Blair Getting Away With Murder 561

 in War in Iraq by

Blair just said “You would be hard pressed to find anyone who in September 2002 doubted that Saddam had WMD”.

It wouldn’t have been that hard. If he had asked members of the Near East and North Africa Department of the FCO, the Middle East experts in the FCO’s Research Analysts, or in the Defence Intelligence Service, he would have found absolutely no shortage of people who doubted it, whatever position No 10 was forcing on their institutions.

One of the many failures of this Inquiry has been a failure to ask individual witnesses before it whether they personally had believed in the existence of any significant Iraqi WMD programme. I know for certain that would have drawn some extremely enlightening answers from among the FCO and probably MOD participants.

Sir Martin Gilbert allowed Blair to conflate Iran, Iraq, Al-Qaida, WMD and terrorism in a completely unjustified way. When Straw tried exactly the same trick, Rod Lyne did not allow him to get away with it.

A further stark contrast with Straw is that both Blair and Straw were asked about the failure of the UK to secure movement in the Middle East peace process by using our role in Iraq to influence the USA. A major, detailed and fascinating part of Straw’s answer was that Israel’s – and specifically Netanyahu’s – political influence in the USA had prevented progress.

By contrast, Blair did not even mention Israel in response to the questions on the failure to achieve progress in the Middle East. He solely blamed the Palestinian Intafada. He has been anxious to widen the discussion beyond Iraq at every opportunity, and frequently referred to destabilising factors in the Middle East, and again and again pointed to a growing threat from Iran and Iranian sponsorship of terrorism, and to Palestinian terrorism (including Saddam Hussein’s past sponsorship of it).

He has made not one single comment about Israel’s behaviour as a contributing factor in Middle East instability. Given Blair’s official position as Middle East envoy, this lack of any bare pretence at impartiality is most revealing.

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561 thoughts on “Blair Getting Away With Murder”

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  • Ruth

    Rob Lewis

    Maybe when Blair sold his soul to the devil he was granted the power of invisibility

  • tony_opmoc

    Clark,

    Because you said “Anyone may use them in any way they see fit.”, and because they are so good, I have posted one photograph and a link to your zip file and to this website in America.

    It is possible, that someone may post all your photographs on a very fast website for download by anyone interested anywhere in the World.

    It is also possible that some MSM newspapers may want to publish them, and they may want to contact you to ask permission first, and they may even want to pay you some money for doing so.

    I don’t know if you are contactable, but maybe you should be.

    Your photos are fantastic.

    Thank You

    I respect your copywrite, and so I think will all the MSM.

    Tony

  • Apostate

    Blair’s failure to square Israel into the Middle East equation speaks volumes.

    The parts of a story that are not reported are the key ones.

    How high or low a profile does this or that bit of the story get in the official media?

    If it ranks highly on the “absentometer” it’s a good rule of thumb to consider it a meaty morsel,a crucial detail they would rather you missed.

    The small detail in this case is the role of British Israelism in

    (i)creating the state of Israel in the first place

    (ii)creating its dialectic opposite in Wahhabist Saudi and the theocratic regime in Iran

    (iii)creating the international synarchy that funds the Anglo-US-Israel Military Industrial Complex

    Now,I may have missed it,but I’m sure Blair never mentioned British Israelism.We can be pretty sure the corporate media are not about to do so either.

    http://educate-yourself.org/

    Onced you’re there hit the British Israel link.

  • logos

    Just got back from the QEII centre. Some nice bits of shouting and banner-waving going on. Took loads of photos & vidclips.

    It was like a copper’s convention; the place was swarming with rozzers. Still, at least they were well behaved: nobody accidentally fell over and just sort of died this time.

    Ming Campbell who gave a very critical interview on the radio early in the day, left via the front door, to a warm reception … notably unlike the star of the show.

  • technicolour

    On a more serious note, did anyone else think Blair was wearing light mauve eye shadow?

  • eddie

    Apparently there were only 200 people or fewer outside the centre, a much lower turnout than expected. Perhaps this shows that the mass of the public are not as excited about this process as the people on here. Surely the stoppers could have mustered a decent turnout to taunt their nemesis Bliar? The truth is that most people are bored with these constant enquiries which don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. I thought Blair put on a bravura performance today: as he said, it was all about judgement. He should have expressed some remorse or regret for the dead though. No leader should commit troops to a conflict without feeling remorse.

  • tony_opmoc

    The can of worms is slowly being prized open for the entire world to see.

    The initial reaction is to feel really ill and run to the toilet.

    And then when you regain your composure

    You get exceedingly angry

    And run back to the toilet and your guts explode, both ends simultaneously.

    And then you have a glass of water and start thinking

    Well what can I do about this?

    I Can’t take Clark’s Photo off my Computer Screen

    I hope it is seen by Millions

    Because it makes me Proud to Be British to show such Disgust – Right at the Supposed Heart of Democracy and Freedom of The World

    Shame & Disgust

    http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/5844/imag0063m.jpg

    Tony

  • technciolour

    Cheers for the video, Glenn. And CLark, drat, just lost your photo download; will try again.

  • technicolour

    Eddie, I don’t think people are bored. I was in the heart of Middle England yesterday and people there (many of whom supported the war) were desperately concerned about whether it was legal or not. It’s true the subject only came up when the news came on. Otherwise people are blanking it out, I think.

    I think it’s obvious Blair has trained himself not to feel remorse, so I’m rather pleased he didn’t try and act any, in a way.

  • Paul Amery

    Blair deserves the same “justice” he meted out to Saddam Hussein. Let him swing for the Iraq war.

  • glenn

    Very nice pictures, Clark – thank you for making them available.

    Decent variety of race, age etc. in the crowd. Not very much diversity in the ranks of the filth – a disgustingly white turnout there. Might as well have been a BNP rally.

    Isn’t it striking that the people talking for peace needed no protection, just loudspeakers because so many wanted to hear them. But our supposed representatives needs a huge amount of protection. Not from “terrorists” – but from us, the represented who voted them in.

  • Nomad

    “Iraq, Afghanistan, and next Iran.”

    No, Arsalan, next is Yemen. You will see. Then, It will be Saudis. Maybe 5 or 7 years afterwards.

  • writerman

    Craig,

    I feel for your frustration at how this slippery character was able to glide through his appearance at the inquiry with such consumate ease. At times he sounded almost like he was mocking them, and answering his own rhetorical questions. They actually gave him a platform to create a gigantic, paranoid, fantasy, about Saddam the “monster” and Iraq as a gigantic threat.

    He was allowed to drag terrorism and 9/11 into his looney, bizarro-world, where up is down, and wrong is right, lies are truth, and a broken dictator in broken country is a theat to the world!

    Then he fantasizes about the threat Iraq might have possibly posed at some future date, and neatly brings Iran and it’s conflict with the United States and Israel, into the horror-show mix.

    It is staggering that he is allowed to get away with this kind of stuff.

    Don’t the people on the inquiry team have any honour at all, or regard for their own reputations, giving him such a transparently easy ride?

  • tony_opmoc

    Clark 10

    Mark 10

    Glenn 9

    Eddie -7

    Angry -7

    Larry -1

    technicolour -10

    (Larry gets -1 cos he’s funny)

    technicolour gets -10 cos he’s a clever cunt

    Tony

  • George Dutton

    “Don’t the people on the inquiry team have any honour at all”

    “If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

  • Ruth

    writerman,

    ‘Don’t the people on the inquiry team have any honour at all, or regard for their own reputations, giving him such a transparently easy ride?’

    Of course, they don’t. They’re just one part of the synchronised show. The whole thing has been manipulated to throw the public a titbit and let off steam but at the same time to maintain the integrity of the witnesses so that a line can be drawn under the war.

  • Anonymous

    And for the best links posted on this site

    We all know who is in a league of his own

    http://tinyurl.com/yj4f45y

    Fuck Me He is Scottish too

    (Americans Don’t believe me when I tell them that Anthony Charles Lynton Blair IS NOT ENGLISH)

    And so for the best links – and some of the most incisive comments – stand up and receive your award for being an O.K. bloke

    I can’t believe this is the url of your website

    http://www.solidarityscotland.org

    I thought you were Welsh

    Thank You

    George Dutton

    Tony

  • mirella biagi

    hey!

    i tried to comment on something you wrote last year but it wouldnt let me. it was about Castelvecchio pascoli. I’m from there too! and my parents still own a house there and it’s where i’ve spent every summer since i was a baby. I’m even planning on moving there permanently this june. i had no idea there were so many academics from there. if you go there now you would never imagine it as the majority of the 500 or so people that live there barely got their high school diplomas. despite that I wouldn’t give up that village for any other.

    thanks for the blog post. i really made my day 😀

  • Anonymous

    This and that, they must be the same

    what is legal is just what’s real

    what I’m given to understand

    is exactly what I steal

    I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd

    I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd

    I was shocked to find what was allowed

    I didn’t lose myself in the crowd

    Shot by both sides

    on the run to the outside of everything

    shot by both sides

    they must have come to a secret understanding

    New offences always in my nerves

    they’re taking my time by force

    They all sound the same when they scream

    they have to rewrite all the books again

    as a matter of course

    Shot by both sides

    I don’t ask who’s doing the shooting

    shot by both sides

    we must have come to a secret understanding

  • techniclour

    writerman, thanks. What I found also disturbing was that Blair was allowed to present his ‘2010’ vision of a world where ‘Saddam’ still reigned, with his sons – Blair was careful throughout to mention his sons – and as a result we would have been facing a nightmarish, Iran/Iraq, WMD/nuclear weapons escalating stand-off in the region.

    Lyne muttered something about the alternative to invasion not being the equivalent to ‘letting Saddam out of the box entirely’ but said that they’d come back to that later. They did not. Nor did they talk about recalling Blair, at the end, as far as I know?

    Actually, you could go on about this for hours – the brave attempt by the nice guy to put IBC figures into a context (hello, BBC) included.

    I’m looking forward to reading you on this, Craig.

  • Abe Rene

    For reference, if you were heading the inquiry, can you give us a short list of questions that you would put to Blair or Straw? (Actually this may be suitable for a separate thread, because you could then add a commentary).

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