As you can see, it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and the folks here are having a wonderful time (and I’m sure you can guess which movie I watched last night)…
New Statesman – The men in grey suits must do their duty: Blair has to be persuaded to stand down. The announcement should take place this spring, with a leadership contest in the summer. (via)
I disagree. For the good of the Labour Party, for the good of the country, and for the good of the whole bloody world, Tony Blair must not leave Downing St voluntarily… and if he does, he must be forced to resign in shame. (And before anybody makes any smart-arse remarks about intervention, I would remind them that this measure is far from pre-emptive.)
Why? Because someone has to be called to account or the next batch of power-mad bastards – here or abroad – will think they can get away with exactly the same thing.
I’ll move onto the guts after a few stabs at the heel:
Blair is a pretty straight sort of a guy
BBC – Capita boss quits over Blair loan
BSSC – Crapita Protection Racket
BlairWatch – Was Rod Aldridge Going to Resign Anyway?
Independent – Contractor who lent Labour £1m quits over sleaze fears
Guardian – Capita chairman quits after criticism of loan to Labour
There’s a lot to say here this morning, so let me be brief about this particular issue; if the PM approves a scheme that sees a winner of major government contracts *approached* for a loan because it neatly sidesteps a law controlling donations (that they themselves championed; bully for them) then that is corruption. There’s no denying it.
Now we lunge for the guts, and we begin with bankruptcy…
The Blair-led coalition currently passing itself off as the face of the Labour Party is bankrupt in every sense of the word. Their finances, their morals, their authority… they have squandered it all and abandoned everything but the facade that keeps them in power.
And we continue to let them get away with it… to the point where soon they’ll be able to write their own laws without democratic oversight.
Your right to protest
If you got so mad about this (or anything else for that matter) that you decided to congregate at Downing St this afternoon to protest, there are already laws introduced by this government that allow the police to round you up and shut you up.
Take a look at Belarus and witness your future; it only took riot police 15 minutes to round up 200 protestors who – like may international observers – thought the election was more than a little fishy. But protestors first enabled the authorities by losing their will and dwindling in number. The media helped by ignoring or denouncing the initially 20,000-strong protest… police bullying, the weather and a lack of will did the rest. Then, finally, Lukashenko was confident that he could sort the whole thing out with a dustpan and brush.
Here I wish to make a quick point about precedent and accountability… Lukashenko knew that he would get away with this if he didn’t shoot anybody. Here’s why.
Now you need to take a moment and look at the worldwide numbers during the most recent protests over foreign policy and consider that we here in Britain only boast one man willing to stick to his guns (so to speak).
The media is to blame
Meanwhile, we are assured that the media never report any good news from Iraq and that this is what is causing all of the problems. (That, and people object to Blair ‘purely because they disagreed with him about Iraq’, so can’t we all please move on? For the sake of the Iraqis? Please?)
Bush claimed a day or so ago that this behaviour enabled the terrorists… the same terrorists that he created a playground for in that same country. Pretty neat trick, huh?
Bush and Blair use this same tactic when confronted with images of abuse and torture. Here’s a clue for you, Jack… if you think awareness of this kind of behaviour enables terrorists, then don’t employ these tactics in the first place!
For fuck’s sake…
(breathes)
We don’t do torture
And now, some more images of torture and abuse, deliberately released by leftist apologists as ammunition for the terrists:
Salon.com – The Abu Ghraib files: Three years and at least six Pentagon investigations later, we now know that many share the blame for the outrages that took place at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003. The abuse took place against the backdrop of rising chaos in Iraq. In those months the U.S. military faced a raging insurgency for which it hadn’t planned. As mortar attacks rained down on the overcrowded prison — at one point there were only 450 guards for 7,000 prisoners — its command structure broke down. At the same time, the pressure from the Pentagon and the White House for “actionable intelligence” was intense, and harsh interrogation techniques were approved to obtain it. Bush administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, had already created a radical post-9/11 legal framework that disregarded the Geneva Conventions and other international laws governing the humane treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror.” Intelligence agencies such as the CIA were apparently given the green light to operate by their own set of secret rules. But while the Pentagon’s own probes have acknowledged that military commanders, civilian contractors, the CIA and government policymakers all bear some responsibility for the abuses, to date only nine enlisted soldiers have been prosecuted for their crimes at Abu Ghraib (see sidebar). An additional four soldiers and eight officers, including Brinson, Pappas and Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military police at Abu Ghraib, have been reprimanded. (Pappas and Karpinski were also relieved of their posts.) To date no high-level U.S. officials have been brought to justice in a court of law for what went on at Abu Ghraib.
And guess what? We were there, too. We also participated in Guantanamo. And allowed up to 73 planes to refuel in our country as the U.S. shipped an unknown number of suspects to countries where they could be tortured for our ‘benefit…. countries like Uzbekistan.
In my darker moments when I begin to lose hope and/or the hammering of willing media causes me to doubt my sanity, I often turn to this:
Team Blair pulled out all the stops to protect the drunken womaniser David Blunkett when he actually did naughty things with his penis that led to shady visa dealings… and even when he was brought down, Blair stood by him and said that he left office “with no stain of impropriety against him whatsoever”. But when then-ambassador Craig Murray refused to shut up about torture and murder conducted by our then-ally Uzbekistan, they pulled out all the stops to destroy him with false claims of drunkenness, womanising and shady visa dealings.
That says it all for me… Blair uses morals as a weapon to protect actions and polices that are morally repugnant (and just plain wrong, even in purely practical terms).
Respect the victims
In July 2005, I resisted the temptation to ‘respect’ the victims of the London bombings and let Bush and Blair have their wicked way with them and then posted this: On Thursday the 7th of July, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush climbed over the bodies of the dead, dying and wounded in order to claim the moral high ground. I’m sorry there isn’t a more pleasant way to say that; it’s just the way it is. They also used this atrocity to further cement their foreign and domestic policy. The same policies that prompt and/or enable such atrocities. In the process, they recruited human beings in no position to disagree with them . Sadly, this is not a first for Tony Blair.
It took a while for others to realise just how cavalier they could be about this, though the then-ally Scum newspaper woke a lot of people up when they hijacked a victim of terrorism to help Blair sell his 90-day detention plan. And they’re still at it now… showing that they don’t know or care if those victims are alive or dead… all that really matters to them is if a collective/individual plight can further their agenda.
Ditto for Blair. Here’s a fucking bombshell for you… he only ‘cares’ about victims when the cameras are rolling:
Rachel North – Ready to speak out: I have worked out that I gave my details out eleven times at least, possibly more, but by 24th October I was still, apparently, not on an official Department of Culture Media and Sport list of survivors, and nor were many other passengers. This is staggeringly incompetent: I and other people managed to climb out of a bombed train, find each other, look after each other, and now we have almost 100 survivors’ names and details. We have executed a successful media strategy, helped each other find counsellors, fill in compensation firms, find lawyers, medical help, dealt with hundreds of media enquiries, safeguarded ourselves from nutters and weirdoes trying to infiltrate the group, organised a 6 month memorial ceremony, set up a website, campaigned for a public enquiry, liaised with the police, all whilst holding down a day job and recovering from injuries and PTSD. And nobody has given us any funding: we haven’t asked for it we did it all by ourselves, for free. Meanwhile someone, somewhere has a salary or a grant and a job description that is about looking after victims of July 7th. I’d like to know what they are bloody well doing, frankly.
Chicken Yoghurt – Justify this: However you look at it, Rachel North and the other survivors of the July 7 bombings have been badly, inexcusably let down. They’ve had to fight for every scrap of help and recognition. I’d like to hear a government minister try and justify this. No doubt it’d be hand-wringing laments of being “unable to go into details of individual cases” and “things are improving” and “INSERT NON-SPECIFIC PLATITUDE HERE”. No wonder the Government don’t want a public inquiry into the bombings. Tales of the careless, aloof, unfeeling and incompetent treatment of these people are the last thing this grubby and limping administration needs right now.
Now I want to get back to loans and a different kind of bombshell… primarily because the paperwork seems to be above board.
Bear with me… you’ll need some background:
We don’t use chemical weapons
I shan’t bother you with tales of napalm. We knew it was being used in Iraq. Well, sensible people did. Blair’s team turned a blind eye and pretended to be surprised when it almost blew up in their faces. So to speak II. What I want to talk about is white phosphorus…
A white phosphorus round, when used only for illumination or screening, is a perfectly legal device. But when you use it as an anti-personnel device, it becomes a chemical weapon. Even the Pentagon agrees on this point… when they’re not using as an anti-personnel device in Iraq… erm… to stop a dangerous tyrant who supposedly had large reserves of chemical weapons and the will to use them.
Now, please pay attention, because I have not blogged this before, as I only have two sources and have not been able to pursue the matter… but I figure if I’m wrong, then John Reid will be in touch soon enough with the relevant legal papers and we can sort the whole thing out from there.
The first source was a soldier; one of Tony Blair’s true believers who – it must be pointed out – didn’t know who he was talking to. He was perfectly willing to go and fight and die for the ‘good cause’ in Iraq, even though (and I personally found this quite telling) he had no idea who Rupert Murdoch was. So I think it’s fair to say that he had no axe to grind.
He told me that all of the training paperwork and processes teach soldiers how to deploy white phosphorus for the purposes of illumination and/or screening. They learn how to store, load and fire the weapon in a way that is completely in keeping with the law. Then their corporals give them repeated informal briefings on how to use it to clear rooms, bunkers and trenches. Rooms, bunkers and trenches full of people.
But, of course, all of the paperwork seems to be above board.
The second source involved a confrontation with someone who should know about such things. And not a ‘friendly’, I should add. His response was to assure me that I would be sued from here to kingdom come if I dared to publish the claim. I noted the lack of denial (Boy, they are good at this, aren’t they?) and made my question more direct. No denial followed; only a rather graphic outline of what it would cost me if I published the claim.
So, here I am. It’s done. I’ve made the claim. Would anyone care to confirm or deny it? Or perhaps sue me to kingdom come? Perhaps John Reid would care to deny knowledge that it happens (all of the paperwork seems to be above board) and then act surprised when it turns out to be true.
This shit must end
All of these matters and more need to be addressed. Without fear. I say we that we should let the record show that Britain stood up for what’s right and gave Blair what for.
Yes, we may end up with an interim, crippled or Tory government as a result, but – at this stage – that’s better than what we have and more than we deserve.
One last time, folks…. over the top we go. And this time let’s finish the job.
Attention all troops
This is a formal call for an ammunition check. What have we got that we haven’t used? What have we got that can be used again? Count it, check it, and get ready to use it. Blair must fall.
