Bushlies Cause Main Ally, Britain, Embarassment

Bushlies have caused us all embarrassment, if not worse!

By David Connett
Sunday, 6 July 2008

GETTY

'David Miliband persistently gave me the brush-off, saying we could rely on US assurances': Andy Tyrie, Conservative MP on the Foreign Secretary

MPs are to launch an investigation into US activities on Diego Garcia after accusing Washington of lying about extraordinary rendition flights from the British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean. They described false assurances given by the US about its use of Diego Garcia for the controversial flights as "deplorable".

Following one of the strongest British condemnations of the US rendition policy, by which terror suspects are sent overseas for interrogation, the influential Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) plans to scrutinise Whitehall's supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from there.

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was forced to apologise to the Commons in February after it was revealed that two US "extraordinary rendition" flights had landed on UK territory in 2002. Britain had previously been told that no such flights had passed through its territory.

His apology came after the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, admitted that two suspects had been on flights to Guantanamo Bay and Morocco in 2002 that had stopped to refuel on Diego Garcia. In a report published today, the MPs conclude that it is "deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the US administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK government inadvertently misleading our select committee and the House of Commons."

Andy Tyrie, a Tory MP, welcomed the report last night. Mr Tyrie, chair of the parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, said: "In October 2007, I started asking questions about Diego Garcia. I was very concerned that Britain and British territory could have become complicit in America's programme of extraordinary rendition, whereby people have been kidnapped around the world and taken to places where they may be maltreated or tortured. The Foreign Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He said we could rely on US assurances. My allegations were correct. The Foreign Secretary's brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace."

He continued: "We must get to the bottom of British involvement in rendition. The Foreign Secretary's latest attempt to do so is wholly inadequate. We must have confidence that the US has not been using our airports to service their planes to or from a rendition, but the Foreign Secretary has refused to even ask the Americans if this is the case. This is yet another issue on which a weak and indecisive Prime Minister should have given leadership."

The FAC said the Government should also do more to support exiled inhabitants who were forcibly removed from Diego Garcia and adjoining islands when the US established a military base there.

In addition, it called for a public inquiry into allegations of official corruption in the Turks and Caicos islands, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean. MPs who visited the islands described the allegations as "very serious", saying they had experienced "a palpable climate of fear" while there, and warning they would take action against anyone who tried to intimidate witnesses who had spoken to them.

They also demanded evidence from the Foreign Office that it was fully investigating allegations of corruption in Bermuda and Anguilla, accusing the Foreign Office of being "too hands-off" in its administration of overseas territories.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Brit Judge Steps In It.

Apparently our cousins across the pond and Bush's partners in crime, in the British government, know less about freedom of speech than we do.

Send the damned memo to us, we'll publish it!

Gagging Order as Two Are Jailed for Leaking Blair-Bush Memo
By Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian UK
Friday 11 May 2007


Judge bans disclosure of defendant's comment.• Whitehall man handed "deterrent" sentence.

An Old Bailey judge yesterday imposed gagging orders on the media after jailing a civil servant and a Labour MP's researcher for disclosing the minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair and George Bush about Iraq.

Mr Justice Aikens prevented journalists from publishing a comment by David Keogh, a Whitehall communications officer, on what the minutes revealed, even though it was said in open court. He also said that allegations already in the public domain could not be repeated if there was any suggestion they related to the contents of the document.

The Guardian and other media organisations immediately said they intended to appeal against the orders. The judge suggested that the allegations could be "recycled," but only if they were published on a separate page of a newspaper from that containing references to the trial. Foreign newspapers, including those in the US, are not bound by the contempt orders.

At one point in argument in court, Anthony Hudson, counsel for the Guardian, Times and BBC, said the media would be in a "ridiculous" situation. He said the judge was making a "serious intrusion" into the media's rights of freedom of expression.

The restrictions were imposed after the judge jailed Keogh, 50, for six months in what he called a "deterrent sentence". On Wednesday, an Old Bailey jury by majority verdict convicted him of breaching the Official Secrets Act. The judge said the document about the meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Bush in the White House in April 2004 which the civil servant had disclosed was "highly sensitive" and contained information passed from the US to Britain.

In evidence at the trial, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the prime minister's top foreign policy adviser, said private talks between world leaders must remain confidential however illegal or morally abhorrent aspects of their discussions might be.

The judge said yesterday that Keogh had decided to disclose the document to Leo O'Connor, researcher to the then anti-war Labour MP for Northampton South, Anthony Clarke. The idea was that its contents would be raised in the Commons and also passed to John Kerry, the then Democratic presidential candidate in the US. Keogh believed the document exposed Mr Bush as a "madman," the court heard.

O'Connor, 44, was jailed for three months for passing the document to Mr Clarke. The judge said that while it was accepted that the disclosure of the document caused "no actual damage", it posed a significant risk to British interests abroad. Journalists and the public were barred from the court when evidence about the contents of the four-page document was heard during the three-week trial.

The judge also ordered Keogh to pay £5,000 of the £35,000 prosecution costs. He told him: "You decided that you did not like what you saw. Without consulting anyone, you decided on your own that it was in the best interest of the UK that this letter should be disclosed. Your reckless and irresponsible action in disclosing this letter when you had no right to could have cost the lives of British citizens. This disclosure was a gross breach of trust of your position as a crown servant."

After the sentencing, Keogh's solicitor, Stuart Jeffery, said: "He took a moral stance on something that he found shocking and has to accept the decision of the court as far as his guilt is concerned. It was never his intention to put lives at risk. He would state rather that it was his intention to save innocent lives." Mr Jeffery said he would be looking at avenues of appeal.

A spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition condemned the prison sentences, adding: "While not a single government minister has been held to account for the disastrous policy of war in Iraq, two men are imprisoned for trying simply trying to shed some light on Tony Blair's relationship with George Bush."

He added: "The prison sentences are another sign of the double standards perpetrated in relation to the war."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Nations of The World! Gather Up Your Neocons, Throw Them On The Fire!

This will require of, Americans. an honest search of their own pet political parties.

Anyone who believes that the Neoconservative agenda exists only in America and only in the Republican party is a damn fool.


Americans are sick of the unrepentant arrogance of this elite.

But the realisation has come at a very heavy cost
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Friday May 11, 2007
The Guardian

Now and again people have found themselves in places where the course of history was dramatically changed: Paris in 1789, Petrograd in 1917, Berlin in 1989. Sometimes the feeling of momentous change is illusory. When Tony Blair won his first election 10 years ago, perfectly sane people proclaimed that "these are revolutionary times". As most of us realised long before his ignominious departure, that was just what they weren't.

And yet to visit the US at present, as I have done, is to experience an overwhelming sensation of drastic impending change. It's not merely that President Bush, to whom Blair so disastrously tethered himself, is "in office but not in power". Most Americans can't wait for him to go, Congress is beyond his control, and the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, has told him that the war in Iraq is lost - for which statement of the obvious Reid was accused of "defeatism" by the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Besides that the portents range from Paul Wolfowitz's travails at the World Bank to the Senate interrogation of Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, and the trial of Conrad Black. This might sound like the "succession of small disasters, oh trifling in themselves", in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On ("a Foreign Secretary's sudden attack of dysentery at the funeral of George V, an American ambassador found strangled in his own gym-slip...") And yet there really is an observable pattern.

Along with the collapse of Bush's authority, all these episodes are connected to the great disaster in Iraq. And all illustrate the hubristic, impenitent arrogance of the people who have been guiding America's destiny - as well as ours, alas - for the past six years. What one senses so acutely are the conditions building for a political perfect storm, which will engulf and destroy the whole neoconservative project.

In Washington I took part in a debate with Christopher Hitchens, my old sparring partner and drinking companion (mots justes, all of them), who supports Bush with a defiance worthy of a better cause. He surpassed himself by insisting that his friend Wolfowitz is a wronged man. A World Bank committee reportedly disagrees, and has found that Wolfowitz did violate the bank's rules in the matter of his lady friend's salary.

But in any case everyone else in Washington says the same thing: Wolfowitz cannot survive. His appointment was widely resented in the first place - the German, French, Dutch and Scandinavian governments have warned that they might withhold funds if he stays in office; and severe damage is being done to the organisation he claims to have at heart by his refusal to accept reality.

Then again, detachment from reality is perhaps to be expected from one of the architects of the war, a man who thought that the Iraqis would rise up to greet the American army as liberators. As the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said, Wolfowitz and his cabal "do not seem to understand that being president of the World Bank is a privilege, not an entitlement".

Gonzales was just a Texan hack lawyer who acted as Bush's consigliere, but he made his contribution to the great enterprise when he ruled that torture could be justified in the "war on terror". His Senate hearing provided a little comic relief, what with his acute amnesia followed by the deathless admission that "I now understand there was a conversation with myself and the president". One day Blair may understand that there was a conversation between himself and the president about the invasion of Iraq, and that his commitment to the war took place much earlier than he has ever admitted.

While Lord Black has never worked for the Bush administration, he was aligned with the neocon elite through the National Interest, the journal he used to publish, and he brought some of its members, such as Richard Perle, on to the board of his companies. Perle seems to have taken his fiduciary duties as lightly as he and his colleagues took the problems that would arise in Iraq as a result of the invasion. What has struck me about Black's trial was that we were hearing another version of the arrogance and denial we have heard from Wolfowitz and many others. It will give me no particular pleasure if my former employer is banged up, but his downfall is another grave blow for the neocons.

All of which has vital implications for British politics. Nicolas Sarkozy has been called "an American neoconservative with a French passport", which he is not. But Blair really is an American neoconservative with a British passport. He revealingly and accurately said that "there isn't a world of difference" between himself and the neocons politically, and his party must now, as it shakes off the burden of these past years, ask itself what, in that case, he was doing as Labour leader.

The Tories have questions of their own. Even the stupidest have grasped that the war and the American alliance are unpopular with the electorate, but they should now ask if sceptical, pragmatic Conservatism ever had anything in common with neoconservatism and its vast revolutionary scheme. One who did understand is Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP. Before the 2004 presidential election he said he wanted Bush re-elected: his presidency was halfway through an "experiment whose importance is almost literally earth-shattering" and should be played out to its inevitable failure.

But that failure must be demonstrated beyond contradiction. "The theory that liberal values and a capitalist system can be spread across the world by force of arms... should be tested to destruction ... The president and his neoconservative court should be offered all the rope they need to hang themselves."

His wish has come true; neocons are dangling all around us. In a flicker of self-knowledge, Wolfowitz told a recent World Bank meeting: "I understand that I've lost a lot of trust, and I want to build that trust back up." But it's too late, for him and all the other courtiers. They never really enjoyed the trust of most Europeans, let alone Africans and Asians, and they have now lost the trust of the American people.

All the readings on the barometer and the wind gauge say the same thing. The perfect storm is gathering. Unfortunately the collapse of the neocon project comes at a very heavy cost, not only to the people of Iraq but to all of us.

· Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of Yo, Blair! wheaty@compuserve.com


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Everybody Knew!

Envoys 'warned of Iraq invasion nightmare'

By David Blair, Diplomatic Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:04am BST 02/05/2007

Every British ambassador in the Middle East warned the Government that invading Iraq would be a "nightmare" and turn popular opinion against the West, a former envoy has told The Daily Telegraph.

Sir Ivor Roberts: warnings

Sir Ivor Roberts, now the president of Trinity College, Oxford, saw a selection of the telegrams sent by Britain's envoys in the Middle East when he served as ambassador to Ireland before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

As Britain and America massed their forces on Iraq's borders, these telegrams to the Foreign Office contained the ambassadors' considered advice on the wisdom and likely consequences of going to war. Some were circulated to every British envoy in the European Union and reached Sir Ivor's desk in Dublin.

To the best of his memory, the assessments offered by Britain's representatives in the Muslim world were unanimous. "Every ambassador in a Middle East post accurately predicted what a nightmare invading Iraq would be," he said.

"The telegrams I saw were full of doom and gloom about the consequences."

Sir Ivor did not "check them off one by one", but believes that every ambassador "from the Arab world or the Muslim world was anticipating how disastrously it would play in their countries at both public and government levels".

Sir Ivor did not see all the secret telegrams emerging from Britain's embassies in the Middle East. But British ambassadors in EU countries were on the Foreign Office circulation list for "quite a large amount of traffic".

Sir Ivor, who retired last year, called for an official inquiry into the war in Iraq. "How we landed up in this mess is going to be the subject of a long inquiry, I hope," he said.

After leaving Dublin in 2003, Sir Ivor served as ambassador to Italy and once described President George W Bush as "al-Qa'eda's best recruiting sergeant". He retired last year with a blistering valedictory telegram, saying the Foreign Office was gripped by "management speak" amounting to "bullshit bingo".

Sir Ivor, 60, stands by his key criticisms of his former employer. He believes the Foreign Office is obsessed by management at the expense of diplomacy and policy-making. This has helped the Prime Minister and his Downing Street advisers to assume much of its former role.

"There are now 34 separate reviews being undertaken at the Foreign Office. There are skills audits, capability reviews, zero-based accounting reviews and so on," said Sir Ivor. "Apart from being deeply demoralising and unsettling for Foreign Office staff, the same staff cannot be expected to focus on crucial policy questions, like how we clear up the mess in Iraq."

He added: "It's rather odd that outside the UK, British diplomacy is highly admired and we seem to be spending our time dismantling it faster than anyone can imitate us."

At the end of his career, Sir Ivor ended one hallowed tradition. Until last year, departing British ambassadors would always send a valedictory telegram to the Foreign Office. Under an equally hallowed tradition, these missives would often be leaked.

After extracts from Sir Ivor's last telegram were published, Sir Peter Ricketts, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, ruled that no further valedictory dispatches would be allowed.

Sir Ivor said that his criticisms of the Foreign Office had won praise from "every corner of the organisation".

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

A British View of the Nightmare

Iraq's death toll is far worse than our leaders admit

The US and Britain have triggered an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide By Les RobertsOn both sides of the Atlantic, a process of spinning science is preventing a serious discussion about the state of affairs in Iraq. 02/14/07 "The Independent" -- --

The government in Iraq claimed last month that since the 2003 invasion between 40,000 and 50,000 violent deaths have occurred. Few have pointed out the absurdity of this statement.

There are three ways we know it is a gross underestimate. First, if it were true, including suicides, South Africa, Colombia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia have experienced higher violent death rates than Iraq over the past four years. If true, many North and South American cities and Sub-Saharan Africa have had a similar murder rate to that claimed in Iraq.

For those of us who have been in Iraq, the suggestion that New Orleans is more violent seems simply ridiculous.Secondly, there have to be at least 120,000 and probably 140,000 deaths per year from natural causes in a country with the population of Iraq. The numerous stories we hear about overflowing morgues, the need for new cemeteries and new body collection brigades are not consistent with a 10 per cent rise in death rate above the baseline.

And finally, there was a study, peer-reviewed and published in The Lancet, Europe's most prestigious medical journal, which put the death toll at 650,000 as of last July. The study, which I co-authored, was done by the standard cluster approach used by the UN to estimate mortality in dozens of countries each year. While the findings are imprecise, the lower range of possibilities suggested that the Iraq government was at least downplaying the number of dead by a factor of 10.

There are several reasons why the governments involved in this conflict have been able to confuse the issue of Iraqi deaths. Our Lancet report involved sampling and statistical analysis, which is rather dry reading. Media reports always miss most deaths in times of war, so the estimate by the media-based monitoring system,

Iraqbodycount.org (IBC) roughly corresponds with the Iraq government's figures. Repeated evaluations of deaths identified from sources independent of the press and the Ministry of Health show the IBC listing to be less than 10 per cent complete, but because it matches the reports of the governments involved, it is easily referenced.

Several other estimates have placed the death toll far higher than the Iraqi government estimates, but those have received less press attention. When in 2005, a UN survey reported that 90 per cent of violent attacks in Scotland were not recorded by the police, no one, not even the police, disputed this finding. Representative surveys are the next best thing to a census for counting deaths, and nowhere but Iraq have partial tallies from morgues and hospitals been given such credence when representative survey results are available.

The Pentagon will not release information about deaths induced or amounts of weaponry used in Iraq.

On 9 January of this year, the embedded Fox News reporter Brit Hume went along for an air attack, and we learned that at least 25 targets were bombed that day with almost no reports of the damage appearing in the press.Saddam Hussein's surveillance network, which only captured one third of all deaths before the invasion, has certainly deteriorated even further. During last July, there were numerous televised clashes in Anbar, yet the system recorded exactly zero violent deaths from the province.

The last Minister of Health to honestly assess the surveillance network, Dr Ala'din Alwan, admitted that it was not reporting from most of the country by August 2004. He was sacked months later after, among other things, reports appeared based on the limited government data suggesting that most violent deaths were associated with coalition forces.

The consequences of downplaying the number of deaths in Iraq are profound for both the UK and the US. How can the Americans have a surge of troops to secure the population and promise success when the coalition cannot measure the level of security to within a factor of 10? How can the US and Britain pretend they understand the level of resentment in Iraq if they are not sure if, on average, one in 80 families have lost a household member, or one in seven, as our study suggests?

If these two countries have triggered an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide, and have actively worked to mask this fact, how will they credibly be able to criticise Sudan or Zimbabwe or the next government that kills thousands of its own people?

For longer than the US has been a nation, Britain has pushed us at our worst of moments to do the right thing. That time has come again with regard to Iraq. It is wrong to be the junior partner in an endeavour rigged to deny the next death induced, and to have spokespeople effectively respond to that death with disinterest and denial.Our nations' leaders are collectively expressing belligerence at a time when the populace knows they should be expressing contrition. If that cannot be corrected, Britain should end its role in this deteriorating misadventure.

It is unlikely that any historians will record the occupation of Iraq in a favourable light. Britain followed the Americans into this débâcle. Wouldn't it be better to let history record that Britain led them out?

The writer is an Associate Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health © 2007 Independent News and Media Limited


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.