Blair’s Iraq war lies ‘based on taxi driver’s gossip’


This video says about itself:

This is a video highlighting the propaganda and lies told by the Bush administration in order to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

These lies included :

- Iraq supported Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups
- Iraq was developing nuclear weapons
- Iraq had huge quantities of chemical and biological weapons
- Iraq had a fleet of unmanned vehicles to deliver these weapons
- Iraq has failed to destroy its chemical and biological weapons
- Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Africa
- Iraq was amassing these weapons to use against the USA and its allies
- The US security services knew where these weapons were
- The insurgency would be short lived
- The US military were wrong about the number of troops required and Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney knew best

There were plenty of others …

Next, quotes from the British Conservative party. Which supported the Iraq war, based on the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Published in the London Times. Owned by Rupert Murdoch, who, before the Iraq war started, did more than anyone else to ram pro-war lies down people’s throats.

December 8, 2009

Gossiping taxi driver source of Iraq 45-minute WMD claim

Michael Evans, Defence Editor

An Iraqi taxi driver who overheard two military commanders talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was allegedly the “intelligence sub-source” quoted in the Government’s dossier to prove that chemical missiles could be fired in 45 minutes, according to a report by a Tory MP.

Adam Holloway, a former army officer and Conservative MP for Gravesham, told The Times last night that he had been given information that the taxi driver’s recollections of the conversation in the back of his taxi had helped to form part of the dossier. The controversial dossier was published in September 2002 and supported the Government’s case for invading Iraq the following March.

When the information was acquired by MI6, a footnote was written on the page of an intelligence report sent to No 10 stating that the claim was “verifiably inaccurate”. “But the footnote was ignored by Downing Street,” Mr Holloway claimed.

During the review of intelligence behind the Government’s case for invading Iraq, carried out by Lord Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary, it was revealed that MI6 had accepted that some of the sources and subsources of information in the dossier were regarded as no longer credible.

Mr Holloway said that one of the sub-sources was the taxi driver who had eavesdropped on Iraqi military officers while they chatted in his car two years before the invasion.

The Butler report was scathing about the way in which the intelligence was used in the dossier but absolved Tony Blair’s Government of deliberately misleading the public about Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Holloway claimed that the taxi driver had fed his information to an MI6 source — a senior Iraqi military officer. The information was then presented to Downing Street for inclusion in the dossier, heavily footnoted to indicate its lack of credibility.

The claim that Saddam could fire chemical weapons at British troops in Cyprus at 45 minutes’ notice was one of the most controversial components of the 2002 dossier. The Butler report said that the Government should have made clear that the weapons were battlefield systems, not missiles that could have been targeted at the United Kingdom. …

The allegations are due to be published in a report on the Iraq war by Mr Holloway on a website called www.firstdefence.org. …

Mr Holloway says that pressure was put on MI6 to come up with intelligence after Mr Blair met President George W Bush in Texas in April 2002. The Chilcot inquiry has heard that this was the meeting at which a plan for Iraq was first discussed.

In his report The Failure of British Political and Military Leadership in Iraq, Mr Holloway writes: “Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, SIS [MI6] were squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all.”

See also in another Conservative paper, here.

Boris Johnson has received a formal letter of warning after using public money for party political purposes after using his official mayoral Twitter account to celebrate the fact that the Sun had ditched Labour and decided to back the Tories: here.

Blair informed Iraq had been disarmed, still invaded: here.

Iraq Inquiry blog: here.

Tony Blair and Iraqi WMD, cartoon by Steve Bell

The Iraq war inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot has cut the live video feed of evidence from a former senior British diplomat because “sensitive” information was mentioned: here.

JUST before Jack Straw appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday, he released a 25-page memorandum which explained that his decision to support the Iraq war was the hardest of his life: here.

A little-known loophole in UK company law is being used by Tony Blair to keep his finances secret, the Guardian can disclose: here.

NATO kills Afghan civilians again


This video is called Alarming rise in Afghan civilian casualties – 9 March 09.

From British daily The Morning Star today:

NATO strike kills 12 civilians

Afghanistan: The government said on Tuesday that NATO forces killed 12 civilians in an overnight strike on “militants” in the east.

Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said that the civilians had been killed when NATO forces went after a Taliban operative in Laghman province.

Hundreds of residents took to the streets in protest at the incident.

See also here. And here.

Labour MP Paul Flynn challenged ministers on Tuesday to explain why 100 British soldiers have died this year in Afghanistan protecting “corrupt thief” president Karzai and his cronies: here.

British Anti-War Military Families go to Downing Street, here.

Europe’s oldest dinosaur feather discovered


Translated from DPA news agency in Germany:

Oldest dinosaur feather in Europe discovered

Stuttgart – It is just eight millimeter long, but a big sensation: a 150 million years old dinosaur feather, found by a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Stuttgart, in the Swabian Alb.

Whether it belongs to a Archaeopteryx or a previously unknown feathered dinosaur is still unclear, the museum said on Tuesday in Stuttgart. A comparison with the feather, so far considered the oldest, of the Solnhofen Limestone Archaeopteryx, does not tell much, paleontologist Günther Schweigert daid. “Because that was a wing feather, and this one is a body feather.”

The new artifact comes from the Solnhofen Nusplinger – a true paradise for paleontologists. …

More than 350 different species of animals and plants from the Jurassic have already been found in the lagoon deposits.

So far, the feather of a Archaeopteryx from Solnhofen in Bavaria, found in 1861, was considered the world’s oldest. However, the chalk predominating in Swabia is about 500 000 years older than Solnhofen. Thus, the Swabian specimen is Europe’s oldest. Perhaps it is also the world’s oldest: only in the last few months, feathered dinosaurs have been found in China, said to be 158 million years old. “However, the data there are very incomplete”, Schweigert says.

Pinochet’s murder of Chilean Christian Democrat Frei


This video is called The Crimes of Pinochet – Chile.

From the BBC:

Chile judge charges six over ex-president’s 1982 death

Mr Frei Montalva was president from 1964 to 1970

A Chilean judge has charged six people over the death in 1982 of the country’s ex-President, Eduardo Frei Montalva.

The judge said there was now evidence that Mr Frei, a vocal critic of military leader Augusto Pinochet, had been poisoned in hospital.

The arrests come less than a week before Chile‘s presidential election, in which Mr Frei’s son, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, is a leading candidate.

The former president’s family have long argued he was murdered.

Mr Frei Montalva died after undergoing routine surgery.

The six people charged in connection with the alleged killing include four doctors – two who were involved in the operation and two in the subsequent post mortem.

At the time, the authorities said the former leader had died of a bacterial infection.

“The death of the former president came about as a result of the gradual introduction into his system of unusual, toxic substances… which broke down his immune system,” Judge Alejandro Madrid said as he announced the charges.

See also here.

Although the initial results of the Chilean elections appear to show strong support for right-wing candidate Sebastian Pinera, the real news of this election is that for the first time since the coup in 1973 the Chilean Communist Party has achieved parliamentary representation: here. And here.

Chile’s president has apologised to the descendants of a group of indigenous people who were kidnapped and exibited as “curiosities” in Europe during the 1880s: here.

Conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera has won the presidential election in Chile, a result likely to swing the country the right and increase tensions across Latin America: here.

Nikolas Kozloff: Chile’s Presidential Election and Future of South American Left: here.