The FCO claim that records of extraordinary rendition flights to Diego Garcia were destroyed by water damage is an insult to all our intelligence. The FCO is refusing to say where the records were at the time, or what else was damaged in the (presumed) flood. This is of a piece with, but much more serious than, the “accidental” shredding of all Tony Blair’s parliamentary expenses claims. It is not that they expect us to believe them – they just don’t care. They have the power, and we don’t.
Just as much an insult to our intelligence is the new scheme of security measures at airports. These are all to do with maintaining the fear levels that keep the population compliant, and nothing to do with aviation security. If you have some kind of bomb inside an electronic device, you need a power source to trigger it. The last thing a bomber wants is a flat battery.
It is over twenty years now since I went on a MI6/SAS hosted course at “the Fort” near Gosport. One of the things we were shown and had explained to us, was a laptop which had been converted into a very effective bomb incorporating a slim sheet of semtex. That laptop could switch on and work absolutely normally. The laptop battery was the power source for the detonator.
Explosives detectors at airports would today pick up the semtex. That a mobile phone with no power source could be a bomb, in a way not immediately spotted by x-ray or explosives detector, is a nonsense. If you want to cause real damage on a plane, buy two one litre bottles of 50% strength premium vodka in duty free and set fire to them. You would be surprised at the extreme heat that can produce in a confined space.
More useless information. Telling us what we already know except they say ‘may have’ rather than ‘have’.
The Tory pals went off with their sacks of loot.
Royal Mail sale ‘lost taxpayers £1bn’
Taxpayers may have lost out on around £1bn in undervalued Royal Mail shares and assets, a committee of MPs says.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28250963
The Al Hilli thread people seem to have hit on something. The Daily Mail are moderating out their comments, and apparently fuzzed-out a face on a photograph in response to it being recognised:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/09/not-forgetting-the-al-hillis/comment-page-103/#comment-465916
Situation yesterday. (Current Palestinian total death toll > 90, hundreds injured. Current Israeli death toll, nil. One serious injury reported since this link. And counting)
58 Palestinian civilians, including 11 women and 21 children, have been killed in Gaza, since the start of “Operation Protective Edge” on 7 July.
The targeting and destruction of residential buildings in Gaza continues to be the main cause of civilian casualties.
Some 70 homes have been targeted and totally destroyed. Overall, since the start of the operation, 342 housing units have been destroyed or severely damaged by Israeli airstrikes, displacing about 2,000 people who are being hosted by relatives.
Five health facilities have suffered damage after air strikes in their vicinities. Gaza hospitals treating injuries are affected by severe shortages of medical supplies and fuel needed to operate backup generators.
Indiscriminate rocket firing by armed groups from Gaza has targeted main Israeli population centres, but has resulted in no serious casualties so far.
http://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/occupied-palestinian-territory-gaza-emergency-situation-report
In addition, Israeli stikes have been directed against farming and fishing facilities, including boats in Gaza Port. Access to the sea is forbidden.
That’s more civilians than bad mans in black hats, btw.
MC Blair haz left da (Tel Aviv) house.
Yere arasında Silifkeye ve Mut’e onu almak gerekir…if you’re quick. 🙂
THAT made him turn, lol
Oho. Kazakhstan?
Snap Ba’al!
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/07/so-soon-forgotten/#comment-465895
We can’t buy it. Muslims don’t drink.
Right route for Almaty. I think the Quartet representative is en route to consult with that well-known ME expert Nursultan Nazarbayev on…the 2022 Olympic bid? Money? Money? I give up.
Something must have gone horribly wrong with Google Translate, Arsalan. Ah. “buy it” for “get him” Apologies. In haste, and only know a little Turkish, hence Google translate. Are you anywhere near Kayseri? Look out for G-CEYL @ 43,000 feet in a few minutes, heading NE.
Changed course again. Now online for Baku. Second time this year?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articlePictures/LevantineEnergyCorridor.gif
See the BTC pipeline? The other end’s at Baku.
@Scorgie
“I don’t remember ESLO or you Habbabkuk expressing any outrage on the killing of innocent Palestinians, perhaps you were among this crowd?”
I’m afraid you have a selective memory – I am outraged at the killing of any innocents whether they be in Gaza, Israel or anywhere else for that matter. What the Israeli Govt is doing with regard to its bombing of Gaza is not right, but then neither is what Hamas and its supporters doing – who did what first really is something of an irrelvance. I’ll leave the games of moral relativism to the moral pygmies of this blog, who Anon has quite rightly commented have done nothing whatsoever to improve the lot of the Palestinians and whose overtly partisan stance is really just part of the problem rather than the solution.
I am saddened to have to announce that Mr Tony Blair, the Quartet representative
from Israelhas now landed safely on the East runway at Baku Heydar Aliyev Airport, Azerbaijan* (Israel’s 5th. largest trading partner, and virtually submerged in oil). The purpose of his visit is unknown, but at least there’s no chance of a Hamas rocket landing on him. Methanol? Oil? Money? Money? We may never know for sure.* Disembarking at the Silk Way Business Aviation Terminal, by the look of it.
@arsalan
“We can’t buy it. Muslims don’t drink.”
I think you meant “Good Muslims” – the bad ones can do all sorts of nasty things just as the nasty of all religions are capable of doing.
http://www.royalinsight.net/forum/index.php?topic=71061.0
Prince Andresw and BP’s CEO, Bob Dudley, met this week. Andrew has well-known form with Azerbaijan. Dudley was in Azerbaijan last month, meeting Aliyev.
http://en.trend.az/capital/energy/2281212.html
So was Blair’s plane, G-CEYL. (see http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/06/rusbridger-the-worst-editor-in-the-world-part-ii/#comment-463694
And so was Charles Hendry, formerly UK Energy Minister and now Prime Ministerial Trade Envoy to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
And this, for connoisseurs of Blair only, encapsulates his crystalline thinking on the Israel-Palestine dispute.
Summary:
“We” (meaning anyone but Israel) have to stop the fighting.
“We” need some short term agreements.
But first “we” need some long term agreements.
‘That should cover it nicely. Off to Baku now to do some oil stuff, and, guys, do call me if you want any more of my expertise in conflict resolution. I may be free on the 14th August from 3 pm to 4…’
http://www.quartetrep.org/quartet/news-entry/statement-on-the-middle-east/
How did human evolution manage to produce this asshole?
” we all want the minimum civilian casualties…” Cue the self-awareness software, Ba’al. Even when he speaks in peaceful platitudes, he can’t help himself.
What’s an acceptable ‘minimum’?
ESLO, 1:23 pm:
Wonderful hypocrisy, and separated by only ten words.
ESLO, do you consider yourself morally more enlightened than most other people who comment here? Do you metaphorically tower over, say, myself, like a White man over a pygmy?
Ba’al Zevul
That was supposed to be a joke in response to what Craig wrote.
But I do admit, not a very funny one.
— — –
Israel can kill as many Palestinians as they like, with the excuse “Well what we did is wrong, but we aren’t the only ones, look they fired a few fire crackers that scared some of us in response to us slaughtering a whole bunch of them”.
Why I’m on the brink of burning my Israeli passport
Friday, 11 July 2014 12:48
.
Independent
MIRA BAR HILLEL
I can no longer stand by while Israeli politicians like Ayelet Shaked condone the deaths of innocent Palestinian women and children
She is young. She is pretty. She is a university graduate and a computer engineer. She is also an Israeli Parliamentarian – and the reason why I am on the brink of burning my Israeli passport. Because behind that wide-eyed innocent face lurks the Angel of Death.
Ayelet Shaked represents the far-right Jewish Home party in the Knesset. This means she is well to the right of Benyamin Netanyahu, just in case you thought such a thing was not possible.
On Monday she quoted this on her Facebook page: “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
A week earlier, just before 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair was snatched and burned alive, Shaked wrote: “This is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. The reality is that this is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started it.”
So even before the boy died horribly she declared him to be the enemy, and afterwards, without any apparent hint of guilt or remorse, she was calling for the deaths of innocent women and their unborn babies.
She made me think about my mother’s sister Klara and her three small children who were living in Krakow in 1939 when the Germans invaded. They decided that the Jews – all Jews – were the enemy and had to be eliminated, not least the women and the little snakes they were raising. “Why? Ask them – they started it”, as the Nazis would say if asked.
I never met Klara or her children who had perished by 1942. I did meet my uncle Romek, who survived by working in Oskar Schindler’s factory, and his wife Yetti who survived because she spoke good German and was able to pretend she was a fine German woman who had kicked out her Polish Jewish husband, as she smiled prettily at every Nazi she came across.
In pictures: Israel launches further air strikes on Gaza
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My father’s brother Shmuel and his young family also perished before I was born, taken in Holland, to where they had escaped from Berlin, to the same camp Anne Frank died in.
I know what it is to have been helpless victims, living and dying under racist oppressors’ boots, and I know that today’s Israelis are no longer the victims but the perpetrators of the current crisis. Yes, Hamas are dreadful hate-filled killers and woe betide Israel had they had the wherewithal to carry out their intentions. But the fact remains that it is Israel which has the tanks, bombers, artillery, nuclear warheads and missile defences of Goliath, while ordinary Gazans had nothing a week ago and even less today, as even hospitals and schools were bombed.
Shaked got what she wanted: the death toll in Gaza is nearing 100, one in four being children. Hundreds more have serious injuries in a place where hospitals have also been bombed and medical essentials are running out.
In Israel, in spite of Hamas’s best efforts, not one death has been recorded, nor any serious injuries, although a wedding party was disrupted and got on the television news.
And, as the bombs rain on Gaza, Israeli teens have taken to tweeting scantily-clad selfies alongside their political sentiments. In two now deleted tweets, one wrote “Death to all of you Arabs you transfag”, while another proclaimed “Arabs may you be paralyzed & die with great suffering!” Another teen simply tweeted “Death to these f****** Arabs”, and attached a photo of themselves pouting alongside it.
Seeing these angelic faces of evil spouting such genocidal rhetoric, I pick up my Israeli passport and a box of matches. “Not in my name, people. Not in my name!”
The real enemy is, war itself.
If anyone denies that Israel is a Nazi state they must remember what Israeli Politicians say while they kill Palestinians:
On July 1, 2014, Shaked posted a message on Facebook, quoting speechwriter Uri Elitzur, calling for war against the Palestinian people.[2] She called for the killing of Palestinian mothers as they give rise to “little snakes”.
Ben-LA PACQUTE LO ES TODO
What is happening in Gaza isn’t a war. It is shooting in to a barrel of fish with a shotgun.
As far as the Zionists are concerned they are stamping on ants.
The UN/Red crescent should step in….
“Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that Palestinian healthcare services are not able to handle the wave of people requiring medical attention”
http://rt.com/news/171916-israel-gaza-death-strikes/
I agree with your characterization Arsalan, but war takes on many guises. Treblinka was a war on innocents with little means of returning fire.
MAP is on the ground – has been for years – and donations go to the people who need medical aid, (not Tony Blair Associates).. Nonpolitical, stick their necks out to do their job.
http://www.map-uk.org/
Clark
“ESLO, do you consider yourself morally more enlightened than most other people who comment here? Do you metaphorically tower over, say, myself, like a White man over a pygmy?”
______________________
I don’t know how ESLO considers himself, but he and like-minded contributors certainly tower over you when it comes to intellectual honesty
Or any other kind of honesty for that matter.
Which is why you hate him and them so much – they hold up a mirror in front of your faces.
Arsalan
“Israel can kill as many Palestinians as they like, with the excuse “Well what we did is wrong, but we aren’t the only ones, look they fired a few fire crackers that scared some of us in response to us slaughtering a whole bunch of them”.”
_________________-
And why does Hamas continue to give the Israelis that alibi/excuse?
Is it evil or just stupid?
Baal
“MAP is on the ground – has been for years – and donations go to the people who need medical aid, (not Tony Blair Associates).. Nonpolitical, stick their necks out to do their job.
http://www.map-uk.org/”
________________
Careful there, Baal, Mary has already “investigated” MAP and spat some bile in its direction.
But perhaps you don’t know that – the disadvantage of Habbabreaking her (and me)!