If anybody is surprised that key letters between Tony Blair and George Bush on launching the invasion of Iraq have gone missing, they have not been paying attention. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Obama and Cameron regimes have consistently and continually covered up the crimes of their predecessors, from launch illegal wars of aggression to instituting programmes of torture and extraordinary rendition and murder.
The motive in both cases is the same. Not only are the senior politicians in all mainstream parties members of the same “club”, committed to the same neo-conservative principles and indebted to the same corporate paymasters. But also these crimes involved the active complicity of thousands of senior members of the establishment, in the armed services, the secret services, the diplomatic services and other public servants. To come clean would take down thousands of people still in public service. or in other high places. In the UK, for example, war criminals Sir Richard Dearlove now master of Pembroke College Cambridge and Sir Mark Allen of Shell are only two who would have to go to jail. I am sorry to say that I am convinced that some people I know and like myself, ought to be sentenced. Not that it will happen.
When a state embarks on illegal war and systematic torture and murder, as a state, the ramifications go extremely wide. Literally thousands of highly placed people are implicated. There is nothing short of political revolution which would bring justice.
It is fascinating how far even the “liberal” media will and will not go in reporting these crimes. The murder part is almost entirely left out – it is well documented, for example, that scores of rendition flights went to Uzbekistan, including many from the CIA black base in Szymano-Szczytny in Mazuria, Poland. But it is almost never noted that not one person who was rendered to Uzbekistan ever emerged alive. They were all murdered.
The astonishing disparity of wealth in the UK – with just nine families owning as much as the poorest 15 million in the country – has now reached the point where, together with the crimes described above and the takeover of all main parties by the same neo-con philosophy – I have become, for the first time in my life, a political revolutionary. I have, unexpectedly, lost my faith in the ability of the currently constituted “democratic” system to provide a fair society. That seems to be because the extreme and escalating concentration and control of capital coincides with the extreme and escalating concentration and control of the media. That media control seems, despite the availability of alternative new media, to have sufficient power of influencing people to grant untrammeled hegemony over society to the wealthy.
Working on the Voltairian basis that il faut cultiver le jardin, I shall continue to work for Scottish independence on the grounds that smaller polities have a greater chance of resistance, a kind of theory of political asymmetric warfare, and that for cultural reasons there has been a less complete neo-con takeover of political debate there.
To return to Chilcot, there is a sense in which it is good that he has not yet reported. Chilcot is holding out to be able to include the Bush-Blair correspondence, which offers conclusive proof that the “WMD” meme was a knowing lie to justify a vicious and pre-determined war. The recent Tory pressure for early publication is for publication without these documents. Much better to wait and get the actual proof.
The idea that two heads of state corresponding on taking their states to war can be “private” and kept from their people, is so outrageous that the fact it is stated at all is, in itself, sufficient evidence of the media control being as complete as I assert. It is a laughable proposition. Besides which, if these were private letters, why were Sir David Manning and Sir Christopher Meyer delivering them at public expense? Can we charge Blair for this service? Meyer and Manning don’t come cheap. It was, incidentally, Sir David Manning who brought back to No. 10 the request from the White House that I be sacked as British Ambassador in Uzbekistan for kicking up a fuss internally over extraordinary rendition.
After careful consideration of the Rome Statute, I am convinced that an independent Scotland will be able to refer Blair to the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, and I am determined to make sure that this happens.
I don’t normally do this, but the stuff in some of these comments is truly interesting. The thread explores Blair’s claimed success in Sierra Leone, and ties this in with his intervention in the 2012 Glencore/Xstrata merger. There are some useful links. I am intrigued by Blair’s allegedly continuing association with Glasenberg, and of course his strange positioning as the representative of both God and JP Morgan on Earth.
It’s on David Icke. Yes. Sorry. But if you are a Blair-watcher, read it. Icke’s fans cite their sources, unlike some here…
http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=271979
Hats off to you Craig. The issue hasn’t gone away or even reduced in recent years in spite of efforts of the media to rewrite history and rehabilitate our former PM.
@John Goss: this replaced the scheduled Panorama programme and was typical “neo-BBC”. The latest news to come out of the Odessa TU building is that traces of chloroform and phosgene were found. There is also a “Letter from Odessa” written by a teacher who grew up in that area, lived there all his life, and felt he had to say something:
http://www.oneworldofnations.com/2014/05/the-nazi-danger-letter-from-odessa.html?spref=tw
Ba’al Zevul said before:
Kyzylordia. There’s a name to conjure with. Seems an angel from the Office of The Holy Blair has recently been meeting someone with a view to getting money for something in Kazakhstan:
http://strategy2050.kz/en/news/8188
Doctor Doctor (sic) Andreas Baumgartner, a suit who does business stuff, runs Blair’s Abu Dhabi front op.
http://ae.linkedin.com/pub/dr-dr-andreas-baumgartner/47/2b9/7b0
If you go to the Baumgartner link, alongside is a list of names under the heading ‘Viewers of this profile also viewed’. There you see the name of one David Knott.
He now works in Cameron’a government as Deputy Director and Head of Social Action and before that as Deputy Head, Government Advisory Practice. Going back to 2004 he has held a variety of senior posts in Brown’s and BLiar’s government in the Cabinet Office, DfID etc He was also seconded to Australia for a short time.
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/davidmknott
Is there not some sort of conflict of interest or are we ‘all in it together’, as ever. Also given Cameron’s love affair with Blair, his “mentor” etc., blah, blah.
Heywood of course moved seamlessly working for one government to the next, commencing as BLiar’s principal private secretary, then Brown’s and now Cameron’s. He must know ALL the secrets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Heywood
Do these top honchos in the Civil Service maintain complete impartiality and work for the good of the people who pay their salaries? 🙂
PS Some other interesting names if you keep linking round on Linked In.
Missed out the inverted commas.
Ba’al Zevul’s comment was:
Kyzylordia. There’s a name to conjure with. Seems an angel from the Office of The Holy Blair has recently been meeting someone with a view to getting money for something in Kazakhstan:
http://strategy2050.kz/en/news/8188
Doctor Doctor (sic) Andreas Baumgartner, a suit who does business stuff, runs Blair’s Abu Dhabi front op.
http://ae.linkedin.com/pub/dr-dr-andreas-baumgartner/47/2b9/7b0
~~
The rest of the post is mine.
Back to Baumgartner – Representative Middle East North Africa Central Asia at The Office of Tony Blair – and all those visits that sleek black BLiar jet makes to the region.
Syr Darya
A beautiful river that ‘rises in two headstreams in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan and eastern Uzbekistan—the Naryn River and the Kara Darya which come together in the Uzbek part of the Fergana Valley—and flows for some 2,212 kilometres (1,374 mi) west and north-west through Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan to the remains of the Aral Sea.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syr_Darya
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8516200.stm Factual about the diminishing glaciers and as we know BLiar is obviously concerned to limit pollution in his climate change work for JP Morgan.
“Kyrgyzstan has significant deposits of metals including gold and rare earth metals. Due to the country’s predominantly mountainous terrain, less than 8% of the land is cultivated, and this is concentrated in the northern lowlands and the fringes of the Fergana Valley.
Thats my JPMorgan boy! Very relevant to his envoyship too. Go get those goodies Tony. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrgyzstan
“Not only are the senior politicians in all mainstream parties members of the same “club”, committed to the same neo-conservative principles and indebted to the same corporate paymasters”.
Further to that, this topic throws up at least one supporting argument. The merger of Xstrata and Glencore, creating a gigantic global mining and commodity conglomerate, was at least partly facilitated by Blair. Who is at least known to Glasenberg. The boss of Xstrata (who was eased out of the conglomerate) was Mick Davis. Who donated £509K to the Conservative Party in the year of the takeover alone.
http://politicalscrapbook.net/2013/06/conservative-party-donors-tax-havens/
That’s in addition to helping to bankroll the Fox-Werritty disaster, and numerous other donations.
In passing, like Michael Levy, Blair’s fundraiser when in government, Mick Davis is a prominent member of the UJIA –
http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/United_Jewish_Israel_Appeal
Lotta connections there. So it can be a little difficult to assign loyalties to the very rich people who are actually in the driving seat. Let alone inconvenient principles. Can’t it?
“I have become, for the first time in my life, a political revolutionary…” Eh? I thought you’d been going on like that for years. Judging from past experience, I predict that in a few years you will be saying that Western democracy is not so bad, same as the transition from “Gordon B is a @#*1!!” to “Gordon B is not so bad after all..” 🙂
A remarkable blog, I congratulate you for the clarity of your thinking, Sir.
O my prophetic soul!
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/campaigner-urges-iscotland-should-grant-asylum-to-edward-snowden.1400565128
When Lady Thatcher died, I was rather sad that, like her or loathe her, due respect was not shown to the recently-deceased. However, I am not at all sure I will not be among the cheering crowd lining the street upon which the rotting corpse of the Blair creature is dragged by its gonads.
Meanwhile, in withholding protected evidence, USG admits ongoing multitargeted investigation re. Wikileaks, and by implication Assange.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/assange-targetted-by-fbi-probe-us-court-documents-reveal-20140520-38l1p.html
Court record here –
http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/wikileaks_doj_05192014.pdf
I think this is one of Craig’s best and most powerful pieces. I agree that “the senior politicians in all mainstream parties are members of the same “club”, committed to the same neo-conservative principles and indebted to the same corporate paymasters”, but that this infiltration is very much wider than political parties. It also infects the entire mainstream media and powerful institutions throughout much of the world.
I am convinced that neocon ideology is inherently evil, and directly responsible for gross human suffering on a vast scale. Yet most people will have absolutely no idea what it is, nor where it came from. We can all theorise about that, but what I want to more fully understand is the methods used to achieve such infiltration and dominance across the planet, by what is actually a tiny clique of very few, very powerful people. How can all our institutions, and points of control, have been so corrupted, in such a relatively short period of time?
In my view money, bribery and blackmail do not have sufficient leverage. I think something else is going on, which involves almost satanic / religious / psychological mind control at multiple different levels. Unless we more fully understand such techniques, we have little or no defense against them. Its all very well coming to the conclusion that psychopaths have taken control, but if that control includes all the instruments of law and justice, such that the most powerful criminals are isolated and secure against prosecution, how do we protect ourselves from them? What is to stop them moving on to the next stage, such that the horrors we already see in other countries such as Yugoslavia/Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria/Ukraine envelop us too? Drones and GPS work just as well in the UK, as anywhere else, as can Fascist thugs.
Tony
Jermyn St. Jim., 20 May, 2014 – 12:43 am – Thanks for that video link, rather confirmed my assumption that the limitation of jurisdiction in the Rome Statue was deliberate and at the instigation of the US.
@Tony: That was my point a couple of months ago when I came back to Craig’s blog. Germans are a really decent, principled people, but in the 1930s they were systematically groomed to accept any level of violence towards a goal of world domination. Plenty of good psychology in the 1950s showed this “mass psychology of fascism” could happen to any people. I guess the lessons learned have been largely forgotten…
“I think this is one of Craig’s best and most powerful pieces. ”
Please add ‘COURAGEOUS’.
You have my full support Craig
From Australia.
Au contraire, Peacewisher – they have been well learned and developed further, only by the wrong people, of course.
Nice to see you, Tony – hope you are keeping well.
offended:
resentful or annoyed, typically as a result of a perceived insult.
“he sounded rather offended”
synonyms: upset, hurt, wounded, injured, insulted, aggrieved, affronted, pained, displeased, distressed, disgruntled, put out, annoyed, angered, angry, cross, exasperated, indignant, irritated, vexed, piqued, irked, stung, galled, nettled, needled, peeved, ruffled, resentful, in a huff, huffy, in high dudgeon, fed up; More
antonyms: pleased
The lady on Radio 5 spent 15 minutes telling us how offended she was at the premier leagues worker Peter Scudamore.
I am sorry but I agree sexism has it’s place and either way it is perceived i find somewhat less offensive than a bucket load of offenses that most here would also take great offence.
The lady on radio 5 who opened up Scudamores emails is seeking legal action to help her come to terms with her offended position.
Sorry for my deluded writings but it is all so offensive.
Enjoy your day.
Three essays on the Truthseeker today comprise my Holy Triumvirate of ‘foundations’/substantiations
(i) Bilderbergs’ Silent Takeover of Britain’s 60billion Defense budget-Tony Gosling
(ii) Lessons from the Sinking of the Titanic -Rebel of Oz
(iii) Surfing the Lowlands with Friends in High Places -Les Visible
(i)- a ‘family history’ in which our Dutch Queens got involved with tawdry, low-level German ‘nobility-NOT’ NAZIS
(ii) – a romantic if doomed Love story-from the Netherlands to DownUnder and back to Germany, Canada, Pakistan, Australia…which kind of demonstrates how our hearts (COURAGE) DO live on, and on…..ETERNITY
(iii) -where I come from (the mud of the Lowlands, and whence I return….
More lulz at the Astana Anti-Crisis Forum this week. Once you’ve got over the potted bio.
http://astanaforum.org/2014/en/author/tony-blair
One “brutal regime” Tony knows better than to remove, or do much about:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/11/tony-blair-kazakhstan
‘I have, unexpectedly, lost my faith in the ability of the currently constituted “democratic” system to provide a fair society. That seems to be because the extreme and escalating concentration and control of capital coincides with the extreme and escalating concentration and control of the media. That media control seems, despite the availability of alternative new media, to have sufficient power of influencing people to grant untrammeled hegemony over society to the wealthy.’
Exactly. But there is some kind of revolution going on. I know you don’t like UKIP but if you look at the readers’ comments in the Daily Mail after one of the never ending smearing articles, you’ll find that a huge majority of the readers are utterly disgusted with the political elite. I’ve never seen such a thing and find it very, very encouraging.
Ruth
I quite agree. The wave of discontent with the political elite is being ridden by UKIP, because (despite UKIP’s whinges) that is where the mainstream media show an alternative. A common view is that any change must be better.
This too is relevant. Tony Opmoc asked how it was possible that the socio-political system had been subverted so thoroughly and quickly – actually he put it more clearly than that, see above – and the answer is the formal doctrine of globalisation. This is now seen by the fat cats as the cure for the crises caused by their own greed. And once again, Blair provides a lead. The conference he is probably being paid at least ten times my annual wage to address is this one:
http://www.group-global.org/en/page/view/516
Reading between the lines we see that the “crisis” is basically concerned with rich people being impeded in the act of filling their boots – the concerns of the proles being tertiary.
And, in this, very rich FSU people, very rich Chinese people and very rich Western people are speaking essentially the same language. Be very afraid.
Gordo
19 May, 2014 – 10:24 pm
“George Galloway is against Scottish Independence.”
Yes he is and I disagree with him but he is entitled to his view.
“He is supposed to be trying to expose Tony Blair and I actually contributed to his project, but now that he has been exposed as a hypocrite…”
How has he been exposed as a hypocrite Gordo? Is it because he disagrees with you on Scotland?
“Scotland must become independent as its the only way to escape from the scammers and conmen like George Galloway…”
Sounds like he’s upset you Gordo.
Scouse Billy,
“well learned and developed further” – agree completely, though I think they have now got too arrogant, and one step beyond, such that even people who read the Daily Mail, and even the Israeli Government (which takes some doing), can see through their lies and evil, and are disgusted at their insanity which goes even beyond what they would consider.
I think both Syria and The Ukraine are a turning point, in that ordinary people, not normally politically aware, are revolted at what they see and the involvement, complicity and lies from our Government and media.
Hope you are keeping well too. Can’t complain myself. Not only am I amazed I’m still alive, it still works O.K.
Tony
Used to be called brainwashing, didn’t it?
We engage your target audience via conventional,
Digital, Social, Viral and Experiential media channels driven by culture-specific analyses
http://global-ny.com/wp-content/uploads/Global-US_Market_Entry-2013.pdf
Thanks, Jermyn St. Jim, hope your confidence is justified, but I strongly doubt it.
Jill Abramson was less able in seeing that real justice was served regarding the vast 9/11 cover up than she was in seeing that Clarence Thomas didn’t become a Supreme Court Justice.
Excellent post.
“I have become, for the first time in my life, a political revolutionary. I have, unexpectedly, lost my faith in the ability of the currently constituted “democratic” system to provide a fair society. That seems to be because the extreme and escalating concentration and control of capital coincides with the extreme and escalating concentration and control of the media.”
Welcome hermano.
And from a progressive perspective, Scottish independence offers both a much greater chance of escaping the austerity-ridden stranglehold of entrenched British state power, and the opportunity to create a more egalitarian society. Either of those would be reasons enough to support independence, but when we also consider that the alternative is maintaining the status-quo, it seems a no brainer. If it might make it more likely to bring Blair to justice too, then all aboard the good ship self-determination!
Solidarity.
Post by “Oddie” at 01.25:-
“John Friend: 9/11 Museum run by “Holocaust” industry
Link to blog run by Holocaust denier. Why is this still here?
[craigmurray.org.uk – thanks, deleted now]
Ruth & Craig
A “wave of discontent with the political elite” expressed as online comments and voting for another party is the same old same old. The idea that such things make “some kind of revolution” is an illusion that sustains the corrupt system we have.
Our discontent needs to be expressed in unsanctioned ways.
@Peacewisher,
20 May, 2014 – 9:17 am
Some of the bodies had bullet holes to the head. There is a lot more to this than is at first apparent. It was a carefully-planned operation with those involved having access to the roof of the building.
As to the school teacher’s letter it must be like a nightmare for good people in the Ukraine to see the seeds of Fascism once more planted on their land. It is a moving letter. I wonder what people who have shown support for Pravy Sector and Svoboda on this blog would think reading that letter?