[…] chapters are more interesting and, as befits a former Conservative MP, he has a serious go at the latest ‘C’, John Scarlett, for his relationship with the Blair government and the fiasco over Iraqi WMDs. He also drops some hints about blemishes on Scarlett’s career which can only have come from SIS personnel. The […]
[…] measures taken to combat terrorism comply with all their obligations under international law.’ But then immediately the war on terror ideologues scream ‘special circumstances’; for example Tony Blair on 5 August 2005: ‘Let no-one be in any doubt. The rules of the game are changing.’ In practice this means an erosion of our civil […]
[…] the Zinoviev letter. When the Zinoviev report appeared the major media forgot – or chose to ignore – that it wasn’t the first time since Prime Minister Blair took office that the Zinoviev story had appeared. In August 1997, just after Labour won the General Election, MI6 leaked material about Zinoviev to a couple […]
[…] Ahmed was not under surveillance, a departure from their normal policy of neither confirm nor deny with regard to such claims. (24) In a written answer Tony Blair stated that government policy remains that there be no tapping of telephones of members of the Houses of Commons and Lords, and with this exception it […]
[…] in central Asia. We are dependent on information given to us by the United States’ CIA and NSA.’ The British overseas lobby in Whitehall – like Tony Blair – still dreams of being a ‘world player’. But it doesn’t have the tax resources to match the UK’s (private) overseas investments. Which is essentially why […]
[…] not ‘feed into the intelligence process’. But how can they not? How could they not in the case of the Iraq war? Everybody and their cousin knew Blair had agreed to support a US attack; and supporting the Americans is the political consideration which is always in the intelligence process. The authors tell us: […]
[…] 70 page, perfect (glue) bound pamphlet, part commentary on and part supplement to George Monbiot’s book The Captive State. It covers all the main agenda items: the Blair administration’s obsession with big business; PFI spreading throughout the public sector; the government’s Task Forces dominated by business personnel and the role of groups such as […]
[…] was shown by the Daily Telegraph’s report on 7 April: headlined ‘Africa becomes vital front in war on terror’, the story by the Telegraph’s diplomatic correspondent David Blair told us that ‘Meanwhile, a belt of countries in the Horn of Africa and on the southern fringe of the Sahara could, say US officials, become […]
[…] at a dead-end: believe it or don’t. Assertion plus documentation opens doors, empowers. For example, in a really splendid and splenetic assault on Our Great Leader (T. Blair) he quotes extensively from the material on the British American Project for the Future Generation and TUCETU in Lobster 33. But the source is not given. […]
[…] Democrats willing to take before they conclude that attack may be the only form of defence? Notes I haven’t read the party’s history before 1960 and don’t know. A great deal of this critique of the Democrats – fear of the spooks and the media, for example – applied to the pre- Blair Labour Party.
