Thousands of young people who sought refuge in Britain as unaccompanied child asylum seekers have since been deported to war torn countries that are in part controlled by Islamic State, the Taliban or other repressive regimes, a Home Office minister has admitted.
Turkish forces have allegedly left 150 Kurds to burn to death while trapped in basements in the Cizre district as troops enforced a curfew after this week’s bombing in Ankara.
The allegation was made Friday by a Kurdish lawmaker in the Turkey’s parliament, Feleknas Uca.
With the news that an American rights group has succeeded in forcing the Pentagon to release more photos of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, while the UK government is trying to prevent lawyers from taking them to court over the abuse that Iraqis suffered at the hands of British soldiers, it is worth revisiting the sorry history of Britain where torture is concerned.
Reports of UK war crimes in Iraq, confirmed by the International Criminal Court, led to the establishment of the Iraq Historic Allegation Team, which was presented with 1,000 alleged criminal acts by British troops ranging from murder, rape and other forms of violence.
We strongly objected to developments taking place, say, in Iraq, Libya or some other countries. We said: “Don’t do this, don’t go there, and don’t make mistakes.” Nobody listened to us! On the contrary, they thought we took an anti-Western position, a hostile stance towards the West. And now, when you have hundreds of thousands, already one million of refugees, do you think our position was anti-Western or pro-Western?
There is a lot more than meets the eye in the newly revealed Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence briefing of Sept. 5, 2002, which showed there was a lack of evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – just as President George W. Bush’s administration was launching its sales job for the Iraq War.
The divisions that were fomented by the US occupation in Iraq to weaken resistance, and then to provoke civil war in Syria against the Assad government, are already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and forcing millions in both countries to flee their homes. The fact that American and European strategists are contemplating redrawing borders, entrenching sectarian and ethnic conflicts and, most likely, triggering new wars, is testimony to the sheer criminality of imperialist policy in the Middle East.
Iraqi parliamentary security and defense committee chief, Hakem al-Zameli, said his government has video evidence of its military downing a US and two UK aircraft carrying weapons for ISIS terrorists in Anbar province.
So the US would be bolstering the militiamen in Iraq with Apache gunship support and then firing on those exact same militiamen across the border in Syria in support of the “moderate” rebels battling to oust the Assad regime.
It’s beyond absurd.
As events are unfolding there may soon be no more wriggle room for all those involved in the lies and cover ups. Their Nuremberg may yet await. It is owed to those who lost their lives for a pack of lies. For the people of Iraq it is a sacred accounting, a debt of ultimate honour and a woefully inadequate apology which might at least demand reparations.
On the basis of the evidence before Chilcot, there is little reason to doubt that the Blair government misrepresented the intelligence to parliament and to the British public in order to make the case for an illegal war in which 179 British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died.
‘The War You Don’t See’ (2011) is a powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of ’embedded’ and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.
