I too watched Greenstock and was totally unconvinced by his argument. In fact I dont believe he really believed it himself!

I read your analysis of the ‘impartiality’ of the members of the Chilcot enquiry, and have to say Im totally shocked at the way this has been manipulated by the Brown government. Not that it surprises me since I viewed the BBC Alba documentary’ Diomhair’, where Labour and Tory conspired to blacken the reputation of the Scottish Home rule movement. A brilliant peice of investigative journalism by George Rosie. It can be viewed at http://www.scottishindependenceconvention.org

click on the resources button. BTW Craig, we would like to have you as a guest speaker at one of our future meetings in 2010. We meet in the Scottish Parliament. How about a visit the next time you are up here?

“legal but not legitimate” seems very close to Orwellian doublespeak to me

The definition of legitimate from an internet dictionary: “1. according to law; lawful: the property’s legitimate owner.”

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/legitimate

I guess they aren’t using it in this sense.

27 November, 2009

“The Iraq War ‘Inquiry’: ‘Revelations’? What revelations?”…

http://www.creative-i.info/?p=12533

Interesting, this week vice-premier of Uzbekistan Mr Ganiev has visited London to participate in Uzbek British trade council meeting. In his report, which was leaked to independent parties, he is praising “willingness of the British” to cooperate with Uzbekistan.

1 Not sure I follow your logic on Jeremy’s alleged non-logic.

If weapons can be and are hidden in the desert, the fact that some such weapons may end up being found does not mean that all of them have been found.

Likewise the fact that MWD have not been found in Iraq is not proof that none ever existed or that none were concealed.

2 The distinction between Legal and Legitimate is real enough.

Given the way international law operates, it may be that some countries get so exasperated by the illegal acts of another that they take matters in to their own hands (eg on self-defence grounds). Even if they can muster credible legal arguments that what they have done is lawful, the fact remains that without a Security Council Resolution to give them full formal legal but also political cover too (ie ‘legitimacy’), those countries who oppose the action will feel that they have a lot more weight behind them.

Charles -

1. Proving a negative is pretty difficult. Particularly when the investigators (Hans Blix at the time) are pulled out – by US. Read ‘Iraq Confidential’ by Scott Ritter (an earlier weapons inspector) sometime. Funnily enough, both were Republican poster-boys until they started providing reports which did not support war on the grounds of failing to adhere to weapons compliance.

We know that WMD did exist at one point because we sold them to Iraq, for use against Iran. Whether they still existed was in dispute, and in any case, that is not a legitimate reason in itself to attack another country.

2. Self defense was never an issue, except in the minds of those naive enough to believe our government’s lies. After all, why would we put 1/4 million of our troops on his boarders, if we thought for even a moment Saddam Hussein had these fearsome WMD?

Charles

It was known by the Iraqi scientific community and many in the higher echelons of the Iraqi army that Saddam Hussein had ALL WMD destroyed long,long before the war. To even think that the USA and UK intelligence services didn’t know is an impossibility.

It has always trouble me greatly that after the war the USA offered large amounts of money to anyone who would come forward to tell them where the WMD was hidden, it was all for show. There must have been many that came forward to tell where it had ALL been destroyed as there indeed had been tons of the stuff supplied by the USA and by some european nations. To have moved ALL that WMD and have it destroyed would have involved a lot of people. I know a lot would have come forward and told all to collect that kind of money.I think some did and told what the USA and UK didn’t want told, they wished to try and keep the thought that it could still be hidden. I fear for the people who did come forward?.

You should have a talk with Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear scientist Jaffar Dhia Jaffar who gave an interview from Paris after the war…Very revealing.

As I said …”To even think that the USA and UK intelligence services didn’t know is an impossibility.”

Charles

“Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction”…

http://tinyurl.com/yl4pqey

“World Tribunal On Iraq – The New York Hearings”…

http://www.blip.tv/file/293217

And don’t you dare laugh at comparing Cheney With Prescott…

Whilst obviously knowing that his Mate Tony Blair was taking it Up The Arse From George Bush (Or Vice Versa)

You Should Have Invited Him To The Meeting With The Cunt Cheney

Prescott Might Look a Bit Thick

But He Knows How To Hit Cunts

Tony

Craig – All the Blairites are complaining how this 3rd inquiry is superfluous and I agree because the people running the show are die-hard interventionists. Still, Blair is being slowly torn apart and there is a remote chance that he will be arrested one day a la Pinochet. I think people like Oliver Kamm and John Rentoul were desperate to see Blair elected as President of Europe not because they felt he would achieve anything but because it might have provided him some protection from prosecution. So the inquiry will conclude that everyone is too blame and Tony can go back to his incredible useful role in the Middle East glossing over Israeli war crimes (he is an expert after all) and trying to get Abbas to do Netanyahu’s dirty work. Wonderful.

Off topic, but not so long ago Craig laughed at AD’s economic predictions. did you see this Yesterday (Friday?:

Recession ‘is even worse than feared’: Chancellor predicts steepest slump ever

By Sam Fleming

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1231282/Recession-worse-feared-Chancellor-predicts-steepest-slump-ever.html

Are there two tony-opmocs? One who seems quite sensible, and one who – well, see above. I know my own postings may not always be gems of clarity and relevance, but I wish the second one would stop.

More importantly, I think the fact that the FCO could be bullied/blackmailed/fooled into going along with this is no real surprise, though a disaster. What are civil servants to do, when their government goes crazy, apart from strike/threaten to resign en masse? Does the FCO have a trade union? I don’t think it does.

People I knew were quite excited when Labour first got in, and at the thought of implementing an ‘ethical foreign policy’, in fact. But then we are all living with that legacy.

Does anyone know if Elizabeth Wilmshurst will testify? (apologies if anyone’s already asked this). I can’t find anything on the net.

ps If the FCO doesn’t have a union, it should start one.

“But what was entirely plain is that Greenstock is much more sceptical of the Iraq War than the committee who were questioning him.”

I was watching on Sky, and Tim Marshall commented more than once that Jeremy Greenstock was inviting the committee — almost putting it into their mouths — to ask him about X or Y, but that they were ignoring his blatant invitations. I started watching out for what Tim Marshall was suggesting, and yes, Greenstock was even saying, “if you were to ask me” (such and such) “but you haven’t”. And they continued not asking. Whatever about his beliefs that WMD were hidden (such rank nonsense) I fully believe that the committee were avoiding going where Greenstock was inviting them to go.

Such a self-satisfied and incurious group of so-called “investigators” I have rarely seen. I am fast losing interest, unless someone points me in the direction of a highly contentious and interesting interviewee in the coming days …

A month ago, Greenstock wrote that…

The US and the UK famously came to grief when they tried too hard, when lacking proof, to be convincing about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Those of us closely involved on the UK side believed we were illustrating a case that was bound to turn out to be true when the final evidence was collected. But it never was; and we had to take the rap for anticipating the facts.

It’s a shame this wasn’t mentioned.

Champagne Charlie Crawford writes,

‘Likewise the fact that MWD have not been found in Iraq is not proof that none ever existed or that none were concealed.’

Likewise the fact that fairies have not been found at the bottom of my garden is not proof that none ever existed or that none were concealed.

How is it that weapons that before the war were only ’45 minutes’ away from being used, after the war became too difficult to find in six years of occupation?

Occam’s razor suggest that ‘none ever existed’ and ‘that none were concealed’ in the run up to war.

I find these inquiries into government ‘incompetence’, corruption and misbehaviour endless. They appear as if something truthful might be discovered; they even allow a little truth to be revealed and then after that everything fizzles out. The public seem to be hoodwinked by the morsel of truth and then after all the fuss their interest wanes.

In the Cash for Honours it all looked good when Yates launched his dawn raids. But after he’d finished strutting about nothing really happened.

In the Diana inquest there was the revelation that Diana was very serious about Dodi. But that was the only grain of truth permitted.

In all the inquiries into the misconduct of Customs & Excise we were allowed to know that there had been incompetency but the inquiries hid the real truth and never touched on the matter of where all the billions of ‘missing’ excise duty/VAT Customs went to.

Another example is the huge attention in the media over Megrahi’s release. To me this was clearly orchestrated by the government to hype up public interest in the question of whether his release was right or wrong to take away from the real issue of whether the three judges made a corrupt decision to convict an innocent man. An inquiry would most surely have revealed this. The public have been fed bits of evidence that show Megrahi couldn’t have been the bomber. Now all will die down. In this case the evidence is so strong the Crown would have had a very hard job squirming out of it. so other means of manipulating the public had to be used.

The core ‘myth’, of our type of world is that leaders are out to do good, though they make ‘mistakes’, like invading Iraq, they, like the rest of us, are only human too. This is a comforting and benign attitude. There is no conspiracy, only the great cock-up at work.

But, over and over again? Surely if one makes the same type of ‘mistake’ time after time, decade after decade, century after century, there must be something fundamentally wrong with the way our rulers think and act? Are we really, honestly, supposed to believe that the British Empire was some kind of accident or mistake too? Imperialists by accident? I think this is pure bullshit.

Obviously one doesn’t get far up the greasy pole of power in the UK if one thinks the system isn’t benign and our rulers civilized, compared to the bloodthirsty dogs that rule the rest of the world.

Even Craig, despite his education, experience, intelligence, seems to put great store by the ‘niceness’ our rulers exhibit in public. It’s perfectly possible to be a ‘nice’ person in ones living-room over a nice cup of tea, and then, in another context, a bloody butcher of the innocent.

For example, one of my ancestors was a truly lovely man, vast library, spoke and wrote Greek and Latin, a faithful husband, a wonderful father, went in for liberal reforms in Britain… However, at the same time he owned three sugar plantations in the West Indies where five hundred slaves, sweated their guts out, so he and his family, and I suppose me too, could enjoy a life of luxury in leafy Berkshire.

Something else about ‘nice’ people involved, up to their nice collars and ties in despicable, criminal, acts; like a conspiracy to launch a war of unprovoked agression against a country that was defenceless and on its knees – Iraq – is that they really, these ‘nice’ and ‘civilized’ people, the cream of the crop, have no shame or sense of honour any more.

What happened to honour in England? What ever happened to resigning when one was caught lying in public life? It wouldn’t matter so much that the country was ruled over by a smiling, conceited, gang of corrupt criminals, on the make, let them fuck over England if they can get away with it. But to destroy another country on the other side of the world as well, slaughtering so many people for nothing, is beyond mere criminal behaviour, surely?

We are not taking about fleecing the sheep for ones retirement, after all that’s what the system is all about, isn’t it? Here we are dealing with destruction and mass murder on a collosal scale. Literally rivers of blood and gore. And these ‘nice’ people get away with it. Surely this says something profound about our culture and institutions, that shouldn’t and cannot be ignored by any normal, decent, sentient being, who hasn’t been lobotomized or turned into a whore?

I think the myth writerman talks about is particularly evident in the UK where there is/has been? almost absolute faith that those ‘above’ us are out to act in our best interests. So it is quite easy for the state to carry out the most monstrous acts.

I must say I have found people from the Continent far more realistic.

I’ve never managed to discover exactly what is an “illegal war”. I always thought that any country had the right to declare war on any other country. If this illegality is because of our membership of the UN, that’s another good reason for withdrawing from this corrupt organisation.

I can accept the argument that the war was not legitimate as it can be strongly argued that the action of our government may have ben legal, but that it hardly had overwhelming support of its citizens, which I believe has generally been the case in the past.

I don’t think that it is Greenstock who is dispensable but the whole committee of enquiry.

How they plan to make wars happen…

“Even more American Enantiodromia”…

http://tinyurl.com/y8wr4nt

In keeping with the link above…

tinyurl.com/yz8wyks

I suppoae Mr Crawford is technically correct: absence of proof is not proof of absence. The point at issue however is whether the UK/US governments genuinely believed Iraq had WMD or whether it was a premeditated lie.

The fact that much of the key evidence given to the UN was subsequently proved to be fake and that the US happily parked several hundred thousand troops in neighbouring Kuwait weeks before the invasion strongly suggest the latter.

The biggest surprise perhaps is that the US didn’t try to plant evidence of WMD after the invasion. Oh hang on – perhaps it did. I don’t recall the following report quite making it to the MSM…

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/?page=story_12-8-2003_pg1_9

Am beginning to wonder if Tony_Opmoc is some sort of computer generated entity that produces drivel to order for the purpose of eroding confidence in new comers to this site.

Brian E – an illegal war is also known as a war of aggression, ie, where full military engagement takes place, an attack or invasion of another country which has neither attacked, nor threatened the attacker. Check out the Nurermberg on the definition of war of aggression.

Flipping norah – my spelling is too bad for this time in the morning. Should have read ‘Nuremberg trials’, of course (slaps forehead).

@Stokely

Aha! I think you might have a point. I always felt there was something vaguely familiar about the opmoc postings.

There’s stuff about computer generated writing at tinyurl.com/ygbdt4z, and you might particularly enjoy reading the ‘Further Last Words of Dutch Schultz’ linked on that page. Vintage opmoc!

Taking example from our new EU president, I tried my first bit of Haiku on Sir Jeremy’s polished performance.

‘Ambassador Greenstock speaks, it sounds like rain off a ducks back, honest.’

While I’m no fan of tony_opmoc’s more artistic comments, I am very thankful to him for his role in providing the videos of Craig at the HRSC a few months back.

As for Greenstock and the rest of the ‘enquiry’ fandango it would be intersting to poll the following.

Y/N

1) Do you believe members of the inquiry are going to uncover the truth of the Iraq war?

2) Do you believe the outcome will result in any change?

3) Will people face prosecutuon based on the evidence given and findings obtained?

4) Will the testimony offered be tested for veracity?

5) Will the public do nothing once the inquiry finishes, no matter what it’s findings?

Me? N,N,N,N,Y

Nobody expects the Spanish Extradition !

I rmemebr well that BBC was telling with glee that war agasint iraq had been decided between tony bastard blair and bush and what needs to be done is simply to sell that war to the rest of the world-and that repeort was in july 2002.

BBc was rooting for this charade and was very smug-as can be expected from a prime spy organisation(that is BBc for you) working for the enlgish race.

very good point avatar singh, the BBC seems to be always getting away with their propaganda channels, regardless whether its the Falklands, Gulf war or the Iraq war.

They are egging us on to send our sons into service, making sure that none of the MP’s gets asked any questions as to their sons reaqdying themselves for conflict. They are the one’s who make uip words, leave out importan bits and shilly shally around the political parties, showing their Dependence(not Independence)by talking up the political agenbda of whoever is the next incumbend to power.

Sack the lot and privatise the BBC, after you have split off the world service, I’m sure they could find their own funding from somewhere and could easily run their own show.

@Ingo

Your haiku does have 17 syllables, but as I understand it, they are supposed to be grouped in the pattern 5-7-5 syllables in three respective lines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku).

So, if I may, I might modify your work of art a bit, to read:

Envoy Greenstock speaks

Like rain falling off a duck

It honestly seems

PS. You could have ‘As’ beginning the second line instead of ‘Like’ if you wish, to avoid the diphthong.

PPS. Or ‘H.E.’ instead of ‘Envoy’ in the first line – but to be honest, I would allow the diphthongs and keep it as it is.

“privatise the BBC”

It already is, has been 100% since the Gilligan affair. Might as well hand it over to this abhorrence of humanity and be done with it…

http://tinyurl.com/ydjv79c

Oh, honour, it seems

Has been buried alive

Under, so much blood

very kind of you chaps, thank you for the lesson, it was my first attempt. Will try again and get in touch with my inner ‘dip thong’.

Only question is, how deep do you dip this thong? (;-)

Let us take Iraq

So much it has to give us

Ask questions later

@ Vromsky

Thanks for the link…the ‘Further Last Words of Dutch Schultz’ was very interesting.

So….is Tony_Opmoc an exercise in PSYOPS designed to discourage and demoralize…or are its (his?) inputs an ‘art form’ cleverly disguised as complete and utter crap?

“So….is Tony_Opmoc an exercise in PSYOPS designed to discourage and demoralize”

I don’t think so. Tony has written some exceedingly intelligent and useful posts here. But he has also made references to Speckled Hen, and it appears to me that the later in the evening that Tony posts, the more likely it is that Speckled Hen comes into the picture. But of course I could be very wrong, and will be more than happy if Tony chooses to correct me. I know he posts in at least one other location that I read online.

@ Writerman: only 6 syllables in line 2, you need 7. Maybe ‘totally buried’ instead of ‘buried alive’?

@MJ: 10/10, manifests the deplorable mentality of invasion for selfish reasons so well, maybe it ought to be a song!

@ingo: a diphthong is the sound where two half-vowels are joined together, like the ‘ow’ in ‘down’, so it’s not a pure vowel like the ‘a’ in like ‘gas’.

Questions to be asked

Answers to be given but

No blame to accrue

Verbal jousts even

Words appear in glossy print

But nothing changes

Come the day and come

the hour, the blood spilled for oil

Will be forgotten

@ at November 30, 2009 12:41 AM

That’s impressive stuff from someone too modest to sign a name. I salute your talent nevertheless!

@lwtc247 12:27

My responses would be NNNN and NQ, the last being a very faintly optimistic ‘not quite’. The inevitable flood of whitewash will convince a few more people that the game as presently played is not worth the candle. I find it impossible to believe that growing public awareness of corruption and actual criminality in government will have no consequences.

It will certainly kindle a little more heat under the wish for separation in Scotland – perhaps the dissolution of the Union is the most damaging blow that could be struck against the present gangsters-in-charge (as someone has called them – on this blog, I think) and certainly the most plausibly achievable.

Anent dipthongs in haikus, you’ll be losing your Scottish audience, AbuRene – we don’t dipthongise. There’s an interesting note at the start of one of the Oxford dictionaries (can’t remember which) on pronunciation. ‘Awe’, ‘or’ and ‘oar’ all sound the same in English (it says) except in Scotland, where they are all distinctly different.

@ Vronsky

Thanks for the lesson in Oor Wullie’s English – though I would have thought that ‘ou’ in ‘Mousa Broch’ would be pretty much a diphthong. As I see, Scottish English might not include all the diphthonga used South of the border (and I’m happy to take your word on the examples you give), they do exist, although they might sound a bit different from their English counterparts. The ones in the haikus might be examples, such as the Scottish ‘like’, ‘jousts’ and possibly ‘envoy’ as well.

@tomy_opmoc

thinkorbeeaten.blogspot.com

Thanks for that link. Great stuff.

Audrey Kurth Cronin

Ziobitch on Start The Week:

Arab violence!

@ anno

I listened to Start the Week, but I didn’t hear any statements from Cronin supporting Israeli occupation of the West bank, or apartheid-like laws, or the blockage of Gaza. Which ‘Zionist’ statements from her interview were you referring to?

Abu Rene

She repeatedly accused Arabs of violence at each and every given opportunity to give her opinion.

Which I thought was a bit rich coming from the senior advisor to a country that recently has invaded two sovereign nations illegally and caused the deaths of millions. In Iraq five million refugees have been given amnesties by the Iraqi government but refused to return to a country controlled by Shi’a.

In Afghanistan, after the carpet bombing in 2003, 3 million fled to refugee camps in Pakistan, and a lot has happened since then.

Everyboby knew that if USUK invaded Iraq chaos would descend on that country. That’s what the present enquiry is discussing now. There is nothing I can do about that because we live in a cover-up tradition, but please let me challenge rabid, racist, Islamophobic accusations from a Zionist, US spokesperson.

Abu Rene

Do you think that Zionism is a limited,local affair between the citizens of Israel and Palestine?

Please google the Zionist websites and read their discussions about the actions their evil cause must take to further their interests in the world.

Inflammatory accusations would not be tolerated from Muslims on the BBC, so why do they permit Zionists to promote their evil agenda in prime air-time? Can you tell me please?

@anno

Zionism, as I understand it, was and is an attempt to create and maintain a Jewish state in Palestine. I have no particular interest in Zionist websites, but those I have looked at seem to be encouraging ‘aliya’ or Jewish emigration to Israel.

You still haven’t said what ‘Zionist’ statements were made by Cronin. Which ‘inflammatory accusations’ were you referring to?

Abe Rene: correction – Zionism was an an attempt to create and maintain a Jewish state. Herzl, the founder of Zionism, originally proposed Kenya. The push for Palestine came later.

Even in the 30s and 40s Zionist leaders where happy to discuss with Hitler his proposal of Madagascar.

“Aliya” is of course one of the subtler forms of Israeli aggression. The rules of eligibilty for Israeli citizen are so broad and loose they lead to an influx of immigrants so massive the country cannot accommodate them. This of course becomes a pretext for ever-increasing illegal land-grabs of Palestinian territory.

Re “I think people like Oliver Kamm and John Rentoul were desperate to see Blair elected as President of Europe not because they felt he would achieve anything but because it might have provided him some protection from prosecution.” – Babor (above)

George Monbiot has interestingly suggested the opposite may be the case:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/10/26/arresting-blair/

Abu Rene

Please listen again to the programme and count the times that Audrey Kurth Cronin made the accusation of Arab violence. Iraq has now passed a law permitting foreigners to buy and own land in Iraq. I have pointed out several times on this website that Zionists have been buying land in Iraq in order to expand into that country. This land grabbing at knock down wartime prices, especially near oil-rich Kirkuk has now been made legal.

Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq against his senior diplomatic advisors is currently in the spotlight and this is the topic of this blog. It is outrageous that his cause should be assisted by the BBC inviting aggressively racist Zionist shills to influence the general public into thinking that there could possibly be an excuse for invading another sovereign country on the who;;y untruthful and outrageously racist pretext that the race of that country was prone to violence.

UK, US and Israel have been the principal perpetrators of violence in this century and no amount of BBC sponsored racism can disguise that fact. What a horrible way to start the week after a lovely Eid holiday.

@anno

Just took your advice and listened to Cronin’s interview again, this time listening carefully for anything that sounded like ‘Arab terror’:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r9xr

(the first 10 minutes or so)

She never mentioned ‘Arab terror’ once! Terrorism in general, yes; Al-Qaeda lots of times, but there was no generalized racist anti-Arab statements or support for Israeli settlements etc. In fact she made a point that Craig has made before: the danger of treating ‘Al Qaeda’ as a single entity such that its importance becomes exaggerated. I think I might get her book if it becomes available in a cheap edition!

Did I say anything about ‘terror’ Mr Rene ?

@anno – indeed not, the word you used was ‘violence’; my apologies for the inaccurate citation. So, I went back and listened to the extract again.

At the very beginning there’s one mention of ‘violence’ in the Middle East triggered by political failure and religious rifts at the beginning, before Cronin is actually brought in.

The rest is as I said – she’s essentially an academic, no evidence of Zionist axe-grinding.

@ MJ

Thanks for the historical pointer about the connection between Zionism and Africa. This wiki article(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl) indicates that Herzl’s original idea was for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but that Kenya was on offer from 1903 till 1905 when the Zionists confirmed their preference for Palestine. Madagascar may have been favoured (by antisemites) in the late 1930s, but Tel Aviv was a thriving city by then, so we may doubt whether that would have worked.

Abe Rene

In the course of the program, she used the word violence 9 times in relation to Arabs and 2 times in relation to Northern Ireland.

Hi Abe Rene

I’m not disputing the details of your wikipedia reference above, but I will say that wikipedia is part of the battle to own the truth, and what I’ve seen of its coverage of Zionist issues is more than a little unbalanced (in a pro-Zionist way, need I add). Understanding the Zionist perspective is important, obviously, but it should not be confused with the truth. Unless you’re a post-modernist of course.

Abe Rene

I’m sorry you only listened to the first nine minutes of the programme because you missed her statement that ‘Palestinian identity… is so related to violence… either as victims or perpetrators of violence..’

If a Muslim had made the statement: ‘Israeli identity.. is so related to violence… either as victims or perpetrators of violence…’ the statement would have been challenged rightly so because there is much more to Israel than violence. It is the Holy Land, the home of Jesus and many other prophets before him.

There is no point complaining to the BBC after they made their position clear by refusing to raise funds for Gaza last year.

Audrey Kurth Cronin may be an academic as well as being a political advisor, but it does not give her the right to denigrate the Palestinian people over our airwaves at the anniversary of Israel’s bombing Gaza with molten phosphur and during an important review of the war in Iraq. That’s just the BBC pushing the Zionist cause.

Hi Abe Rene

Wonder away. Sorry, but I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not. Do you really suspect that Jews are better educationally equipped than Palestinians to edit wikipedia pages? How hard do you think it is? If I were a Palestinian I might be insulted.

Wiki is a Shi’a organisation. Plenty of knowledge, no truth.

Thanks for confirming my thoughts on Jeremy Greenstock’s performance Craig. I found his body language revealing at times when he was trying to keep his composure. It’s good to hear an account of an interview by someone who knows the person in the hot seat.

Hi daydreamer

You seem to have misunderstood my statement, which wasn’t about Palestinians at all. It was about the ubiquity of Jews in every kind of cultural activity, including wiki. Since Jews are liable to support the state of Israel, this ubiquity is liable to make people wonder if there is some Zionist conspiracy present even if there isn’t. That’s the point I was making.

Legal but not legitimate is obviously a finagle as anybody looking at the words can tell.

However the main thing is that all these people co-operated fully in the previous Kosovo war which they knew for a fact was neither legal nor legitimate being fought on a lie (that Milosevic was engagedin genocide) & fought for the specific purpose of letting NATO’s KLA employees engage in genocide, ethnic cleansing, the sexual enslavement of children & the dissection of living people to steal their body organs,

The politicians & diplomats who did that are one & all obscene Nazi war criminals who in a law abiding society would have swung by the neck. All this stuff about Iraq is simply misdirection by people who think they can at least palm off the guilt for that one on Bliar.

People dismiss the legal but of questionable legitimacy statement too lightly. Legality and legitimacy are, and should be seen as often distinct entities, which only on occasions come together. The key here is the SC. If people believe the Rwandan genocide should legimately have resulted in international intervention but could only go ahead without SC authorisation (for whatever reason) then one could argue the case would have been one of illegality but legitimate. If people recall the Kosovo Report headed by Goldstone made the same point ‘illegal but legitimate’. It may be a rhetorical device in this case, however I regard Greenstock’s arguments as more sophisticated than people here give credit for – mainly because of their firmly established views regarding the war. If you regard international law as the summum bonum fine, but don’t cry out if the SC takes a different decision of matters which you regard as illegitimate because they will likely be acting within the scope of legality as defined by the UN Charter and their role in enforcing it.