP since 1987, voted against the Iraq War and offers a telling insight. “From the autumn of 2001 it was absolutely obvious to me that US president George Bush was going to have an invasion and occupation of Iraq and that Blair would go with it. “And that Blair would in some sense fall in love with the world stage and that is exactly what happened with disastrous results for the Labour party, from which we have actually not recovered and will not recover for a long time to come,” He adds the Iraq War has become a “benchmark” issue in British politics, going beyond just the conflict itself – and revealed he came close to quitting Parliament over it. “It has become a symbol of what kind of country do you live in and what sort of direction do you want it go to in? I found that whole period between 2001 and 2003 utterly depressing. It was like knowing the train was going to crash, there wasn’t much you could do about it. And I make no bones about it, looking back on it now, that if Labour had kept control of Newcastle City Council in 2004, if it had done well in those all-out elections, I would not have stood at the 2005 general election. “I felt very unhappy about the project that I had become part of,” A succinct vignette of just what has happened to the Labour Party. Jim, We at AfghanCentral and Wolves In The City salute your integrity.

Droneheads and Boneheads II

Q and A about computer generated carnage. Afshin Rattansi for the real world. Lt. Col. Chris Gough of NATO for military cloud cookoo land:-

AR: “What about the psychology behind it all? It’s presumably very different from actually flying in an aircraft and dropping a bomb? What does it do to your men and women?”

GG: “Great question. What I’ve found through personal experience and I’ve been involved both in combat in manned aircraft and now in these remotely piloted aircraft is that I feel more connected with the ground fight than I ever did when I was flying over the top at 20,000 feet, the reason being that I am much involved in coordination and contact with those ground forces that are taking fire than I ever was in a F-16. Although, academically, it looks like you could make it sound like…

AR: “A computer game?” I interrupted, “Which is, after all, the usual charge?”

CG: “When you look at it from the outside, you could easily come to that conclusion but in fact it never occurs that way. There is an intense coordination with the ground. Through our training and the rigor of our exercising, we know that when I push the button, that I am taking life. So that is a very deliberate event and we always debrief and we always hold ourselves accountable to a very high standard and, like I said, the intense communication that we have with the ground party and the clearance authority – the authorizing agent of the strike – it comes together to create a much more tangible, much more real event, in my opinion, then I experienced when I was dropping bombs from F-16s.”

AR: ''Some U.S. personnel would certainly say it is definitely more tangible because retaliation is swift in Afghanistan where the U.S. is losing so many men and women. But what about government’s reactions to the use of UAV’s in the region. You know that politicians in Kabul and Islamabad don’t appreciate them?”

CG: “Well, on retaliation, it certainly is quick. We are fighting a violent enemy and they have a deep desire to fight us. Our ability to prosecute is really unique because it’s less significant when we take a strike. What we really want to do when we attack these terrorist networks is not to take down the guy with the rifle. You want to track him down to his boss and then want to find his boss, the jackpot guy and that’s the guy you want to roll up. We’re never going to win this war with a Hellfire strike and so on retaliation, sometimes it’s better not to take action. Sometimes it is better to sit and watch and investigate the patterns of life so that I can go back there and grab the jackpot agent.

“That leads to the second point – regarding the responses of governments in the region: unlike all the other weapons systems out there, I can control collateral damage to a much greater degree in this and I can minimize it and negate it because if I see a high-value individual – one of those jackpot guys – that I want to prosecute an attack on I’m not limited by gas. I’m not limited by the physiological constraints of the air crew. I’ll swap another air crew out. I’ll bring another plane out and have them run in there and get a new GCUS and I will stay with that individual until the time is right by my making. “

AR: “And what about mistakes?” I asked, “are there fewer now? Because hundreds of civilians have been killed in such strikes as well as hundreds of as you would put it, ‘the enemy’. “

It should be noted that exact figures are hard to come by which is why the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit to try to get the data on civilian casualties. U.S. federal agencies never answered a Freedom of Information Act request for an outline of the legal basis for the Predator drone program.

“What about people who you work with who cause collateral damage. How do they cope?” I added.

GG: “The argument that we have executed collateral damage – I dispute that, honestly I have never seen it during the course of my two..”

AR: “Wedding parties in Afghanistan?” I interjected.

CG: “I have seen those reports in the media but I have never actually seen that in the course of events in my unit. And what I will say is that -- and I have ample examples to bring forth -- we have been engaging the enemy with ‘friendlies’ taking heavy fire from advancing parties of insurgents and we’ve actually called off strikes because we have seen kids with the insurgents. And so that level of fidelity – that I can have someone whose whole job in life is to look at pixels on a screen and determine whether that is farm equipment or whether that is a piece of anti-aircraft artillery or see if that is a child or someone actually carrying and employing a weapon -- means I can make that call and I can isolate that event so that I don’t take a lethal action against those people. We’ve been able to minimize collateral damage to a degree that we have never experienced before in a combat environment. From my perspective, this is game-changing in nature, for many reasons and not least because in a counter-insurgency you need to win the hearts and minds of the people and the way you do that is to preserve what they hold dear which is mosques and schools and children and non-combatants and we do that with better than any other weapons system that’s ever been fielded. We do that.”

AR: “What about other countries which use these UAV’s?”

CG: “What I will say is that we know that this is proliferating and frankly it should be proliferating.”

Proliferating it certainly is. The White House is considering sending them to the Somalian government. Texas Governor Rick Perry wants them deployed on the border with Mexico. Pakistan is developing one. Israel is developing more and more of them. The ratio of civilian to military deaths in wars has been steadily rising and we can expect it to continue.

H/T to Counterpunch and Reality Zone.

Grubby Non-Dom Entrepreneur? Step Forward Tony Blair.

From Craig Murray today.

The newspapers today carry the unsurprising news that Blair's business affairs are routed through a multiplicity of companies operating in tax havens. He is raking in over £5 million per year, aside from his official job of chief Zionist - sorry, I mean Middle East Peace Envoy.

But I was more struck by the information in Michael White's Blair puff piece that, before his arrival in the Sedgefield constituency yesterday, six policemen blocked off the roads around the venue with trafic cones.

Why? I am not making a petty or petulant point, I mean it. Why? This was a Labour Party event, not a government event. Blair holds no executive office in this country. The election has not been called. Even if it had been, he is not a candidate. Why do the police cone off the roads for a Blair New Labour speech?

How much did the six policemen cost? And they were just the bottom of the pile, the road coning bobbies. Blair arrived in a huge entourage of cars, at least some of which were taxpayer provided. There was a large police car and motorcycle escort. Not to mention the close protection officers. How much did all that cost?

Thatcher and Major move around with no blues and twos and a single close protection officer when required. The Duke of Edinburgh moves around privately with much less security than Blair. As a taxpayer I object fundamentally to footing the bill for protecting this war criminal. He should get a single close protection officer and fund anything else himself. He can certainly afford it.