Nick Cohen’s latest rant is a defence of La Palin, under the guise of advice to liberals on how to attack her more wisely. He gives the game away with the following defence of Blair:

If they had confined themselves to charging Tony Blair with failing to find the weapons of mass destruction he promised were in Iraq, and sending British troops into a quagmire, they might have forced him out. They were so consumed by loathing, however, they insisted that he had lied, which he clearly had not.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/07/uselections2008.republicans2008

Which planet is Cohen on? On 24 September 2002 Blair told the UK parliament this:

The dossier we publish gives the answer. The reason is because his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programme is not an historic leftover from 1998. The inspectors aren’t needed to clean up the old remains. His WMD programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The WMD programme is not shut down. It is up and running…

Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.

http://www.biogs.com/blair/blair14.html

Which is beyond doubt the most infamous lie, or series of lies, in all political history. It fulfils all the criteria of a lie by being demonstrably untrue, and by the fact that Blair knew it to be untrue. Unlike Nick Cohen, who was in a pub somewhere, I was a senior British diplomat at the time the dossier was produced and a former head of the FCO section monitoring Iraqi sanctions enforcement. I know, and have counted as a friend, John Williams, the Head of FCO News Department who did the first draft and is now a man wracked with conscience. I was told at the time that our claims were “Bollocks” by Bill Patey, then head of the FCO department covering the Middle East and now our Ambassador in Saudi Arabia, I heard first hand and before the war started witness of the pressure and career threats that reduced members of the FCO Research Analysts to tears.

It is interesting that Cohen tries the same rhetorical trick with Blair that he does with Palin. He starts off by trying to sound sympathetic to liberals, that there is validity to “charging Tony Blair with failing to find the weapons of mass destruction he promised were in Iraq, and sending British troops into a quagmire.”

But in fact we know these are not Cohen’s views at all and he remains a major cheerleader for the Iraq war. He has written an entire book about how misguided the “Left” are for not understanding Iraq and the noble neo-con desire to export “democracy” by force. So if Cohen disguises his defence of Blair with a false cloak of sympathy for the arguments against him, how much notice should we take of his feeble anti-Palin points before he defends her? Is it not more probable that the laughable old dipsomaniac is simply lost in admiration of another fellow neo-con?

Hurray! Osama Bin Laden’s driver has been convicted by a totally impartial jury of, umm, US military officers. Next week we have the trial of the woman who cooked his soup, while I understand the CIA are pursuing a very reliable lead on the whereabouts of his local dry cleaner.

Neil Mackay was one of the best reporters internationally on extraordinary rendition. He has now broken a story that is important for everyone in Scotland and beyond.

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2410437.0.scottish_government_hires_firm_accused_of_torture_in_iraq.php

I am a supporter of Scotland’s SNP government, but they have made a terrible blunder in handing Scotland’s census to US mercenary group CACI, whose well-paid torturers were famously involved at Abu Ghraib but are also contracted to carry out interrogations throughout Iraq. CACI has used libel lawyers to try to limit knowledge of its connection with torture, but lost its landmark case against Air America. CACI’s own description of its main activties is

1) National Security

2) Intelligence

3) Homeland Security

CACI has its headquarters in Arlington Virginia – home of the CIA.

I am stunned by this. These people’s main business is providing intelligence services to the US government. Do the Scottish government really want to hand over data on every household in Scotland, including their ethnic and religious background, to the CIA? Does anybody believe that a firm whose primary source of income is the War on Terror and which has wholeheartedly bought into Bush’s “The gloves are off” philosophy – and made a fortune from it – will respect internal firewalls and not give that information to the CIA?

This appointment is an abomination and Alex Salmond must rescind it immediately, or lose much of the ethical high ground which the SNP has so painstakingly won.

There are those who oppose the census per se. I do not take that view, regarding it as useful – but that utility would be vastly outweighed by the danger of giving the individual confidential data to CACI. If the government persists with this appointment, I must with great reluctance join the ranks of those calling for a boycott of the census. Or even better, mess it up with stupid returns. I think, for example, that everyone should declare themselves to be Aztecs working as golf course owners with an improbable number of children, living in a mansion with seventeen cars and regularly worshipping Kon-Tiki. I wonder how much the CIA will give CACI for all that info on Scotland’s billionaire native Americans?

My post below brought a comment from Darren who objected to my rather strong and personal attacks on Margaret Curran and Doug Hoyle.

I used to be one of the most civil and orthodox people you might meet. Then I came across the hideous torture in Uzbekistan. I could give hundreds of examples. Two men were boiled alive, a woman was raped with a broken bottle, my neighbour was held down while a truck was driven over her legs, the teenage grandson of Professor Mirsiadov was abducted from outside his home and tortured to death while I was inside eating dinner with his grandfather. And I found that our government not only supported the regime that was doing this as part of the “War on Terror”, but was knowingly and repeatedly receiving and using the intelligence reports that arose from these hideous torture sessions. I then discovered we were doing this not just in Uzbekistan, but all over the world, in support of “extraordinary rendition”.

Then we have the War in Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians – indeed many, many thousands if you only count the children – have been brutally and violently killed as a result of an illegal war launched when we had full knowledge that Iraq no longer had any significant WMD.

We have actively caused the deaths in agony of hundreds of thousands. And yet I found that my colleagues in the diplomatic service were carrying on politely as though none of this had happened – just as those who loaded prisoners on to cattle trucks for Auschwitz were nice people with wives and kids. And I found that at home we were supposed to conduct the charade of party politics in the normal way, as though our government’s actions were not causing screaming deaths in agony. Well. I sincerely hope that the worst that ever happens to Margaret Curran is that I called her a shrew-faced bitch. Compare her distress to that of a mother watching her children die crying with their guts hanging out. Margaret Curran is a lot better off than thousands of very real women, who were just as human as her, and whose lives the illegal wars of New Labour have destroyed.

So think about it, Darren. And fuck the politenesses of politics.

With fighting surging in Basra and other parts of Iraq, the Government is, yet again, squirming out of holding an enquiry into how this whole mess got started. With 4,000 dead Americans and a current best estimate of 1,200,000 dead Iraqi’s, Tony Blair is taking a little time out from solving the Middle East conflict to to talk about ‘Faith and Globilisation’ at Westminster Abbey. Marvellous.

To keep track of some of the people who are actually responsible for starting our involvement, its worth a look at http://www.holdthemtoaccount.com/.

To get an update on how others in the inner circle of war initiators has prospered read Catherine Bennett here. However, even there one of the biggest beneficiaries of the WMD scam is not mentioned. John Scarlett, was promoted in May 2004 to be head of MI6. This followed his role in overseeing the ‘intelligence’ behind the dodgy dossier as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Transparent corruption at the highest level.

This is definetely a long term Project for the New “choose your own” Century. So, if you are still at school and thinking of joining up for this never ending jolly foreign colonial escapade, better check this out first: http://www.beforeyousignup.info

Update: A British soldier was killed in Iraq in the early hours of this morning.

Update 2: Sounding out Tony Blair is going to try and ensure his appearance at Westminster Abbey is not a quiet event…

Amnesty International describes the curent state of play:

Carnage and despair in Iraq

Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is still in disarray. The human rights situation is disastrous, a climate of impunity has prevailed, the economy is in tatters and the refugee crisis continues to escalate.

Seumas Milne sums it up brilliantly in The Guardian:

There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy

The problem in Iraq, we’re now told, was a lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of planning, or mistakes in implementation. If only, say the neocons, we had put our man Ahmad Chalabi in charge from the start, the Iraqis wouldn’t have felt so humiliated. If only we hadn’t dissolved the army, the pragmatists insist, the insurgency would never have taken off. If only the Brits had been running the show, mutter the old Whitehall hands, all would have been different. The problem, it turns out, was not the invasion and occupation of a sovereign Arab oil state on a tide of official deceit, but the way it was carried out…

…For the future, so long as the disaster of Iraq is put down to mistakes or lack of planning, the real lessons will not be learned, but repeated – as appears to be happening now in Afghanistan. Gordon Brown has at last promised a full Iraq inquiry when British troops are no longer in the firing line. But any more delay to a proper accounting of what has taken place – including, as the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said at the weekend, the nature of the US-British relationship – will only further corrode the political system. The disaster of Iraq has at least had the effect of demonstrating the limits of imperial power and restraining further US attacks. The danger is, however, that next time they’ll just try and do it differently – without the mistakes.

From Stop the War

Next Saturday 15 March, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, will see a day of global

protests. The London demonstration will assemble at 12 noon in Trafalgar Square and march down Whitehall on a route which will surround Parliament. The rally in Trafalgar Square will

highlight the disasters of five years and more of war.

Speakers will include Tony Benn, ex-SAS trooper Ben Griffin, representatives from Palestine, Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas, Lindsey German from Stop the War Coalition and film director Nick Broomfield. Joining us on the stage will be Omar Deghayes, recently released from the Guantanamo torture centre, where he was held for five years.

Today is the last day of the hearing by the Law Lords brought by Military Families Against the War (MFAW). Beverly Clarke and Rose Gentle have argued that ministers breached their duty to Britain’s armed forces by failing to ensure that the invasion was lawful. They are demanding a public enquiry is established to look into how the war was initiated.

In particular, the women are challenging a Court of Appeal ruling that said the Government was not obliged to order an independent inquiry under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the “right to life”.

Over the last two days the law lords have been considering the mothers’ argument that servicemen and women have the right not to have their lives jeopardised in illegal conflicts.

Rose Gentle writes: “Blair and his cronies must be held to account. I want Justice for my son Gordon and all the other soldiers and civilians whose lives were lost due to this illegal and immoral war.”

It is a tribute to the power of political blogging that the Times is prepared to devote several column inches to a whingeing reply to this blog. Or perhaps its simply a sign of the intellectual decline of the Times. I am pretty surprised to find even a Murdoch paper publishing this:

Now suppose, that I were to write an article for this paper in which I began by telling readers that Craig Murray was not just wrong and oddly ill-informed, but that he was also – let’s say – a chinless, adulterous, anti-Semitic clown whose vanity and incontinence had led to him damaging those very causes that he claimed to care for so much. My editors wouldn’t have stood for it, and the readers would have thought less of me for it. Yet in several of the more lionised and supposedly political websites that influence some of our journalists, this is exactly the level of debate.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article3227701.ece

I think I had reached the age of 49 without ever being accused of being anti-semitic. Anybody who even vaguely knows me will find that accusation laughable.

David Aaronovich is confused as to why I would wish to be impolite about him. The answer is quite plain. Supporting the Iraq War, and cheerleading for it, is not a legitimate policy choice. It is complicity in an appalling act of aggression and mass murder. The invasion of another country, resulting in the death of (literally) countless civilians, in order to seize control of natural resources, was an act of hideous criminality. Nazi “Journalists” stood trial at Nuremberg charged with propagandizing for illegal war.

I tend to have rigorously argued political views. I am, for example, strongly against the private finance initiative and other private provision in the NHS. I am opposed to state aid to Northern Rock. On those and other issues, many people have other opinions and I genuinely respect those views and engage with them, much as I may disagree.

But the Iraq war is not like that. Supporting the illegal invasion of other countries is a crime; it is no more legitimate than to argue that “The Yorkshire Ripper Was Right”. It does not surprise me that Aaronovitch and other renegades of the hard left like Phillips and Hitchens have taken this position – ruthlessness and disregard for individuals provide the consistent thread in their odyssey around the unpleasant extremes of politics.

I am afraid, David, that decent people will look down on you the rest of your life. Get used to it.

With the British forces in Iraq having officially ‘handed over‘ Basra Province yesterday, the debate over whether we jumped or were pushed out has resurfaced. This graph tends to suggest that there were, at the least, compelling tactical reasons to leave, independent of any ‘progress’ on the ground.

The links above come from a site originally set up as the London Friends of Craig Murray blog. This site, set up by a group of, err.., friends in London, supported Craig’s election campaign in Blackburn back in 2005. This year it has morphed in to a dedicated casualty monitoring project, aiming to track the human cost of Blair’s wars to Iraqis, Afghans, and British forces.

The original blog has now moved to a new home at http://www.casualty-monitor.org.

I fear I have entered a time warp. Gordon Brown is in Basra announcing that we are going to reduce our troops pointlessly occupying its airport to 2,500. He hasn’t been there and made that announcement for almost three months, since he tried to steal the thunder of the Conservative party conference. Indeed that is at least seven different times this announcement has been made over eight months.

We have also taken Musa Qala from the Taliban. That is the fourth time “coalition forces” have done that since 2001. I wonder if we’ll do it again next year?

All just became clear. Sky News gave out the headline “As Gordon Brown touched down in Afghanistan, NATO announced they had just taken a strategic Taliban headquarters.” We bombed the town – that’s the way to win hearts and minds. If we kill enough Afghan civilians they’ll love us eventually, no doubt. I expect we’ll manage to hold the town at least until Gordon has left, so that was worth several deaths, including of at least one British soldier.

For all those fools of the David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen variety who argue that things in Iraq would fall apart if we left, so we have to stay to secure the oil – sorry, keep the peace – here is the definitive answer.

http://www.independent.ie/breaking-news/world-news/middle-east/basra-attacks-down-90-since-british-troops-left-1221511.html

It is obvious to anyone not blinded by neo-con ideology, or greed, that UK and US continued military presence is the main provoker of violence – both in Iraq and elsewhere, including at home. Now the British have left Basra and occupy nothing but the airport, and have entirely reduced their mission to pretending the US is not alone in Iraq, Basra has gone peaceful.

Meantime I see that sleazy fat neo-con slob Aaronovitch – someone should buy that man a picture for his attic – has been chosen by the BBC to “interview” Blair. It is yet another sign of the disgusting propaganda vehicle that the BBC has become, that it allows a leading neo-con pro-war, pro-Zionist and anti-Muslim propagandist to conduct what ought to have been an important interview by a real interviewer. Where is Paxman when you need him?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/17/tonyblair.politicsandthemedia

In response to the half-baked, and frankly dangerous, moves from the British government to increase protection for Iraqi employees and ex-employees, Early Day Motion 2057 has been published in the House of Commons.

“…recognises the courage of Iraqis who have worked alongside British troops and diplomats in Southern Iraq, often saving British lives; notes that many such Iraqis have been targeted for murder by Iraqi militias in Basra, and that an unknown number have already been killed, whilst many others are in hiding; further recognises that many Iraqis who have worked for fewer than 12 months for the UK are threatened by death squads; and therefore calls upon the Prime Minister to meet the UK’s moral obligations by offering resettlement to all Iraqis who are threatened with death for the ‘crime’ of helping British troops and diplomats.”

If you are based in the UK has your MP signed? This is an issue where the common cause of reducing the level of carnage in Iraq should be able to unite voices from across the political spectrum. Further ideas for action are detailed here.

Whether the “Government” of Iraq has any authority in its own country will be tested by the ability to make their banning of Blackwater stick. Most governments might be expected to object to having scores of thousands of foreign mercenaries roaming around their land, threatening the populace and occasionally massacring them.

Over 80% of the money spent by the US on “reconstruction” in Iraq has gone under the heading of “security”, mostly to companies like Blackwater and Aegis, their UK counterpart. The US is now trying to put on pressure by suspending all aid projects until Blackwater is reinstated. As their efforts this last four years have undeniably left Iraqis much worse off than before, they should be told where to get off.

If anyone doesn’t understand how these mercenary companies operate, they should view the infamous “Aegis Trophy Video”, originally put up on Aegis website by their employees as a macabre souvenir. In fact everyone should watch this – and remember this is not a movie, those are real human beings murdered for fun.

http://www.flurl.com/uploaded/Bareknucklepoliticscom_EXCLUSIVE_10122.html

The comment by the ex mercenary under the video is also worth taking in.

I feel terribly sorry for the soldiers who have ended up in this futile war. But for mercenaries I have no time at all. They kill people for money. If they are killed themselves, my sympathy is still there, but strained. One story which went peculiarly quiet was the five mercenaries, four British, from “Garda World” who were kidnapped at end May along with the consultant they were protecting. The kidnap involved over a hundred properly accredited Iraqi security personnel with the right uniforms, documents and weapons. What happened to the mercenaries, and to their client? Why did the whole story get a miniscule percentage of the publicity given routinely to Brit hostages?

The Garda World mercenaries had a peculiar relationship with the MI6 informant and neo-con alcoholic, the Rev Canon Andrew White, quite the strangest creature to come out of the generally admirable Church of England for many years. He left Baghdad shortly after this kidnap. Any connection?

From Amnesty International

The UK, the world’s third largest user of lethal cluster bombs over the last ten years, has renamed one of its two remaining cluster munitions in an effort to beat an expected worldwide ban next year said humanitarian organisations Oxfam, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Landmine Action today.

The move would mean that the Hydra CRV-7 rocket system, which can deliver 171 ‘M73’ bomblets from a helicopter-mounted rocket pod, would remain part of British arsenals.

As recently as 23 November 2006, the government listed the CRV-7 as a cluster munition. But on 16 July this year, just months after it said it would back a worldwide cluster bomb ban, the Government said the CRV-7 was no longer a cluster bomb.

Simon Conway, Director of Landmine Action said:

‘Ten years after it championed a treaty banning landmines the UK has a chance to do the same with cluster bombs – but instead it is spinning a cluster bomb con.

‘This is a deeply cynical move. The UK Government needs to announce an immediate end to the use of these indiscriminate killers.’

US forces used the rocket-delivered M73 ‘bomblets’ in Iraq in 2003. Human Rights Watch reported contamination of unexploded M73 bomblets left behind after the strikes…

From The Times

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil, he says…

Was General Petraeus painting an honest portrait of the US surge in Iraq?

Casualty Monitor takes a look.

via Bloggerheads

Sorry, that was a long break from blogging because of another visit to Ghana on energy projects, an appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival, commitments at Dundee University and agreeing contracts for my next three books. I am also just finishing a play.

The Mail on Sunday is today carrying another one of my blasts.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23410665-details/How+BAE+and+a+rather+mysterious+Labour+peer+get+rich+as+our+troops+die/article.do

As I have said before, I think the Mail deserves great praise for the range of opinion it is prepared to cover, more so than any other British mainstream newspaper. Strangely, the Mail website doesn’t mention who wrote it. You can see the full article from the link, but to whet your appetite:

After the First World War, Stanley Baldwin surveyed the House of Commons of which he was soon to become Conservative Prime Minister. He was filled with disgust, dismissing the MPs as ‘a lot of hard-faced men who looked as though they had done rather well out of the war’.

He had hit upon a universal truth.

To you and me, the Iraq and Afghan wars may look like unmitigated disasters. Hundreds of our young soldiers have died, as have untold thousands of local civilians, but to what end? Even the minority who supported the invasion of Iraq are inclined to agree that the subsequent occupation has been catastrophically handled.

Iraq is more than ever a failed state, with an abysmal decline in the most basic water, energy and health services for the majority of the population. Armed militias control their little fiefdoms, sometimes actually constituting the laughably named Iraqi security services. Nowhere is that more true than in Basra, now controlled from Tehran, while our troops hunker in ditches under mortar fire and take casualties whenever they venture out on patrol.

Last month, for the second time, the Iraqi governor of one of the provinces we had declared secure and ‘handed over’ to Iraqi forces was murdered, almost certainly not by Al Qaeda but by the very warring factions to whom we have handed control.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the drugs warlords we promoted to the Karzai government preside over massively increased opium harvests and busy heroin factories. The United Nations has just announced that this year the opium harvest is up 30 per cent, after a massive 60 per cent increase last year. Heroin production has increased more than tenfold since our invasion, while there are more men in arms against us than at any time since the conflict began.

It is hard to believe anybody can think our policy is a success.

Yet there are those who have indeed, in Baldwin’s biting phrase, ‘done rather well out of the war’. It has been waged at a great cost, not just in young soldiers’ lives but in cash.

When we talk of the vast sums that have been spent ‘ more than ‘250billion by the United States and at least ’30billion by the UK – the eyes tend to glaze over. Strings of noughts, such as those in ‘30,000,000,000, look surreal, but it is very real cash indeed, taken from your pocket and mine. And very little of it goes to the poor bloody infantry, who get pitifully little extra pay for their daily heroism.

Their value in the grand scheme of things was well illustrated this week by the campaign for Ben Parkinson, the 23-year-old Lance Bombardier who lost both legs and sustained permanent brain damage from a landmine last year in Afghanistan. The Government valued the ruin of his life at a pathetic ‘152,150. Parkinson’s mother denounced the compensation as ‘contemptible’, and she was absolutely right.

But his plight neatly illustrates an important truth. Even in the most extreme circumstances, our highly professional servicemen see only a minute fraction of the vast sums of money spent.

More than 90 per cent of it goes to private-sector firms who benefit from war, including arms manufacturers.

The Baldwin quote was pointed out by one of the commenters on an earlier post here, for which thanks. Keep commenting – I can recycle your comments and make money out of you!!!