The planned scenario for a war with Iran is playing out before our eyes at frightening speed now. Unfortunately. as I have frequently said, Iran has a regime that is not only thuggish but controlled by theocratic nutters: the attack on the British Embassy played perfectly into the hands of the neo-cons. William Hague is smirking like the cat who got the cream.
The importance of the Fox-Gould-Werritty scandal is that it lifts the lid on the fact that the move to war with Iran is not a reaction to any street attack or any nuclear agency report. It is a long nurtured plan, designed to keep feeding the huge military industrial war machine that has become a huge part of the UK and US economies, and whose sucking up of trillions of dollars has contributed massively to the financial crisis, and which forms a keystone in the whole South Sea Bubble corporate finance system for servicing the ultra-rich. They need constant, regenerative war. They feed on the shattered bodies of small children.
Gould, Fox and Werritty were plotting with Israel to further war with Iran over years. The Werritty scandal was hushed up by Gus O’Donnell’s risibly meagre “investigation” – a blatant cover-up – and Fox resigned precisely to put a cap on any further digging into what they had been doing. I discovered – with a lot of determination and a modicum of effort – that Fox, Werritty and British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould had met many times, not the twice that Gus O’Donnell claimed, and had been in direct contact with Mossad over plans to attack Iran. Eventually the Independent published it, a fortnight after it went viral on the blogosphere.
The resignation of the Defence Secretary in a scandal is a huge political event. People still talk of the Profumo scandal 50 years later. But Fox’s resignation was forgotten by the media within a fortnight, even though it is now proven that the Gus O’Donell official investigation into the affair was a tissue of lies.
Take only these undisputed facts:
Fox Gould and Werritty met at least five times more than the twice the official investigation claims
The government refuses to say how often Gould and Werritty met without Fox
The government refuses to release the Gould-Werritty correspondence
The three met with Mossad
How can that not be a news story? I spent the most frustrating fortnight of my life trying to get a newspaper – any newspaper – to publish even these bare facts. I concentrated my efforts on the Guardian.
I sent all my research, and all the evidence for it, in numeorus emails to the Guardian, including to David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Rupert Neate and Seumas Milne. I spoke to the first three, several times. I found a complete resistance to publishing anything on all those hidden Fox/Werritty/Gould meetings, or what they tell us about neo-con links with Israel.
Why? Guardian Media Group has a relationship with an Israel investment company, Apax, but the Guardian strongly denies that this has any effect on them.
The Guardian to this day has not published the fact that there were more Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings than O’Donnell disclosed. Why?
I contacted the Guardian to tell them I intended to publish this article, and invited them to give a statement. Here it is, From David Leigh, Associate Editor:
I hope your blogpost will carry the following response in full.
1. I know nothing of any Israeli stake in the ownership of the Guardian. As it is owned by the Scott Trust, not any Israelis, your suggestion sems a bit mad.
2. The Guardian has not “refused” to publish any information supplied by you. On the contrary, I personally have been spending my time looking into it, as I told you previously. I have no idea what the attitude of others in “the Guardian” is. I form my own opinions about what is worth publishing, and don’t take dictation from others. That includes you.
3. I can’t imagine what you are hinting at in your reference to Assange. If you’ve got a conspiracy theory, why don’t you spit it out?
I can understand your frustration, Craig, when others don’t join up the dots in the same way as you. But please try not to be offensive, defamatory, or plain daft about it.
As I said, it would be honest of you to publish my response in full if you want to go ahead with these unwarranted attacks on the Guardian’s integrity.
Possible some Guardian readers will get drawn to this post: at least then they will find out that Werritty, Fox and Gould held many more meetings, hushed up by O’Donnell and hushed up by the Guardian.
It should not be forgotten that the Guardian never stopped supporting Blair and New Labour, even when he was presiding over illegal wars and the massive widening of the gap between rich and poor. My point about Assange is that he has done a great deal to undermine the neo-con war agenda – and the Guardian is subjecting him to a campaign of denigration. On the other hand Gould/Fox/Werritty were pushing a neo-con project for war – and the Guardian is actively complicit in the cover-up of their activities.
The Guardian. Whom does it serve?
@Komodo. It’s the coincidence that intrigues me. But not just the spelling.
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No sooner had ‘Lord Cashpoint’ Levy, key fundraiser for Blair, departed Number 10 along with Mr Tony, than he was replaced in the role of prime ministerial fundraiser by Apax founder Sir Ronald Cohen, key financial backer of Gordon Brown. This, and the Apax/AIPAC coincidence, is what first drew him to my attention.
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Levy first met Blair, if you recall, at a dinner party hosted by the Israeli diplomat Gideon Meir. For almost a decade the ardent Zionist Levy, labelled in an Observer headline a ‘jolly bagman,’ served as the UK prime minister’s ‘personal envoy’ to the Middle East.
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Cohen, known as the ‘father of British venture capital,’ gave Labour over £2 million & bankrolled Gordon Brown’s leadership bid. He went on to be dubbed the prime minister’s ‘private banker.’
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From a 2007 Jewish Chronicle interview:
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‘As for the tougher questions journalists have raised – whether he is “non-domiciled” for tax – he is firmly evasive: “I take the view that I am a law-abiding citizen who pays all the taxes that he is supposed to pay, and they are substantial. I am not going to discuss my tax affairs in public, full stop.”‘
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Now it’s being suggested, not for the first time, that the Guardian’s dependency upon financial backing from Cohen’s Apax may be warping the paper’s editorial policy on matters pertaining to Israel & Iran.
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Pub quiz? On this one, Komodo, nul points.
@ Fedup
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Troll does as trolls do;
The MSM prnt what they can get,if they get loads of intelligence people and governemnts telling them something is true then they print that,it is up to you to believe it or not frankly.
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However before it was;
If you believe that what wikileaks have released is not truthful then that would be your problem,the evidence suggests it is.
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ON goes the contradictory run of bullshit, and bullocks, to tie up the thread.
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I got ya dude,i know…i just couldn’t be bothered riffin’ against those posts.Sometimes you just know it’ll fall on ears that won’t hear…my energy levels are a tad low tonight..
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Regards,
fedup and jives..a double act who think they know whats what. Laughable. I will tell you what you really know. You know the colour of your socks and what you eat and things that you do firsthand in any given day. Everything else in the entire world that you do not see first hand you do not know. That is the fact boys..now run along.
@ Ken
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“That is the fact boys.”
You assume i’m male-and read The Sun,as well!All in the space of two posts! LOL.
Iran Threat Is a Tactic: Main Goal Is to Checkmate Syria
General David Petraeus, now head of the CIA: “a war of perception… conducted continuously through the news media”.
“Everything else in the entire world that you do not see first hand you do not know.”
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So I shouldn’t be telling anyone that the world is not flat, it’s round. Ok. 🙂
Guardian, BBC, the Daily Mail, etc – in fact almost all of British mainstream media is controlled by anti-Muslim Ziocon mafia. They have at war against Muslim world before WW I. Balfour Declaration, 9/11 and 7/7 are all connected to invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya and the future wars with Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan.
As far Britain’s anti-Muslim cospiracies are concerned, who would know better than former London Mayor Ken Livingstone.
“The people like Michael Gove who are fervent Zionists and Boris Johnson, they wanted to isolate Al-Qaradawi because he’s a critic of Israel. And they ignored the fact he strongly urges Muslims not to launch attacks here in Britain”.
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/uk-lobby-ken-livingstone-is-anti-semite/
I’ve only just realised that the David Leigh in this post is the same man who published the Wikileaks password. I honestly hadn’t made the connection when I commented earlier. It’s not surprising he’s so rude and unpleasant and unprofessional in his reply to Craig.
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Craig, he may have done some good work at some point in the past, but he’s not ‘an excellent journalist’ given the way he betrayed confidences and broke commitments to his source.
When the Times moved to Wapping I started reading the Guardian. Even though it only costs €1 here in Ireland I stopped buying the Guardian a year ago because it had strayed from its previous editorial policy. I watched a video today where it was quoted that a Chinese General had stated that China would support Iran even if it started World War III
Jon
@Pete – no, I think he’d still have worked with them. In fact, as an evidently highly intelligent individual, I suspect Assange decided to hold his nose whilst working with the MSM even before they fell out.
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No, I think it’s a mistake to dignify the Guardian by lumping them together with the MSM in this context. Assange also worked with Der Spiegel and Le Monde, but neither of them published the password. If Wikileaks needed a UK partner there are other papers out there. The Guardian, and David Leigh in particular, have shown themselves to be contemptible and dishonest pseudo-journalists. I’m really disappointed that Craig should still be giving credibility to Leigh – if he wants to take the Guardian up on its failure to report fully on Gouxitty, couldn’t he have approached someone without quite such an egregious record of turning on sources and breaching their confidences?
Hullo Craig,
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Let me get this straight, this is all driven by the Military Industrial Complex so that presumably they might sell more weapons? And the fact that the targets of these weapons all happen to be the aboriginal inhabitants of land sought by the Ashkenazi Jewish state grafted into their midst has little to do with it, yes?
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Isn’t this a bit like saying the meat industry exists as the product of the evil Abattoir Industrial Complex? As opposed to, say, the demand of carnivores who like eating flesh?
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Why can’t we just say it? We’re prepared to say it of Muslims so there ought not to be any problem. Here, I’ll do it: there are Jewish people out there who act in the interests of the Jewish state, and they do so to the detriment of the nation they reside in. Don’t argue – Fox/Gould/Werrity is proof of that and in the words of the famous joke ‘now we’re just haggling’.
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The question then follows: How far would they be prepared to go, these people who’d sell out their own country to war? Would they be prepared to fake a terror attack on a ‘friend’ whilst pretending to be Arabs? Like they did in the King David hotel bombing? And the Lavon Affair bombings? And the attempted sinking of the USS Liberty? And if Whitehall, and the media, and other like-mindeds are covering this up, what else might they cover up? The seventh of July? I don’t see why not. After all, these are wars we’re talking about. And faint heart ne’er won a fucking armageddon.
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As for your posited MIC villain: you really need some kind of primate recognition chart Craig. It only needs two creatures – on one side a monkey and on the other an organ grinder.
The Guardian. Whom does it serve?
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The phone hacking stuff is brilliant, though I have wondered for a while how much The Guardian is being manipulated, even on this story. However, the Libya coverage was laughable, and their editorial policy is generally neoliberal-lite. This alone makes it clear that The Guardian has become a fairly standard mainstream newspaper, with all the inherent MSM flaws.
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Their vindictiveness towards Assange, however, is deeply strange. And David Leigh just comes across terribly in that email. Just sanctimonious, and overly defensive. Something to hide?
Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned Thursday against an Israeli attack on Iran, saying such a move would likely lead to a regional war involving Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria.
“I’m concerned about possible mistakes and I prefer to speak out before there is a catastrophe,” Dagan said in an interview on the Israeli television program “Uvda.”
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/former-mossad-chief-israeli-attack-on-iran-must-be-stopped-to-avert-catastrophe-1.399046
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This is the third or fourth time he’s said this I think.
The clowns at Press TV have wheeled out one of the most desperate articles I’ve ever seen.
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Anti-Iran mobs have attacked Iran’s embassy in London and breached security in a coordinated and planned move, reports say.
The incident happened less than 24 hours before the deadline Britain had given Iran to close its embassy in London and remove its diplomats from the British soil.
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Does anyone have any pictures or video of this mob attacking the embassy as the only picture appearing on Press TV is of a solitary Bobbie standing outside.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/213228.html
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They do this all the time with headlines screaming about “people arrested” on demos in the UK/US etc… while observing stony silence on the daily killings by Syria’s security forces except occasionally to say that it is the work of Zionists.
Joke of the day:
“The Guardian truly lets a thousand flowers bloom.”
CiF blogger Richard Silverstein
Angrysobs
Perhaps PressTV are trying to learn from their august colleagues in the west.
Fedup This is a discussion on the Miliband piece in the FT. You have to scroll through the repeats of the actual acticle which is a bit tedious.
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http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1322766642.html
The mad men in Washington up the pressure. Obama is said to be sceptical because of the effect on the faltering economy and might veto the move.
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U.S. Senate OK’s sanctions on Iran central bank
Fri Dec 2, 2011 2:58am GMT
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Senate acts despite warnings from Obama administration
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Officials concerned over impact on oil markets, allies (Updates with passage of defense bill, paragraph 8)
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By Arshad Mohammed and Susan Cornwell
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WASHINGTON, Dec 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate unanimously approved tougher sanctions against Iran on Thursday, voting to penalize foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran’s central bank, the main conduit for its oil revenues.
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The Senate acted despite warnings from Obama administration officials who said threatening U.S. allies might not be the best way to get their cooperation in action against Iran.
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Administration officials said they were indeed looking to sanction Iran’s central bank, but in a calibrated manner, to avoid roiling oil markets or antagonizing allies.
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The United States already bars its own banks from dealing with the Iranian central bank, so U.S. sanctions would operate by dissuading other foreign banks from doing so by threatening to cut them off from the U.S. financial system.
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The United States and its Western allies have supported multiple rounds of sanctions on Iran, seeking to persuade it to curtail its nuclear work. Washington suspects Tehran of using its civilian nuclear program to develop an atomic bomb, although Iran says its program is solely to produce electricity.
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The Senate voted 100-0 for an amendment sponsored by Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, and Senator Mark Kirk, a Republican, that would allow the U.S. president to sanction foreign banks found to have carried out a “significant financial transaction with the Central Bank of Iran.”
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“We seek to break the stable financial intermediary in between Iranian oil contracts and the outside world, so that it will just be easier to buy oil from elsewhere,” Kirk said in debate this week.
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The sanctions were approved as an amendment to a huge defense bill that passed later on Thursday in the Senate [ID:nN1E7B01V8]. Similar provisions have passed a House of Representatives committee, increasing the likelihood that some version will be sent to Obama for his signature into law — or possible veto.
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On Nov. 21, the United States, Britain and Canada announced new sanctions on Iran’s energy and financial sectors, but the Obama administration stopped short of targeting Iran’s central bank, a step that U.S. officials said could send oil prices skyrocketing and jeopardized global economic recovery.
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“The Obama administration strongly supports increasing the pressure on Iran, and that includes properly designed and targeted sanctions against the central bank of Iran, appropriately timed as part of a carefully phased and sustainable policy toward bringing about Iranian compliance with its obligations,” U.S. Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier on Thursday, several hours before the Senate vote.
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http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/02/iran-usa-sanctions-idUKN1E7B00N320111202?feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews
That emoticon appeared because the figure 8 was followed by a close bracket sign in the text!
I cancelled my subscription to the Guardian Weekly years ago because the Guardian editor supped regularly with Blair and was determined to support him through thick and thin, even if it meant condoning war crimes and supporting a war criminal. When editors are so complicit with politicians their newspapers lose all credibility.
In my opinion its figleaf liberalism makes it a dangerous paper, more so than the Daily Telegraph, where at least you know where you stand. For me, The Guardian is the “liberal bombers'” newspaper. Its readers are those who think Iraq was a “mistake”, not a crime. They deplored the mess but voted Labour in again anyway.
Its 2 redeeming features are Monbiot and (up to a point) Polly Toynbee. But even these 2 aren’t enough to counterbalance its pernicious influence.
The Muslim Chronicle, the UK’s oldest and most widely-read Shi’ite newspaper, ran this rather odd story yesterday:
http://thepassionateattachment.com/2011/12/02/muslim-envoy-not-loyal-to-uk-says-labour-mp/
Its 2 redeeming features are Monbiot and (up to a point) Polly Toynbee.
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No. Its two redeeming features are Steve Bell and Martin Rowson. Monbiot is occasionally worthwhile but sometimes ignorant and foolish. Toynbee is a waste of carbon and water.
Brendan “the Libya coverage was laughable”
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The Guardian backed the rebels. I read the middle-east blog sometimes and the editor Brian Whitaker regularly appeared in the comments supporting Nato’s bombing campaigning saying it was justified becuase UN 1973 said protecting civilains was
mandated.
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But he refused to acknowledge the first UN 1973 demand that was a ‘negotiated ceasefire’. In other words regime change, removing Gaddafi, a war crime, would save lives – I assumed his reasoning was that in the long term a new democratic Libya would be born from the ashes and everyone would live happily ever after. (now of course the Guardian has moved on with the rest of the media, Libya has been forgotten)
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Below another piece about Syria he accused a commentator of being a “conspiracy theorist” for suggesting that Saudi Arabia might be backing some anti-Assad militants.
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Backing UK wars is normal for the paper, the bombing of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now it’s got guns blazing at Iran. For years it’s been giving a disproportionate amount of attention to Iran and published lots of “leaked” IAEA hype about Iran’s nuclear program. It’s like Iraq never happened.
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“Now it’s being suggested, not for the first time, that the Guardian’s dependency upon financial backing from Cohen’s Apax may be warping the paper’s editorial policy on matters pertaining to Israel & Iran.
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Pub quiz? On this one, Komodo, nul points.”
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Do check back on some of the other threads, and see who’s been doing the suggesting (and research) lately.
You asked about AIPAC.
You should be asking about BICOM if you are interested in the generous funders of British parties. Though Patricof’s links with AIPAC are probably relevant to a wider study.
The Guardian backed the rebels.
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The Guardian backed NATO. As ever.
I would suggest you supply your evidence to Russia Today News and get an interview.
Keep up the good work.
You can rob a bank with a gun, you can rob the world with a bank.
O/T Is this man with strange beliefs related to Rosa Monckton, wife of Dominic Lawson and hence daughter in law of climate warming sceptic Lord Nigel Lawson. She was also supposed to be a friend of Diana.
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http://climatecrocks.com/2011/07/18/monckton-im-a-member-of-parliament-ive-cured-hiv-there-is-no-climate-change/
Brendan:”
The phone hacking stuff is brilliant, though I have wondered for a while how much The Guardian is being manipulated, even on this story. ”
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Me too, of late.
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What better pretext for official censorship of the press than protecting the public from phone hackers – at the same time as diverting attention from the “private investigators” who were actually doing the hacking?
@Maidhc Ó Cathail: Brilliant link. Deserves widest possible circulation.
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So, to save anyone having to look for it, I repeat it here:
http://bit.ly/v8sY0Y