Twelve years on, it is more clear than ever we were right to oppose those war policies. The vote in the British parliament on 30 August was a reflection that our political leaders can — by the force of majority public opinion, which opposes any more western intervention in other people’s countries — be made to end this era of perpetual war.
The West abandoned its plans for military intervention in Syria because the world rejected its narrative, and despite assurances that the West had air tight intelligence, after many months still, the lid is tightly closed. It is clear that the West desired military intervention in the worst way, and had it possessed real intelligence linking the attacks to the Syrian government, it surely would have revealed it. As Hersh points out, they never had such evidence to begin with and depended entirely on their ability to sell yet another pack of lies to the public.
The American media has blacked out an account by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh demonstrating that President Barack Obama and the US government lied when they claimed to have proof that the Syrian government carried out a sarin gas attack last August on areas near Damascus held by US-backed “rebels.”
It seems clear that without de facto quotas, explained in Kaliya’s report, it is much less likely that the process of being assessed for support would inflict so much suffering on so many people. Taken together, the reports add more detail to an emerging picture of the political manipulation at the heart of an assessment process that continues to cause sick and disabled people immense hardship and suffering a full 5 years after its introduction.
David Cameron has gone down the way of Tony Blair. Just as Blair’s moderation dissolved when it came to the invasion of Iraq, Cameron’s has been wearing thin for the last year, with increasingly radical and reactionary attitudes toward Europe, immigration and personal liberties. Harassment of The Guardian has been two-pronged. First there was private pressure; then there was public pressure after the private attempts failed to produce the desired effect.
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.
It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.
The BBC’s shoddy performance was painfully demonstrated again last week on a “Hard Talk” exchange between Glenn Greenwald and BBC journalist Stephen Sackur. The depressing conclusion taken from this laughable interaction is that the BBC is only interested in personally tarnishing the characters of whistleblowers and truth tellers who have conducted brave and substantive journalistic endeavours (often at great personal risk) yet managing to ignore the damning evidence they brought forth exposing establishment duplicity.
While the media applaud the agreement reached between the P5+1 and Iran, Thierry Meyssan, a personal friend of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sees in it an abdication by the new Iranian government. As far as he is concerned, it is absurd to pretend that the two parties have solved a misunderstanding supposedly maintained for eight years by the aggressiveness of President Ahmadinejad. The truth is that Iran gave up its nuclear research and began to dismantle it without receiving anything in return except the gradual lifting of illegitimate sanctions. In other words, the country, brought to its knees, has surrendered.
To the likes of [New York Times columnist David] Brooks, Snowden was a disconcerting mystery; Glenn Greenwald, though, got him right away. “He had no power, no prestige, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family, totally obscure, totally ordinary,” Greenwald says. “He didn’t even have a high school diploma. But he was going to change the world – and I knew that.” And, Greenwald also believed, so would he. “In all kinds of ways, my whole life has been in preparation for this moment,” he says.
Is aiding and defending a belligerent foreign power, land thief and serial abuser of human rights a listed policy in the Conservative Party manifesto? No. It is a private agenda for which Hague and Cameron have no popular mandate. And is terrorizing Iranian civilians with economic ruination, just for the hell of it (or because Israel wants it), Conservative policy? Well, I suppose it must be, otherwise Hague and Cameron would have been slapped down.
the war on terror is mutating, growing and spreading. Drone attacks, which have escalated under Obama from Pakistan to north Africa, are central to this new phase. And as Dirty Wars – the powerful new film by the American journalist Jeremy Scahill – makes clear, so are killings on the ground by covert US special forces, proxy warlords and mercenaries in multiple countries.
