I was called by a journalist yesterday who told me that in Dewsbury six years ago I shared a platform with Baroness Warsi’s now husband at a meeting against the persecution of Muslims. Sadly I couldn’t really help him as at the time I was doing hundreds such events and have only the dimmest of recollections of that one.
It is not merely amusing that Cameron refers Warsi for investigation for allegedly pocketing a couple of thousand quid while protecting Hunt who tried so hard to shepherd the Murdoch BSkyB bid past the winning post, while pretending to referee the event.
Nor is the lesson just that a Muslim woman will always be expendable while a fully paid up member of the ruling class will be less so.
The truth is that to trip up an MP over a little cash does not threaten the system. To tackle the massive institutional corruption by which corporate interests control the British state is a different question altogether.
Hunt is of course not the only case not to be referred. Nor was the Adam Werritty debacle, where rather than the proper investigative procedures Cameron organised a tidy little stitch-up by Gus O’Donnell which omitted almost all the key facts and particularly did not say what the entire scheme was about – the promotion of the interests of Israel. The Murdoch Empite, the Israeli lobby, these are amongst the interests that actually run the exploited citizenry of this poor wracked old country. Every now and then glimpses of truth emerge.
But must not be pursued.
Yes – thanks Nuid and fool on me for also forgetting this:
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It was an ex Royal Navy Commander, who I cannot name here, who joined the security services (MI5) and who was quite successful in “turning” PIRA volunteers to become spies and informers.
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Interestingly he said, “in our opinion they [the IRA] have fought a just cause based on the fact there had been legitimate grievances among, and discrimination against, the nationalist community and this had sustained the IRA through the length of the campaign.”
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He added, “has it been a successful campaign? The answer is yes.” He then concluded, “I refer to the fact Sinn Fein had two ministers in power. What better success can you wish for than to have your people in positions of power in government.”
“Welcome To The Third World, Part 5: Higher Education Goes Broke”
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http://dollarcollapse.com/welcome-to-the-third-world/welcome-to-the-third-world-part-5-higher-education-goes-broke/
There was another point I wanted to make about media narratives, further to the above. And funnily enough it involved the same interviewer who interviewed Finkelstein.
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At that time she was the anker on Newsnight I believe, or one of their other dribblings.
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Anyway, she was interviewing Martin McGuinness. It was during one of the many manufactured “problems” in the peace process. There was a lot of objection to the peace process in Britain, mostly amongst Tories who wanted it to fail. They preferred the killing to continue. It was the studio setting which was unusual. She was facing the camera looking out to the audience and he was on a screen over her shoulder to the back of her. It was deliberately set up to look like she had her back to him. I’d never seen a TV interview setup quite like it, but obviously the setup was designed to present him as someone who ought to be treated as some kind of leper and with the utmost disrespect.
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Yet, a few years later he’s basically the joint prime minister of N Ireland, and the figure who, to much acclaim, makes the whole thing work.
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So if you only got your news from the BBC you really wouldn’t have a clue as to the changes that were about to come in NI. You’d have thought the unionist statelet was safe and sound.
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So not only does the BBC mislead its viewers in terms of the variety of opinions on various issues but also in terms of facts on the ground. It disables people in terms of choices they might want to make about their own lives, for example. The unionist people just weren’t prepared for the changes that were to come.
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I see this nonsense time and time again on the BBC both in political and financial progs.
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Suffice it to say that if you’re relying on the BBC for your information you’ll be ill-prepared for the looming financial threats to any wealth you may have.
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And the saddest thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s all just pointless, though deliberate, diversionary tactics that serve no useful purpose.
Mary:
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I don’t think the situation in Burma is quite as clear cut as you seem to indicate. Burma used to be in the western camp, then moved to the Chinese, but over the last 6 months they have swung back to the US. I haven’t really heard any particularly convincing arguments as to why this happened (my guess is the Arab Spring freaked them out, so they decided to liberalise and control the transition rather than face an all out revolution). The Burmese generals could have easily maintained the status quo and gotten filthy rich with Chinese investment, there was no need to release Aung San Suu Kyi.
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I have some friends living in a Thai-Burma border town who are working with Burmese refugee groups, and even the most hardcore elements of the refugee community are pretty stunned by what is happening and don’t know what to make of it. The Burmese have no trust for the junta and actively loathe them, however the junta have kept all their recent promises and seem to be improving more rapidly than anyone could have imagined. If it were entirely a western resource grab, I’m sure the generals would have happily signed some deals and left Aung San Suu Kyi in prison.
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I’m also usually the first one to criticise oil/gas deals, however this is one of the few cases where I am reluctant to. Not only is the Burmese economy completely dysfunctional internally and totally unable to support its own population, but I have seen first hand how virtually all of Burma’s neighbours exploit the economic and political situation in Burma to turn all Burmese migrant workers into slaves. Until the Burmese economy makes some significant steps towards modernisation, the entire population will continue to be the most exploited in south east asia.
A powerful ‘entry’ Herbie and I won’t spent any time here trying to usurp or arrogate your examples. I agree our obtuse or uncomprehending brethren may adhere to mainstream media as fact and authority, however in many cases this comes out of loyalty or a desire to cohere with their own fixed beliefs instead of an open-mindedness or refinement based on a wider understanding of opposing arguments or fact.
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As you suggest we are in a period of enlightenment, a widening of consciousness stronger and more prolonged than that which naturally occurs from generation to generation.
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This then is the rub to those in power, those who control, those who rule and pull the wires of deceit and lies.
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That is why we witness the slew of current legislation or ‘Acts’ to control communication by filtering, curb access to information or lawfully spy on our activities – that is why Julian Assange is being hounded, that is why for example ‘bunny’ Greenhouse was broken, stripped of her dignity and subjected to a demotion that took years and huge legal fees to gain some compensation for lost earnings. Or why Deputy Legal Adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst was undermined, ruined and her resignation letter redacted for calling the invasion of Iraq a ‘crime of aggression’ and stating the attorney’s view had ‘changed’ into the new ‘official line’ pushed by PM Blair & Co. Or why Katharine Gunn was charged under the Official Secrets Act for revealing a joint British-American operation to spy on the UN in the run-up to the Iraq war.
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Or why our host Craig Murray came close to death from a stress induced embolism.
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Yes, I *am* talking to the faithful, the trustworthy, the incorruptible and in that regard I believe it is our duty to form an alliance, an agreement to share our vision of this ‘new’ era with others capable yet duped and cheated by deception.
Great posts, great reading, thanks, Mark, Guest, Herbie and CheebaCow.
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I was thinking of posting a link to a piece in the Land Destroyer blog, about Burma, and what it calls ‘Wall Street-proxy Aung San Suu Kyi’, but I’d be better advised to ask if anyone here can tell me anything about ‘Tony Cartalucci’ who owns the blog. I’ve Googled him without much success and even found him on Facebook, but there’s not much info there either.
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All I know for sure at the moment is that Land Destroyer is “an alternative news blog based in Bangkok, Thailand, covering geopolitics.” (It’s a couple of links in his sidebar that are worrying me!) It’s at http://landdestroyer.blogspot.ie/ (notice the ie. But based in Bangkok he says.)
Tomorrow’s Observer front page
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Rowan Williams pours scorn on David Cameron’s ‘big society’
Key policy ‘comes across as waffle’, says Archbishop of Canterbury in valedictory bombshell
Farewell book blasts march of consumerism
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Tory donor part of Carr tax scheme
Romangate tax shelter, part of Rushmore scheme, had both George Robinson and Jimmy Carr as directors
Advisers to stars lobbied MPs over tax
Hoy denies he avoided tax
‘Billions’ in tax revenue being held up
Marina Hyde: tax avoidance and bad British film
Editorial: the price Mr Cameron pays
Another site I’ve taken to reading occasionally recently is Activist Post: http://www.activistpost.com/ but again I can’t vouch for it as I haven’t enough experience of it. Others may have.
Finally….
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RBS chief executive Stephen Hester has apologised for technical problems which left customers of the group’s banks unable to pay bills or access money. He said: “Our customers rely on us day in and day out to get things right. On this occasion we have let them down.”
Mary,
This is hot off the press for you; a character known as bernard henri louis, who is purportedly a French journo with storng ties to the tribe and the ever present mossad. The latest data concerns is activities around 2001 in Iraq. Evidently he was busy setting up various “salafist” and “jihadist” fronts in Iraq, prior to invasion of Iraq,
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Clearly this is the tip of the iceberg and there needs to be some more digging around. However, the fact that this character has been instigating and setting up these various groups in Iraq, and given his form in Libya, Sudan, and Darfour, further strengthens the notions that most of the “salafist/jihadist” outfits have a korsha boy as their advisor/benefactor/organizer. This added to the mentoring role that the same bunch of operators are playing for anders breivik et al in norway and edl et al here. Clearly a case of playing both ends to the middle seems to be the case.
Absolutely no irony. Her husband having been responsible for the creation of hundreds of thousands of widows, Mrs Blair shows her concern for them along with Cilla and that silly Dell’Olio woman.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cherie-blair-herds-goats-for-widows-day-7878761.html
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Good on this widow.
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A protester muscles in at the last minute carrying a banner saying “Spot the Irony: Blair Kills Husbands”.
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Bundled off before she is noticed by Mrs Blair, Rose Wynes-Devlin, 53, a mother of five from south London, says: “I’m a widow and I’m insulted that Cherie Blair is the president of a widows’ charity. I lost my husband 13 years ago due to health reasons, but I know what it is for a child to grow up without a father, which is why I’m antiwar.”
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An unpleasant piece from Nick Cohen who carried the propaganda for the Iraq war.
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Definition of paranoia: supporters of Julian Assange
The right does not have a monopoly on paranoia, as the conspiratorial fantasies of the backers of Julian Assange show
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/24/nick-cohen-julian-assange-paranoia
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‘Reasonable doubt cannot stay the tongues of Ken Loach, Tariq Ali, Jemima Khan, Naomi Wolf, John Pilger and their comrades. They lament western wickedness with the reliability of professional mourners. For them, America is a demonic empire with supernatural power and reach. The constraints that bind ordinary nations cannot contain it. I refuse to call their conspiracy theories “leftwing,” and not only because most of the British liberal left behaved honourably during the WikiLeaks affair.’
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It’s a wonder he didn’t have a swipe at Craig too. Earlier he refers to Bradley Manning as ‘wretched’ when he is saying that he is only being prosecuted because he was a serving soldier and that Assange is not at any risk because Wikileaks is a newspaper and the US First Amendment protects freedom of expression.
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What tripe. He also omits to mention that for every seven British people extradited to the US, only one American is extradited to the UK.
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PS I see that Laura Bush is a supporter of the same widows’ charity as Cherie Blair {http://www.theloombafoundation.org/about/board} along with Branson and Kagame of Rwanda!
Hmmm, it seems my last post was lost in the ether, so I am posting again. Apologies if this ends up being a double post.
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Nuid:
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The piece you linked to to on Burma was a little strange to read, the first 3/4 of the article used hyperbolic language to describe the roles of the US, China, India and Aung San Suu Kyi, but then towards the end started to acknowledge some of the subtleties of the situation.
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Calling Aung San Suu Kyi a ‘Wall Street-proxy’ leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I think it’s something only a pampered western ‘activist’ would have the gall to say. It’s easy to criticise progressive leaders for not being ideologically pure enough when you don’t have any responsibility yourself, and can easily feed yourself and family.
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Aung San Suu Kyi has sacrificed a lot both personally and politically (She only saw her husband five times during her 15 year house arrest, and she was unable to visit him on while he was dying from cancer). Sure, Aung San may be closer to the west than China, but to say that makes her a proxy of the west is ridiculously over simplistic. When South American states were forced into the Soviet camp during the 50-80’s by the USA’s strident anti-socialism, the right then accused all these progressive states of being Soviet puppets (very unfairly). Are we now going to do the reverse with Aung San, just because the Chinese have shown so little care towards the Burmese people that by default Aung San falls into the western camp? I’m curious, what allies should leaders such as Aung San or the Dalai Lama have?
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It’s also interesting that the author brings up India, as if it has been clashing with the Burmese generals and is close with the US and Aung San. The reality is far from that clear. India, like Burma’s other neighbours has actually had relatively decent relations with the junta and has been criticised by Aung San for letting her people down. The reality of the situation is that all the states/players in the region have their own agendas and all are playing for themselves. the different groups will cooperate when it is beneficial but will also diverge when it is beneficial. It’s not the US/India/Aung San Vs China, it is US Vs India vs China Vs Aung San. Off all the players in this particular game, the only one with any type of moral authority and proven care for the Burmese population is Aung San.
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BTW I’m guessing the .ie address is to try and avoid censorship/political repercussions. I would suggest to the blog owner that it won’t help him at all if he is living in BKK and writes the wrong thing.
Get the hell out Amerikka!
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Request that the heads of state and the
government of the states who are members of
the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our
America, immediately expel USAID and its
delegates or representatives from their
countries, due to the fact that we consider their
presence and actions to constitute an
interference which threatens the sovereignty and
stability of our nations.
In the city of Rio de Janeiro, Federal Republic of Brazil, June 21st 2012.
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Signed by:
The government of the Pluri-national state of Bolivia.
The government of the Republic of Cuba.
The government of the Republic of Ecuador.
The government of the Commonwealth of Dominica.
The government of the Republic of Nicaragua.
The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”
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http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7069
Nuid:
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You piqued my interest about who this Tony is. I can’t really add much, other than my google-fu returned a page that indicates that his name is merely a pseudonym, and that he has been supportive of the yellow shirts in Thailand (the politically safe/mainstream option). I did find it amusing that this same page heavily criticised ‘Tony’ for supporting the ‘globalist backed’ side in the Thailand crisis. So the anonymous ‘Tony’ has a go at Aung San for being globalist backed, and the even more anonymous ‘Tony Critic’ attacks ‘Tony’ for supporting the Thai ‘globalists’. And we wonder why the left has so much trouble achieving political success….. Apparently ‘Tony’ gets quite a bit of space at globalresearch.ca.
“Calling Aung San Suu Kyi a ‘Wall Street-proxy’ leaves a bad taste in my mouth …”
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Thanks for all that, CheebaCow. I was surprised at his description of Aung San Suu Kyi too and was looking for someone else’s perspective on this Tony character. Or even some information, which as you can see is very thin on the ground.
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Given you had difficulty finding out about him too, it does look very like he’s using a pseudonym. So I’ll be off now trying to find out from Irish contacts, is he Irish, and if so, who the heck is he.
“BTW I’m guessing the .ie address is to try and avoid censorship/political repercussions.”
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I don’t think that was his own doing, CheebaCow. My husband has a Blogger blog, and (apparently) it’s recently appeared as .ie which was a surprise to him as it’s always been .com. It appears that Blogger is making the change, according to the blog’s location.
Hmmmm …
Herbie:
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Just had a chance to watch the BBC Hardtalk interview with Finkelstein. God damn the interviewer was so frustratingly rude. She would ask a confrontational question, Finkelstein would calmly answer it and demolish the assumptions the question was based on, but then the interviewer insisted on interrupting his answer nearly every time.
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Finkelstein was amazing however, I’m sure every Zionist who saw the piece wasn’t happy with how well Finkelstein answered the questions and handled himself. Finkelstein’s ‘Beyond Chutzpah’ is my go to book on the Israel/Palestine issue. It is so methodical is dismantling the pro-Israel position, and uses such mainstream sources to do it. The only option for the Zionists is to ignore the book completely.
It was funny when the interviewer started to attack Finkelstein’s style after he trashed her political questions. I haven’t even heard of the name of the person she says made Finkelstein’s argument better and more mainstream, but I have no doubt that just about everyone who has any interest in the Israel/Palestine issue that they have at least heard of Finkelstein. I will say though, that Finkelstein was well served maintaining such a calm demeanor during the interview, it definitely made his case seem more reasonable and less controversial. Has Finkelstein made the decision to calm his style a little, or is he starting to mellow with age?
Nuid:
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The ‘Tony Critic’ says that Tony is American (in fact even states they believe that Tony is C.I.A. or another American acronym). Although this seems weird considering ‘Tony’s”anti-imperialist’ writings on other topics, unless of course that is a bluff to sucker us in. However I think the much more likely situation is that ‘Tony’ and ‘Tony Critic’ view the world so ideologically that they cannot see reality for what it is. Trying to interpret what is happening in Burma as entirely a struggle of the US Vs China, or what is happening in Thailand as ‘Western globalists’ vs ‘Thai nationalists’ completely removes all subtlety and agency from the local actors. As a result they don’t see what the real motivations are for all the players and ‘T’ and ‘T C’ just try to cram them into their preconceived notions of how the world is.
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I don’t really have any understanding of the blogger platform, but from your latest description it sounds like it was either setup in Ireland or it is linked to a google user account that is designated Irish. However all that means relatively little, as the person may have just used an Irish proxy when creating the account.
“Two years ago the National Archives promised the American public that it would release thousands of pages of still-secret JFK assassination records by the end of 2013. The National Archives, at the behest of the CIA, reneged on this promise. This is contrary to President Obama’s pledge to have the most open administration in history and makes it impossible to have a full and open debate when the 50th anniversary of the assassination occurs in less than two years on November 22, 2013.”
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http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?s=e4f2fbda1ffedf0aeb88427765f9a922&showtopic=19223&hl=
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I wonder if the same thing will happen when its time to release the Dr David Kelly files ?.
Bliar was given 18 minutes on Marr BBC 1 this morning to hold forth mostly on Europe. He dodged the soft ball stuff from Marr on the Iraq war and taxation. Windrush was not mentioned in regard to the latter.
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On Iraq, he was not asked who had armed Saddam. When asked about his justification for going to war and whether he had misled the cabinet, he replied quoting two anniversaries, Halabja and the Iraq/Iran war ‘where hundreds thousands of conscript young Iranians had lost their lives’, the latter having no connection to the hundreds of thousands of lives he was responsible for. He twisted the question by saying that in both cases Saddam had used chemical weapons. He said that the Iran/Iraq war had triggered Iran’s interest in developing nuclear weapons. More of his lies.
He used the phrase ‘the broad sweep of history’ once or twice. I know where he will end up when he is brushed away. He obviously see himself as a world statesman and the likely inheritor of the EU presidency.
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His hand movements were present as usual and the dropped right eyelid is the telltale sign when he lies. Plausible as ever and absolutely no contrition for his actions.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01kcz3c/The_Andrew_Marr_Show_24_06_2012/ 40 mins in
“Bliar was given 18 minutes on Marr BBC 1”
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“30 September 2010”
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“Blair was embraced by the new BBC corporate class, which regards itself as meretorious and non-ideological: the natural leaders in a managerial Britain in which class is unspoken. Few did more to enunciate Blair’s ‘vision’ than Andrew Marr, then a leading newspaper journalist and today the BBC’s ubiquitous voice of middle-class Britain. Just as Murdoch’s Sun declared in 1995 it shared the rising Blair’s “high moral values” so Marr, writing the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister’s “substantial moral courage” and the “clear distinction in his mind between prudently protecting his power base and rashly using his power for high moral purpose”. What impressed Marr was Blair’s “utter lack of cynicism” along with his bombing of Yugoslavia which would “save lives”.”
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http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-bbc-is-on-murdoch-s-side
“Over the past few days, Henry Blodget at Business Insider posted a number of graphs, here and here, which depict something about the US economy that everybody knows to some extent or another, but that most of us won’t have let thoroughly sink in. For some because the consequences are too opaque, for others because they are too scary. But make no mistake: we can only continue to ignore or misinterpret them at our own peril. And even then it’s terribly late in the game.”
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http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/this-is-not-america.html
Guest:
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Fuck Obama and his ‘openness’. Obama has only worked to make the USA surveillance state a bipartisan issue. Even the establishment NYT states this:
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“The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office. ”
(nytimes.com/2012/02/27/business/media/white-house-uses-espionage-act-to-pursue-leak-cases-media-equation.html)
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Compare that to what Obama said about whistle blowers on the campaign trail:
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“Such acts of courage and patriotism . . . should be encouraged rather than stifled.” (salon.com/2011/05/16/whistleblowers_6/)
Mary said:
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“His hand movements were present as usual and the dropped right eyelid is the telltale sign when he lies. Plausible as ever and absolutely no contrition for his actions.”
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I thought Blair’s tell was when his lips are moving 😉
The carefully choreographed tip toe dancing of our general “media” around the story of the downed Turkish fighter, has assiduously ignored the other hidden story of the Turkish supply aircraft flying into the Syrian border areas and providing weapons, and ordnance, including some chemical tipped mortar rounds, on a regular basis.
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The downing of the fighter has been a menacing gesture of Syrians that the slow moving cumbersome transporters can be far more easier downed. This fact is somewhat obscurely hinted at by the Turkish media through extending their accusatory finger at the run away and somewhat autonomous and apparently rouge elements within the Turkish military establishment.
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However, do these events mean an end to the support of the outside actors for the terrorists and saboteurs posing as “free syrain army”?
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Further given the impeding joint military maneuvers of Chinese, Russians, Iranian, and the Syrian forces due to be held in early part of July, and the effective Western economic stall that is incapable of meeting its basic remits, and the said economies facing their main creditors on the other side of the line drawn up by the Syrians, how long will it be, before the charade is ended and dreams of “world domination” and “full spectrum dominance” are put to bed?
Oh the humanity of it all. The changing demography of Arab population, bloody forty three million of them! Jpost is worried about the face book Arab Population, just think about it, a nicea boy owning the virtual real state that forty three million Arab settlers have taken up residence in, and are rubbishing all the self awarded chosen ones.
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Memo to all the poor, poor, victim, poor zionists; find any passage in the bible to do with the promissory note on face book and or invent a couple if you have to, now is the time for all to come to the aid of the cause!
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This year face book, next year Jerusalem (that will keep the fuckwits up to wee hours of the morning)
The Pugin church in Craig’s home town of Ramsgate was featured in tonight’s Songs of Praise.
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St. Augustine’s Church, Ramsgate.
http://pugin.com/pugchur.htm
Guest Yes Marr, like Rentoul, is Bliar’s stooge. I still think it is shameful that the state broadcaster gives Bliar airtime.
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Cheeba Cow 😉
Fedup,
Cameron stated that time was running out, so when you ask:-
” However, do these events mean an end to the support of the outside actors for the terrorists and saboteurs posing as “free syrain army”?
Eihter the West/NATO/US make a deal – or – more of the same.
I don’t know what other options exist in light of the Kofi Annan plan, which serves the interest of peace but not the interest of West/NATO/US.