The Tony Blair House Journal (editor Alan Rusbridger) reports on Kanye West’s disgusting private performance for the Kazakh dictator and his family, and takes a sideswipe at David Cameron for visiting that country.
But peculiarly they fail to mention that Tony Blair receives US $4 million a year as a consultant to the worker murdering Kazakh dictator, and that Alistair Campbell and Jonathon Powell as well as Blair visit to give this support – which has included a behind the scenes campaign to help Nazarbaev win the Nobel Peace Prize, fortunately with no result to date.
Not even pretending to be on-topic 🙂
While Obama turns up today in Stockholm, activists have been busy putting Gitmo-orange hoods on all the city’s statues, haha.
http://www.svt.se/kultur/konstaktion-mot-obamas-sverigebesok
Some of you may also have noticed media reports that Wikileaks has filed two (out of four, they say) 186-page legal affidavits requesting criminal investigations into illegal intelligence activities against Julian Assange, the first to Sweden regarding the seizure of Wikileaks data, including evidence of the Garani massacre war crime, from Stockholm airport. See here:
http://wikileaks.org/IMG/html/Affidavit_of_Julian_Assange.html#5 (that’s just the first 50 pages in easy-to-read html format)
Well, these lawsuits (one has gone in to Germany also, regarding illegal surveillance that was used to convict Chelsea Manning of “wanton publication” – Wikileaks says the outcome of the requested investigation will be used in Chelsea’s forthcoming appeal) have already caused ructions in the Swedish investigation. One of the women’s lawyers has had to pull previous press releases off the internet as a result of new evidence in this affidavit, etc, etc. The case is finger/thumb crack away from falling apart.
Anyone who’s interested to know more, read from here for a quick catch-up:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/09/why-i-am-convinced-that-anna-ardin-is-a-liar/comment-page-8/#comment-427258
Tony Blair is certainly a “Prostitute of Zionism” – but Kanye West is a “sort of Jew-hater”. Mr. West had compared Blacks’ plight in the United States with the “unique” Jewish Holocaust.
http://rehmat1.com/2013/09/04/kanye-west-rapper-under-zion-microscope/
“Gagging and blacklisting bill overcomes first Parliamentary hurdle”
https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/gagging-and-blacklisting-bill-overcomes-first-parliamentary-hurdle/
Disgusting s**t in the FT from Janan |Ganesh. I have seen him on the execrable Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics programme. He writes for the FT, the Economist, Guardian and elsewhere.
Blair’s doctrine just suffered its greatest defeat
September 2, 2013 6:24 pm
Britain’s wish to intervene will survive a lost vote
By Janan Ganesh
Far from being a foreign policy realist, David Cameron has a taste for moral activism
George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, likes to tell colleagues what he regards as the first rule of politics: “You must be able to count.” His point is that even the grandest events – from Margaret Thatcher’s fall to the birth of the coalition government – are born of basic parliamentary arithmetic.
David Cameron, the prime minister, will be wryly remembering that rule now. Had an overconfident Downing Street not fumbled the numbers last week, war with Syria might now be imminent. But narrow defeat for a government motion proposing action against Bashar al-Assad has put paid to that, and seemingly delayed any American intervention too. It was a lapse into sloppy old ways by a political operation that had tightened up over the past year.
Everything about Mr Cameron’s character suggests he should be a dry realist in foreign policy: his caution, his English mistrust of utopian projects. Instead he has shown a taste for moral activism since his years as leader of the opposition, when he backed Georgia in its skirmish with Russia in 2008. His own MPs, used to complaining that he does not believe in anything very much, are consistently struck and sometimes perturbed by his appetite for intervention.
Mr Cameron’s presence as leader of a Nato country and permanent UN Security Council member is one reason to discount the fashionably bleak prognosis for interventionism. According to this view, Britain’s abstention from Syria augurs badly for all such missions. The sun is supposedly setting on the kind of moral wars espoused and enacted by Tony Blair during his decade as prime minister. Those interventions proliferated – from Kosovo to Sierra Leone – for two reasons. First, the west could afford the military commitments. Second, the botched war in Vietnam was a diminishing memory. For a generation of leaders, wars of choice were not instinctively associated with trauma and humiliation. Today, after the financial crash and the ignominies of Iraq and Afghanistan, neither condition holds. The west generally, and Britain especially, has neither the money nor the morale for Blairism.
This is excitable stuff. On the part of the isolationist right and the peacenik left, it is also wishful thinking. If anything, the most remarkable thing about Mr Blair’s doctrine of intervention, propounded in Chicago in 1999, is how well it has endured despite the reversals of the past decade.
Only two years ago, Britain took a leading role in a military intervention in Libya that was actually bigger than the one now proposed in Syria. The west did not just launch cruise missiles but enforced a no-fly zone. What is more, the supposedly war-fatigued British public and its parliament went along with it.
Of course, Syria is a mightier challenge and Britain’s stated war aims there, which stopped short of regime change, were disconcertingly ambiguous. The Arab spring has also soured since 2011. But all of these are practical quibbles; there is no western objection to targeted humanitarian interventions per se, even in the world’s most flammable region.
Libya is a tangible example of how Mr Blair’s doctrine has survived, but it also lives on in the realm of ideas. It is now normal to talk of the “responsibility to protect”. The UN coined this in 2005 and has been firming it up ever since. The doctrine treats military action as a last resort but accepts that state sovereignty is not absolute. That is a remarkable stance for a body that includes Russia and China as permanent members of its Security Council.
When Mr Blair first made the same argument, it was contentious. It is now something approaching orthodoxy, in word if not deed. The credit may not belong to him; the world has probably been edging towards some norm of moral intervention since the unchecked atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia. But it does mean that his foreign policy should not be given the last rites.
Indeed, perhaps his greatest victory has been in influencing the British politicians who have succeeded him. True, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader who helped to see off the proposed mission in Syria, shows an almost neurotic keenness to distinguish himself from Mr Blair. (Their respective electoral records may end up doing that for him.) When he urges the government to heed the “lessons of Iraq”, it is obvious he thinks that war discredited an entire approach to foreign policy.
Among senior politicians of his age, Mr Miliband is unusual, however. Mr Cameron is not the only cabinet member who would nod along to the Chicago speech. Mr Osborne is another hawk. Michael Gove, whose influence extends beyond his education department, is the most fervent interventionist in British politics. Even Nick Clegg, Mr Cameron’s Liberal Democrat deputy, backed action in Syria. These are young politicians; the case for intervention will have an audience as long as they are around. Call them Blair’s children.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eed573e2-13ba-11e3-9289-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2dvaNuv6U
Letters
Sir, Janan Ganesh writes (“Britain’s wish to intervene will survive a lost vote”, September 3) that “there is no western objection to targeted humanitarian intervention per se”. This is to deny the reality that the House of Commons voted precisely against “targeted humanitarian intervention per se”. Mr Ganesh then claims that Tony Blair’s “greatest victory has been in influencing the British politicians who have succeeded him”. On the contrary, Mr Blair’s doctrine of humanitarian intervention has just suffered its greatest defeat, when MPs, representing their constituents’ views, voted against any such intervention.
Will Podmore, London E12, UK
Well said to the Blairite Ganesh, Will Podmore
PS Thought Ganesh was the name of a Hindu god?
Its ‘Spaet, aber nicht zu spaet’ meaning ‘late, but not too late’ to bring war criminals to trial.
Something Tzivi Lipni and her white phosphourous cast lead ilk should remember.
Last nights Newsnight carried a comment from a German Holocaust survivor who said that these ‘now old and challenged guards, should not be going to prison, but should agree to tell all, so the next generations can realise the horrors of Auschwitz.
Why it has taken so long for the Krauts to finally get to these lower ranking,. but conniving nevertheless, Guards who must have known what was happening, we will never find out.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/nazi-murder-germany-may-prosecute-30-former-auschwitz-guards-a-920200.html
Today president Gauck is visiting the French town of Oradour sur Glane, were German troops massacred 642 people during WW2, some of them, women and children, gassed in a church, horrendous.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/german-president-visits-oradour-sur-glane-and-urges-french-reform-a-920336.html
Thanks for your concern, Dreolin and Mary, I’m on the mend and far better of than anybody in Gaza, or in any of the refugee camps.
Komodo, your calling me a “tool”, asking me whether I “shag goats” and accusing Habbabkuk of “beating his wife” disqualify you from any decent discussion.
I didn’t ask whether you shagged goats, did I? I thought I’d stated it definitively, lol. And I didn’t accuse your best pal of beating his wife, I asked when he last did it. Which was my way of responding to his bad habit of asking questions for which any answer designedly puts the answerer in the wrong. But you are still a tool.
A must read (if genuine)
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/debatableopinion/debatableopinion/16/u-s-intelligence-agencies-involved-in-chemical-attack-in-syria/
Perhaps Craig’s next book could be “The Neocon Wars — From Serbia to Syria”
Just an idea.
Mary, that’s actually a worthwhile article, whether you agree with it or not.
Libya is a tangible example of how Mr Blair’s doctrine has survived, but it also lives on in the realm of ideas. It is now normal to talk of the “responsibility to protect”. The UN coined this in 2005 and has been firming it up ever since. The doctrine treats military action as a last resort but accepts that state sovereignty is not absolute. That is a remarkable stance for a body that includes Russia and China as permanent members of its Security Council.
Good point. The Cold War doctrine, which probably helped ensure that large areas of this planet were not covered in a thin ceramic glaze, was that you didn’t interfere in the affairs of a sovereign country. Obviously, it was honoured as much in the breach as in the observance, the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan being just one example, but interference tended to be confined to a superpower’s traditional sphere of influence. Interesting to see Putin this week referring to the doctrine –
“According to current international law, only the United Nations Security Council can sanction the use of force against a sovereign state. Any other approaches, means, to justify the use of force against an independent and sovereign state, are inadmissible,” he said, adding it would amount to aggression.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/us-syria-crisis-russia-idUSBRE98307M20130904
“Syria: Climate Change, Drought and Social Unrest”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/03/437051/syria-climate-change-drought-social-unrest/
@ Mary 4 Sep, 2013 – 1:30 pm
“‘The closures mean 1,400 prison places will be lost in England and Wales while the new £250m prison in Wrexham will hold more than 2,000 inmates.’ I think it will not be the easiest place to reach for relatives and friends to visit.”
The way it works in the US is that bus companies, that ordinarily operate gambling trips to Vegas and many casinos on tribal lands, added trips to major prisons, timed to coincide with visiting hours. Don’t know if they’ve worked out the schedule so families can combine casinos and prisons all in one convenient adventure.
Heard some local mayors, tasked with fixing potholes (not), trade-promoting overseas junkets (hos-n-coke) and extracting maximum $$$ from peasants in fines and permits, weigh in YES on bombing Syria — on humanitarian grounds.
“Heading For A Different Planet”
http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/726-heading-for-a-different-planet-global-warming-irrefutable-science-and-the-failure-of-journalism.html
Barbarity.
Iraq Probe: Soldier ‘Shot At Twitching Bodies’
A former Army private gives evidence at the Al Sweady Inquiry into events after the Battle of Danny Boy in southern Iraq in 2004.
http://news.sky.com/story/1137114/iraq-probe-soldier-shot-at-twitching-bodies
@SKN, 8:51, Obama has a choice – commit crimes for the deep state, or get killed. Obama and Bush will not be swanning around the world as elder statesmen. That’s what they signed up for.
Recall how a Swiss legislator chased Bush home by invoking war crimes charges. Legal charges followed Cheney to Canada and they followed Obama to Sweden. Robert Lady got detained for his role in disappearance and torture.
For a sitting president or a member of the nomenklatura, flight from prosecution is a nuisance, easy to finesse with ‘security’ concerns about sign-waving peaceniks at your lecture. A nuisance – for now. IMO accountability will attain an intermediate state where, as William Pepper puts it, no guilty US official can step outside US borders for fear of arrest in universal jurisdiction. That will formalize the outlaw hermit-kingdom status of the US government. In time, when young cadres balk at the prospect of giving up retirement sojourns in Tuscany or Patagonia, the state will start to change.
Great buddies. Kerry and McCain yesterday.
http://i.azcentral.com/i/1/d/4/L169_CIFRfea1d50b2c5ca387d94b8469105024d1.jpg
Mary:
“Thought Ganesh was the name of a Hindu god?”
Thought Mary was the name of a Virgin, mother of Jesus?
You are one woman with a sick mind! Irretrievable!
“Black Bloc: the new unknown element in Brazil’s social unrest”
http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/09/02/inenglish/1378144335_726742.html
“From the jobless line to virtual slavery”
http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/09/01/inenglish/1378041190_009212.html
It’s select-a-silly(misleading/tendentious)comment time again, folks.
Three this time :
1/. “Ghastly old warmonger {ie, John McCain } He and his kind could and should be addressing the poverty of the citizens in their countries. Here in the UK nearly one fifth of workers are paid less than the living wage. Same elsewhere probably.” (from Mary)
_________
I would agree. As I would if you were to include the leaders of, say, the BRICs in your comment. Would you be prepared to?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2/. ” (Interesting that the excrescences never engage with that poster {ie, Krishnamurky } isn’t it?) (from Captain Komodo)
___________
Probably for the same reason you don’t either. What are your reasons for not engaging with him with him, Captain?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3/. “Which was my way of responding to his { ie, Habbabkuk’s }bad habit of asking questions for which any answer designedly puts the answerer in the wrong.” (Captain Komodo, again)
_______________
That statement concerns my intentions in asking questions and is something you cannot possibly know (as Craig once pointed put in more general terms). But I admit it’s a convenient explanation of why you never answer hard questions. Carry on!
McCaine now says bombing Syria not a good idea, WTF is going on? Has someone just had their masterplan for war blown out of the sky by the S300 (so called missile tests)?
What a very strange post at 5.51pm. An observation about the name of a journalist provokes the old Virgin Mary meme in the same style as Habbabkuk’s. Pathetic. New script writers needed urgently. Quickly!
This came in.
Call for Hands Off Syria! Actions
List of Actions (updated frequently)
Join Nationally Coordinated Actions Sat Sept 7 to tell Congress:
NO NEW WAR! HANDS OFF SYRIA!
Hands off Syria!
Not another war!
Let’s make our voices heard BEFORE the U.S. Congressional war vote.
All out! Saturday, September 7
Join the call for united, regional and local actions.
http://www.iacenter.org/actions/syria090213/
[Mod/Jon: focussing on one poster, removing]
[Mod/Jon: excessive focussing on one poster, and abusive – removing]
@ Gs (16h28)
“In time, when young cadres balk at the prospect of giving up retirement sojourns in Tuscany or Patagonia, the state will start to change.”
______________
By Jove, I do believe you’ve hit the right answer – future holiday homes (absence thereof) as a determiner of national foreign policy.
How stupid we are not to have twigged before.
LOL, Habbabkuk (La Vita È Bella!) at 6:16 pm
“Say what you will, shameless and disgusting the back-handed hateful venom you spew here.”
Villager 30 Mar, 2013 – 8:49 pm:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/03/nuclear-nightmare/comment-page-5/#comment-401227
Interesting discussion of Greg Palast’s article on the banking scam that dictates much of the West’s global policy:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/wall-streets-secret-economic-endgame-making-the-world-safe-for-banksters-syria-in-the-cross-hairs/5348107
All should already be aware that the bankers have scammed us in the West, and it looks as though those who offer alternative systems of banking are to be killed off to ensure the scam can continue globally.
Oh yes, Sir/Madame Rouge, you just happen to be a little behind the curve AND playing the usual troll tactics?
I have admitted it before, and have no hesitation in repeating it again, I am embarrassed by my own poor judgment and indiscretion. But the thing to do when you get it wrong, is to show some balls, or ovaries, as may be the case.
Comment in the here and now, my friend.
Oh dear, it’s Troll show time, with guest appearence by an apoplectic Villager yet again !
It’s truely amazing that Mary can have such an effect on him, and actually rather worrying.
@Rouge, thanks for the reminded that Villager can give Fred a run for his money in spewing vulgar abuse, and all at his now new best pal !
Binoy Kampmark discusses Julian Assange’s case against the US – affidavit attached.
http://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/Swedish_Unlawful_Seizure_Complaint2013.pdf
“The document is littered with nuggets about intelligence practices, most of them troubling. Germany and Sweden feature prominently, as they provided avenues for surveillance of WikiLeaks practices. Specifically, physical surveillance of Assange by U.S. military intelligence is said to have taken place at a Berlin conference in December 2009.
Had U.S. surveillance of Assange in Germany been unlawful, it would follow that material obtained and used in the Manning trial would have to be excluded, given the illegal means of obtaining it. This would certainly be vital in the context of any appeal.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/04/the-wikileaks-case-against-the-united-states/