It is worth reminding ourselves of the detail of the murders by Blackwater on which charges were recently dismissed in the US.
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/01/2010128143176494.html
And remembering that in the UK there has not even been any attempted legal action against hired killer Tim Spicer and his Aegis crew:
http://www.newstrend.com/2005/12/aegis-iraq-trophy-video-download.html
Wishing you and your family a good year ahead..keep up the good work you stuzzicatore…..hope my translations correct
Wishing you and your family a good year ahead..keep up the good work you stuzzicatore…..hope my translations correct
The trophy videos a sickening inditement of ‘cantractors’ aka mercenaries behaviour.
let them see justice in Iraqi……
hope your watching bush and blair….
On a happier note I’ve just heard that obama been sunnying himself in hotter climates. How the fuck he manages to look at his wife and kids when killing innocents civilians using drones (sorry there all named ‘callatoral damage’) is fucking beyond me. But there again is nice having such a orator fronting a war machine
“Tony Blair’s Pet Bulldog”
A warning about private contractors in Iraq from 2004…
http://www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0266.html
I think you may have the judge wrong on this one. It looks like the prosecutors deliberately buggered up their case.
Still not sure why anyone expects the US to behave differently though. We wouldn’t be surprised at Nazi bad behaviour. Why should we be surprised at the behaviour of an even bigger war criminal.
I remember in an interview once with Prince Charles, he suggested that since the British Army were the best in the world at what they do, we ought to rent them out and make some money from their expertise.
He said this with a little smirk and snigger, in acknowledgement that it was a controversial thing to say in public, but I suspect it’s not so controversial in private. Anyway, they’ve been rented out to corporate interests for years.
Not sure I’d want to do too much dying for fat corporates for £13,000 a year, whilst war criminals like Blair and his greedy bitch wife trouser millions.
Mustn’t be too bright, these squaddies…
Thank-you Craig – you are a man of distinction – a leader.
Can they be tried in Iraq, or did western mercenaries have legal immunity at the time of the massacre?
Obviously they will not set foot in Iraq any time soon, but I doubt the issue will go away. Perhaps it will not be as easy to hide from justice in 20 or 30 years time.
Looking at the Simon Mann case and his attempted coup, I have the feeling that these mercenaries aren’t really that competent, so it’s probably not a good idea to leave them totally unnacountable to law and criticism.
We see a lot of this incompetence in private companies, as government transfers increasingly more and more public business to them.
I know that the A4e company was built on contracts from its friends in New Labour, particularly Blunkett. One of the interesting aspects of these contracts is that those awarding them were not allowed to make decisions based on past performance. Hardly the best way to ensure that public monies are wisely spent.
But that’s the point. These private companies operate with less control and scrutiny than the public bodies that preceded them. Same with the mecenaries.
“We wouldn’t be surprised at Nazi bad behaviour. Why should we be surprised at the behaviour of an even bigger war criminal.”
And this moron calls himself Winston Smith. Beyond parody.
Here’s a contribution from our own ‘lads’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoRpfRhXDFc
This bunch of shoot-’em-up cowboys apparently work for Aegis Defence Services.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1381
Clearly, these killers are responsible for many deaths, but perhaps did not manage a Blackwater/.XE scale massacre in one go. At least, not one that we know about.
What did Spicer get his OBE for again?
Funny old world:
That is why I regard so-called ‘New Labour’ as not only thieves and gangsters, but as traitors: they have steadily transferred the powers vested in them by their employers, the public, for the purpose of serving said employers, to their cronies and out of public control. And of course, to the EU, where many of said cronies have fat salaries and are similarly unaccountable to the public.
The following article is an example of the most completely brilliant investigative journalism I have seen.
Deek Jackson is a hero of mine, but he didn’t write it – just posted it on his blog…
The Underwear Bomber ?” Crushing Freedom With Phony Arab Terrorism
Joe Quinn
SOTT.net
Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:30 EST
http://main.fknnewz.com/blog/?p=1069
Tony
Anyone who refers to him as a ‘terrorist’ in scare quotes is as thick as two short planks. And anyone who quotes this crap with admiration is several sandwiches short of a picnic.
This Gordon Bennet seems unable to distinguish between argumentative and argument.
It’s comforting though to know that one with his views is also exceedingly dim.
Cause and effect, I suppose.
Mark Golding,
“Thank-you Craig – you are a man of distinction – a leader.”
I agree.
People like Craig Murray, inspire me, because he is a man of principal, who exhibits the most tremendous courage, in bringing some of the most aweful things to the attention of Millions…
He knows that those in control of us are evil, but he is still incredibly naive and doesn’t fully understand the extent of the evil…
Sure he know lots of people in high places, and though horrible, it is not at that level where the real problem lies…
Yes we can see Movies like V for Vendetta – and the really funny one – that the UK Government have given full access to the Film Companies to even use the interior of Number 10 for what is a supposed fictional and hilarious account of the workings of Government, that is just so close to the truth…
But the Real Evil is Out There and it is at a Much More Powerful Level Than Our Political Pygmies Tony Blair, Dick Cheney and George Bush…
Sure almost anyone can be corrupted, and become a tool of a much greater power…
But we at the Oldham Working Class Level Can See This Happenning
And we do our best to fight back with words, because we really don’t want to go to the next level
The situation in America is somewhat different – because the Michigan Working Class Level are Being Screwed Even Harder Than Working Class People From Oldham…
I Can’t see any way, that The American Working Class are Not Going To Get EXTREMELY ANGRY
And whilst I am just armed with a pint of Pendle Witch, they are armed with Machine Guns
Its going to be horrible, unless we use WORDS to bring us back to our senses…
I sometimes get into discussions with these Right Wing American Lunatics with Guns, and They Make it Quite Clear That They Want To Kill Me, and Splatter My Guts Everywhere, but they hate their President even more than me…
I try and explain, that he is just a Politician, and that the problem goes much higher, and that it is not him, but the person who has got his finger up the President’s Arse
And they object to my spelling – and say its Ass
Love & Peace and More Lancashire Eccles Cakes
Tony
Tony – you need to stop buying this climate change denial BS that the rich and big business is foisting on you. What’s going to bring you to your senses? When the Maldives are something you can only visit in history books? When the North Pole is completely free of ice? When Polar Bears are extinct?
If you think you know better than the consensus of the world’s climate scientists, why don’t you write a paper on the subject, publish it, and get it peer reviewed – your proof that climate change isn’t happening?
Nobody’s managed it yet. And the oil/gas/coal industry will give you a considerable payment if you can.
For God’s sake, Tony, get a grip. You’re rational enough with your views in other respects.
glenn,
I know you mean well, but I have not been programmed by anyone since I rejected the Roman Catholic Religion at the Age of 15…
Well of course I have a bit – because mind programming is all around you…
But at the age of 15, having freed myself from this Religious Nonsense in a Confessional ( I Was an Altar Boy and My Parents Wanted Me to Be a Catholic Priest )…
My training as a Scientist Continued…
And My Career was all about Analysing Stuff And Finding Solutions To Real Problems – and Turning Them Into Solutions That Worked…
If I Had Been Shit at it, then I would have died in the gutter 25 years ago
I have been where you are and done that (and actually still do)
I am not being controlled by Big Energy
My Motivation is To Find Real Solutions To The Worlds Real Problems
If You Think The World’s Problems Have Anything Whatsoever About The Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, then I will quite happilly smoke a joint with you at a Climate Camp, and I will bring on the The Drummers…and tell you what I told the Priest…
He was in mental control of me, then I realised that when he wanted to know all the details of my confession – which I made up about what I was fantasizing about a girl in my class at school..
It was Me that was in Control of him – The Priest Wanking his pants in the confessional…The more I told him, the more detail I gave him about how we slowly made love and I ejaculated deep inside her.. the more excited he became. The fact that I made it all up is not the point. It was exactly what I wanted to do – but we were both innocent 15 year old virgins, and if and when it happenned was absolutely nobody elses business but ours.
I Never went back
But explaining this to my Parents and my Older Brothers and Sisters that I was no longer a Catholic and would not be going back to Church…
Took Real Courage…
You See – I Used to Believe the Entire Thing
Objective Analysis, has brought me to the Conclusion that Jesus Christ Probably Never Existed as a Real Human Being…
Trying to explain this especially to Someone who is Smiling After His “God” Experience at His New Church Of Global Warming where he has been dancing and singing and having the same kind of experience that you get from listening to Brian Eno & The Psycho Killer’s My Life in The Bush of Ghosts – is Not Likey To Have any Effect
Most People believe in nonsense.
The evidence is overwhelming.
Once you slowly realise that at least some of your core beliefs may be wrong, then you can maybe start to learn something new and ask questions.
Check out how a 2 year old learns, and wonder at their Magnificence.
Some parents subcontract out this experience so that they can afford a bigger TV to watch Vera Duckworth even larger.
Tony
tony, you claim to be a scientist. From which University did you receive your PhD? Where is your PhD dissertation? What peer-reviewed papers have you published? How many of them are on climatology?
I don’t believe you are a scientist. I think you’re a deluded crank. Prove me wrong.
Religions are not generally endorsed by _all_ the world’s most prestigious scientific bodies. Here’s some:
http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/media/1021climate_letter.pdf
Tony – thank you for your reply, and everything you said makes total sense on religion. I was brought up as a Christian in the Baptist traditions, and believed every single word of the Bible, as we were called upon to do. I went forward and became evangelical in my mid-teens, and wanted nothing more than to become the best Christian I could be. At the age of about 17, I decided the best way to know Him better was to read the Bible thoroughly, so I did.
Reading in Exodus that Moses appealed for his people to go, “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (Ex. 9:12) bothered me greatly. Why didn’t God just lighten the Pharaoh up a bit?
Reading on, that God had allowed the Egyptians to enter the parted sea, and then killed them all, I was greatly troubled. Why hadn’t the Red Sea closed behind the Jews, so they could just get away? Reading about the walls of Jericho, and their “mighty men of valour”, and all the inhabitants slaughtered… how fathers gave away their daughters to be raped and “made a burnt offering thereof” etc. … I came to a horrible conclusion.
The God of Christianity could not possibly be the God of love that I’d thought. My faith went quickly downhill, and I’ve never looked back. I’m proud to be an atheist now.
I imagine that’s why Catholics aren’t supposed to read Bibles much. Like Adam Smith – free-market worshipers revere him, but aren’t supposed to read his stuff. Or the belief system will fall apart.
*
But back to global climate change – nobody brainwashed me into believing that climate change is happening, and I’ve been studying the subject long before mainstream media/ politicians etc. even bothered mentioning it. Those concerned about climate change were considered outsiders, cranks, just plain stupid until pretty recently.
Real climate change scientists are tearing their hair out that MSM still treats the subject as a “debate”, where an oil-company shill should hold the same weight as the entire climatologists’ consensus.
It beats me why decent people like you, Tony, want to get into bed with the oil companies and the ‘business as usual’ crowd on this one.
And I’d definitely be up for a ‘smoke’ to discuss this sometime. Name the Climate Camp event!
(Sorry for the slightly off-topic posts here.)
Some of these Music Gods turn up in some of our local pubs, and sometimes they play and sometimes they don’t, but whilst nearly all musicians whether or not they have been comercially successful or not are just incredibly ordinary people to talk to…
Its just a fucking job, and in most cases extremely poorly paid…
The thing is, being a musician, is not something you have much of a choice about…
You just have to do it nearly every day, particulaly if you are a guitarist…
Otherwise your fingers get sore
My wife and daughter have just told me, that someone has just killed themselves, just up the road from where we live.
They probably believed the propaganda and couldn’t take it any more.
We don’t know who it is, but the body bag is there and the Police (who I have enormous respect for) are dealing with it and cleaning up the mess.
There is a lot of it about.
Tony
Yes Tony – Craig has got balls and you need a decent pair to go against the flow.
I met Robin Cook at a R4 ‘Question Time’ debate. I spoke to him after the show and he was seriously worried about staying in politics – he was genuinely scared and asked me what he should do. I’ve known Bridget from J7 Truth Campaign and she and Ant have been intimidated. I speak with Annie Machon and she remains extremely cautious. I am not name dropping; all these people have tremendous courage against evil. Don’t get me wrong I am not a pacifist or a conspiracy theorist, in fact I am ex Navy and my ‘mates’ are all against these so called ‘wars’ against an unknown enemy that we must be kept ‘safe’ from by preemptive aggression.
I do feel pity for ordinary Americans who have to endure constant monitoring and real life attacks on their liberty. Our hardened exterior tends to nullify this ‘fear mongering’ with some insight as to why from this post some two years ago:
Understanding 21st Century Terror
To understand terrorism it is critical to engage in dialogue with the terrorist to understand the cause. By understanding, it then becomes possible to reduce or even eliminate acts of terror.
From a British prospective we draw on our experience of terrorist acts by the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, whose cause was essentially political, a united Ireland separated entirely from British rule.
The history of the conflict serves to remind us that after the invasion, Irish men and women resisted British rule for 800 years and fought a military campaign against occupation. Ireland was eventually partitioned by an act of Parliament without the consent of the Irish people.
In Ireland we witnessed military intervention to quell riots and ‘internment without trial’ to round up trouble-makers in dawn raids. Religion also played a part because most republicans from southern Ireland were Catholic and many Unionists from the North, Protestant mainly because their ancestors were originally from Protestant British main-land. Religion however was a handy ‘tool’ to gain external support from the Catholic movement in America who provided finance and even weapons.
This was always a political war and death caused by hunger strikes was a weapon to garnish external support from Europe where the Human Rights Council ruled that interrogation techniques used on internees amounted to “inhuman and degrading” treatment.
We should take note however that peace was obtained by using Christianity as a common bond between two leaders (Paisley and Blair) to agree a truce and integration of opposing parties towards a common aim. Thus history is rewritten and the Irish terrorists became freedom fighters.
Knowing all this we can certainly draw parallels to our 21st century ‘war on terror’, we understand the religious constructs, the military invasions, the internments (rendition), torture at Camp Delta and the British dawn raids on Muslims.
But how did this ‘war’ start and why is it called a ‘war between good and evil? How do ‘de facto’ governments like the Taliban suddenly become ‘terrorists’ and ‘terrorists’ become freedom fighters as they did in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union?
It was the ‘evil of communism’ obsessively promoted and advanced by western societies and the religious fervour that Russia was a ‘Godless’ society that promoted a ‘jihad’ or ‘holy war’ from sympathetic Muslims in surrounding regions as well as support from western governments, so the Afghan terrorist in the eyes of Russia became the mujaheddin or soldiers of the holy war.
But things change.
This was a war between good and evil and Muslim sympathy focused on atrocities against the people of Palestine by Israel. America was seen to support the Israeli actions and became ‘the Great Satan’, now a threat to Muslims world-wide. A dominating, hegemous America turned into a catalyst for ‘global jihad’, this war became asymmetric, jihad soldiers become ‘suicide bombers,’ deadly killers far removed from martyrs of IRA hunger strikes.
The Iraq war and the threat to Iran by America began to change world opinion and as this year closes we note a withdrawal of British forces from Iraq as again we resort to a common belief between leaders that peace must be achievable at all costs to prevent destruction of all we cherish in this world.
Tony seems a little shy about his credentials.
Anyway, some links:
Why scientists use tree rings as a temperature proxy, and why they break late 20th century:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/why_climatologists_used_the_tr.php
Debunking claims about fraud in CRU code:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/quote_mining_code.php
Factcheck.org on “climategate”:
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
Nature on “climategate”:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
Anthony Watts is full of shit:
http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-crock-week-whats-anthony-watts-take-2
Tony, read James Lovelocks ‘The Revenge Of Gaia’. It is very well argued from a man who has spent his whole life working in environmental science. It is very grim reading that even the MSM do not want to bring up. He makes many very strong points, backed with evidence that even pursuaded me to swallow my lifetime fear of nuclear energy. Time is very short for this planet to sort out the CO2 problem, we can do it if we act fast. But dithering about what is science fact or not will kill not just mankind, but all life (possibly the only life in the universe) Read, learn, and get with the vast majority of science thinking.
Craig, the Aegis footage just sickens me to the core. It gives cause to think that acts like this was not just a one off piece trophy footage.
Private, unaccountable armies, given immunity from procecution should be outlawed at once. At UN level. (not that the US gives a flying fig for the UN 95% of the time)
Glenn,
In a sense we are going through a Massive Climate Change, but it has absolutely nothing about how warm or cold our planet is…
It may well have an enormous thing about how us humans have been fucking our home – our planet up. We see it everywhere. I do everything I can to minimise my own pollution and do not fart in my local pub, because it is totally and completely socially unacceptable…
My wife meanwhile goes round collecting rubbish that ignorant twats just throw away…
A real education on the subject of care for your local village we learnt when our kids were young and we took her parents to a little village I used to Fly Gliders from Sutton Bank over in North Yorkshire…
Not a blade of grass was out of place.
Not one cigarette had been discarded. Not one building did not look as immaculate as the day it was built – sometime over the last few hundred years…
Sure it was like a pristine model village in some museum – except it is Real, and The People are Real and They Live In Their Village, just like people have done for thousands of years – and they grow food.
And they are incredibly welcoming and friendly.
And you naturally respect such beauty.
I think they filmed some of Brideshead Revisited nearby..
As I type, my wife is doing her best to try and find out exactly who has committed suicide just up the road…
She is running to the Copper – and asking if they have analysed the blood to get their DNA yet (well actually no – just phoning up everyone we know – to see if anyone knows anything)
Tony
Tony youre fine, but your posts are too long and self referential.
crab,
Do want a job as my editor? You can delete everything I say that does not conform to your point of view, and then you can publish the final finished product of what you think about the world.
But before I appoint you as my editor, can you say something self referential about yourself – such that I have a reference point to make a self referential judgement about you.
For all I know you could be a complete TWAT.
Tony
http://angrysoba.blogspot.com/2010/01/james-balog-time-lapse-proof-of-extreme.html