Bhutto The Democrat
October 3, 2007
As Washington and Whitehall send this ‘democrat’ back to Pakistan, Brian Whitaker offers some useful ‘Food for Thought‘.
I got an email yesterday from a firm called Busy People Ltd (“Part time cleaning, gardening, party help, handyman, painting & decorating, computer help, secretaries, filing, waiting for deliveries. Why don’t you ask for our list of services? Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this email.”)
Among their multiplicity of tasks, Busy People have taken on the job of organising invitations for a dinner this evening in honour of Benazir Bhutto, the delightfully artistocratic convicted money-launderer who is returning to Pakistan after eight years in exile.
Her send-off bash, at the RAF club in London, is hosted by the Defence and Security Forum (run by Lady Olga Maitland and Major General Patrick Cordingley). Ms Bhutto will be introduced by Lord Ahmed of Rotherham and if you want to go along it will cost you 80 quid.
Ms Bhutto’s expected return to Pakistan is the indirect result of efforts by General Musharraf – who seized power in a coup in 1999 – to secure another term as president. The Americans, not to mention many Pakistanis, have become disenchanted with Musharraf’s performance and Ms Bhutto has been demanding that he should retire from the army if he wants to remain president.
General – sorry, Mr – Musharraf has now agreed to this and has nominated his intelligence chief to be head of the military.
As part of the deal the Pakistani government has said it will drop long-standing corruption charges. Ms Bhutto is also seeking a change in the constitution so that she can become prime minister for a third time.
Although she has been actively cultivating friends in the west and touting her democratic credentials, it might reasonably be argued that two doses of Ms Bhutto’s premiership were more than enough for Pakistan. Both of her earlier periods in office ended amid allegations of corruption.
The charges, unsurprisingly, were instigated by her political opponents and Ms Bhutto continues to deny them. Even so, there are ample grounds for asking whether she is a fit person to hold office. The money trail has been pursued in various countries but readers in Britain may recall the affair of the diamond necklace and the mysterious purchase of Rockwood Estate in Surrey by her husband. The property was eventually reclaimed by the Pakistani government on the grounds that it had been acquired on the proceeds of corruption.
In 2003, a Swiss court convicted Ms Bhutto and her husband (in their absence) of money laundering. The pair were given suspended jail sentences of six months each and ordered to repay about £8m to the Pakistani government.
The decision to drop remaining charges in Pakistan (which may have run into a hitch today) seems to have more to do with political convenience than their actual substance – which is a pity. Whatever the outcome, they ought to be pursued through the courts to a proper conclusion. Abandoning them now does nothing to promote good governance and only encourages others to think they can get away with corruption.
Billions Over Baghdad
September 12, 2007
The Spoils of War
Donald Barlett and James Steele, one of the best US team of investigative journalists, had earlier in the year published an excellent report on SAIC and its lucrative collaboration with the Pentagon. They return in the new issue of Vanity Fair with an exceptionally thorough investigation of the $9 Billion that went missing from Iraq’s reconstruction fund, with some of it finding its way to the Bahamas. Today’s Democracy Now has an in depth interview with the duo on the article.
Hidden in plain sight, 10 miles west of Manhattan, amid a suburban community of middle-class homes and small businesses, stands a fortress-like building shielded by big trees and lush plantings behind an iron fence. The steel-gray structure, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, is all but invisible to the thousands of commuters who whiz by every day on Route 17. Even if they noticed it, they would scarcely guess that it is the largest repository of American currency in the world.
Officially, 100 Orchard Street is referred to by the acronym eroc, for the East Rutherford Operations Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The brains of the New York Fed may lie in Manhattan, but xeroc is the beating heart of its operations—a secretive, heavily guarded compound where the bank processes checks, makes wire transfers, and receives and ships out its most precious commodity: new and used paper money. Read the rest of this entry »
A Friend of Feudalism
September 1, 2007
William Dalrymple sheds important light on Benazir Bhutto’s past which is curiously missing from much of the recent commentary on her imminent return.
Not far from the ruins of the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro, lies Benazir Bhutto’s feudal estate of Larkhana. In this backward and arid region amid the dry salt flats of the Indus plain, Bhutto’s family have long been the most prominent land owners, and the area is witness to many of the Borgia-like feuds that distinguish the lives of Pakistan’s feudal elite.
The last time I visited the estate, in 1994, a convoy from the house of Begum Bhutto – Benazir’s mother – to her husband’s grave had just been shot at by police, leading to the deaths of three of the family’s retainers. Begum was in no doubt that the police were acting to support Benazir. Soon afterwards, there was the funeral of Benazir’s brother Murtaza, who had just returned to Pakistan to try to oust his sister from control of the family’s political wing, the Pakistan People’s party. He died, along with six of his supporters, in a hail of police bullets, yards from his front door. Many pointed the finger of suspicion at Benazir, and her husband was later charged with complicity in the murder.
This week Bhutto has been doing the rounds of the television studios announcing her imminent return to Pakistan. Representing herself as the face of Pakistani liberal democracy, she has had an astonishingly smooth ride from interviewers, few of whom seemed to be aware of her deeply flawed record.
Perhaps this should not be surprising: the west has always had a soft spot for Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may be figures as foreign and frightening as, on one hand, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, and, on the other, a clutch of Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar – one of us. She speaks English fluently as it is her first language. She had an English governess and her childhood revolved around a succession of English colonial clubs like the Karachi Gymkhana. She went to a convent run by Irish nuns, and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.
For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto isn’t is possibly more attractive than what she is: she isn’t a religious fundamentalist, she doesn’t have a beard, she doesn’t organise mass rallies where everyone shouts “Death to America”, and she doesn’t issue fatwas against bestselling authors – even though Salman Rushdie went out of his way to ridicule her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.
However, the very reasons that make the west love Benazir Bhutto are the same that leave many Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can’t say the same about her Urdu which she speaks like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi is even worse: apart from a few imperatives, she is completely at sea.
Few would argue with the proposition that democracy is almost always preferable to dictatorship; but it is often forgotten the degree to which Bhutto is the person who has done more than anything to bring Pakistan’s strange variety of democracy – really a form of elective feudalism – into disrepute. During her first 20-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Her reign was marked by massive human rights abuse: Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Bhutto’s premiership was also distinguished by epic levels of corruption. In 1995 Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari – widely known as “Mr 10%” – faced allegations of plundering the country.
In contrast, the first few years of Pervez Musharraf saw Pakistan run with remarkable competence: Pakistan enjoyed a construction and consumer boom, with economic growth of around 8%, and one of Asia’s best-performing stock markets. Hundreds of new TV channels opened up. For the middle classes, it has been boom time. It is true that Musharraf behaved with astonishing stupidity in sacking the chief justice, there have been growing human rights violations and abductions by state intelligence agencies – an estimated 600 activists have “disappeared” since 2002 – and dangerous deals have been forged with Pakistan’s Islamists, allowing their power to rise significantly. Yet in the latter two cases, Benazir’s critics point out that her record is little better.
Nor is the distinction between democracy and military rule quite as sharp as Bhutto likes to imply. Behind Pakistan’s swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of interests: to some extent, the industrial, military, landowning, and bureaucratic elites are all interrelated and look after one another. The current negotiations between Musharraf and Bhutto – which have excluded Bhutto’s democratic rival Nawaz Sharif – are typical of the way that the civil and military elites have shared power with little reference to the electorate.
Real democracy has never thrived here, at least in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians can emerge. The educated middle class – which in India gained control in 1947 – is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. It is this as much as anything else that has fuelled the growth of the Islamists. According to the political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa, “The military and the political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.”
Pakistan today in many ways resembles pre-revolutionary Iran. A cosmopolitan middle class is prospering, yet for the great majority of poorer Pakistanis life remains intolerably hard and access to justice or education is a distant hope. Healthcare and other social services for the poor have been neglected, in contrast to the public services that benefit the wealthy, such as airports.
Secular democracy will only ever flourish in Pakistan if space is created for secular politicians from non-feudal backgrounds who represent the grassroots: the Pakistani equivalents of India’s dalit (untouchable) leader Mayawati, or Laloo Prasad Yadav. Until then, if Pakistanis only have a choice between the inter-related feudal and military elites, the growth of the Islamist parties will continue, and the country’s violent upheavals can only escalate.
· William Dalrymple is the author of The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
www.williamdalrymple.com
The War on Democracy
August 22, 2007
John Pilger’s superb new film. A must see. (Thanks Dave)
Sealing Pakistan’s Fate
July 30, 2007
So now we have one willing executioner of Washington’s war of terror, and one would-be executioner deciding the course of Pakistan’s future in secret trysts in backroom meetings in the Gulf. No one has asked however exactly what mandate allows each discredited puppet to feel qualified to speak on these weighty matters.
The subtitle of this silly article (which actually describes the neoliberal Benazir as ‘left-leaning’) from the Guardian carries in it the precise reason why the alliance of Pervez Musharraf with Benazir Bhutto threatens to seal the country’s fate. “Joint rule seen as best way to beat extremists”, it says. Except, the extremists are only a recent problem, and the aforementioned individuals have done much to engender this extremism. People do not want to get rid of Musharraf only to have him replaced with someone even more subservient to the Washington agenda. The victory of the MMA in the first place was a response to Musharraf’s enthusiastic embrace of Bush’s war of terror. Contrary to the popular liberal myth (repeated ad nauseum by elite-leftists like Tariq Ali), the MMA won their seats fair and square. The extent of their victory, in fact, was diminished through direct intervention from the federal government, which rigged the votes in favour of the PML-Q (pro-Musharraf party) to bring about a result more favorable to Musharraf’s continued rule. (I know this because a friend’s Father-in-Law was running on a PML-Q ticket, and they were handed bagsful of the pre-stamped votes on the eve of the election by electoral authorities to be dropped into the ballot box along with a legit vote to boost the numbers of vote cast).
What Pakistan needs is not an enforcer for the Washington agenda, which is what Benazir (the second most vacuous head of state in Pakistan’s history, after Nawaz sharif) is promising, but someone who can represent the legitimate aspirations of its people. Both these discredited individuals promise to wage Washington’s counterinsurgency war with more vigour, which only promises to alienate people of NWFP and Baluchistan further, and possibly lead to the country’s disintegration.
Israelis can sit back and relax now: they have found in the higher echelons of Fatah willing executioners for their policy of creeping genocide in Gaza. According to Shlomo Shamir: “Fatah-led delegation to block UN initiative over Gaza crisis“.
The Palestinian delegation to the United Nations is blocking a Security Council initiative aimed at expressing the organization’s concern over the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Since the militant Hamas faction violently seized control over the coastal territory in mid-June, border crossings between Gaza and its neighbors Israel and Egypt have largely remained closed, limiting the transfer of food and supplies into the Strip.
Hamas routed rival faction Fatah in the takeover, and thus the resolution of the humanitarian crisis stands in conflict with the interests of the Fatah-affiliated Palestinian delegation to the UN.
Senior UN officials reported Friday that the Palestinian representatives have been relentlessly operating in recent days to foil an initiative ultimately aimed at issuing a Security Council presidential statement criticizing the situation in the Gaza Strip.
A presidential statement is typically issued when the council is unable to attain a passing vote on a resolution, and is non-binding. However, such a statement requires a consensus among the 15 member states. These statements are meant to apply political pressure and to warn that additional action could follow, and are usually accompanied by a press statement.
Reports from the UN headquarters in New York reveal that Qatar, a member of the Security Council, formulated at least two drafts for the final presidential statement on the Gaza humanitarian crisis. The second draft was formulated in efforts to appease the Palestinians.
However, according to sources, the Palestinian delegation has opposed any move on the behalf of the Security Council regarding this issue.
“This situation is absurd,” a Western diplomat told Haaretz. “It is obvious that it is in the Palestinian delegation’s best interest to conceal the fact that Hamas is in control of the Gaza Strip,” he said.
Conyers has Sheehan Arrested
July 27, 2007
I never thought much of congressional liberals, but I thought John Conyers had done a good thing or two in the past. My respect diminished however when he attacked Jimmy Carter over his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, even before the book was released. Remember that he is part of the same Black Caucus (Malcolm X would have called it the ‘House Negro’ Caucus), the majority of which did not have the guts to publicly protest and call for sanctions against Israel when it was breaking the anti-apartheid boycott and selling arms to South Africa. The respect that I never had has now turned to contempt, after the way Conyers had Cindy Sheehan arrested for a protest at his office demanding impeachment. Dave Lindorff reports: (Also check out this debate between Cindy Sheehan, Ray McGovern and a Democratic Party strategist)
Yesterday Conyers had 48 impeachment activists, including Gold Star Families for Peace founder Cindy Sheehan, Iraq Veteran Against the War activist Lennox Yearwood and Intelligence Veterans for Sanity founder Ray McGovern, arrested for conducting a sit-in in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. The three, together with several hundred other impeachment activists who packed the fourth floor hallway outside Rep. Conyers’ office, had come to press Conyers to take action on impeachment, and specifically to start action on H.Res. 333, the bill submitted nearly three months ago by Rep. Dennis Kucinich calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney…
This reporter subsequently called Conyers’ press office for an explanation of Conyers’ true position on impeachment. Only a few days earlier the congressman, at a San Diego meeting on health care reform, had told members of Progressive Democrats of America that it was time to “take these two guys (Bush and Cheney) out” and had promised that if just “a few more” members of the House signed on to the Kucinich bill (it already has 14 co-sponsors), he would move it forward for consideration in his Judiciary Committee. Asked how that statement squared with what he had told the group of activists in his office, the spokesman said Conyers’ “must have been misunderstood” in San Diego. He said that in view of Conyers’ statement to Sheehan and the others today, the Kucinich bill was “not going to go anywhere.”
As impeachment activist David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org has said, there “seem to be two John Conyers.” There’s the one who, in 2005 and early 2006, while Republicans controlled the House, was systematically making the case for impeaching the president and vice president. This Conyers had even submitted a bill, with 39 co-sponsors, which called for creation of a select committee to investigate possible impeachable crimes by the administration. And then there’s the Conyers who submits to the wishes of the new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and is keeping impeachment off the table. Occasionally the former Conyers breaks out, saying things such as that the president needs to be “taken out” or, as he put it at an anti-war rally last spring, that “we can fire him!” But then the other Conyers comes to the fore, and stands in the way of impeachment action.
Ray McGovern is more scathing in his critique: “John Conyers Is No Martin Luther King“
What do Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and President George W. Bush have in common? They both think they can dis Cindy Sheehan and count on gossip columnists like the Washington Post’s David Milbank to trivialize a historic moment.
I’ll give this to President Bush. He makes no pretence when he disses. He would not meet with Sheehan to define for her the “noble cause” for which
her son Casey died or tell her why he had said it was “worth it.”Conyers, on the other hand, was dripping with pretence as he met with Sheehan, Rev. Lennox Yearwood and me Monday in his office in the
Rayburn building. I have seldom been so disappointed with someone I had
previously held in high esteem. And before leaving, I told him so.Throwing salt in our wounds, he had us, and some 50 others in his
anteroom arrested and taken out of action as the Capitol Police
“processed” us for the next six hours.As we began our discussion with Conyers, it was as though he thought we
were “born yesterday,” as Harry Truman would put it. With feigned
enthusiasm he began, Let’s hold a Town Hall meeting in Detroit so we can
talk about impeachment. Get out my schedule; let’s see, we need to hear
from everyone about this.Been there, done that, I reminded the congressman.
On May 29, 2007, Col. Ann Wright and I were among those who flew to
Detroit for a highly advertised Town Hall meeting on impeachment,
because we were assured that John Conyers would be there.That Town Hall/panel discussion was arranged by the Michigan chapter of
the National Lawyers Guild less than two weeks after the Detroit City
Council passed a resolution, cosponsored by Conyers’ wife Monica
Conyers–calling for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney. We had hoped that Monica’s clear vision and courage might be
contagious.I had to remind the congressman that he did not show up for the Town
Hall.Apparently, that incident was of such little consequence to the
congressman that he had completely forgotten about it. Small wonder,
then, that he has apparently forgotten the oath he took to protect and
defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and
domestic.Selective Alzheimers? I don’t know. What was clear was that he had
forgotten a whole lot.When I raised James Madison’s role in crafting a Constitution that
mentions impeachment no fewer than six times, he replied: Madison did not
say Conyers has to impeach every one. Why, if I had to impeach everyone
for high crimes and misdemeanors, that’s all my committee would have
time to do.I learned in Rhetoric 101 the name of that technique: reductio ad absurdam.
How about just Bush and Cheney, we suggested.
Conyers protested that he would need 218 votes in the House and
complained that the votes are not there. His priorities showed through in
his loud lament that if he fell short of the 218 votes, the Republicans and Fox News would have a field day.There was no getting through to Conyers, who seemed astonished at the direct questions we were posing.
In reflecting on this later, the dictum of my father, also a lawyer, began to ring in my ears: “When you reach the age of `statutory senility,’ you do everyone a favor if you retire.”
He followed his own example, when he retired as Chancellor of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, long before senility–statutory, or otherwise–set in for him.
Septuagenarian Conyers (and, for that matter, 80-year-old Senator John Warner, R-Virginia, who has also forgotten his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution) would do well to heed that advice.
Toward the end of the meeting, Conyers showed uncommon chutzpah in
referring to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was too much for me.You’re no Martin Luther King, I found myself wanting to say. Instead, I
quoted a portion of Dr. King’s famous address at Riverside Church almost
40 years ago:“We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak….there is such a thing as being too
late….Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with
lost opportunity….Over the bleached bones of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words: `Too late.’”I used that quote in a letter I left with Conyers’ aides on Monday, in
which I tried to express why my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity feel it is URGENT to find some way to apply the
Constitution to restrain a run-away Executive.The text of that letter follows:
############
A Note to Congressman John Conyers: On Impeachment and the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Dear John,
We each have our favored crime for which President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached. Many of us have several.
But the real challenge is to look AHEAD. What are Bush/Cheney likely to do in the coming months if the impeachment process does NOT begin?
One often hears, Oh, they will do what they want anyway, impeachment process or not. Not true.
If we the people and our representatives in Congress choose the course given us by our Founders and impeachment proceedings begin, important swaths of our body politic AND military will be less likely to follow illegal orders from the White House.
These important constituencies will become sensitized to the peril into which this administration has brought us and to the extra-constitutional orders they may be asked to carry out.
NEW ELEMENT: Even the Scaife-owned newspapers have begun to question Bush’s MENTAL STABILITY.
What could be more important at this juncture?
We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been applying all of our analytical techniques to assess the Bush/Cheney administration. We have helped to establish the long record of abuses and usurpations of the past. What about the future?
Iraq is going to hell in a hand basket. A Tet-type incident becomes more and more likely. The Green Zone is being hit by mortar fire more frequently than before. It may be just a matter of time before the Resistance gets lucky and lobs a shell onto our spanking new $600-million embassy, killing a bunch of Americans in the process.
What then? Will Cheney tell the president the US military has found Iranian markings on the shell fragments and we need to retaliate…and, actually, while we’re at it, let’s implement Plan A and hit all Iranian nuclear-related facilities.
With Congress voting resolution after resolution against Iran, how would the president react to such a suggestion from Cheney?
Many of us intelligence analysts have found utility in relying, in part, on short studies applying psychoanalysis to develop profiles of foreign leaders. (This marriage of psychoanalysis and intelligence work actually goes back to the early 1940s, when the OSS commissioned such studies on Hitler.) We called them “at-a-distance personality
assessments.”Three years ago Justin Frank, M.D., a psychiatrist here in Washington, wrote a book “Bush on the Couch” in which he provided keen insights into the president’s mode of thinking–or not thinking.
Eager to use every tool at our disposal, VIPS recently asked Dr. Frank to update his observations, with a view to forecasting, to the extent possible, how Bush is likely to react to the building pressures of the coming weeks and months. We will issue, perhaps as early as this week, Dr. Frank’s latest analysis, fortified by our own input. But we already have his preliminary analysis; there is no other word for it: Scary.
In a quick note to us this morning [July 23], Dr. Frank noted we are “dealing with a potentially cornered man [who] could lash out, and it is possible that the best way would be to bomb Iran…. Whatever the root causes of Bush’s pathology, we have a dangerous man running
things…grandiose and unchecked.”Some snippets from the Memorandum that Dr. Frank is drafting for issuance under VIPS auspices:
“George W. Bush is without conscience…and destructive, willfully so. He has always likes to break things…most shocking is the way he is breaking our armed forces.
“He doesn’t care about others, is indifferent to their suffering…He is almost constitutionally missing the ability to sympathize or empathize…More indifferent to reality than out of touch with it, he makes up whatever story he wants.
“Ultimately, he is psychologically unstable…His goal is to destroy things [and he can do that] without experiencing anxiety or a sense of responsibility. An equally important goal is to protect himself from shame, from being wrong, from being found small and weak.”
So what do we do?
At a similarly critical juncture, Dr. King was typically direct: “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak…. there is such a thing as being too late…. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity…. Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: `Too late.’”
There is today another Edmund Pettus Bridge to cross, John. And it has fallen to you to lead us across.
With respect,
RM
Plenty Cash, Little Honour
July 20, 2007
Jonathan Swift had it right: the so called British Justice system is little more than a web of legalisms put in place to sustain a structure of deep inequalities by providing a veneer of legitimcay. (To be fair, it is no different in any other corner of the world, except no one fusses over theirs the way Americans and Brits do). For those brown anglophiles who keep harping on about a British ‘legal system’, the following should lay those sentimental illusions to rest. The same system that slaps ASBOS on preteens for making noise, and makes a terrorists of men buying corn-flour for their tacos, has now concluded that the mountains of evidence that implicated the New Labour government in free distribution of honours (in the strictly ceremonial sense of the word) in return for large swathes of cash, is insufficient to bring charges against the culprits who, just so it happens, are also the country’s ruling elite.
Notice how forgiving the media is?
The Gap Between Legality and Morality
July 18, 2007
In a country where courtrooms are adorned with portraits of the two moral giants who forced China to open its markets to the legal export of British opium (produced in Bengal), the following passes for a Legal system: Four years since the illegal (and immoral) war on Iraq was launched, finally someone is being held to account for the fiasco that has resulted in the deaths of nearly a million Iraqis — the man who vigorously opposed the war!
There is a scene in the Errol Morris film Fog of War where Robert MacNamara is asked why he ordered the use of Agent Orange when he knew of its disastrous after effects. He replies, ‘but no one told me it was illega’. Not for a moment does it occur to him that what he did might have been immoral.
The history of British, American, and now Israel, colonial conquest is replete with instances where deeply immoral acts were given a veneer of legitimacy through judicious use of legalisms. The theft of Cherokee land in North America, and the theft of Palestinian land in the Middle East (through the quasi-governmental JNF) are two cases in point. In present day Britain, whenever there are deviations from the orthodoxy, the establishment finds perfectly legalistic ways to exact revenge. They get one of the transvestites (generally referred to as ‘judges’) to come and dump on the malcontent and consecrate an act of crude retribution. So, for example, when the war started going bad, the Blair junta wheeled out Hutton to dump on the BBC, even though its coverage had been overwhelmingly pro-war. But for Blairites, even one deviation was one too many. The aim was to intimidate — and it succeeded.
So now we have the antiwar George Galloway being suspended from parliament on trumped up charges by an establishment that eagerly dragged the country into a disastrous war, and contributed to the deaths of nearly a million Iraqis. I have no doubt their action is perfectly legal; I also have no doubt it is immoral. But more interestingly, the same Charities Commission that is investigating Galloway, at the same time has given tax-deductible charitable status to an organization, the JNF, that has been described as Israel’s ‘main agency of ethnic cleansing’. (Incidentally this happened the same day when it was revealed that Labour peers had been accepting cash for access to lobbyists. Appropriate, no doubt, as most of these peers had paid for their titles in cash in the first place.)
Here is a video of George Galloway’s own response, and in the following Mark Steel addresses the hypocrisy of the decision :
At last a politician has been suspended for their role in the Iraq war. You’d have thought it would have happened before now, and you might have thought when it finally happened, it wouldn’t be the politician most prominently against the war. Suspending George Galloway for his conduct in Iraq is as if last week’s trial of those failed suicide bombers ended with the judge saying “This was a monstrous crime. So I’m going to let you off, and jail the bloke who chased you through the Underground.”
The main reason given for the suspension is that some of the money for Galloway’s charity came from a dodgy Jordanian businessman. Is this the normal attitude with charities, that no donation should be accepted without the donor being investigated? Maybe it’s a new culture, and in next year’s “Children in Need”, Terry Wogan will say: “And how about this? We’ve had a grand donation of £25 from Mrs Wimthorpe in Derby. Well I’ve got one thing to say – who the hell are you, Wimthorpe, and what’s your game? We’re going to go through you with a microscope and if you’ve put one finger out of line you can keep your dirty money you old scallywag, spina bifida doesn’t need you.”
Another source of friction is that Galloway’s charity, The Mariam Appeal, which assisted sick Iraqis who were suffering from the effects of sanctions against their country, was political in that it was against those sanctions. In other words, it was against the thing causing the suffering. And that’s wrong, apparently.
So presumably there will also be investigations into appeals for victims of earthquakes. How dare these people oppose earthquakes in the name of charity? At least they should be balanced, and allow space for supporters of earthquakes to present their side of the story.
The original investigation into Galloway’s dealings in Iraq came when The Daily Telegraph accused him of taking money from Saddam, an allegation that cost them £150,000 when they lost the libel case. Now, despite their acceptance he didn’t take a penny for himself, the parliamentary committee says his charity “damaged the reputation of the house”. So there’s the explanation – the full report probably went: “You mean you weren’t on the take? How the bloody hell does that make the rest of us look, you bastard?”
Somehow, however, the diligent committee seems to have missed other possible examples of the house being brought into disrepute, such as a Prime Minister taking the country into war because “I have no doubt that Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction – absolutely no doubt, no doubt whatsoever.”
And insisting we could be attacked in 45 minutes when he knew this was bollocks; and ignoring his own intelligence that this would make us targets for terrorism; and ignoring the UN and the weapons inspectors, so assisting in the creation of mass carnage, while he swans off to make millions from his memoirs.
If they want to investigate corruption in the Middle East, they could look at the $300m taken in cash from the Central Bank in Iraq, and secretly flown to Beirut in a chartered jet to buy arms, organised by the Iraqi Defence Minister whom we helped put in place. This led to his colleague, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie saying: “I am sorry to say that the corruption is worse now than in the Saddam era.” No wonder Blair resigned – how do you top helping to make Iraq more corrupt than under Saddam? In his new job, is he planning to make Afghanistan less keen on heavy metal and women’s football than under the Taliban?
Or the committee could glance at the billion pounds in illegal payments made to Saudi Arabia in order to secure arms deals for British Aerospace. Unlike Galloway’s crime, parliament decided this matter was too trivial to warrant an inquiry. And if they did find them guilty, they’d have probably ordered them to pay it back at one dollar a week.
But instead, the person suspended is the one who opposed these things. The only explanation is the Commons procedures were originally taken from a chapter in Alice in Wonderland, in which you get charged by the authorities for being an un-criminal. And maybe that’s the plan for our whole legal system, so you’ll be sent to prison for being an un-corrupt arms dealer, or an un-robber, while liberal types complain that prison doesn’t work because most un-criminals re-offend, and if you lock someone up for not stealing a car, when they’re released they’ll do something even worse such as not rob a bank.
Meanwhile robbers and murderers will be allowed to stay free, but only if they remember to ask you to draw a line under robbery and murder, and accept that, hand on heart, you thought that robbery and murder was right at the time.
Democrats Grow Cojones: Who’s Your Daddy Revisited
July 8, 2007
The Democrats have been historically criticized as wimps, but as the following shows if its a matter close enough to the heart, they could turn into blood thirsty hyenas. Here Jewish Democrats are criticizing AIPAC, the spearhead of the Israel Lobby, for not being aggressive enough in subordinating the US treasury to Israel’s interests!
A Democratic Jewish group said it was “disappointed” that AIPAC had not yet rebuked Republicans for voting against a foreign aid bill that included funding for Israel.
“The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is an incredibly effective organization that shares the Democratic Party’s goal of Israel’s security and the US-Israel relationship, but they have shown an apparent double standard,” said a statement issued this week by the Young Democrats of America-Jewish Caucus.The Republican leadership ordered its U.S. House of Representatives caucus to vote against the foreign aid bill last month because Republicans opposed an increase in aid and because it provided some assistance to overseas groups that provide some assistance to groups that use other funds to pay for abortions. The assistance included $2.4 billion in aid for Israel…
AIPAC is set to publish the roll call on the vote in its flagship publication, Near East Report, as it has done for previous votes. “AIPAC considers the vote on foreign aid to be a top priority and is disappointed when any member does not support it, regardless of the reasons,” sources close to the lobby said.
