Chunky Mark on the Ex-MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove and the Resignation of Ian McNicol

Here’s another great piece from Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver, which he posted yesterday. He comments on the remarks in the Torygraph from the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove. Dearlove was speaking about Jeremy Corbyn’s meeting with a Czech spy, and declared that the Labour leader ‘has questions to answer’. This is part of the continuing attempt to create a ‘Red Scare’ about the Labour party and its leader, comparable to the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ that lost Labour an election in the 1920. The Zinoviev letter was an MI5 forgery, and this is a complete non-story and Tory libel.

Mike’s pointed out that the spy in question was a diplomat. Corbyn met him, just as he met other diplomats and no secrets were passed on. The Czechs, and the academic in charge of their Secret Services library has said they have categorically no evidence that Corbyn ever worked for them, or passed on any secrets at all. And in the week Andrew Neill, who is the former editor of the Sunday Times and the Economist, told his viewers precisely what a load of rubbish it this story is on the Daily Politics.

Corbyn is threatening to sue for libel. Gavin Williamson, the Tory apparatchik who repeated in a Tweet, is trying to backtrack without giving Corbyn the apology or money to charity that he demanded.

But the bug-eyed slander-merchants of the Torygraph are still carrying on with it.

Chunky Mark makes the point that Dearlove himself is hardly reliable, because he was involved in the concoction of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ that served to bring us into Blair’s illegal and murderous war in Iraq. And he’s repeating the libel that Corbyn handed secrets over to a Commie spy, simply because he hates and fears him.

He also comments on the resignation of Ian McNicol, the Labour Party chief, who presided over the massively unjust suspension and expulsion of tens of thousands of Labour members, because they had the audacity to vote for Corbyn rather than endorse the preferred Blairite Thatcherite entryists. Chunky Mark says that we shouldn’t celebrate his departure, because this is a man who poured his life and blood into the Labour party. Before going on to say precisely why we should. One of those he expelled was a trade unionist. She committed the terrible offence of saying that she ‘f***ing loved Dave Grohl’ in a post she put up about the Foo Fighters. This apparently brought her union and the Labour party into disrespect. Actually, considering the fruity language on the internet, I’m surprised anyone even noticed, let along took offence.

So McNicol’s walked, and hopefully we’ll get a better, fairer person in to do his job. Hopefully.

The redoubtable Tony Greenstein, anti-racist, anti-Fascist and very definitely not an anti-Semite, put up a post yesterday commenting on McNicol’s departure, with the restrained title ‘Rejoice – The Witch is Dead – Crooked McNicol Rides No More’. He gives further information on McNicol’s resignation. Apparently he was given his marching orders on Tuesday. Greenstein also points out that this is just the beginning of making the Labour party’s bureaucracy more just.

But this does give up to everyone libelled, smeared and unfairly expelled, simply for their opposition to the Blairites and their wretched neoliberalism.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/rejoice-witch-is-dead-crooked-mcnicol.html

Spokesman Pamphlets on Blair, the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ and the Iraq Invasion

Spokesman, as you’d expect from an organisation that’s part of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, also publishes a couple of pamphlets on Tony Blair and the Iraq invasion. One is The Dodgiest Dossier, whose blurb states

This publication brings together for the first time all the leaked memoranda about the British Government’s decision to go to war on Iraq, plus the Attorney General’s legal advice.

You can read the full text of the revealing memorandum about preparations for war on Iraq, dating from July 2002, (which) was leaked to the press in the days before the 2005 General Election.

That’s 80 pages in lengths.

Rather shorter is Ken Coates’ Not Fit to Be a Prime Minister? That Interview and a Commentary by Ken Coates. The blurb for this states

In September 2007, John Humphrys interviewed Prime Minister Blair at length about his decision to go to war on Iraq. In his inimitable way, the Today presenter said:

‘If your judgement is wrong on this – let me put this very bluntly, you wouldn’t be fit to be Prime Minister …’

Ken Coates provides a commentary on the facts that underlie this memorable exchange.

Blair’s judgement was wrong – horrifically, catastrophically wrong, and Humphrys, for all his other faults, was right: Blair wasn’t fit to be prime minister. I don’t know how useful these pamphlets will be, considering the new information available and the Chilcott Inquiry’s report, which states very clearly that Blair misled parliament in order to get the war he wanted. They do show that at the time there was considerable scepticism about the war and the spurious pretext on which it was founded.

CounterPunch on British Spies’ Recruitment of Islamist Fighters against Syria

On April 5 CounterPunch posted an article on their blog examining the number of Islamist extremists, who the British intelligence agencies had tried to recruit, including a number, who had then been caught travelling to Syria. They concluded that there are very strong reasons for believing that the spooks are trying to recruitment them as part of a strategy to overturn Assad’s regime.

The article begins by noting that British intelligence was responsible for the ‘dodgy dossier’, the spurious intelligence document claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which provided the pretext for Blair to join Bush’s invasion. They then note that 500 British citizens have gone to Syria, 50 of whom have subsequently been killed in fighting. They then discuss the individual cases of those who have been approached by the spooks. These include:

Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of Lee Rigby;

Three sisters from Bradford, who decamped to Syria. It seems they had been contacted by NECTU, the North East Counter Terrorism Unit, who had actively encouraged them to go to Syria to contact their brother, who was already there;

Mozzam Begg, who claimed MI5 had given him permission to train recruits for Syria;

Aimen Dean, who in Radio 4 interview claimed he had been recruited by MI6. Part of his duties included training impressionable Muslims to fight in Syria;

Bherlin Gildo, who had been intercepted travelling from Copenhagen to Manila to attend a terrorist training camp. His trial at the Old Bailey collapsed when it became apparent that if it carried on, it would lead to embarrassing revelations about Britain’s spies;

Siddharta Dhar, who was caught trying to travel to Syria for the sixth time. The intelligence services had also attempted to recruit him;

And the original ‘Jihadi John’, Mohammed Emwazi, was also known to the British intelligence service, who had also tried to recruit him.

They conclude:

These cases demonstrate a couple of irrefutable points. Firstly, the claim that the security services would have needed more power and resources to have prevented these abscondances is clearly not true. Since 1995, the Home Office has operated what it calls a ‘Warnings Index’: a list of people ‘of interest’ to any branch of government, who will then be ‘flagged up’ should they attempt to leave the country. Given that every single one of these cases was well known to the authorities, the Home Office had, for whatever reason, decided either not to put them on the Warnings Index, or to ignore their attempts to leave the country when they were duly flagged up. That is, the government decided not to use the powers already at its disposal to prevent those at the most extreme risk of joining the Syrian insurgency from doing so.

Secondly, these cases show that British intelligence and security clearly prioritise recruitment of violent so-called Islamists over disruption of their activities. The question is – what exactly are they recruiting them for?

At his trial, Bherlin Gildo’s lawyers provided detailed evidence that the British government itself had been arming and training the very groups that Gildo was being prosecuted for supporting. Indeed, Britain has been one of the most active and vocal supporters of the anti-government insurgency in Syria since its inception, support which continued undiminished even after the sectarian leadership and direction of the insurgency was privately admitted by Western intelligence agencies in 2012. Even today, with ISIS clearly the main beneficiaries of the country’s destabilization, and Al Qaeda increasingly hegemonic over the other anti-government forces, David Cameron continues to openly ally himself with the insurgency.

Is it really such a far-fetched idea that the British state, openly supporting a sectarian war against the Ba’athist government in Syria, might also be willfully facilitating the flow of British fighters to join this war? Britain’s long history of collusion with sectarian paramilitaries as a tool of foreign policy – in Ireland, Afghanistan and throughout the Gulf – certainly suggests this may be so.

Go to their article at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/05/british-collusion-with-sectarian-violence-in-syria/ for further information.

As for the reasons why the British government should want to overthrow Assad, my guess is that a number of them are about the geopolitics of the Middle East, as well as the Neo-Con, Neo-Lib urge to get their hands on the Syrian state’s assets and then sell them off, just as they did to Iraq. Assad’s regime is Ba’ath, which is secular, Arab nationalist and Socialist. They’re allied with the Russians and, although the country has not been in military conflict with Israel for some time, technically it is still at war. And oil may still be a priority, due to the proximity to several pipelines. On several of the American Conservative blogs after the Iraq invasion there were demands for the war to be expanded to oust Assad. My guess is that Britain is covertly following this policy by arming and supporting Islamist fighters.

If this is the case, then there’s a huge irony here. Islamists bitterly hate the state of Israel, and yet if they are being recruited by the West to overthrow Assad, they are being so as part of a strategy to defend Israel from a nation that has supported the Palestinians. Which should be a good reason for any prospective jihadi to think better of it and stay at home. As well as not becoming a murderous thug, whose organisations have done nothing but spread brutality, chaos and murder amongst the already beleaguered and suffering people of the Arab and Muslim world.

The Young Turks on Report Showing Iraq Invasion Based on Lies

This is a piece from The Young Turks on a recently declassified report from the intelligence committee for the Joint Chiefs of Staff showing that instead of the confident knowledge the Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, the result was the complete opposite. Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and Bush himself stated that they were absolutely certain that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and that they were only a few months away from developing nuclear bombs. They also claimed that the Iraqis also possessed the missiles to drop these bombs on Israel.

This report shows that instead of secure knowledge, Bush’s administration was profoundly ignorant whether Hussein really did pose a threat. The report states that they didn’t know how much they didn’t know. In some areas of Hussein’s weapons programme, they admitted that they had zero knowledge, while in others the information could go up to about 75 per cent. The report’s compilers admit that in some areas the report was based on 90 per cent uncertainty. They had very little information on Hussein’s chemical weapons. Furthermore, the report stated that the Iraqis did not have the precursors for a sustained chemical weapon attack. As for biological weapons, the report states they had no information on their whereabouts or the regime’s capabilities regarding the various stages in their manufacture. They also had little or no information regarding their nuclear weapons programme. And the report states that Hussein did not have long range missiles. In other words, there was absolutely no danger of him nuking Israel, despite Rice’s statement that the first information they would have about the Iraqi nuclear threat might be a mushroom cloud.

Cenk Uygur states that this report is damning. The invasion of Iraq was based on lies. The only fact to come out of it that might partially exonerate Bush himself, is a statement from one of the intelligence staff responsible for the report. When he was asked whether the report would have been sent to Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney to pass on to the president, he said, ‘That’s the last place it would have gone.’ The generals did not want Bush to know the truth, as they wanted war.

And in Britain Tony Blair’s regime also lied with the ‘dodgy dossier’ and ‘sexed up reports’. The results have been millions of dead and displaced Iraqis, the emergence of ISIS, and the destabilisation of almost the entire Middle East. But the American military wanted war anyway.

I think Ozzy Osbourne sang about this kind of affair in Black Sabbath’s War Pigs.

‘Generals gathering in their masses
Just like witches at Black Masses’.

Bush is a liar, but Ozzy still rocks.

Louise Mensch and American Republicans Demand War with Iran

Mike over at Vox Political has this piece reporting an article in the Canary commenting on the latest frenzy of sabre-rattling and jingoism from former Tory MP and full-time airhead motormouth, Louise Mensch: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/01/15/this-renowned-tory-wants-to-blunder-into-full-blown-war-with-iran/. Yesterday, an American ship strayed into Iranian waters and was duly captured. Its crew were later released. According to the Canary, the American military ain’t bothered by the incident. They’ve said it was a genuine mistake. So, from their point of view, it’s ‘My bad, no problem, guys!’

This isn’t good enough for the Repugs by far, and the usual suspects have worked themselves into a frenzy demanding Obama bomb them back into the Stone Age. The pro-war party naturally includes the usual recidivists like Tom Cruz. Cruz is almost as bad as Trump in his hatred of Muslims, but it more concealed about it. And in some of his proposed policies, he’s actually worse. He also has absolute no clue about affairs in the Middle East. He got very huffy with a group of Middle Eastern Christians he was addressing a few years ago, when they responded very badly when he started telling them they should support Israel. He really didn’t know that, although they’re Christians, the people to whom he was talking were also the indigenous peoples of the Middle East, Arabs and Assyrians. They share the comment resentment towards Israel across the Middle East as a modern settler state. Moreover, Christian Palestinians in Israel are monitored and have suffered discrimination by the Israeli authorities. They’ve also been attacked by their Muslim compatriots as collaborators. So the Christian population of the Holy Land has declined from about 25 per cent to 1 per cent.

As for attacking Iran, this would be a monumentally bad move. The article in the Canary, to which Mike’s piece is linked, list a number of very good reasons why attacking Iran would be a very bad idea. Not least is the fact that any attack in Iran would be countered by more military force and determination than the other campaigns in the Middle East, and would result in a nightmarish war would that would last for many, many years.

Iran is the Shi’a state, and so is the leader and protector of region’s Shi’a Muslims. Any attack on Iran would provoke the rest of the Shi’a into hostilities against America. The result would be that America and the West would end up fighting everyone in the Middle East, with the Israel and Turkey. As Shi’a, the Iranians are also the enemies of al-Qaeda and ISIS, who under the command of the Saudis have targeted and massacred Shi’a in Iraq and Syria as ‘rejectionist heathens’. By attacking Iran, America would be deliberately alienating and provoking a potentially useful ally.

Of course, the Republicans also hate Obama for what they consider to be his betrayal of America by signing a deal on nuclear power with Iran. If you listen to them, Obama has allowed the Iranians to develop nuclear missiles. A year or two ago they were running ads against the President’s negotiations with the Iranians, frightening Americans with pictures of America suffering a nuclear attack. In reality, Obama’s deal has actually ended any Iranian programme to develop a nuclear weapon, while still leaving them space for the peaceful development of nuclear power.

This is particularly a blow to Netanyahu, who was also trying to scare everybody with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, using pretty much the same scare tactics that were used in the ‘dodgy dossier’ about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes. Netanyahu claimed that Iran was only a year away from building an atomic bomb. This was absolute rubbish, and senior Israeli generals and intelligence officers said so.

Netanyahu would like a war with Iran, because of the Iranian regime’s poisonous hatred of Israeli and its very ostentatious support for the Palestinians. The American Republicans publicly share these sentiments. But the reality is more likely it’s another, grubby attempt to nick their oil. Back in the 1950s, the Americans and Britain overthrew the Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadeq, after he dared nationalise the Iranian oil industry. This meant the seizure of the property of Anglo-Persian Oil, now BP. The oil industry was renationalised by the Iranians, who have made the date of this a national holiday. And while Iran is keen to sell its oil and other industrial products, it won’t allow foreigners to invest or own Iranian industry.

This has driven the plutocrats berserk. Forbe’s has place the country very high up in its list of countries lacking ‘commercial freedom’. Which seems to mean in their case, countries that won’t allow mega-rich multinationals to buy up their firms.

This is the real reason Cruz and the other Republicans want a war with Iran. It’s about more than American pride and jingoism, though that’s also one of the powerful drivers. It’s about more than defending Israel. It’s the same reason America and his poodle, Bliar, invaded Iraq: oil, and the seizure and looting of whatever industries and companies Haliburton and the rest of the American multinationals think worth getting their mitts on.

Bush at the beginning of the Iraq invasion convinced himself and his fellow Neocons that somehow, the American and western forces would be hailed as liberators by the Iraqi people. As events have shown, that has manifestly failed to occur. The result has been a further destabilisation of the country, along with the radicalisation that has spawned ISIS. The same would happen again if America went to war with Iran.

Like Iraq, Iran is a mosaic of different ethnic minorities. 51 per cent of the population speak Farsi, modern Persian. Other ethnic groups include Kurds, Various Turkic-speaking peoples, peoples speaking languages related to Persian, and Arabs in the West of the country. The Kurds have been fighting a war with the Iranian government to have their own, autonomous homeland since the 1970s. There have also been jihads by the Turkish peoples, after the government began seizing their land to give to Farsi speakers. If central government in Tehran was shattered, the result could be another bloody mess of ethnic conflict and cleansing such as has occurred in Iraq.

And all so that big oil can get its hands on yet another country’s supplies.

Cruz and co. are ignorant stooges for the big corporations. Mensch is also, though in this case I wonder if some of it’s the result of all the E she was trying to get her colleagues to take when she was a shop assistant in the 1980s. These people have nothing to offer the world except more blood, pain and suffering, all so that big business can once again boost their profits.

They should never be allowed anywhere near public office. Boot them out.