Category Archives: War Crimes and Criminals
Current British premier David Cameron praised Lady Thatcher for having “saved Britain” and for making the has-been colonial power “great again”.
Tributes poured forth from French and German leaders, Francoise Hollande and Angela Merkel, while US President Barack Obama said America had lost a “special friend”.
Former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev also lamented the loss of “an historic world figure”. Polish ex-president Lech Walesa hailed Margaret Thatcher for having brought down the Soviet Union and Communism.
Such fulsome praise may be expected coming from so many war criminals. But it is instructive of how history is written by the victors and criminals in high office. Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel should all be arraigned and prosecuted for war crimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Mali, among other places. Kissinger has long evaded justice for over four decades for his role in the US genocide in Southeast Asia during the so-called Vietnam War in which over three million people were obliterated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
The British state is to give Thatcher, who died this week aged 87, a full military-honours funeral. The praise, eulogies, wreaths and ceremonies are all self-indictments of association with one of the most ruthless and criminal political figures in modern times.
So, here is a people’s history of Thatcher’s legacy.
She will be remembered for colluding with the most reactionary elements of Rupert Murdoch’s squalid media empire to launch a war over the Malvinas Islands in 1982, a war that caused hundreds of lives and involved the gratuitous sinking of an Argentine warship, the Belgrano,
by a British submarine.
By declaring war, rather than conducting political negotiations with Argentina over Britain’s ongoing colonial possession of the Malvinas, Thatcher salvaged her waning public support in Britain, and the bloodletting helped catapult her into a second term of office in Downing Street. Her political “greatness” that so many Western leaders now eulogize was therefore paid in part by the lives of Argentine and British soldiers, and by bequeathing an ongoing source of conflict in the South Atlantic.
It wasn’t just foreigners that Thatcher declared war on. Armed with her snake-oil economic policies of privatisation, deregulation, unleashing finance capitalism, pump-priming the rich with tax awards subsidised by the ordinary working population, Thatcher declared war on the British people themselves. She famously proclaimed that “there was no such thing as society” and went on to oversee an explosion in the gap between rich and poor and the demolition of social conditions in Britain. That legacy has been amplified by both successive Conservative and Labour governments and is central to today’s social meltdown in Britain – more than two decades after Thatcher resigned. Laughably, David Cameron, a protégé of Thatcher, claims that she “saved” Britain. The truth is Thatcher accelerated the sinking of British capitalism and society at large. What she ordered for the Belgrano has in a very real way come to be realised for British society at large.
During her second term of office in the mid-1980s, the Iron Lady declared war on the “enemy within”. She was referring to Britain’s strongly unionised coal-mining industry. Imagine declaring war on your own population. That is a measure of her pathological intolerance towards others who did not happen to share her obnoxious ideological views – ideological views that have since become exposed as intellectually and morally bankrupt.
For over a year around 1984, her Orwellian mindset and policies starved mining communities in the North of England into submission. Her use of paramilitary police violence also broke the resolve and legitimate rights of these communities. Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill would later be vindicated in the eyes of ordinary people, if not in the eyes of the mainstream media. Britain’s coalmines were systematically shut down, thousands of workers would be made unemployed, and entire communities were thrown on the social scrap heap. All this violence and misery was the price for Thatcher’s ideological war against working people and their political rights.
The class war that Thatcher unleashed in Britain is still raging. The rich have become richer, the poor decidedly more numerous and poorer. The decimation of workers’ rights and the unfettered power given to finance capital were hallmarks of Thatcher’s legacy and are to this day hallmarks of Britain’s current social decay. But that destructive legacy goes well beyond Britain. The rightwing nihilistic capitalism that Thatcher gave vent to was and became a zeitgeist for North America, Europe and globally. The economic malaise that is currently plaguing the world can be traced directly to such ideologues as Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan.
A final word on Thatcher’s real legacy, as opposed to the fakery from fellow war criminals, is her role in Ireland’s conflict. Her epitaph of “Iron Lady” is often said with admiration or even sneaking regard for her supposed virtues of determination and strength. In truth, her “iron” character was simply malevolent, as can be seen from her policies towards the Irish struggle for independence from Britain. In 1981, 10 Irish republican prisoners, led by a young Belfast man by the name of Bobby Sands, died from hunger strikes. The men died after more than 50 days of refusing prison food because they were demanding to be treated as political prisoners, not as criminals. Thatcher refused to yield to their demands, denouncing them as criminals and callously claiming that they “took their own lives”. No matter that Bobby Sands had been elected by tens of thousands of Irish voters to the British House of Parliament during his hunger strike. He was merely a criminal who deserved to die, according to the cold, unfeeling Thatcher.
As a result of Thatcher’s intransigence to negotiate Irish rights, the violence in the North of Ireland would escalate over the next decade, claiming thousands of lives. As with Las Malvinas dispute with Argentina, Thatcher deliberately took the military option and, with that, countless lives, rather than engage in reasoned, mutual dialogue. Her arrogance and obduracy blinded her to any other possibility.
As the violence gyrated in Ireland, Thatcher would also embrace the criminal policy of colluding with pro-British death squads. Armed,funded and directed by British intelligence, these death squads would in subsequent years kill hundreds of innocent people – with the knowledge and tacit approval of Lady Thatcher. It was a policy of British state terrorism in action, sanctioned by Thatcher. One of those victims was Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane, who was murdered in February 1989. He was shot 12 times in the head in front of his wife and children by a British death squad, after the killers smashed their way into the Finucane home on a Sunday afternoon.
Thus whether in her dealings with Las Malvinas row with Argentina, the British working people or Irish republicans, Margaret Thatcher was an intolerant militarist who always resorted to demagoguery, violence and starvation to get her political way. She was a criminal fascist who is
now proclaimed to be a national hero.
Reports this week say that Thatcher died with Alzheimer’s, the brain-degenerating disease in which the patient loses their faculty for memory. Western leaders, it seems, would also like to erase public memory of Thatcher’s criminal legacy.
Jewish hasbara bodies aiding and abetting Israeli crimes must face the full force of the law
By Nureddin Sabir
Editor, Redress Information & Analysis
The world of Jewish politics is so back to front and upside down that, when it comes to Israel, bad is good and wrong is right.
That is the sad fact of which we need to remind Israel flag wavers, such as failed US politician Katrina Lantos Swett, who from time to time rear their heads to bleat “anti-Semitism” and decry the “deligitimization of Israel”, which they blame for allegedly rising anti-Jewish sentiment.
On 5 April the Times of Israel reported that a Jewish organization in Melbourne, Australia, could face expulsion from the country’s Jewish umbrella body for launching a campaign that calls for the boycott of products from West Bank settlements.
These settlements – colonies and squatter camps, in fact – are illegal under international law and, with their rapid expansion under successive Israeli governments, both of the left and the right, are terminally undermining any prospect of a two-state solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Boycott settlements call
The Australian campaign “Don’t Buy from the Settlements” was launched on 26 March by the Melbourne-based Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS) with the aim of encouraging Australian Jews to avoid buying products made in Jewish colonies and squatter camps located in the Palestinian territories occupied after the 1967 war.
In a media release published on its website, the AJDS said:
Israeli settlements are seen around the world as a major obstacle to creating peace between Israelis and Palestinians. One way to take a stand against the harm they create is not to buy the products they produce. This sends a clear message that we will not be complicit in the settlement programme.
According to Jordy Silverstein, an executive member of the AJDS:
Not buying products from settlements will not work on its own, but it is one small step that we can take. When we add in the possibility of sharing knowledge about what the settlements mean and what they do … we can work alongside Palestinians, Israelis and people throughout the diasporas to create an exciting, liberating future.
However, this principled stance of the AJDS quickly prompted Australia’s Israel hasbara (propaganda) groups to gang up against it. For them, anything short of total, unconditional support for Israel, its illegal occupation and colonization of Arab territories, its war crimes and its crimes against humanity is tantamount to treason.
Orgy of Jewish solidarity with Israel
So, first came the umbrella Jewish organization, the Zionist Federation of Australia, which described the call for boycott as “immoral” and “repugnant”.
Then came the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, which consists of more than 50 Jewish organizations in the state. Its president, Nina Bassat, touted the idea of expelling the AJDS for having the audacity to call for action against Israeli criminality.
Bassat was joined in this orgy of Jewish tribal solidarity with the racist Israeli state by Peter Wertheim, of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who also called for the AJDS to be expelled from Australia’s Jewish umbrella body.
“The AJDS campaign is repugnant to the strong anti-BDS policies of every Jewish communal roof body in Australia,” he bleated, referring to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, “and to the ECAJ [Executive Council of Australian Jewry] platform of support for Israel and its legitimacy as the state of the Jewish people”.
“Anti-Semitism” and support for Israel
If there is indeed a rise in anti-Jewish sentiment anywhere in the world, then to find the cause look no further than the above-mentioned types of frenzied Jewish defence of Israeli crimes.
There is a strong case for nurturing a worldwide culture at grassroots level that promotes international legality and opposes crimes committed or sponsored by states. As a first step towards this, it is necessary to bring to account groups and individuals that support criminal actions committed or sponsored by states.
Just as in most civilized countries there are laws against aiding, abetting and glorifying terrorism, and against crimes such as rape and drugs trafficking, so there should also be laws that proscribe supporting or glorifying state crimes.
If neo-Nazis and Nazi holocaust deniers can be prosecuted in Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe, so should organizations that support Israeli crimes also be prosecuted, whether in Australia or anywhere else, for aiding, abetting and/or glorifying Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.
During the presentation by Ivanov data was shared which shows that 820 tons of heroin makes its way into Europe and Russia every year. Most of it is trafficked through the unstable Middle East and Africa as is part of the 994 tons of cocaine that is consumed in the U.S. and Europe.
“… First, there is no impartial intervention. Entering the conflict is to take sides. Ronald Reagan, 241 Marines, and 17 American embassy personnel learned that lesson in Lebanon in 1983. Washington had proclaimed its commitment to peace by aiding one force in a multi-sided civil war. By becoming a de facto combatant the administration turned Americans into targets. Aiding Syria’s opposition means becoming a participant in that conflict.
Paradoxically, aiding the resistance could drive some Syrians who desire a negotiated solution toward the government. The Financial Times recently reported: “As the civil war becomes ever dirtier, rebels’ actions are starting to mirror those of the regime.” In fact, opposition fighters increasingly kill regime soldiers and supporters, and have turned to crime, including kidnapping, to raise funds.
Second, there is no magic elixir that combines riskless intervention with speedy conquest. In Libya the allies provided the rebels with air support, but only enough to drag out the conflict for five months, during which time thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of Libyans died. By being prudent and cost-conscious the allies were not humanitarian, their professed objective….”
The 9/11 attacks were criminal acts intended as reprisals for American-sponsored oppression in the Middle East
Anti-war campaigners gathered in Trafalgar Sqaure on April 1, 2009 to protest against the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The protest, organised by the Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was part of a day of protests in advance of tomorrows G20 summit in London. The protest began outside the US Embassy and then marched through Central London to Trafalgar Square. (Photo: Simon Kimber)
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
The U.S. Global Strangulation of Iran has nothing to do in the short or intermediate terms with any fear Iran will get a nuclear weapon. American intelligence and former heads of Israel’s Mossad agree with the international assessment that there is no evidence Iran is now trying to produce nuclear weapons or that they could do so in less than several to ten years if they tried to do so. There is also nearly universal agreement among serious analysts, including U.S. intelligence sources going back many years, that attacking Iran would likely lead to severe cuts in oil supplies from the Persian Gulf that would produce a severe shock to the global economy, especially in this time of financial crisis. This does not mean Obama or the entire U.S. leadership at the top is going insane or trying to destroy the U.S. Empire. There is a “method to this seeming madness,” a very clear grand strategic goal involved in these constant threats and attacks on Iran. The general goal is to save the U.S. Empire and its domination and exploitation of the world to stop the accelerating decline and disintegration of the Empire and the American financial system and economy. The specific goal of all the attacks on Iran is to stop the rise of the Iranian-Shia superpower in the Middle East and its rapidly growing alliance with Islamist Sunni powers growing across North Africa, the Middle East, South Central and Central Asia. Iran is also the core leader in the growing alliance of Shia and Islamist Sunnis with the vast nations of Russia, India and China against the U.S. Empire’s energy and dollar imperialism. all of this makes Iran and its allies a mortal threat to the U.S. global empire and the present U.S. financial system tied to that empire. this is why the U.S. is taking such desperate risks to try to strangle Iran and to destroy its central position in this anti-American imperialism coalition that is growing rapidly. Iran and its Shia Allies across the whole Middle East are a very real threat to the U.S. Global Empire’s domination and exploitation of this whole vast region. That Iranian superpower Shia bloc’s rapidly growing alliance with Islamist Sunnis makes Iran the core of a very grave threat to the U.S. global empire which I believe has already developed far enough to prevent the U.S. from continuing its imperialist suppression of muslim nations with totalitarian, puppet regimes and the use of those to exploit this vast region. But I think these would be temporary set-backs for Iran and its great alliance of nations lining up against the U.S. Empire. I think the world sees the Giant is crippled severely by its losing wars, by the decline of the U.S. economy relative to the rising nations around the world, the so-called BRICKS, though one must add another I to that for Iran [in addition to India] – BRICKS, and The Great Global Financial Crisis the U.S. produced and is making worse and worse with vast help from its puppets in the EU and elsewhere, as even the “liberal” Brookings Institute just reported on the basis of global indices they analyze.
By attacking Iran and all of the Shia and Islamist Sunni nations allying more and more closely with Iran, most obviously Syria right now, the U.S. is in fact turning the vast Muslim World of nearly one and a half billion mostly young and very fertile people and much of the rest of the world against its brutal Empire.
This desperate grand strategy has, therefore, put the existence of the U.S. empire and of the U.S. financial system dependent on it at grave risk. at the very least, the U.S. is “going for broke” – “playing for all the marbles” – in its blatantly brutal, imperialistic strangulation of Iran and now some of its allies such as Syria.
The U.S. destroyed the Sunni block to the rise of Shia Iran as a Super Power in the Middle East when it destroyed Hussein’s Iraqi military machine, which the U.S. had earlier secretly supported in Iraq’s vast invasion of Iran [which led to the defeat of Iraq and the U.S.] Sunni Iraq was the only major block to the rise of the Shia as a Super Power at the heart of the Middle East. When the U.S. also installed a totalitarian Shia military power in Iraq which from the beginning was quietly allied with their brother Shia in Iran [where many of the new rulers of Iraq had lived for many years to escape Hussein's secret police], the new, rising Shia Super Alliance of Iran and Iraq became a huge military power of 100,000,000 mostly young people who loathe the U.S. and control more oil and gas than the Saudi Arabian and UAE puppets of the U.S. Iran was by then already building its Super Alliance with Syria, Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, an Alliance at the very heart of the Arab World and the Middle East. That alliance grew very rapidly after Hizbollah defeated Israel and drove them out of Lebanon for the second time.
Beginning over a year ago the U.S. puppet Sunni regimes across North Africa started falling to popular revolutions against the puppets and, above all, against the U.S. Empire which replaced the U.K. and French Empires that had oppressed them earlier. The revolutions are still going on in almost every U.S. Sunni puppet nation, but in almost all of them the people are winning their revolutions and moving steadily into a new age of Islamist governments which are in fact very anti-American and becoming more so as the U.S. allys itself more and more openly with the most hated totalitarian regimes, such as the Egyptian Army. the absurd, monarchical and pseudo-democratic tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen and a few others.
From the beginning of these new Sunni Islamist movements and governments, the Iranians and their Shia allies have allied themselves more and more with the Sunni Islamists, based largely on their common loathing of the Great Satan – the U.S. – and the terrorist threat it poses to all of them. Turkey has not had an Islamist revolution, but the Sunni Islamists are taking over more and more in Turkey and becoming more and more Islamist, more and more anti-American and more and more quietly allied with the Iranians and the rising Sunni Islamists.
At the same time the U.S. was enraging the people of the Middle East against itself, the U.S. was enraging the Afghans and Pakistanis in the same way only more virulently with its terrorist murders and raids everywhere. The hearts and minds of nearly 200,000,000 Afghans and Pakistanis are now virulently anti-American. Though they are not yet allied with the rising Iranian Super Alliance, they are becoming more friend;y and will almost certainly find more and more common causes against the U.S. as the U.S. and its European [Nato] puppets flee the rising power of the Islamist guerilla armies. The U.S. has lost its terrorist war against Afghanistan and Pakistan and pushed them closer and closer to both iran and china, and even to some degree india and russia, to counter-balance the u.s. in its final desperate war against the world.
All of these vast developments are being hidden from the American and European peoples as much as possible by vast propaganda Media Wars against Iran and its grand global alliance against the U.S. But intelligent leaders around the world see the U.S. is desperate and is losing and even in Latin America the few remaining puppet regimes of the U.S. Empire, notably Mexico and Colombia, are turning more and more against the U .S. even in full public view. This happened just this weekend in Cartagena, Colombia, where Obama and his motley crowd of Key Stone Cop “security guards” were publicly humiliated by the still partially puppet regime of Colombia which needs vast U.S. military help in oppressing the peasants of the North for the vastly rich landowning families of the South. All 30 Latin Leaders there opposed even a future meeting of this sort with the U.S. without the U.S. allowing Cuba to attend and almost all insist as well on an end for support of the U.K. puppet regime’s claims to the Falklands off the coast of Argentina. Hugo Chavez, the elected president of Venezuela, was not even there because he is getting more cancer treatment in Cuba [not Miami]. He is more and more an ally of Iran, as is even Brazil on crucial matters like opposition to Dollar Imperialism and Inflation Thievery. Had he and his few very close allies from Latin America, Ecuador and Nicaragua, been there, the anti-American thrust would have been even greater. As it is, the Cartagena police wound up mortally embarrassing the Secret Key Stone Cops, the U.S. Army and Obama by taking U.S. security guards into custody over refusal to pay a prostitution bill for servicing rendered. Obama et al were made a laughing stock in a way that never happened before when these terrorized nations were ruled by oppressed puppet regimes. [Like Congressman Issa, I think these were SOP activities which led to police custody and massive public exposure for the first time. The U.S. Empire is losing its grip even on still dependent puppets.]
The U.S. has gotten very desperate in the Middle East. It is not only risking a cut off of oil by Iran over the U.S. strangulation of Iran, but the U.S. is now more and more openly involved in supporting the Sunni revolt against Syria and the Sunni oppression of Shia revolt against Bahrain by Saudia Arabia, the only major U.S. puppet left in the Middle East and a tyrannical monarchy loathed by the whole vast region and its own population [as far as we can tell in such an extremely closed police state].
It is always possible the U.S. will realize it is risking its entire Empire in this grand strategy, or that Iran will buckle under the strangulation pressures and retreat, or an Iranian ally like Syria will start a war inadvertently with another, more important ally, Sunni Turkey, that might reverse the growing great alliance. Maybe the U.S. will become more wise in its mix of sticks and carrots in dealing with Iran.
I think the U.S. is desperately fighting its last great imperial war against the world. I think the U.S. will lose this WAR and destroy its Empire and its global financial system. Obama has become the Undertaker of the U.S. Global Empire and, if he and his desperate strategists keep attacking the world, he will be the Undertaker of the U.S. as it now exists. By all indications, they will continue to destroy the U.S. unless some greater power, perhaps a Great Awakening of the American people who would prefer not to be impoverished or torn apart by the Obama Undertaker Strategy.
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
The U.S. Global Strangulation of Iran has nothing to do in the short or intermediate terms with any fear Iran will get a nuclear weapon. American intelligence and former heads of Israel’s Mossad agree with the international assessment that there is no evidence Iran is now trying to produce nuclear weapons or that they could do so in less than several to ten years if they tried to do so. There is also nearly universal agreement among serious analysts, including U.S. intelligence sources going back many years, that attacking Iran would likely lead to severe cuts in oil supplies from the Persian Gulf that would produce a severe shock to the global economy, especially in this time of financial crisis.
This does not mean Obama or the entire U.S. leadership at the top is going insane or trying to destroy the U.S. Empire. There is a “method to this seeming madness,” a very clear grand strategic goal involved in these constant threats and attacks on Iran. The general goal is to save the U.S. Empire and its domination and exploitation of the world to stop the accelerating decline and disintegration of the Empire and the American financial system and economy. The specific goal of all the attacks on Iran is to stop the rise of the Iranian-Shia superpower in the Middle East and its rapidly growing alliance with Islamist Sunni powers growing across North Africa, the Middle East, South Central and Central Asia.
Iran is also the core leader in the growing alliance of Shia and Islamist Sunnis with the vast nations of Russia, India and China against the U.S. Empire’s energy and dollar imperialism.
all of this makes Iran and its allies a mortal threat to the U.S. global empire and the present U.S. financial system tied to that empire. this is why the U.S. is taking such desperate risks to try to strangle Iran and to destroy its central position in this anti-American imperialism coalition that is growing rapidly.
Iran and its Shia Allies across the whole Middle East are a very real threat to the U.S. Global Empire’s domination and exploitation of this whole vast region. That Iranian superpower Shia bloc’s rapidly growing alliance with Islamist Sunnis makes Iran the core of a very grave threat to the U.S. global empire which I believe has already developed far enough to prevent the U.S. from continuing its imperialist suppression of muslim nations with totalitarian, puppet regimes and the use of those to exploit this vast region.
But I think these would be temporary set-backs for Iran and its great alliance of nations lining up against the U.S. Empire. I think the world sees the Giant is crippled severely by its losing wars, by the decline of the U.S. economy relative to the rising nations around the world, the so-called BRICKS, though one must add another I to that for Iran [in addition to India] – BRICKS, and The Great Global Financial Crisis the U.S. produced and is making worse and worse with vast help from its puppets in the EU and elsewhere, as even the “liberal” Brookings Institute just reported on the basis of global indices they analyze.
by Rania Khalek on March 20, 2013
The United States may be finished dropping bombs on Iraq, but Iraqi bodies will be dealing with the consequences for generations to come in the form of birth defects, mysterious illnesses and skyrocketing cancer rates.
Al Jazeera’s Dahr Jamail reports that contamination from U.S. weapons, particularly Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions, has led to an Iraqi health crisis of epic proportions. “[C]hildren being born with two heads, children born with only one eye, multiple tumours, disfiguring facial and body deformities, and complex nervous system problems,” are just some of the congenital birth defects being linked to military-related pollution.
In certain Iraqi cities, the health consequences are significantly worse than those seen in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Japan at the end of WWII.
The highest rates are in the city of Fallujah, which underwent two massive US bombing campaigns in 2004. Though the U.S. initially denied it, officials later admitted using white phosphorous. In addition, U.S. and British forces unleashed an estimated 2,000 tons of depleted uranium ammunitions in populated Iraqi cities in 2003.
DU, a chemically toxic heavy metal produced in nuclear waste, is used in weapons due to its ability to pierce through armor. That’s why the US and UK were among a handful of nations (France and Israel) who in December refused to sign an international agreement to limit its use, insisting DU is not harmful, science be damned. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s refusal to release details about where DU munitions were fired has made it difficult to clean up.
Today, 14.7 percent of Fallujah’s babies are born with a birth defect, 14 times the documented rate in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fallujah’s babies have also experienced heart defects 13 times the European rate and nervous system defects 33 times that of Europe. That comes on top of a 12-fold rise in childhood cancer rates since 2004. Furthermore, the male-to-female birth ratio is now 86 boys for every 100 girls, indicating genetic damage that affects males more than females.
(On a side note, these pictures are rather sanitized compared to other even more difficult to look at images. See here if you can bear it.)
If Fallujah is the Iraqi Hiroshima, then Basra is its Nagasaki.
According to a study published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, a professional journal based in the southwestern German city of Heidelberg, there was a sevenfold increase in the number of birth defects in Basra between 1994 and 2003.
According to the Heidelberg study, the concentration of lead in the milk teeth of sick children from Basra was almost three times as high as comparable values in areas where there was no fighting.
In addition, never before has such a high rate of neural tube defects (“open back”) been recorded in babies as in Basra, and the rate continues to rise. According to the study, the number of hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”) cases among new-borns is six times as high in Basra as it is in the United States.
This isn’t isolated to Fallujah and Basra. The overall Iraqi cancer rate has also skyrocketed:
Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.
As Grist’s Susie Cagle points out, “That’s potentially a more than 4,000 percent increase in the cancer rate, making it more than 500 percent higher than the cancer rate in the U.S.“
Dr. Mozghan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told Jamail that “These observations collectively suggest an extraordinary public health emergency in Iraq. Such a crisis requires urgent multifaceted international action to prevent further damage to public health.”
Instead, the international community, including the nation most responsible for the health crisis (hint: it starts with a “U” and ends with an “S”), is mostly ignoring the problem.
To make matters worse, Iraq’s healthcare system, which was once the envy of the region, is virtually nonexistent due to the mass exodus of Iraq’s medical doctors since 2003. According to recent estimates, there are currently fewer than 100 psychiatrists and 20,0000 physicians serving a population of 31 million Iraqis.
Dahr Jamail was on Democracy Now this morning discussing the horrific effects of military-related pollution in Iraq:
Yanar Mohammad, President of the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq was also on Democracy Now and addressed the toxic legacy of birth defects in Iraq. (I interviewed Mohammed for a piece I wrote for Muftah about the deterioration of Iraqi women’s rights since the invasion, which you can read here.)
If they had a scintilla of decency, Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and John Scarlett would not show their faces in public again
Ten years ago today, American and British tanks stormed across the border of Kuwait into Iraq, precipitating a torrent of violence which has since cost more than 100,000 Iraqi and Allied lives.
We, the British people, were told by our leader Tony Blair that the invasion was indispensable to Britain’s national security because Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction which could be used against us.
Soon after Western forces reached Baghdad, it became plain that no such weapons existed.
Moreover, it also emerged that the Prime Minister had assured President George Bush of Britain’s armed support in deposing Saddam Hussein, well ahead of the WMD claims, because he wished to assist the Americans in doing what he considered a good deed in the world.
Blair’s trusted henchman, Alastair Campbell, colluded with John Scarlett, chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, to produce a document which afterwards proved to be a mass of falsehoods, offering ‘evidence’ of the case for war.
|Alastair Campbell (left), colluded with John Scarlett,
chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, to produce a
document which has proved to be a mass of falsehoods,
offering ‘evidence’ of the case for war
All three men thus committed what seems to some of us a heinous political crime. They concocted a false manifesto to justify taking Britain to war, with the loss of 179 British servicemen’s lives.
Yet a decade on, not only are those responsible walking the streets of London as free men, but they are without shame.
Blair said this week on BBC’s Newsnight that he does not regret the war. ‘If we hadn’t removed Saddam from power, just think, for example, what would be happening if these Arab revolutions were continuing and Saddam, who’s probably 20 times as bad as Assad in Syria, was trying to suppress an uprising in Iraq.’
|Blair, Campbell and Scarlett thus committed what seems to some of us a heinous political crime. They concocted a false manifesto to justify taking Britain to war, with the loss of 179 British servicemen’s lives|
I feel passionate because I was among those duped by the WMD claims.
Before 2003 I wrote many times in these pages that Britain should have nothing to do with a recklessly irresponsible American Republican adventure in Iraq. But then I read the government’s report on Saddam’s weapons. I felt that this had to be believed, and an invasion reluctantly supported.
My wife Penny, who never swallowed Blair and Campbell’s claims, argued bitterly with me. I said pompously: ‘It’s impossible that the Government and the Secret Intelligence Service would lie to us about something this big.’
I was as wrong as I could be. Blair, Campbell and Scarlett made fools of many of us.
What seems to make it all much worse is that they got away with it.
Scarlett, whom Campbell described to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War as ‘a mate’, was discredited as an intelligence officer by his role in the scandal. He was the professional spook who processed the material he and Downing Street then served up to the nation. He formed an unholy partnership with his political masters.
When it was all over, however, instead of posting him to Ulan Bator as he deserved, Blair rewarded Scarlett’s misconduct by making him director of the Secret Intelligence Service.
Much of the secret service was thoroughly unhappy about the appointment. But the Prime Minister used his power, and Scarlett served his term. Not only that, but having retired from the SIS, he now serves as an ‘independent director’ of The Times newspaper, a role in which Vladimir Putin would be more credible.
Campbell, meanwhile, has become the darling of the BBC, forever a guest on its chat shows and invited to air his views on news programmes as if he was an elder statesman rather than spinmaster of the most mendacious government of modern times.
Campbell’s off-camera behaviour, as a foul-mouthed bully, was brilliantly captured in the political satire The Thick Of It. But the man himself is nowadays welcomed into studios as if he was a national treasure.
Why have we lost our capacity for anger? I suspect that much of the public is content to forgive these people not from Christian charity, but because it does not care much about anything any more.
I spoke at a dinner last week at which a guest asked me how I would behave if Tony Blair walked in. There was obvious surprise and even disbelief when I said that I would decline to shake his hand.
But I meant what I said. It seems outrageous the former Prime Minister is travelling the world, collecting tens of millions of pounds in consultancy and speaking fees, masquerading black-comically as a Middle East ‘peace envoy’, while in Iraq the killing goes on and on. Yet Blair still insists the invasion was a splendid idea.
Amazingly, David Cameron has invited him into Downing Street to give advice — no doubt about how to persuade the British people that we should get stuck into Syria.
Most of Blair’s former Cabinet colleagues, by contrast, have distanced themselves to some degree from the war. John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister in 2003, said this month that the Iraq invasion ‘cannot be justified’ and offered a bizarre excuse for his support at the time — that he thought George Bush had a plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Prescott was, of course, the Blair government’s resident buffoon rather than a serious politician, but at least he has brains enough now to see that he was complicit in a disaster.
Some people think that public and political attitudes to Blair and Campbell (nobody outside Whitehall remembers Scarlett’s name, luckily for him) will change when the interminable Chilcot Inquiry’s report is published later this year.
I will believe that only when it happens. Official inquiries have a long history of making their conclusions so equivocal that, somehow, nobody ends up getting blamed.
A dispute is continuing between Chilcot and the Cabinet Secretary, who has refused to release pre-war correspondence between Blair and President Bush deemed likely to prove that the Prime Minister signed up for the Republicans’ war long before the issue of WMDs was even raised.
Whatever the outcome of this argument, I shall be amazed if Chilcot’s report displays the courage and clarity of thought to say what most of the British people know already — that Blair and his associates are guilty as hell.
Some people say: ‘Oh, but it’s all a long time ago and, anyway, we are out of Iraq now.’
True, but the nightmare Bush and Blair created continues, with scores dead in a bomb blast in Baghdad only yesterday.
The two Western ‘crusaders for freedom’ achieved the remarkable feat of precipitating the killing of almost as many Iraqis as Saddam Hussein accounted for during his murderous rule.
Yet Tony Blair now lives in a splendour that seems to satisfy even his wife’s sybaritic tastes. Alastair Campbell is said to be advising Ed Miliband on how to get into Downing Street and will probably end up with a peerage for his pains.
The former prime minister and his spin doctor have wrought such tragedy and grief in the world that they should be regarded as pariahs. But people choose to forget.
Political rage focuses instead on phone-message hackers from the Press. Yet at least their crimes, repulsive as they were, never killed anyone. That is more than can be said for those of the former tenant of Downing Street.
"Now, in 2013 another band of manipulators is seeking to take the US to war in Syria. Americans – Beware!"