Tony Blair's Criminality

In the kabuki theater of British parliamentary politics, great crimes do not happen and criminals go free. It is theater after all; the pirouettes matter, not actions taken at remove in distance and culture from their consequences. It is a secure arrangement guarded by cast and critics alike. The farewell speech of one of the most artful, Tony Blair, had "a sense of moral conviction running through it," effused the television presenter Jon Snow, as if Blair’s appeal to kabuki devotees was mystical. That he was a war criminal was irrelevant.
The suppression of Blair’s criminality and that of his administrations is described in Gareth Peirce’s Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice, published in paperback this month by Verso. Peirce is Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyer; her pursuit of infamous miscarriages of justice and justice for the victims of state crimes, such as torture and rendition, is unsurpassed. What is unusual about this accounting of what she calls the "moral and legal pandemonium" in the wake of 9/11 is that, in drawing on the memoirs of Blair and Alistair Campbell, Cabinet minutes and MI6 files, she applies the rule of law to them.
Advocates such as Peirce, Phil Shiner, and Clive Stafford-Smith have ensured the indictment of dominant powers is no longer a taboo. Israel, America’s hitman, is now widely recognized as the world’s most lawless state. The likes of Donald Rumsfeld now avoid countries where the law reaches beyond borders, as does George W. Bush and Blair.
Deploying sinecures of "peace-making" and "development" that allow him to replenish the fortune accumulated since leaving Downing Street, Blair’s jackdaw travels are concentrated on the Gulf sheikhdoms, the US, Israel and safe havens like the small African nation of Rwanda. Since 2007, Blair has made seven visits to Rwanda, where he has access to a private jet supplied by President Paul Kagame. Kagame’s regime, whose opponents have been silenced brutally on trumped-up charges, is "innovative" and a "leader" in Africa, says Blair.

Peirce’s book achieves the impossible on Blair: it shocks. In tracing the "unjustifiable theses, unrestrained belligerence, falsification and wilful illegality" that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she identifies Blair’s assault on Muslims as both criminal and racist. "Human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair’s language a ‘virus’ to be ‘eliminated’ and requiring ‘a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations’." Whole societies were reduced to "splashes of color" on a canvas upon which Labor’s Napoleon would "re-order the world."

The very concept of war was wrenched from its dictionary meaning and became "our values versus theirs." The actual perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, mostly Saudis trained to fly in America, were all but forgotten. Instead, the "splashes of color" were made blood-red – first in Afghanistan, land of the poorest of the poor. No Afghans were members of al-Qaeda; on the contrary, there was mutual resentment. No matter. Once the bombing began on 7 October 2001, tens of thousands of Afghans were punished with starvation as the World Food Program withdrew aid on the cusp of winter. In one stricken village, Bibi Mahru, I witnessed the aftermath of a single Mk82 "precision" bomb’s obliteration of two families, including eight children. "TB," wrote Alistair Campbell, "said they had to know that we would hurt them if they don’t yield up OBL."
The cartoon figure of Campbell was already at work on concocting another threat in Iraq. This "yielded up," according to the MIT Center for International Studies, between 800,000 and 1.3 million deaths: figures that exceed the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the genocide in Rwanda.
And yet, wrote Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiqués reveal no dissent." Interrogation that included torture was on "the express instructions … of government ministers." On 10 January 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed his colleagues that sending British citizens to Guantánamo Bay was "the best way to meet our counter terrorism objective." He rejected "the only alternative of repatriation to the United Kingdom." (Later appointed "justice secretary," Straw suppressed incriminating Cabinet minutes in defiance of the Information Commissioner). On 6 February 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett noted that he was in "no hurry to see any individuals returned to the UK [from Guantánamo]." Three days later, Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw wrote, "We need to do all that we can to avoid the detainees being repatriated to the UK." Not one of the people to which they refer had been charged with anything; most had been sold as bounties to the Americans by Afghan warlords. Peirce describes how Foreign Office officials, prior to an inspection of Guantánamo Bay, "verified" that British prisoners were being "treated humanely" when the opposite was true.
Immersed in its misadventure and lies, listening only to their leader’s crooned "sincerity," the Labor government consulted no one who spoke the truth. Peirce cites one of the most reliable sources, Conflicts Forum, run by the former British intelligence officer Alastair Crooke, who argued that to "isolate and demonize [Islamic] groups that have support on the ground, the perception is reinforced that the west only understands the language of military strength." In wilfully denying this truth, Blair, Campbell and their echoes planted the roots of the 7/7 attacks in London.
Today, another Afghanistan and Iraq beckons in Syria and Iran, perhaps even a world war. Once again, voices such as Crooke’s attempt to explain to a media salivating for " intervention" in Syria that the civil war in that country requires skilled, patient negotiation, not the provocations of the British SAS and the familiar, bought-and-paid-for exiles who ride in Anglo-America’s Trojan Horse. (By J.Pilger)

War Drums Beating !

Michael S. Lofgren wrote: "For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; U.S. elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence which had guided U.S. policy during the cold war, and which the U.S. government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran.

It is curious that the world already has over 100 Islamic bombs: those possessed by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It is even more curious that Pakistan may have had a maximum of 30 to 50 such weapons at the time of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on this country which resulted in a shotgun marriage between Washington and Islamabad. A decade of partnership with the United States netted Pakistan about $20 billion in aid money and at least 50 more nuclear devices; anyone who knows anything about the fungibility of money will conclude that the United States partially funded Pakistan's nuclear buildup, knowingly or not. Pakistan's government has also been credibly linked to sponsorship of terrorist organizations that have operated outside its territory. But Iran, we are told, is different. A window is closing, and it is closing not in two years but in six months. And we had better leap through it before it is too late.

In the past, I have been skeptical about imminent war, e.g., in 2003-06, when the neo-conservative chickenhawks around President Bush were crowing about how "real men want to go to Teheran," meaning somebody else's husband or son should suit up and invade Iran. At the same time Seymour Hersh was churning out articles in the New Yorker about the possibility of an attack on Iran. After about the third article, I began discounting the possibility of war. But present circumstances have a different quality.
During this presidential campaign season, there is on the GOP side the most toxic warmongering political dynamic imaginable: one that makes Bush look like a pacifist in retrospect. President Obama for his part is trying to triangulate à la Bill Clinton between the GOP, a Democratic base that is mostly antiwar but politically ineffectual, Israel, the military-industrial complex, and his polling numbers. Obama may feel he can slide through the next nine months with ever-tightening sanctions and a strategy of tension short of war, but the government of Israel is attempting to force the pace with increasingly hyperbolic predictions. It is also evidently manipulating Congress (e.g., the director of Mossad meeting with the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week). Whether it is sources in Tel Aviv, sources in Washington, or both, that are feeding Iran stories to the U.S. news media is unclear. Whoever they may be, they are playing much of the press -- the Washington Post and CBS News are standout examples -- like a Stradivarius. In Pentagon-speak, this is known as "prepping the psychological battlefield."

No historical analogy is remotely close to being perfect, but in terms of the psychology of the actors, this circumstance resembles the July Crisis of 1914 and the blank check Berlin issued to its client in Vienna. Germany (per Bismarck's previous statecraft) was a sated, status quo world power that would gain nothing by war, regardless of what its neurotic and impetuous Kaiser thought. Its weaker client, Austria, was always fretting about its relative demographic decline amid a hostile Slavic sea -- does that sound familiar? Accordingly, it was constantly egging on Berlin about the "Slavic menace" that was around (and within) Austria's borders. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo was like the Iranian nuclear program -- a red line that the Slavic (read: "Iranian") menace had crossed. Something "had" to be done, and Berlin gave its client a blank check to issue an ultimatum so extreme as to force war, a "preventive" war whose scope snowballed because of an unbroken chain of miscalculations into the First World War.

Fast forward to the present: we have roiling instability in the Middle East because of the Arab Spring (see: Egypt); an unreliable Shiite-run U.S. client state in Iraq; a borderline civil war in Syria; and U.S ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice hectoring two world powers, China and Russia, over their Syria policy (regardless of how heinous the Syrian government's behavior is, it is not obvious that the United States will better secure the future cooperation of two permanent U.N. Security Council members by having its ambassador publicly saying these two powers' votes "disgusted" her. For that matter, how eager will Russia and China be to pull America's chestnuts out of the fire if our brinkmanship over Iran gets us into unforeseen difficulties?). And finally,the U.S. and Iran are reprising the Gulf of Tonkin in the Strait of Hormuz. All these factors compose a a brew potentially so toxic that one would think it would give even the most belligerent chickenhawk pause before quaffing it.

Washington's political class is apparently counting on the short memory of the electorate: it is barely a month and a half since we withdrew the last combat forces from Iraq, and already we have incessant agitation over Iran. America's Iraq adventure took seven years, cost 4,500 U.S. military deaths, likely well over 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, and sent a trillion dollars down the drain. And that one was going to be a cakewalk, remember?"

Another War on the Cheap (Philip Giraldi)

There has been altogether too much stuff in the media lately about how Iran is not really a threat to anyone and how even some prominent Israelis don’t really believe that they have to go to war (or have Washington go to war on their behalf). It was perhaps inevitable that there would be some pushback to again stoke the fires and make the case that Iran is indeed evil incarnate and on the verge of obtaining an apocalyptic weapon.

Not surprisingly, some of the latest pushback comes from the redoubtable Ethan Bronner of The New York Times in his article “Israel Senses Bluffing in Iran’s Threats of Retaliation,” which appeared on the paper’s front page on Jan. 26. Bronner, whose son has served in the Israeli Defense Forces, is the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief and covers much of the Middle East. He lives in Israel, and his objectivity has often been questioned, but the self-proclaimed newspaper of record has refused to consider replacing him with someone less openly tied to Israel and its interests.

As a former intelligence officer, I am acutely aware of how easy it is to create and spread disinformation. Journalists are frail creatures with big egos who want to get an important story that no one else has. What could be better than to get something fresh from a well-placed, unnamed government source? Who cares if it is phony? Bronner, who has been in Israel for four years, is no doubt a confidant of a number of Israeli officials who perceive value in the careful cultivation of a New York Times journalist willing to hew closely to the Netanyahu government’s line. When Mossad sees Bronner walking their way, it’s like Hanukkah coming early.

All of that said, Bronner’s current agenda is clear right from the get-go, as reflected in his apparent endorsement of the view that Iran “has called for Israel’s destruction and … finances and arms militant groups on Israel’s borders.” He reports that “Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism, and sky-high oil prices.” Thanks to Bronner’s report, the whole world can no doubt breathe a sigh of relief. Attacking Iran will produce few or no consequences. And who is telling us that? No less than Israel and The New York Times, one an interested party in minimizing concern over the damage that such a war would cause and the other a newspaper that prints all the news that fits its point of view.

Bronner actually cites one source by name to make his case. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a November speech that “the retaliation [from Iran] would be bearable.” And then Bronner is off to the races with “eight current and recent top Israeli security officials” who are, alas, unnamed. One opines, “Take every scenario of confrontation and attack by Iran…” before delivering his judgment that Tehran having a nuclear weapon would greatly complicate Israel’s possible responses. Excuse me, but even Bronner and his Israeli friend should realize that Iran has not been talking about attacking anyone — the threats to attack have all been coming from the Israeli side for the past five years and more recently from a gaggle of American presidential wannabes. Any “confrontation and attack” by Iran would be retaliation.

And then there is the support provided by the article about to be published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. An advance copy was graciously given to Bronner. The piece argues that the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is a bluff. Bronner does not mention that Tel Aviv University is state-run, and the Institute he cites advertises itself on its own website as having “a strong association with the political and military establishment.” The paper is the work of the former head of military intelligence and the ex-Iran expert from Israel’s National Security Council. So we have government and still more government confirming what the Israeli government itself apparently wants everyone to believe.

Why would Iran not retaliate in the strait? To avoid a confrontation with the U.S. Navy, according to Bronner’s Israeli experts. But what if Iran did not agree with that assessment? Bronner does not go there, but he does cite another think tank, the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Begin-Sadat is government-funded and is based at state-supported Bar-Ilan University. The Center conducts “policy-relevant research on strategic subjects, particularly as they relate to the national security and foreign policy of Israel.” Its non-nonpartisanship is reflected in its current promotion of a “recent important new study by Prof. Haim Gvirtzman, based on previously classified data, [that] refutes Palestinian claims that Israel is denying West Bank Palestinians water rights.” It has also published an article titled “Palestinians: Invented People” by Professor Michael Curtis.

The Begin-Sadat Center obligingly argues that “The threat to Israel of missile warfare is somewhat exaggerated, and public discourse on this issue should reflect realistic assessments. At this stage, missile attacks would be able to inflict only limited physical damage on Israel.” Bronner quotes an anonymous retired official who adds that Iran’s reaction “will be nothing like London during World War II.” That was the German blitz that killed 20,000 Londoners, so it is perhaps reassuring to believe that it will not be like that, but the analysis is based on what Saddam Hussein did in 1991 and the effectiveness of the 4,000 primitive Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah in 2006. The United States and Israel have both been claiming that Hezbollah now has nearly 40,000 rockets and missiles, including sophisticated Grads, that can reach any target in Israel with considerable accuracy, so who is fooling whom?

To be fair to Bronner, he does note here and there along the way in his article that some officials and “experts” disagree with the conclusions he is reporting, but the piece overall seems intended to promote yet another war that can be fought on the cheap. The underlying premises are that Iran can be attacked, that its nuclear program can be seriously damaged, and that Tehran will either not opt to or be unable to retaliate in any meaningful way. And even if it does retaliate, it will not be too bad for Israel, and the United States would be impacted even less.

To say that this is very dangerous thinking would be to understate the case, particularly as Bronner demonstrates that it appears to be what is driving the Netanyahu government. Fear-mongering is the name of the game when citing the underlying concern that Iran might be about to obtain a nuclear weapon and might then be tempted to use it, a “what if” piled on a “maybe” to justify a preemptive war. It is not merely coincidental that Bronner cites Netanyahu’s apparent belief that the so-called Iranian threat is equivalent to “the Nazis who tried to eliminate the Jews.” And the piece concludes with the Israeli prime minister speaking on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, saying, “I want to mention the main lesson of the Holocaust when it comes to our fate. We can only rely on ourselves.”

Someone should remind Bronner that while he is promoting an Israeli viewpoint he is writing for an American newspaper and audience and should address the serious question of what Washington’s options might be if Netanyahu does take action. Israeli self-reliance is a wonderful thing, if only it were true. The United States has been tied hand and foot to Israeli policies and would be drawn inexorably into anything that Tel Aviv starts. The confident assertion that Iran would be unable to retaliate effectively might prove as reliable as the claims made in 2002 that there would be a “cakewalk” in Iraq.

Egypt, Year One !

One year after the fall of Mubarak, the force that was once praised as “the protector of the revolution” has seen a plummeting of popular legitimacy, with Egyptians angered by the SCAF’s impromptu, opaque decision-making, its increasingly brutal tactics and its apparent unwillingness to cede power. Since taking charge of the country, the SCAF has worked to ensure that in any government handover to a civilian authority, it will preserve its own political and economic autonomy and maintain its de facto status as a state within the state. In short: to stop governing Egypt and go back to simply ruling it.
The violence that led to the blinding of Harara was sparked in early November, when Deputy Prime Minister Ali El Selmi proposed a set of “constitutional principles” ahead of Egypt’s parliamentary elections. The Selmi Document, as it became known, gave the SCAF extraordinary powers to intervene in the constitution-writing process, which is tentatively scheduled for completion by May 15 (an impossibly short time, according to many observers). These include the authority to appoint eighty of 100 members of the constituent assembly charged with drafting it, the right to object to certain provisions and the power to appoint an entirely new assembly if a constitution is not drawn up within six months. It also stipulates that the military’s budget remain secret and gives the SCAF exclusive authority to approve any legislation on the army’s internal affairs.

The document caused an uproar, prompting the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by a wide range of parties and activists, to call for a massive protest in Tahrir Square. The demonstration, on November 18, marked a public break by the Muslim Brotherhood from the ruling generals it had thus far cozied up to—an important challenge to the SCAF. But its significance was eclipsed by what happened the next morning when the Central Security Forces, the notorious black-clad riot police used for years by Mubarak, stormed Tahrir to attack a few dozen protesters. Thousands of people descended on the square in solidarity. Downtown Cairo was transformed into a battle zone, the air saturated by a white fog of tear gas. At least forty-two people were killed and more than 3,000 wounded over five days of clashes.
The crackdown was one of the most violent episodes in a year that has seen what Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch describes as “new patterns of violations and an attempt to control the political space.” The military and security forces have engaged in vicious regular assaults on protesters, using live ammunition, rubber bullets, birdshot and astonishing amounts of tear gas. In the most shocking display, the military fired live ammunition into a protest of Coptic Christians and their supporters in October and drove armored personnel carriers at high speeds into the crowd. At least twenty-seven people were killed and about 300 wounded in the single bloodiest day in Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster.
Nearly ninety people have been killed participating in demonstrations in the past three months alone. Protesters under arrest have been severely beaten and sometimes tortured with stun guns. Soldiers have gone so far as to subject several female demonstrators to forced “virginity tests.”
* * *
“I never used to feel scared of protests before the revolution,” says Salma Said, a well-known activist who has been participating in protests for years. “But now, after everything that’s happened, I am very, very scared. Before, there was this idea that there’s some stuff they can’t do, like shoot us. They never did in my lifetime. This happens very casually now.”
The SCAF has also made twin use of a fully compliant state media apparatus to demonize the protest movement and champion official policy while intensifying a crackdown on press freedoms—assaulting journalists, jailing bloggers and raiding TV stations. It has also targeted civil society, most recently by raiding up to ten local and international NGOs.
In the face of increasing levels of state violence and repression, a sustained protest movement has emerged, continuing its calls for change. “It’s turning out to be a much more radical revolution,” says Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent activist and blogger who was jailed for nearly two months by a military court in October. “People want a change that is more fundamental, and they are expressing that in their actions constantly.”

This steady resistance has seen important results. Over the first seven months of SCAF rule, nearly 12,000 civilians were tried in hasty military courts—more than the total number during Mubarak’s thirty-year reign. The trials marked “a huge deterioration in terms of due process rights,” according to Morayef, and activists and human rights lawyers launched a grassroots campaign that catapulted the issue from the margins of the activist community to the center of the political sphere. Today civilians are rarely referred to military courts, though the practice has not been entirely abolished. Activists have also launched a guerrilla media campaign to counter the SCAF’s blanket denials of wanton violence against protesters, setting up portable screens in public spaces across the country to air footage of army abuses.
In the midst of the November unrest, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, in power since March, resigned, only to be replaced by Kamal al-Ganzouri, a 78-year-old who served as prime minister under Mubarak. Hundreds of protesters marched toward Parliament for an indefinite sit-in. But in Tahrir, the protests were largely defused by the start of parliamentary elections on November 28, held in three rounds and lasting more than six weeks. Nevertheless in December, in the middle of the voting process, the military attacked the sit-in—leading to the first sustained street battle involving army soldiers since the revolution. At least seventeen protesters were killed and hundreds were injured. Scenes of soldiers beating protesters made headlines around the world, including the now iconic image of a young woman being dragged and stomped on, her abaya pulled over her head to expose her stomach and bra.
Today, there are four twelve-foot concrete walls blocking Tahrir Square from Parliament, the cabinet and the interior ministry. Erected by the SCAF to put an end to the clashes, the walls have become an emblem of the military’s blunt tactics. “It’s very symbolic of the way they try to solve problems,” Said says. “The walls are the problem, not the solution.”
As parliamentary elections drew to a close in mid-January, the Muslim Brotherhood–led alliance had captured about
45 percent of the seats, while ultraconservative Salafist parties, surprisingly, garnered roughly 25 percent. Liberal parties came in a distant third. The first session of Parliament is scheduled for January 23, two days before the first anniversary of the revolution, and many fear it will be toothless, cutting compromises and allowing the military to return to barracks with its privileges safely enshrined in the new constitution.
“The question is, Will Parliament, the only elected authority we have right now, pick a confrontation with the SCAF?” says Abd El Fattah. “If they choose to remain silent, they will give the military a green light to use even more violence against protesters.”
The SCAF says it will hand over authority to civilians after a presidential vote in June, but protesters are demanding they quit power sooner. On January 14 presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading reform advocate and Nobel Peace laureate, announced his withdrawal from the presidential race—a dramatic move protesting the military council’s failure to put Egypt on a path to democracy. “We feel the former regime did not fall,” ElBaradei said in a statement. “My conscience does not permit me to run for the presidency or any other official position unless it is within a real democracy.”
Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to gather in Tahrir on January 25 to commemorate the revolution that reverberated around the world. This time, the chant that will echo throughout the square is one that has become the revolution’s new clarion call: “Down with military rule!” / With thanks to S.A. Koddous a “Democracy Now” correspondent from Cairo.