Wikileaks: Iraq is a deeper blood bath than we knew

Thanks god for Wikileaks. They are exposing the massive, massive, criminal, violent and messy bloodbath that is Iraq. One we paid for in taxes and the Iraqi people paid for in blood. It's is gobsmacking how low, how deep the void of horror this conflict has opened, is:

...one case in which he claimed a British rifleman had shot dead an eight-year-old girl who was playing in the street in Basra.

"For some reason the tank stopped at the end of the street, she's there in her yellow dress, a rifleman pops up and blows her away."

It's not just that: It turns out they did do body counts; and the majority of those dying in the coalitions own figures, are civilians. Given that I'm sure soldiers sometimes lie about who they had killed to cover-up mistakes - this is still a staggering figure..

Leaked Pentagon files obtained by the Guardian contain details of more than 100,000 people killed in Iraq following the US-led invasion, including more than 15,000 deaths that were previously unrecorded.

British ministers have repeatedly refused to concede the existence of any official statistics on Iraqi deaths. US General Tommy Franks claimed in 2002: "We don't do body counts."

The mass of leaked documents provides the first detailed tally by the US military of Iraqi fatalities. Troops on the ground filed secret field reports over six years of the occupation, purporting to tot up every casualty, military and civilian.

The ignoring of torture - and remember that Bliar and Bush took us into Iraq to stop the torture of Saddam - and they turn out to be almost as bad. With us paying the tax bill... and the Iraqi's paying the butchers bill:

This is the impact of Frago 242. A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

I've run out of outrage words to describe all this....

Bliar's Journey (to the Hague)

I saw a tiny bit of Tony Bliar on TV banging on about how the invasion of Iraq was the 'right' decision. Decisions, decisions - that all he talked about re Iraq. By focusing on the decision alone it allows him to ignore/forget the cack-handed, terrible, inhumane, murderous, idiotic, hubris-tic and racist manner in which 'the decision' was carried out. Oi! Bliar! Even if you'd decided to go into Iraq, your neo-con makes were hell bent on ignoring advice about how best to to it so it resulted in the minimum loss of life. They (and you) ignored any counter-view and set up a group-think empire that just followed free-market fantasies about how to invade, asset-strip and re-brand a country - and you gamely followed along.

Still guilty IHMO, decision or not;

So what happened? A Journey is a re-writing of history, events seen through the rear-view mirror from a man who hitched his wagon to the Bush neocons and learned some of their tunes.

You may not have wished to count the Iraqi dead - but they have no choice but to. I'd like to see you on 'a journey' to the Hague.

This is the way the Iraq War ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.

I've been blogging about Iraq for a loooong, loooong time. So as the last of the US troops heads home, the utter cluster-fuck that was the Iraq War, moves from the occupation phase into a fully fledged low-intensity civil war phase. From start to now this was a massive cock-up that will forever be the albatross around the necks of Bu$h and co, Bliar and his sycophants in Neo-Labour. A pox on all their houses. Juan Cole sums it up well:

T.S. Eliot wrote in “Hollow Men,” that “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” And so too does the US combat mission in Iraq, initiated by George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney in March, 2003 to promises that US troops would be garlanded and greeted as liberators by exultant Iraqis. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the US troop strength would be down to about a division, some 25,000 men, by fall of 2003. Even in September of 2010, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, over 3000 dead US troops, over 30,000 seriously wounded ones and over a trillion dollars later, there are still going to be twice that number.

The US did not ‘win’ the Iraq War. It simply outlasted it. It was strong enough to remain, during the Sunni guerrilla war and the Sunni-Shiite Civil War, until the Iraqis exhausted themselves with fighting. But the massive violence provoked by the US occupation so weakened the Bush administration that it was forced to accept a withdrawal timetable dictated by the Iraqi parliament, in part at the insistence of deputies loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and others connected to Iran.

...

The main thing to remember is that the US military, all the time it was in Iraq, was never really in control at a neighborhood level and that tens of thousands of US troops could not prevent the Civil War from killing so many Iraqis. So there is no reason to think that keeping a large US combat force in Iraq could eliminate political violence. In fact, since the guerrillas used to lay roadside bombs for US convoys, and often missed and killed civilians, the end of active US patrols in the cities actually contributed to a fall in violence.

Moreover, US combat troops cannot help anyone form a government and are irrelevant to Iraq’s stalled political process. ...

$6 Billion Later, Afghan Police Force is a Mess

Not unlike the billions lost in Iraq, the same malaise cause by a mixture of Imperial hubris, lack of transparency and the privatising of war: another nation building cock-up. This time round after sinking a staggering $6 billion (and that is just since 2002) into the Afghan police they have fuck all to show for the money and effort:

America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. ... The worst of it is that the police are central to Washington's plans for getting out of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed government in Kabul will never have popular support if it can't keep people safe in their own homes and streets. Yet in a United Nations poll last fall, more than half the Afghan respondents said the police are corrupt. Police commanders have been implicated in drug trafficking, and when U.S. Marines moved into the town of Aynak last summer, villagers accused the local police force of extortion, assault, and rape.

Wow - extortion, assault, and rape; and we're not even on to the war crimes of the Taliban. What comes across in this article is that the local sort-of trust US forces, they sort-of trust (at least they know where they stand with..) the Taliban but the Afghan Cops are the worst of the lot. Here is another shocking bit of the story:

More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are. At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled drawdown begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room. "It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform." The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train police? It's mind-boggling." The room was silent.

So Bush and Bliar/Brown poured money into and presided over a regime that was failing to train the police that were the bed-rock of the counter insurgency? What a fucking joke. They have left a massive shit-pile for their predecessors to clean-up; it it can be done at all? I can't believe we let these people run not just one war, but multiple wars from Iraq to Somalia.

I wouldn't let them run a fairground ride.

Tony Bliar's Defence of His Own Sanity

So Tony Bliar came to the Iraq Inquiry and not only refused to acknowledge any problems with his conduct or judgement, but went on the attack asking supposed difficult questions, like what would the world be like if he had not acted - with high oil prices and a resurgent Iran and Taliban?

What a fucking prick. These are not hard questions. The high oil price is in part down to the Iraq war. Bliar and Bu$h helped create that. A resurgent Iran is down to the weakening of the US from the failed Iraq war. Bliar and Bu$h helped create that. Many officials and experts have concluded that the failure in Afghanistan is because of the Iraq war - the resurgent Taliban are down to the lack of focus and resources to capitalise on the position the military got to in 2002. Bliar and Bu$h helped create that.

The Iraq war cost billions and sat side-by-side with Guantanamo. Bliar's silence was his complicity. Yes, I suspect that Saddam would still be in power - and that would be terrible - but in his 20-odd reign of terror he killed around 1,000,000 people. Bliar and Bu$h helped kill over that number in less than 5 years.

But more than that there is the arrogance - the towering arrogance of a man - anti-democratically - seems to think that the British Army was his army to do as he willed with and tough shit on those who disagree. That the will of the people who pay for that army (in money and blood) was simply not a factor and he was in his rights to lie to us to follow his war.


Image: A man carries the body of a child recovered from the rubble of a destroyed house after an air strike in Baghdad’s Sadr City in Iraq on April 29, 2008.

The towering arrogance of a man who ignored the experts and thought that the occupation of a middle east country would be a 'cakewalk'. The towering arrogance of a man who he thought would gain any leverage from Bu$h from is simpering compliance - he didn't.

So people have been asking why he had no regrets of any sense of questioning himself. I think this is because to let in even an inch of doubt is to open the mental door to over a million ghosts of the dead who would, with a deafening silence, plague him in his private moments.

Bliar defended his war to save his sanity - as he just happened to do it at the Iraq Inquiry.

Afganistan Update: Dying in Slow Motion

So Britain and the US are to send more troops to Afghanistan. I can't see anything but pouring more resources into a failed war. It was a failed war when the unholy alliance of Bu$h/Bliar squandered the international sympathy they had in the aftermath of September 11th and went off, gung-ho, to bomb one of the poorest countries in the world back into the stone-age.

Why will it fail?

First off NATO forces as killing lots of civilians. I know it does not get as much coverage here, what with the X-Factor going on and all, but to the locals, it is murder. To be fair to the NATO forces, since Obama took over they have been at least sounding like they want to change this dynamic, but I suspect the damage has already been done and still is being done.

Second is because the government that is being propped up is a corrupt and useless rump. Recently we were told that the government in Kabul would fall 'in weeks' without NATO forces. I think the comments were said to stiffen resolve here in the UK - but all I could think of was the waste - all those lives lost and over $10 billion spent training/equiping the Afgan police and army - all all it has achieved is 'weeks' of stability. That and a flawed election. That is shit by any measure.

But wait, it gets worse. The politicians in Afghanistan don't seem to give a shit...

Nader Khan Katawazai, an MP from Paktika, complained that only 30 of the 238 MPs attended Monday's session [to confirm the new cainet]. This is the government we are being asked to prop up with blood and treasure? Only 30 legislators bothered to come in to work?

Or be up for spending the money...

The Afghanistan government presides over the fifth poorest country in the world. It has millions of dollars in aid to spend for the betterment of its constituents. But it actually managed to spend less on these tasks this year than in previous years, despite having more money.

The whole mission seems to be dying in slow motion.

Iraq War: Right Wing War Blogger's Get it Wrong

Back in 2003, the website Right Wing News asked some leading war-cheerleaders for their opinions of the coalition dead in the upcoming war. This is what they said:

John Hawkins: "Probably 300 or less"
Charles Johnson:"Very few"
Henry Hanks: "Less than 200"
Laurence Simon: "A Few hundred"
Rachael Lucas: "Less than three thousand"
Scott Ott: "Dozens"
Glenn Reynolds: "Fewer than 100"
Tim Blair: "Below 50"
Ken Layne: "a few hundred"
Steven Den Beste: "50-150"

Well they were all totally wrong as currently it stands at around 4600.

Right Wing News didn't bother to ask them about civilian casualties, I guess like the US military, they didn't do body counts. Well for the record the number is around 100,000 to 1,000,000.

They also didn't ask about the financial cost of the war. Prior to the war the Bush people has estimates from $0 (Paul Wolfowitz, "really finance its own reconstruction") to $50 billion (Rumsfeld) to $200 billion (Larry Lindsey - Bush sacked him for this view).

At time of writing; $685,000,000,000 (which might rise to as much as $3 trillion).

Wolfowitz went on to run the World Bank for a bit.
Bliar went on to launch the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to promote peace.

You couldn't make it up...

More on Bristol's Neo-Labour Hope

I posted a short article about the new guy from the Neo-Labour party and how hollow his rhetoric sounds. I wrote;

Would this be the same Labour government who for the last eight years allied itself to the most significant anti-Climate Change activists in the world, the Bu$h regime. The same government who approved the third runway at Heathrow and who – via its proxy in SWRDA has, until recently, been using public funds to subsidise airport development in the region.

Then Paul (or at least a poster claiming to be Paul) appeared on the blog to comment;

Yes these are the reasons I want to take the debate to the heart of Government...

and:

and there was me expecting a endorsement from the anarchists of Bristol. I am standing to change and improve the Labour Government not to endorse everything they have done. Indeed I was partly motivated to put myself forward to the local Labour Party to ensure that a robotic yes person politician was not selected.

I will be publishing a fuller political statement on my website soon to set out where I stand on a range of issues.

So at least he has a sense of humour. But seriously - how bankrupt is Labour? Totally. It is staggeringly simplistic (or simply propaganda to us voting masses) that Paul thinks he can 'take the debate to the heart of Government' - a government who don't give a shit about what you or I think.

At a local level; the ongoing debacle over cycling city and Red Trousergate shows the lack of environmental will-power of the local Labour party; they they had wanted the enviroment to count - they could have made it so. But no, it's spin and developers first.

At a national level; Heathrow - no clearer demonstration of climate first could be shown, but not - its developers and spin first. The recent account of the twists and turns of the official reports and consultation in such a way to favour the polluters is staggering. (examples 1 ,2 & 3)

At an international level; Former Neo-Labour leader, friend of big oil, Tony 'War Crimes' Bliar is going to be raking in even more ca$h as an advisor to the Colombian government of Álvaro Uribe. Yes, Bliar is helping out with a government of death squads, big oil and environmental degradation thanks to the failed coca spraying.

Face it if environmentalism is a left turn on the political road-map, then the Labour party is a right.
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Understanding The Airstrikes

First a little bit of history. Remember our brave and visionary leader Mr Tony Bliar? Back in 2003;

Tony Blair, in an attempt to convince critics at home that his "special relationship" with the United States President is not a one-way street, will tonight urge George Bush to keep up maximum pressure for a Middle East peace settlement.

How well did that go? A disaster. Since the axis of Bu$h/Blair the middle east has been worse than ever; over a million dead in Iraq, the ongoing Turkey/Kurdish conflict, Israel/Hezbollah, Lebanon in ongoing various states of turmoil. And Tony 'peace' Bliar is doing such a great job as peace envoy using his 'special relationship' with the US to broker peace (not). What a fuck-up. There are things we can do from here to promote justice in the Middle-East and one thing is to make sure we never forget the shameful complicity of the Neo-Labour party in the ongoing violence, corruption and death.

So how are we to understand the broader context of what is going on? So here are a few links of interest;

The excellent Helena Cobban writes;

The casualty rate is tragic, tragic-- for Palestinians and for all of humanity. ... But at a cynical, Realpolitik level, these casualty levels are not, actually, all that bad for Hamas and its attainment of its political goals. They severely undermine Abu Mazen, Hosni Mubarak, and all the other cast of corrupt and US-supported leaders in the region. These raids will also not succeed in snuffing out Hamas, a movement which is as much an idea of religiously-buttressed resistance, as it is an actual political party. You can't snuff out such a movement simply by killing even hundreds of its members or supporters, or scores of its leaders. Israel pursued the leadership-decapitation strategy through much of the 1990s and early 2000s. It killed three or four successive generations of Hamas leaders with its broad strategy of assassinations-- but the movement as a whole only dug in deeper.

So what does it feel like to have loved ones in the bombing zone?

A little later I called my mother, only to hear her crying on the phone. "The planes are overhead" she cried "the planes are overhead". I tried to calm her down- planes overhead mean the "target" is further away. But in such moments of intense fear, there is no room for rationality and logic. There is you, and there are war planes; and nothing in between, besides orders and a video game screen.

And now we have right-wing US pundits using the same logic Bin Laden used to justify attacks on civilians to cheer-lead these airstrikes;

The question is whether the Palestinian people are educable. Which brings me back to the first point: the Palestinians voted to put in power — i.e., vest with the power of a quasi-sovereign government — a terrorist organization which thinks legitimate governing consists of bringing about the annihilation of its sovereign neighbor and, meantime, targeting the said neighbor’s civilian population with bombing attacks. When you do that, you make yourself a target.

and wingnut Bin Laden;

The American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. ...This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.

Scary how wingnut propagandists will always find a reason to justify killing civilians.
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Failure in Afghanistan

Following on from looking at the colossal cluster-fu*k that is Iraq, it seems Afghanistan is also on the side. NATO are arguing about who should send troops to die in the doomed enterprise and three (yes THREE) recent reports have sounded the alarm;

Three independent reports have concluded this month that a major new effort is needed to succeed in Afghanistan. These reports – by the Afghanistan Study Group, established by the Center for the Study of the Presidency following the Iraq Study Group; the Strategic Advisors Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States; and the National Defense University – concur that without prompt actions by the U.S. and its allies, the mission in Afghanistan may fail – causing severe consequences to U.S. strategic interests worldwide, including the war on terrorism and the future of NATO. The U.S. cannot afford to let Afghanistan continue to be the neglected, or forgotten, war.

But for me, the real sign of failure is the continued human-wreckage that strews this so-called democratic project; death sentences for journalists, clamping down on media freedom and starving Afghans selling girl as young as eight as brides.

PS. In the midst of the chaos of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine - where is one of the architects of this misery? Bliar is busy trying to get more power. Why the hell would anyone consider this man to run anything beyond a defence in his own war crimes trial is beyond me.
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The I-Can't-Believe-They-Did-This Iraq Post

We start with the former war-monger, now at JP Morgan bank for half-a-million per-year part time job, in the run up to the Iraq war;

With blithe self-confidence, and without even asking his officials for expertise, however, Blair assumed it would be easy for the US and UK to run the country after Saddam was toppled. His style was not to encourage his policy preferences to be questioned, or call for nuanced assessments of possible consequences.

Then we need to ask ourselves what else could have been achieved with the cash that paid for the Iraq cock-up (so far);

Consider that, according to sources like Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs, the Worldwatch Institute, and the United Nations, with that same money the world could:

Eliminate extreme poverty around the world (cost $135 billion in the first year, rising to $195 billion by 2015.)

Achieve universal literacy (cost $5 billion a year.)

Immunize every child in the world against deadly diseases (cost $1.3 billion a year.)

Ensure developing countries have enough money to fight the AIDS epidemic (cost $15 billion per year.)

In other words, for a cost of $156.3 billion this year alone – less than a tenth of the total Iraq war budget – we could lift entire countries out of poverty, teach every person in the world to read and write, significantly reduce child mortality, while making huge leaps in the battle against AIDS, saving millions of lives.

Then the remaining money could be put toward the $40 billion to $60 billion annually that the World Bank says is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, established by world leaders in 2000, to tackle everything from gender inequality to environmental sustainability.

I read today that a suicide bomber blew up a school. Worth every penny then? I hope Bliar is enjoying his plush new job. Prick.
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The Iraq Jigsaw

The pieces are all coming together now. A recently published transcript of a discussion between Jose Maria Aznar and Bu$h shows how this belligerent, arrogant war criminal thinks - and backs up the real reason for the war - oil.

Bu$h shows that getting rid of Saddam is not enough when they talk about an offer for him to flee into exile. Now nobody in their right mind would like to see a mass murderer like Saddam let off the noose, but given the alternative involves the death of a lot of people (a million so far) - what would you pick? This is the dicussion about that point;

'Aznar: Is it certain that any possibility exists that Saddam Hussein will go into exile?

Bush: The possibility exists, including that he will be assassinated.

Aznar: Exile with a guarantee?

Bush: No guarantee! He is a thug, a terrorist, a war criminal.

So one way to avoid war is lost because Bu$h says so. I beleive that the reason that he cannot accept this is that it would not leave U$ troops on the ground in Iraq, and without that, they do not control the oil. There is no solution he can accept that does not put him and his cronies in control of Iraqi oil. He is gambling with the lives of millions of people. If this is shocking, you can see how he does it again later on in the discussion;

Aznar: I’m not asking that you have endless patience. Simply that everything is done to [have maximum international support].

Bush: Countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, and Cameroon should know that what’s at stake is the security of the United States . . . [Chilean President Ricardo] Lagos should know that the Free Trade Accord with Chile is awaiting Senate confirmation and a negative attitude about this could put ratification in danger. Angola is receiving Millennium Account funds [to help alleviate poverty] and that could be jeopardized also if he’s not supportive…

Aznar: Tony [Blair] wants to wait until March 14.

Bush: I prefer the 10th. This is like a good cop, bad cop routine. I don’t care if I’m the bad cop and he’s the good cop.

He does not care if he has to withdraw money given to help some of the poorest people on the planet in Angola to boost support for his murderous war. Bu$h is not the bad cop, he's a war criminal as is Bliar for supporting him.

The Wrong Verdict

The six trial of the Fairford Five ended on Friday with a shocking verdict of 'guilty'. I think lots of people had high hopes that following five not-guilty or hung verdicts, that this trial would also end with a glimmer of justice. Not so. On the day the foreman of the jury read out the decision, I read of the ongoing (and sadly 'normal') cacophony of violence that continues to engulf Iraq, including five people shot execution style in different parts of the Baghdad, a mortar killing seven members of the same family and a U.S. soldier dying of wounds. One post on Bristol Indymedia summed it up best;

It is simply wrong that these two have been found guilty, when those who have unleased a war that has killed over 650,000 are not in jail. This is around 100,000 to 200,000 more than Saddam killed during his war of terror. Blair, Brown and all the New Labour people who supported this war should be in the dock not Margret and Paul. This is decision of injustice.

I could not agree more: Stop the Legal Persecution of the Fairford Five - sign here: http://www.petitiononline.com/FAIRFORD/petition.html

On a lighter note (and to keep your sanity...) the 19th sees the Premiere of 'Summer Job' shot in Bristol by local filmmakers. Should be fun and Vialka on the 24th - both at the Cube. Click for full listing.

Bliar! Bliar! Bliar!, Out! Out! Out!

Big-up to Bristol Stop the War for thier plans to make Bliar's last day an Anti-War day. Iraq is his rotten legacy and he'd better get used to it. On the Iraq/War subject, this is a scary & interesting article;

Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That's greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million -- and yet it's a gross underestimate of the Pentagon's wartime consumption.

It's an oil war in more than one sense - also a major contributor ro Global warming.

Slash Blair

If you know HTML, aka Hyper Text Markup Language, the language used to write web pages, you will know what the 'slash' code is. It means what you are doing has come to an end. So if you were to write < B > it would signal the beginning of a bold section of text. The slash 'B' as in < / B > would signal the end of the bold text. In HTML you place inside the tags what is related, for example the text you wish to made bold. 1997 was the beginning of the Blair phase; < Blair > and now we are at the end of the Bliar phase; < / Blair >

We can place Bliar's crumbling legacy inside these tags;

< Blair >
Civil war in Iraq.
Massive rise in use on con-sultants and private sector in public life.
Growing insurgency and civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
Ongoing dirty war in Colombia.
US does not sign up to Kyoto.
G8 reneges on promises to act on global poverty.
Palestinian hopes crushed in civil war.
< / Blair >

BAE and a Sick Trade

BAE and bribery – two linked words that seem to currently echo through the media. On google news its says there are 473 related articles to the story that will not die. Part based in Filton, north Bristol, BAE are accused of having run a slush fund that paid Saudi prince Bandar a staggering £1 to 2 billion in payments to secure a £43 billion arms deal. The serious fraud office was investigating this accusation until Bliar ordered it to stop after the Saudi's threatened to withdraw support in the 'war of terror' if the UK carried on it's investigation. At the time there was outcry as Britain had been hammering African leader sover corruption only be be caught in its own corruption scandal.

Then the Guardian uncovered evidence that suggested the attorney-general ordered evidence of bribery and the slush fund to be hidden from an non-UK investigation into BAE's conduct. The attorney-general says he did nothing wrong, BAE say they did northing wrong (other than being an arms dealer!!) but because the investigation had not run its course and Bliar and the attorney-general may well have obfuscated on the issue – how do we know that?

Something here stinks and the brave Bristolains who occupied BAE's offices in April this year are to congratulated with keeping the story alive and taking a stand that says not all of us in this city are happy about being dragged into the world's limelight for dodgy arms deals without a fight.

But the story is not over – Neo-Labour, who have now taken over the local council from the Lib Dems, have been been the friend of arms dealers and dodgy regimes for the last ten years – over £45 billion in sales including £110 million to the pariah state of Israel, half-a billion worth to that bastion of freedom China, Colombia -a country run by a man linked to right-wing terrorist organizations and the list goes on. They have also granted almost 200 export licenses to countries that don't have any soldiers? Yes the Channel Islands have has CS gas and submachine guns exported to them. Why? From there they can be 'laundered' to the highest bidder with no questions asked.

Not only that, but the arms trade gets around £900 million in subsidies from the government per year. That might build a hospital or two?

A sick trade presided over by a sick political party mired in a sick political system.

So while this global scandal plays out, what does our crusading local paper, the Evening Post, have as a headline? A big brother story. I went to the website to check out their coverage of the story – I could not seem much about the scandal, but the first story that appeared on the search was 'Profits at BAE soar to £1bn' – which says it all really.

Bliar's African Legacy

As Bliar swans around Africa on his 'goodbye, good riddance' tour. The ongoing war in Iraq is following a fairly classic pattern of an insurgency, as the guerillas learn and adapt to become better at killing the occupiers. You can see this in the most recent attack;

"Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq ran a sophisticated sting on US troops in Diyala province on Memorial Day, killing 8 GIs. First, they shot down a helicopter with small arms fire. Two servicemen died in the crash. The guerrillas knew that a rescue team would come out to the site. So they planted a roadside bomb that killed the rescuers. And, they knew that yet another rescue team would come out to see what happened to the first. So they planted roadside bombs and destroyed the second team, as well."

So the occupiers take to the air to avoid being killed – using air power to hammer the enemy;

"What we do know is this: Since the major combat phase of the war ended in April 2003, the U.S. military has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of air-delivered cluster bombs in Iraq -- the very type of weapon that Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls, "the single greatest risk civilians face with regard to a current weapon that is in use." We also know that, according to expert opinion, rockets and cannon fire from U.S. aircraft may account for most U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths and that the Pentagon has restocked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these weapons in recent years."

Hundreds of millions that would be better spent in Africa, the scar on the conscience of the world on things like clean fresh drinking war or AIDS treatments, but no, its being spent on bombs to drop in an unwinable war. So where does Bliar's visit to Africa link to Iraq? This little gem of information;

"Outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair is to intervene this week to try to prevent 700 South Africans – the equivalent of more than one battalion – being forced to quit the British Army because of a proposed anti-mercenary law...Mr Blair is to raise the issue in talks with Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, during his farewell tour of Africa. The South African parliament passed the Prohibition of Mercenary Activities Bill late last year...The draft legislation is aimed at curbing an estimated 20,000 South Africans hiring themselves out as soldiers of fortune in various Third World conflicts, or volunteering for foreign armies."

Bliar's African legacy – South Africans in the British Army fighting in Iraq. Nice.

The War on(of) Terror Continues to Unravel

As Bliar starts to pack his things at number 10, his legacy, Iraq and its fall out continues to burn...

In Basra, militants launched an attack on the UK base in response to the killing of their leader:

In apparent retaliation for the killing of their commander, Mahdi Army militiamen launched a fierce 2 and a half-hour assault on a British base in the southern Shiite city of Basra. The British military must have been alarmed by the assault, since they called in an air strike on the militiamen. Basra crowds said that the airstrike killed 8 innocent civilians and held a public funeral procession for them.

In Afghanistan another solider is killed and four injured in clashes:

A British soldier was killed and four others wounded in Afghanistan on Friday night in heavy fighting. The death was the third this week by British forces in the Middle East. Two other deaths have been reported.

In Somalia the violence continues:

At least one person has been killed and four others were wounded when a roadside bomb went off in north of Mogadishu, Somalia capital on Saturday

In Lebanon, the blowback from covert ops starts to get nasty:

As Seymour Hersh first reported, in an article penned back in March, the U.S. has begun to fund various Sunni extremist groups as part of what Condoleezza Rice refers to as “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East”...This policy appears to have backfired in Lebanon, where a militant Sunni group, Fatah al-Islam, has drawn the Lebanese army into the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Rather than acting as a counter to local Shia bogeyman, Hezbollah, the current backlash has Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Lebanese army colluding in order to crush the intransigent Salafists.

Some legacy.

It'll End in Tears...

Having heard Bliar try to justify the war and ignore the reailty - here is a great quote that sums up why it was always going to end in tears...

"The reason our mission in Iraq has proven to be so disastrous and corrupt is very simple -- the advocates and architects of that war are completely corrupt, inept, and deceitful."
Glenn Greenwald

The BAE Saga...

BAE, employed quite a few people in Filton, North Bristol. I don't know if you have been following the saga of BAE? Here's a brief summary; BAE, one of the largest weapons manufactures in the UK was the subject of a Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery. There are two alleged points of bribery. One is with Saudi Arabia and the other Tanzania. The Saudi allegations relate to a contract for various military aircraft. The deal, know as 'Al Yamamah' has been described as "the biggest [U.K.] sale of anything to anyone" and has been paid for by the delivery of up to 600,000 barrels of oil per day to the UK government. Nice. The allegations are that the Al Yamamah contracts were a result of bribes to key people in the Saudi royal family and government officials ,that BAE maintained a £60 million slush fund to keep key player sweet. The weapons we are selling are destined for that bastion of democracy, Saudi Arabia. The same place that a recent dispatches program accused of funding radical wahhabi Islamic preachers and literature here in the UK. With friends like that....anyway the Saudis soon put pressure on the UK government to drop the Serious Fraud Office investigation or else they would suspend co-operation on terrorism and Bliar duly agreed and dropped it. The evening post has reported on this story somewhat, but only from the local-jobs angle prompting the Bristol Kingswood Labour MP Roger Berry to remark: "We have to be absolutely up front about this. You either support law and order or not. I do not think it is in the interests of British industry or Bristol jobs if you do not...If we're going to suspend law and order if it costs jobs, then there would be a lot of drug pushers in Bristol who'd be absolutely delighted."A local MP, While Tanzania is a poor country that can ill afford (or does not need, it has been persuasively argued) the £28 million system it purchased from BAE and that Tony 'Africa' Bliar's Government approved for export.