The Oxford Union has dubbed fake applause onto the videos of John Bolton’s address to the Union. It has not done this for any other speaker.
If you listen to these videos of Bolton itching for war with Iran, you can hear precisely the same burst of ultra enthusiastic applause at the start, fading “naturally” as he begins to speak.
This dubbing in of applause is not used for any other speaker on the Oxford Union website, either before or after Bolton.
Everyone else just gets the actual applause that really existed.
Contrast the presentation of these question answers from Bolton with this from Julian Assange:
One futher interesting feature of the Bolton video is that the students asking questions – who were mostly hostile – are all edited out in favour of fake applause.
I was involved in heated negotiations with the Oxford Union on the transmission of Assange’s address, against attempts not by the students but by the Board of Trustees to block it “on legal grounds”. These conversations were not pleasant. When Assange’s address was finally put out, the sound was completely messed up and remained so for a fortnight, with this comment from the Oxford Union posted underneath:
“
Thanks for your feedback. We are aware there are issues with the audio when playing on mobile devices and we are working on getting this fixed as quickly as possible. The audio can be heard on desktops or with headphones on laptops.
”
I am therefore fascinated by the skill with which the Oxford Union have merged the dying of the fake applause over the start of Bolton’s speaking, when they were technically incapable of a simple straight sound feed of the Assange address.
Bolton is not only banging the drum for neo-con war, he is a war criminal with a direct role in launching the illegal role of aggression in Iraq. His address to the Union was the day before Assange’s speech to the Sam Adams Award at the same venue. Yet not a single one of the students who demonstrated against Assange demonstrated against Bolton.
To take the issue of rape, which was ostensibly the subject of the protest, Bolton’s Iraq War directly caused innumerable rapes. Nobody can know the exact figure, but certainly tens of thousands of rapes, and very many of them were fatal or had the most devastating consequences for the women who suffered. Read this excellent article
Rape is a common weapon of any war; no one knows how many Iraqi women have been raped since the war began in 2003. Most crimes against women “are not reported because of stigma, fear of retaliation, or lack of confidence in the police,” MADRE, an international women’s rights group, wrote in its 2007 report about violence against women in Iraq. Some women, like Khalida, are raped by Iraqi security forces. A 2005 report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights found that women held in Interior Ministry detention centers endure “systematic rape by the investigators.”
They did not demonstrate against Bolton because the mainstream media and establishment have whipped up no hysteria about him. But they were directed to outrage against Assange, a man who has done a great deal to expose war crimes and try to prevent war, because the mainstream media and establishment pushed the useful idiots in that direction with some extraordinarily unconvincing accusations.
I said most of this IN my owN speech to the Sam Adams awards. Strangely the Oxford Union have not posted that speech at all…..
UPDATE
With thanks to Herbie, there is a history of Bolton and false applause. Perhaps this is insisted upon by his minders – who presumably know he doesn’t get real applause outside the Republican Party!
“The notion that the SWP are cheerleaders for imperialism is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard…”
I have very little knowledge of what the SWP says on a day to day basis. And little interest either, given that the organisation is designed to project the opinions of a tiny, and self perpetuating elite who run the show according to the principles of “democratic centralism.”
On the other hand it is quite clear that, in both Syria and Libya, the SWP took the same side as NATO, Israel the Saudis et al. At one stage it might have been reasonable, though in my view mistaken, to have taken the alleged threat of a massacre in Benghazi as justifying some sort of intervention. But it very soon became evident that NATO and its Arab League friends had no interest at all in the well being of Libyans and that what was being called a “revolution” was just another colour coded front for imperialist aggression.
And the situation in Syria is very similar.
My own view is that the SWP acted as a “cheerleader” in these wars not out of malice (though in any similarly structured group there is always a very good chance that undercover agents are exercising influence) but out of the sort of idiocy that is inevitable in a group in which 99 out of a hundred members sell papers, contribute money and follow orders and those who give orders have no fear of the consequences of idleness, stupidity or failure.
It is surprising that, in 2013, intelligent people do not recognise that the structure of the SWP, and its ethos of deference to ‘leadership’, is pretty well bound to result not only in sordid patronage relationships between the powerful and the submissive but, more importantly, to political conservatism and impotence.
In the greatest crisis that capitalism has ever faced, as the living standards of the people plummet, pensions evaporate, the Health Service disintegrates and the organisations of the working class are paralysed, the SWP hails the “revolution” in Aleppo and aligns itself with those elements who smear Galloway as a sexist, (because he points out that to call Assange a ‘rapist’ is ludicrous), and who, once again, find themselves on the same side as Hague and the Obama regime in calling for Assange to run the risk of being extradited, via Sweden (which has form in this area), to the US.
The truth is that “democratic centralist” structures are environments on which police agents, adventurers and unprincipled careerists thrive. The sad record, from Stalin down, is very clear.
Were the members of the organisation consulted, rather than informed of the “line” I have no doubt that they would have insisted on, at the least, vigorous opposition to their governments adventures in Libya and Syria, while they must have recognised not only the enormous achievements of wikileaks but also the clearly choreographed smearing of Assange in order to sabotage work which is of such importance, and which is so dangerous to imperialism.
US EMPIRE ‘POLITICAL PEDOPHILE GROOMING’ – 3
> the rump of the British hard left on this blog
Mine is the European (very) conservative position (*). Shoulder to shoulder with Tony Benn and any other anti-fascist democrat going. Nil carborundum illegitimi. @ 1.20 –
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svSUCbClg8E
I’ll get my coat. (And /or go to the foot of our stairs? ; ) Ed.)
UP THE US EMPIRE – AND ‘BONKERS’ BOLTON !
Just say “Up yours” to US Empire (Neo-Con?) Nazi mass psychosis. –
Don’t let the Seppos – and their willing helpers on this site – lead you up the garden path.
‘Welease Woger’ and ‘He Wanks as high as any in Wome’. A hidden ‘Bonkers’ Bolton reference? – Life of Brian –
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX0XDHF3M60
‘Biggus Dickus’ – Life of Brian –
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K8_jgiNqUc
Man refuses to pay BBC licence fee on the reasonable grounds that to do so would contravene anti-terrorist legislation on funding such bodies. All too easy to predict the result of the case, I’m afraid.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-911-truth-movement-goes-to-court-in-the-uk/5323188
“I’d be surprised if there was a peaceful transition to a Westminster style democracy. ”
A Capitalist democracy in which their oil belongs to us you mean.
Why would they want to be like us when the system they have results in a lot less people getting killed?
Remarkable Vronsky, and he has a published chemistry professor and a former police intelligence analyst testifying, and tape of bbc harassing him during an interview. The Magistrate might be quite disturbed by the horrible old truth revealed.
Good news: Correa has won the election in Ecuador. The wind may be blowing away from the CIA, pretty much everywhere south of the US border.
Meanwhile in Oxford, ‘legal’ considerations cause the Oxford Union trustees to welcome a war criminal at the same time as they object to inviting someone who is being persecuted by war criminals.
Who’s giving the legal advice? Daniel Bethlehem?
To be precise, we’re talking here about the trustees of OLDUT – the Oxford Literary and Debating Union Charitable Trust, which owns the buildings in which the Oxford Union operates.
Here are the trustees’ names:
Lord Heseltine
Sir Jeremy Lever
Peter Jay
Michael Beloff
Jeremy Catto
Thomas Seaman
Michael Soole
Rev Christopher Lewis
Louis Bagshaw
Victoria Schofield
Fraser Campbell
Their contact man is Malcolm Bacchus, accountant, of Telegraph Hill and Baccma Consulting.
Bacchus is also the contact man for the Mitsubishi UFJ Trust Foundation, of which the declared role is to support the work of OLDUT. Their trustees are
William Hague
Lord Butler
Jeremy Lever
Michael Ancram
Peter Tapsell
Akio Utsumi
Haruko Fukuda
Kazuhiko Kuguchi
Toru Matsuda
Takehiro Kohara
Takamasa Hisada
Hisakata Isomura
Sky News were reporting Correa’s win with a 60% share of the vote but unbelivably, or perhaps believably, repeated that line from the BBC, But critics accuse Mr Correa of being a dictator in the making.
The first item in their bulletin was about Lieberman arriving at court on fraud charges. They even mentioned that he had emigrated to Israel from Russia but omitted mention of his earlier persona as nightclub bouncer and then manager. They said that Netanyahu wants Lieberman back in the Knesset. I bet he does.
‘On 13 December 2012, a CNN breaking news blog post stated that the Israeli Justice Ministry had decided to only charge him with breach of trust and fraud, and not the more serious witness tampering and money laundering corruption charges.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avigdor_Lieberman
Both news items were satisfying to hear.
PS If anyone else here has been ‘up’ at Oxford, did they come across the Habakkuk Room at Jesus College? LOL
http://www.jesus.ox.ac.uk/visitors/habakkuk-room
It was named after Sir John Habakkuk, latterly Principal of the College. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Habakkuk I see he was in the FCO early on in his career.
For good measure http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1413579/Sir-John-Habakkuk.html
It’s a shame that Cameron’s big push on India has coincided with the 24 hour NUJ strike at the BBC. All those harpies are missing and those presenters from the night time World Service are being employed.
Agent Cameron, instead of attending to the dire state of the home country, is out in Mumbai with a huge contingent of businessmen and others including embedded reporters as usual. He was seen speaking in the HQ of Hindustan Unilever Ltd under their banner and with serried ranks of their employees in the background wearing their company lanyards and badges.
When he had finished, he asked them for questions. Oops. The first was a young lady asking why it was so difficult for a student wishing to study at a British university to obtain a visa. Cameron had just been boasting about our universities.
Shame about the bribes scandal too. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/02/18/uk-britain-india-cameron-idUKBRE91H00120130218
Well spotted there N_ When I saw the name – Louis Bagshaw, I thought it was a misspelt Louise Bagshawe, aka Louise Mensch!
OLDUT also have control over whom is invited to speak.
http://www.cherwell.org/news/college/2011/07/17/union-to-clear-guest-speakers-with-trustees
When you run through the names of notable speakers on the Wikipedia page for the Union, you see a miscellany of all sorts of war criminals and their associates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Union#Notable_speakers
OMG! It is Louise Bagshawe, aka Louise Mencsh! She gets/got everywhere.
OXFORD LITERARY AND DEBATING UNION CHARITABLE TRUST
THE ADVANCEMENT OF EDUCATION WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD BY THE PROVISION OF DEBATES AND THE MAINTENANCE OF LIBRARY AND READING ROOM FACILITIES
http://opencharities.org/charities/270292
Mary
Exactly – it was their clearance of who is to speak under which they kept threatening to ban the Assange speech, unless a variety of increasingly onerous conditions were met. They then became increasingly disruptive of the video link.
Hell, I guess I have to do a full post on it.
Craig: please get real. The ethnicity of the president of the Oxford Union may not be irrelevant to the president of the Oxford Union herself. She grew up in Herzliya, on territory occupied in 1948. Going by the article in the Jewish Chronicle, she appears to be a Zionist. The reason I say this is because they were obviously suggesting that she was a Zionist, but I haven’t been able to find anywhere where she has corrected that suggestion. She might have corrected it if it wasn’t true. Being a Zionist doesn’t, of course, mean that she is Jewish, just as being of Jewish extraction doesn’t make someone a Zionist. Many foreign businessmen and diplomats live in Herzliya, so perhaps she is a non-Jewish helper of Zionist interests, like Jimmy Savile?
Meanwhile, over at Cambridge, they have Sir Richard Dearlove i/c. Another you could not make it up.
The Trustees – The Board of Trustees, currently chaired by Sir Richard Dearlove, is responsible for overseeing the long-term development of the Union’s finances and property. Whilst the Trustees are not intimately involved with the day-to-day running of the Society, they maintain ultimate legal responsibility for the organization, its assets and status as a registered charity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Union_Society
Board of Trustees
■Sir Richard Dearlove KCMG OBE (Chairman)
■Dr Nigel Brown OBE
■Mr Andy Swarbrick FCA
■Dr Nigel Yandell
■Mr Nick Heath FRICS
■The Hon Daniel Janner QC
■Janet Turner QC
■Austin Mahler, President Michaelmas 2012
The current President is Ben Kentish.
http://www.cus.org/members/running-your-union/whos-who
No need Craig. It is quite clear from what you wrote above.
I was involved in heated negotiations with the Oxford Union on the transmission of Assange’s address, against attempts not by the students but by the Board of Trustees to block it “on legal grounds”. These conversations were not pleasant. When Assange’s address was finally put out, the sound was completely messed up and remained so for a fortnight, with this comment from the Oxford Union posted underneath:
“Thanks for your feedback. We are aware there are issues with the audio when playing on mobile devices and we are working on getting this fixed as quickly as possible. The audio can be heard on desktops or with headphones on laptops.”
PS Hope the party was good.
Oops, sorry – those ‘e’s went missing from Bagshawe aka Mensch’s name!
Is Daniel Janner any relation to Greville?
Richard Dearlove at Cambridge. LOL! Control the questions to control the answers. Dearlove is Master of Pembroke College. So the Cambridge Union won’t be debating who killed Princess Diana when he was the SIS Operations Director, then? 🙂
@Ex Pat – thanks for the reference to Peter Dale Scott’s stuff on the Breivik massacre. I would really like to read it. Unfortunately it seems to be available only in audio. I can’t be alone in preferring to read stuff, which is much quicker and much more active!
KRF
Iran:”The Westernised middle class resent not being able to date girls and chat freely in coffee shops (coffee shops in Teheran now have cameras to ensure unrelated people of opposite sex don’t meet – check the story of the Cafe Prague in Teheran: recently closed down because it refused to spy on its customers)”
The whole of the Arab Spring has been engineered to achieve the same result at the tacky hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. But the plan is not to legislate for un-Islamic behaviour in public places, which in my opinion would be perfectly legitimate for an Islamic state if everyone knows the rules and the consequences of disobeying them, but unbelievably before the IT revolution, to monitor Muslims’ personal human weaknesses in their own homes and bedrooms.
That is why the dictators have been disbanded, because the mind-control Mullahs have the whole force of Shari’ah to judge events which previously were private. Looking through the keyhole is completely forbidden in Islam. For example. The state will now be able to prosecute a Muslim for stroking his dog in his own house, not just for walking a dog in a public place where it may intimidate other Muslims. OK Islam says that it’s not allowed to stroke the dog, but to use the illegal spying device to monitor un-Islamic activity makes a mockery of the whole set up.
As I have repeatedly suggested, the last time that Islam came within the orbit of the West, at the time of the Enlightenment, when it was Islamic knowledge that was bringing daylight into Medieval mass ignorance, the Zionists of the day, like Calvin, countered the Islamic glow with Puritanism which in turn was blasted off the planet with all its religious observance and self-righteous persecution along with all the good Islamic influences.
The present media caricature of Islam with which we are all familiar, i.e. the Taliban excesses or the mad mullahs of Iran and the future Muslim Brotherhood Middle-East will in their minds achieve the same result as Puritanism in the past. If you want to de-grease wool you mix it with earth and wash it with detergent. If you want to de-Islamise a society you first have to give it freedom, then rinse it with spying. The techniques of de-Islamising societies is an ancient Satanic science, not something invented yesterday by a few expired neo-cons like Bolton and Bush.
N, 10.05am
You’ll enjoy this. Sir Richard Dearlove being taken down over Wikileaks during his own address to the Cambridge Union Society. Those pesky students (erm, I mean Love Police)!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OITB0VOYkEA
http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Richard_Dearlove
Scary photo!
@CE
Thanks for your compliment. Yes, the regime in Iran can’t survive without invoking a common enemy, which is perhaps the reason why it can never re-establish diplomatic relations with the USA. That fact may be the reason why it is difficult to build trust between the two countries, and without trust it becomes difficult to believe there isn’t another agenda behind Iran’s civil nuclear energy project. Burying vast numbers of centrifuges capable of making far more enriched uranium than is necessary to make medical isotopes at Fordow under a mountain at vast expense when the stuff can be bought from abroad much cheaper, but in a form that can’t be diverted to bomb-making, of course doesn’t help). I expect one of the reasons the regime is so tough on Muslims who convert is that it can be seen as a form of political protest, when a feature of controlling the behaviour of the population is the requirement to obey the leadership’s interpretation of the religion. Sorry, I’ve gone on too much blasting this blog with my thoughts.
@Doug Scorgie
On the issue of Iranian lying.
As I’ve said it is not a reason to dislike Iranians; it is not unique to them; it is not necessarily a problem (it is not their fault – they have to be devious to survive under the dictatorial regimes of all the types they’ve had?). I don’t cite any examples: I just lived and worked there for year that straddled the revolution (saw two countries for the price of one). Other people put it in a more diplomatic way and suggest you have to interpret everything Iranians tell you. In a memorable interview the Swiss ambassador to Iran said on CNN when talking about what it was like to be hauled into the Foreign Ministry and shouted at, she said they don’t always tell you everything: you have to interpret things and this makes the job more interesting. You might think Switzerland is insignificant, but this ambassador, remember, has to manage the USA relationship with Teheran within the context of the Swiss relationship. She is no dummy. It was one of the most amusing interviews I’ve seen: without calling the Iranians liars, she managed to convey that impression very well indeed, and she did it without insulting Iranians (very clever – a very impressive interview). Another example is that it is very rare for (establishment?) journalists to call somebody a liar. Marie Colvin, the American reporter who worked for the Times in Syria did call Bashar Al-Assad a liar (that is my point about it not being a problem unique to Iran). Sarkozy famously called Netanyahu a liar (I think I believe Sarkozy’s assessment). It all just chimes with my personal experience in Iran. I can’t be more scientific about it than that.
The unfair treatment of Iran compared with Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea
This is a point I sympathise with Iranians on. The justification for Israel having a nuclear bomb I suppose is that they have a right to exist, and if the most cost effective way of defending their small population (they can’t have a big army?) is to have a nuclear deterrent then who am I to say they shouldn’t have it: Israel would be an unviable economy with a larger army? The fact they are an open society (unlike Iran) and therefore are unlikely to behave irresponsibly (the leadership is fully accountable to its electors: there is little press censorship there?) makes me think it is okay. The fact some Israeli citizens are Persian Jews also reassures me on that point (Persian Jews probably speak Farsi, and so they won’t want their Government attacking Iran without good reason). Iran however, is not an open society, and it does have press censorship (Iranian journalists in London have had their families in Iran threatened). Iran is simply not a fit country to have a nuclear weapon, at least while the current regime is in place. The Indian and Pakistani governments can be held to account by their electorate, so I am less concerned about those.
The “Iran has never declared war on anyone before” argument
This is true, but changing just a few of the words to “never attacked anyone before” of course changes the answer if you think Iran had a hand in the Beirut barracks bombing or the blowing up of the Argentine Jewish Centre, (I don’t know if it did, if I am honest). The dogma the Iranian leadership seeks to preserve of “West is evil, the Islamic Republic is right about everything” is not unlike the Animal Farm slogan of four legs good, two legs bad. The Iranian leadership does not have a very nuanced understanding of the world outside Iran (except on how to annoy the West to maximum effect with minimal effort and how to play on differences between the allies: they are very smart at that, and that is why I think they are likely to test our willingness to use force.
And it is true that Iranians have justifiable grievances against the West (I think I’ve already dealt with Mossadegh and Anglo-Persian oil) but a particularly bad one was the shooting down of an Iranian airliner full of pilgrims flying over a US warship in the Persian Gulf a long time ago. I haven’t followed that story nor the one about all the Iranian assets belonging to the Shah’s regime that are still in the West. All these problems are probably still unresolved.
I am not that stupid to think Iran will attack Israel or the West on the basis of the unresolved business outstanding that needs to be sorted out – the Iranian leadership seems too clever for that (even though its quality of decision making on the economy is abominable: scarce resources used to chase transfer payments e.g. access to dollars at a privileged exchange rate, manipulated business environment to favour businesses which are connected to the regime (I sometimes think of Khamenei as a CEO with a sideline in religion), regressive “taxation” (food price inflation) of the poor to pay for nuclear grandstanding and impressing the Arab man in the street) but I do think their strategy is to use their wealth to cause us the maximum of problems for the least cost – and getting to be one screw turn away from having a nuclear bomb fits in with that strategy – at a later date when they are stronger (when they decide to make the final screw-turn?), they would want a permanent seat on the UN security council (Shia under representation + possession of nuclear bomb would be the reasons: reasons which are hard to object to?), they would seek to destroy the economic viability of Israel (not something of concern to me personally but it just seems unfair on a common sense basis) (Avner Cohen in a debate with Karim Sadjadpour strongly denied this was Israel’s fear, which only makes me think this is what Israel really does fear) and I presume Iran would, as it gets stronger, use its malign influence elsewhere against us. Are these fears justified? No, precisely because we have got them in check with the sanctions for now. Didn’t chess originate in Iran? It feels like we are playing chess with them. Anyway, I don’t expect I’ve converted anyone to my views (not academic enough evidence presented). However, if you think the Iranian leadership likes having its dogma de-constructed and all its contradictions exposed (e.g. temporary marriages to cover up prostitution? Torturing Sattar Beheshti, a blogger, to death to maintain obedience to the religion to give everyone a better after-life?) by Western leaders and that Iran is not going to hit back for showing it insufficient respect, you’ve got to be kidding: they are itching to hurt us any way they can. They are a proud people with much more history than we have, and their culture deserves a lot of respect, but the leadership’s dogma: it deserves none. Just my view.
P.S. For an example of how hard it is to de-construct the sort of garbage they can come out with some times, try explaining to an Iranian why any pop group of your choice didn’t make their music to undermine Iranian youth. You can tell them the Bee Gees wouldn’t have had Iranian youth on their minds when they made their songs, but short of hours of explaining lots of things about Western culture it is hard to convince them. I remember struggling with that one.
I like the attribution there Arbed. Thank goodness there were subtitles as I could not hear what he was saying. I guess he did not know he was being filmed.
Uploaded on 19 Mar 2011
This video was removed by the Cambridge Union Society and the total cunt known as Sir Richard Dearlove from the Love Police channel because it violated their copyright (or should I say copyspite).
COPYRIGHT NOTE: I claim Fair Use under US and UK law for the Journalistic reporting of current news events. Any copyright in the verbal/visible content issued by the asshole scumbag known as Sir Richard Dearlove or by Cambridge Union Society is hereby grudgingly credited to them. Big thanks to the Love Police for actually creating the audio/visual content. Any DMCA bullshit from the Union or Dearlove should be treated with contempt, legal action may be taken if they choose to use the DMCA mechanism fraudulently and we will have some fun at court and with the media.
and this comment
saagua1953 1 year ago
Imagine Dearlove being Master of Pembroke! The SHAME for Cambridge U of that. When I discovered this just yesterday, I immediately revoked the large bequest to Cambridge in my will. I would not give a penny to a place where Dearlove is in an important position.
~~~~
From all appearances, he dines well!
After this Cock up in Vienna in 2000, nobody in the US can possibly claim to be innocent.
Thing is, Iran did not take the bait and yes, they did discover that the blueprint had some false connection in it. But they handed it back, to the UN I believe.
http://cryptome.org/0001/cia-merlin.htm
Doug’s reply to Karimova’s R.F. sounds about right. John Bolton’s Yale education makes him only more dangerous than others, arguably his worst trait is his Lutheran fundamentalism, he is not one to bare the other cheek, indeed as Tony Benn so rightly pointed out, he, despite being trained as a soldiers, ‘did not want to die in a Vietnam rice paddy’, he’s all mouth and agitation, but when it comes down to it, he bottles out, a draft dodger and manipulator.
John Bolton ought to realise that it is the US who has used nuclear weapons in anger and has developed many more, it tested more devices than any other country.
It is also the US who uses nuclear proliferation, or WMD’s as an argument, a lever to create chaotic division and control over resources, neocon neo-colonialism for what others own.
Mali is the latest victim, an unstable country under a junta, with arms everywhere, uranium, gold and oil, what magnetising interest we have in Mali indeed. It is also central to other key states rich and ‘threatened’ by terrorists who want nothing more than to control their own resources, by means of using a religious tool.
For all those who like to see how much Bolton has lied to vilify Iran/Persia and is shekel’ed to false vicious slander and regular false information blow offs, against a country that has not attacked anybody for 250 years, from one warmonger to a peaceful nation.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/iran-nuclear-analysis.html
That said Iran has got some serious judicial problems, its foreign arm, namely Hezbullah are now established in their own right, as elected MP’s in Lebanon, so Iran has lost some levers, but feels obliged to not disband it. ever.
Why should anyone listen to anything the US says about nuclear security when they contract out the security over their own nuclear weapons, as well as over their own civilian nuclear installations, to Israelis?
To an Israeli company called Magal Security Systems, to be precise.
The other good news today.
4 hrs Hugo Chávez Frías@chavezcandanga
Sigo aferrado a Cristo y confiado en mis médicos y enfermeras. Hasta la victoria siempre!! Viviremos y venceremos!!!
4 hrsHugo Chávez Frías@chavezcandanga
Gracias a Fidel, a Raúl y a toda Cuba!! Gracias a Venezuela por tanto amor!!!
4 hrsHugo Chávez Frías@chavezcandanga
Hemos llegado de nuevo a la Patria venezolana. Gracias Dios mío!! Gracias Pueblo amado!! Aquí continuaremos el tratamiento.
https://twitter.com/chavezcandanga
Hugo Chavez’s tweet was the first indication he had returned home.
N_ In answer to your question
Is Daniel Janner any relation to Greville?
Daniel Janner, of 36 Essex Street, has not followed his father Greville Janner MP into the Labour party but runs the policy research team for the Society of Conservative Lawyers.
http://www.thelawyer.com/election-97-manoeuvres-on-the-inside-track/98416.article
Greville Janner is an arch supporter of Israel, a member of Labour Friends of Israel and uses every opportunity he can find to speak for Israel in Parliament, first as an MP and now in the Lords. In this short debate, the Israel lovers pretend to be onside for peace and love between Jew and Arab and for a two state solution! The debate is dominated by them.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2013-02-07a.423.0
His father Sir Barnett was chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and a son in law is Amos Oz. A daughter is a Rabbi.
Mary
In relation to Diana, the last thing we need are more “debates” regarding absurd conspiracy theories.
Not me guv! I am not N_
N_
18 Feb, 2013 – 10:05 am
Oops, sorry – those ‘e’s went missing from Bagshawe aka Mensch’s name!
Is Daniel Janner any relation to Greville?
Richard Dearlove at Cambridge. LOL! Control the questions to control the answers. Dearlove is Master of Pembroke College. So the Cambridge Union won’t be debating who killed Princess Diana when he was the SIS Operations Director, then?
A Q&A with John Pilger.
Q 6. As you look forward, what do you think are the prospects for a more serious flow of critical, visionary, content to wide audiences? What steps do you think might permit and generate that either by an improved alternative media – or by a mainstream media forced to do better, even against its own purposes and logic?
The so-called mainstream media will never contradict its own logic. It is an extension of established authority; it is not, as Edmund Burke wanted us to believe: a “fourth estate”. But it’s not monolithic. I have worked all my career in the mainstream. I’ve done this by expending a huge amount of energy in maintaining my place, and fighting my corner. It has been often and literally a struggle, but in time I learned to navigate through and sometimes around institutions. Learning to navigate is critical for young, principled journalists.
What we need urgently is a “fifth estate” that challenges the autocracy of the corporate media, that includes and gives voice to the public, that mounts an invasion of institutions — TV, newspapers, media colleges — calling on journalists and their teachers to drop their defensiveness and promoting another way of seeing and working. In practical terms, we should be working to create publicly funded organisations that provide seed money to new, independent journalistic ventures. This has enjoyed success in Scandinavia.
and 9 and 10
9. Again, looking forward, how do you think we might do better, in the period ahead?
If by “we” you mean ordinary people, we have no choice but to keep standing up, to keep informing others and organising, and not to allow a mutated “popular culture” or hi-jacked issues of “identity” and “self” deflect us into believe that consumerist lifestyle is real change.
10. What would international relations be like, say fifty years in the future – not country by country but in terms of general relationships – if it was as it ought to be?
Mike, I’m not and have never been a futurist. I predict badly; however, I’m confident that if we remain silent while the US war state, now rampant, continues on its bloody path, we bequeath to our children and grandchildren a world with an apocalyptic climate, broken dreams of a better life for all and, as the unlamented General Petraeus put it, a state of “perpetual war”. Do we accept that or do we fight back?
~~~
Hear! Hear!
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-view-from-the-ground-by-john-pilger
@Doug SCorgie
“People in Iran suffer terrible interference in their lives from higher up officialdom.” [Examples pleas]
80 coffee shops closed down in one district of Teheran in one weekend
“They really have to mind their Ps and Qs, [sic] otherwise you end up being tortured in Evin” Examples please]
Mrs Sotoudeh (Shirin Ebadi’s lawyer). Also the Iranian lawyer who fled to Norway who defended the lady sentenced to death by stoning. Sattar Behesti (blue collar worker who criticised Khamenei on his blog) tortured to death. The new finger chopping machine certainly inteferes with thieves ability to rehabilitate and earn a living honestly.
”A lot of the hangings are not for what the sentence was that was passed.”[sic] [Examples please]
I have no evidence on this, but the number of hangings for drugs is suspiciously large. A country which does not follow due process, which has suspiciously fast trials, which does not always grant access to lawyers, which does not inform the embassy of the country of the arrested person and which imprisons lawyers who do their job too well of defending dissident clients is unlikely to be too fussed about hanging people on false charges. One technique they use is to make charges very vague. A disturbing hanging was the case of the Dutch Iranian national who took part in the Green protests. She was hanged for cocaine possession: why would a Dutch person want to take a South American drug to Iran? It seems a bit odd. The Dutch embassy was not kept informed. Then there was the case of the Canadian Iranian photographer who died from torture in prison. The Iranians do not recognise dual nationality. I think it reasonable to assume they are not too fussed how they get rid of awkward people. Hanging people for drugs may dull some Western people’s scepticism? You may also recall the quasi judicial proceedings in London last year to look into the tens of thousands of executions in the 90s.
“The courts are not independent:” [justify that comment]
“…quite similar to Uzbekistan in that respect…”[again justify that statement]
One of the Larijani brothers is in charge of the judiciary. I think that says a great deal.
”…and of course both countries take hostages to advance their demands.”[Examples please]
Shane Bauer etc (The 3 American hitch-hikers). Mr Levinson is still a hostage (the American who disappeared on Kish Island). The British sailors.
“Iran can’t even obey the Vienna Convention on Diplomats let alone be trusted on anything else.” [Vienna Convention references please].
1979 Commercial Section of the British Embassy attacked.
1979 Seizure of the US embassy
2012 Attack on British embassy
There was also a Russian poet/ambassador killed in the 19th century (but perhaps that was before the Vienna Convention on Diplomats?)