The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media
John Pilger, New Statesman, Dec 10, 2009
I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day, only to learn that he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honourable man. We met soon after he resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor.
“Everyone knows,” he said, “except parliament and the public.”
“And the media?”
“The media – the big names – have been invited to King Charles Street [the Foreign Office] and flattered and briefed with lies. They are no trouble.”
As Iraq desk officer at the Foreign Office, he had drafted letters for ministers reassuring MPs and the public that the government was not arming Saddam Hussein. “This was a downright lie,” he said. “I couldn’t bear it.”
Giving evidence before the arms-to-Iraq inquiry, Higson was the only British official commended by Lord Justice Scott for telling the truth. The price he paid was the loss of his health and marriage, and constant surveillance by spooks. He ended up living on benefits in a Birmingham bedsit where he suffered a seizure, struck his head and died alone. Whistleblowers are often heroes; he was one.
He came to mind when I saw a picture in the paper of another Foreign Office official, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Tony Blair’s ambassador to the United Nations in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was Sir Jeremy, more than anyone else, who tried every trick to find a UN cover for the bloodbath to come. Indeed, this was his boast on 27 November to the Chilcot inquiry, where he described the invasion as “legal but of questionable legitimacy”. How clever. In the picture he wore a smirk.
Under international law, “questionable legitimacy” does not exist. An attack on a sovereign state is a crime. This was made clear by Britain’s chief law officer and attorney general, Peter Goldsmith, before his arm was twisted, and by the Foreign Office’s own legal advisers, and subsequently by the UN secretary general. The invasion of Iraq is the crime of the 21st century. During 17 years of assault on a defenceless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers such as “sanctions” and “no-fly zones” and “building democracy”, more people have died in Iraq than at the height of the slave trade. Set that against Sir Jeremy’s skin-saving revisionism about American “noises” that were “decidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do [at the UN] in New York”. Moreover, “I myself warned the Foreign Office . . . that I might have to consider my own position . . .”
It wasn’t me, guv.
The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media, so that the only issue which matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. When he appears in January, Blair will play this part to odious perfection, dutifully absorbing the hisses and boos. All “inquiries” into state crimes are neutered in this way. In 1996, Lord Justice Scott’s arms-to-Iraq report obfuscated the crimes his investigations and voluminous evidence had revealed.
At that time, I interviewed Tim Laxton, who had attended the inquiry every day as an auditor of companies taken over by MI6 and other secret agencies as vehicles for the illegal arms trade with Saddam. Had there been a full and open criminal investigation, Laxton told me, “hundreds” would have faced prosecution. “They would include,” he said, “top political figures, very senior civil servants throughout Whitehall . . . the top echelon of government.”
That is why Chilcot is advised by the likes of Sir Martin Gilbert, who once compared Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. That is why the inquiry will not demand the release of documents that would illuminate the role of the entire Blair gang, notably the 2003 cabinet, long silent. Who remembers the threat of the thuggish Geoff Hoon, Blair’s “defence secretary”, to use nuclear weapons against Iraq?
In February, Jack Straw, one of Blair’s principal accomplices, the current “justice secretary” and the man who let the mass murderer General Pinochet escape justice, overruled the Information Commissioner, who had ordered the government to publish cabinet minutes from the period when Lord Goldsmith was pressured into changing his judgment that the invasion was illegal. How they all fear exposure.
The media have granted themselves immunity. On 27 November, Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, wrote that the invasion “was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain”. More than four years before the invasion, Ritter, in interviews with myself and others, left not a shred of doubt that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been disabled, yet he was made a non-person. In 2002, when the Bush/Blair lies were in full echo across the media, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in more than 3,000 articles, of which only 49 referred to Ritter and his truth.
What has changed? On 30 November, the Independent published a pristine piece of propaganda from its embedded man in Afghanistan. “Troops fear defeat at home”, said the headline. Britain, said the report, “is at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralising the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned”. In fact, public disgust with the disaster in Afghanistan is mirrored among many serving troops and their families; and this frightens the warmongers. So “defeatism” and “demoralising the troops” are added to the weasel lexicon. Good try. Unfortunately, like Iraq, Afghanistan is a crime. Period.
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by César Chelala, CommonDreams.org, Dec 14, 2009
The collusion between Egypt and the U.S. to build a wall separating Egypt from Gaza not only threatens Gazans’ health and quality of life, already severely deteriorated by the de facto Israeli blockade, it is a serious violation of international law.
According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Egypt is installing an underground metal wall 70-100 feet deep along the border strip where Palestinians have dug a maze-like set of tunnels to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The construction of the wall, carried out with the collaboration of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, has been denied by the Egyptian government.
WMD were not vital for war says ex-PM ahead of appearance at Chilcot inquiry
by Riazat Butt and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian/UK, Dec 12, 2009
Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public.
![[Tony Blair told Fern Britton, in an interview to be broadcast on BBC1, that he would have found a way to justify the Iraq invasion. (Photograph: BBC)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/Tony-Blair-and-Fern-Britt-001.jpg "Tony-Blair-and-Fern-Britt-001.jpg")
The former prime minister made the confession during an interview with Fern Britton, to be broadcast on Sunday on BBC1, in which he said he would still have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
“If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked. He replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]“.
Significantly, Blair added: “I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.” He continued: “I can’t really think we’d be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it’s incredibly difficult. That’s why I sympathise with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision.”
He explained it was “the notion of him as a threat to the region” because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people.
“This was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind. The threat to the region. Also the fact of how that region was going to change and how in the end it was going to evolve as a region and whilst he was there, I thought and actually still think, it would have been very difficult to have changed it in the right way.”
Though Blair has always argued that Iraq would be better off without Saddam Hussein, to parliament and the public, he always justified military action on the grounds that the Iraqi dictator was in breach of UN-backed demands that he abandon his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme.
It is possible that Blair has shifted his ground in anticipation of his appearance early next year before the Chilcot inquiry. The inquiry has heard that Blair made clear to President George Bush at a meeting in Texas 11 months before the Iraq invasion that he would be prepared to join the US in toppling Saddam.
Blair was “absolutely prepared to say he was willing to contemplate regime change if [UN-backed measures] did not work”, Sir David Manning, Blair’s former foreign policy adviser, told the inquiry. If it proved impossible to pursue the UN route, then Blair would be “willing to use force”, Manning emphasised.
The Chilcot inquiry has seen a number of previously leaked Whitehall documents which suggest Blair was in favour of regime change although he was warned by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, in July 2002, eight months before the invasion, that “the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action”.
Manning told Blair in March that year that he had underlined Britain’s position to Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser.
“I said you [Blair] would not budge in your support for regime change, but you had to manage a press, a parliament, and a public opinion which is very different than anything in the States,” Manning wrote, according to a leaked Whitehall document. A Cabinet Office document also seen by the Chilcot inquiry, dated July 2002, stated: “When the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford [his Texas ranch] in April, he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion …”
Now Blair appears to be openly admitting that evidence of WMD – the purpose behind the now discredited weapons dossier he ordered to be published with the help of MI6 and Whitehall’s joint intelligence committee – was not needed to invade Iraq, and he could have found other arguments to justify it.
Blair did say in a speech to Labour party conference in 2004, over a year after the invasion: “I can apologise for the information [about WMDs] that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.
“The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.”
Blair told the former This Morning presenter how his religious beliefs helped him in the invasion’s immediate aftermath.
“When it comes to a decision like that, I think it is important that you take that decision as it were on the basis of what is right, because that is the only way to do it,” he said.
“I think sometimes people think my religious faith played a direct part in some of these decisions. It really didn’t. It gives you strength if you come to a decision, to hold to that decision. That’s how it supports your character in a situation of difficulty.”
Most “really hard” decisions involved a “downside and an upside either way”, he added.
Sir John Sawers, Blair’s former chief foreign policy adviser and now head of MI6, told the Chilcot inquiry on Thursday that Iraq was one of several countries where Britain would have liked regime change. Discussions took place on “political” actions to undermine Saddam, including indicting him for war crimes, Sawers said. There was no talk in 2001 in Whitehall of military action, he added.
“There are a lot of countries … where we would like to see a change of regime. That doesn’t mean one pursues active policies in that direction.”
Eric Ruder, Socialist Worker, December 8, 2009
Barack Obama’s December 1 nationally televised address to announce a further escalation of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan cemented his role as a war president who bears responsibility for the U.S. war on that country. It also marked Obama’s assumption of the task of providing the justifications, alibis and obfuscations needed to cloak U.S. military aims in an aura of legitimacy.
Eric Ruder goes through Obama’s speech and counters seven of Barack Obama’s worst half-truths and lies about Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama speaks on Afghanistan at West Point (Pete Souza | White House)
DECEPTION NO. 1: “We did not ask for this fight…[T]he United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks…and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, we sent our troops into Afghanistan.”
HERE, BARACK Obama is repeating a lie that has been told and retold so often that it goes completely unexamined in the mainstream press. Countless Western newspapers reported on the Taliban’s offers to hand over Osama bin Laden, so long as the Bush administration provided Afghan government officials with evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in the September 11 attacks–something that any sovereign nation, like the U.S., would require before agreeing to an extradition.
India: Carting Off Medical Institute to Corporate Predators
December 14, 2009By Badri Raina, ZNet, Dec 13, 2009
Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page
No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.”
(Herbert Spencer)
To that talisman you could add another: no one can be perfectly healthy till all are healthy.
At a time, however, when Obama, the welfarist democrat, battles the American Congress, sundry red-necks, and powerful Pharma lobbyists and private medical insurers to bring to beleaguered Americans a guaranteed public health dispensation, his strategic partner, Manmohan Singh, may be about to cart off the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, an iconic symbol of Nehru’s welfarist national vision, “recognized for providing low-cost medical care to large numbers of patients” (Wikipedia) to sundry business interests.
A committee (Valiathan) now recommends that the institute “should form consortia to develop and transfer for commercialization a range of products and processes.”
It suggests that “consultancy for Indian industry should be encouraged among faculty,” and faculty “should be given leave to join industry.” Further that research papers should be monetarily rewarded as well, such as may be “of great interest to industry.”
In order that these predatory objectives are nicely fulfilled, it recommends that “industrialists. . . be nominated by the central government” to the controlling Board “in consultation with CII, NASSCOM, and FICCII”—godlike conglomerates of India’s private capital.
Lest you think that these recommendations have anything to do with enhancing the primary health care obligations of the Institute, please note that for the 12 years that the prestigious India Today magazine has conducted surveys, AIIMS has been ranked number ONE for 11 years!
Just as surveys conducted by the Week and Outlook magazines have named it the best hospital in India overall, as well as best in several individual fields, such as Cardiology, Nuerology, Gasteroenterology, Gynocology, and Opthalmology, ahead of several specialized institutions (Wikipedia).
Thus, even as Obama pays compliment to Castro’s Cuba for the care it takes of Cuban’s health, Manmohan Singh rushes to emulate the American Republicans who believe passionately (read rabidly) that the least penny spent on public health by the state violates the overriding sanctity of the Market.
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Tags:All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Badri Raina, D.P. Chattopadhyay, India, India's Brahminical culture, model of Varnasrama society, the Carvak Samhita, Valiathan committee
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