Miriam Hyman Collateral Damage?

Another extremely thoughtful and well argued piece from the inimitable Martin Roberts.

Miriam Hyman Collateral Damage?

By Dr Martin Roberts
19 August 2015


Death and the maiden

The story of Miriam Hyman’s death on the morning of Thursday July 7, 2005 is reminiscent of the John Ford movie ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’, insofar as the genuine executioner is not the one the audience are led to believe did the deed.

Miriam is understood to have been one of thirteen victims of the explosion aboard a no. 30 bus in London’s Tavistock square that occurred at 9.47 a.m. on the morning in question. Her parents realised she was missing and unaccounted for later that day and, in the course of their distress, proceeded to give interviews to the media, who reported as follows:

(John Hyman): "She certainly wasn't injured on the Underground because I spoke to her and at that time she was with a crowd of people evacuated from trains on the pavement outside King's Cross station. The only other possibility, apart from a road accident, is if she was on the bus that was blown up. The reason we think that is unlikely is because it wouldn't make sense for her to take that route. And I was speaking to her about that time and her office ‘phoned her at about 10 a.m., which was about 10 minutes after the explosion to say 'don't come in'. We think maybe she has gone into shock. Her mobile is off. She could have walked away from her handbag in shock. I think she's still in the Greater London area because when I checked yesterday afternoon her car was still in the local station car park." (The Independent, 10 July 2005).

The article continues:

"We would be gibbering wrecks if it weren't for those two ‘phone calls which give us a lot of hope.”

Likewise the International Herald Tribune (11 July 2005) reported:

‘John Hyman, whose 32-year-old daughter, Miriam, is missing, knows a few things for certain: She was not wounded when she left the Underground. She was not on the bus because the bus exploded at about the time he was on the ‘phone with her. Soon after, she called her workplace, and was told not to bother to come in. That was at 10 a.m., after the attacks, he said.

‘"I don't see how she could have got into the bus that exploded," he said. "And the route makes no sense, whether she's going to work or home." Her cellphone goes unanswered. Hyman's friends have papered the town with her image and raced to hospitals.’Miriam’s mother Mavis was quoted to similar effect by the Jewish Journal of 14 July:

‘Other Jewish families face an agonizing wait. Miriam Hyman, 32, a freelance photo editor, called her father, John, from King’s Cross Station at 9:45 a.m. Thursday to say she was all right. That was the last anyone has heard from her. After a fruitless search of London’s hospitals, “we are just waiting,” Hyman’s mother, Mavis, told JTA. ‘She ‘phoned work to say she was going to be late, she was still obviously determined to get in. I think she didn’t understand the seriousness of what was going on.’

‘Something Jewish’ picked up on corroboration given to the Sun Newspaper earlier by Miriam’s sister Esther. They (SJ) posted (11 July 2005):

‘Speaking to the Sun newspaper, her sister Esther said: "Something is stopping her answering the ‘phone or contacting us. It’s so scary because my dad spoke to her as soon as he heard about the bombs. She told him she was sitting on the pavement outside King’s Cross after her train had been evacuated at the station. We have heard nothing since and are frantic.”’

Matters arising

The first detail to bring attention to here is this observation on the part of John Hyman:
“The only other possibility, apart from a road accident, is if she was on the bus that was blown up. The reason we think that is unlikely is because it wouldn't make sense for her to take that route. And I was speaking to her about that time.”

Discounting any road accident (there were none involving pedestrian fatalities that day), Miriam was thought unlikely to have caught the doomed no. 30 bus anywhere near Euston Station for two reasons. First, her intended destination lay in the opposite direction, and second, she had only just concluded a ‘phone conversation with her father while outside King’s Cross (the bus had already left from Euston approximately half-a-mile away).

Things get more puzzling from here on in.

Esther Hyman: “It’s so scary because my dad spoke to her as soon as he heard about the bombs.”

Implying that Miriam’s anxious father rang to speak to her, as one might reasonably expect.

The Jewish Journal, however, would have it that: ‘Miriam Hyman, 32, a freelance photo editor, called her father, John, from King’s Cross Station at 9:45 a.m. Thursday to say she was all right. From her mother Mavis we learn “That was the last anyone has heard from her.”

Not, perhaps, a significant contradiction, but then there are others, which, given a common family origin for the story, are perplexing.

John Hyman (quoted in the Independent):

“And I was speaking to her about that time and her office ‘phoned her at about 10 a.m., which was about 10 minutes after the explosion to say 'don't come in.'”

Whereas the Herald Tribune’s report of Miriam’s conversation with her father proceeds:

‘soon after, she called her workplace, and was told not to bother to come in. That was at 10 a.m., after the attacks, he said.’

This was apparently echoed by Miriam’s mother in the Jewish Journal:

“Hyman’s mother, Mavis, told JTA.  

‘She ‘phoned work to say she was going to be late, she was still obviously determined to get in.”

Again, the directionality of the call might be considered of less importance than the fact of its occurrence. However, the one speaks to the other, metaphorically as well as literally, particularly in light of John Hyman’s remark:

"We would be gibbering wrecks if it weren't for those two ‘phone calls which give us a lot of hope.”

Irrespective of who dialled whom, once John Hyman’s conversation with his daughter was concluded and Miriam went on to speak to her colleague(s) at work (at 10.00 a.m. or thereabouts), how did either John or Mavis Hyman come to learn of that all-too-significant second call, given Esther’s statement that they had had no word of Miriam since the initial (9.45 a.m.) conversation (“She told him she was sitting on the pavement outside King’s Cross…..We have heard nothing since and are frantic.”’)?

‘“We are just waiting,” Hyman’s mother, Mavis, told JTA.’

That remark was published on 14 July, by which time, according to journalists Becky Barrow and Amy Iggulden (“Families receive the news that destroys all hope”), the Hymans had already been advised (13 July) of their daughter’s death (The Telegraph, 14 July 2005). In point of fact they knew by the 11th, as reported by the Jewish Chronicle Online (29.4.2010) and by Esther Hyman personally in an on-line video posted by the Guardian (6.5.2011) wherein she states: “So, we waited until the Monday and our family liaison officer came here and explained to my parents that ‘Mim’ had been identified by her dental records.”

All of which makes the appearance of Mavis Hyman’s ‘we are waiting‘ statement in the Jewish Journal afterwards rather difficult to understand.

The question as to how any of Miriam Hyman’s relatives could have been appraised of any subsequent cell ‘phone call of hers, whether to or from her place of work, remains unresolved however. It is a ‘phone call of the utmost significance, and not just because any such conversation at 10.00 a.m. that morning would rule Miriam out completely as having been a passenger aboard the devastated no. 30 bus.

In actual fact, the significance attaching to the ‘phone call between Miriam Hyman and her office does not reside in the ‘phone call per se, but in her work‘s location – Canary Wharf.

Trouble in the East-end 

Mid-morning on 7 July saw a solitary Radio Five broadcast recounting news of a shooting carried out by security services at Canary Wharf. The announcement was never repeated, although various news outlets worldwide carried the story.

Miriam Hyman has been accepted as dead since July 7, 2005. As far as her father was concerned, at least initially, “the only other possibility, apart from a road accident, is if she was on the bus that was blown up.“

There were only five fatal incidents in London that day – no reported suicides, no road traffic accidents of the ‘person in collision with a road vehicle’ variety; nothing except the four bombs detonated on London Transport and an unspecified shooting at Canary Wharf, Miriam Hyman’s declared destination.

The first three events can be discounted on the grounds that Miriam was safely evacuated from King’s Cross after they had occurred.

That leaves only two feasible explanations for Miriam’s death that Thursday:

Either she died aboard a bus which, according to her own father’s account, she could not have caught, or she was shot at Canary Wharf.

There are no other possibilities.

And now we may begin to appreciate the true significance of Miriam’s telephone dialogue(s) that morning.

The first, at 9.45 a.m., compromises the idea that she may have boarded the no. 30 bus. Rachael Bletchly of the Mirror (4 July, 2015) remains convinced however:

“Ten years ago on Tuesday, the 31-year-old picture researcher rang dad John to say that she had been evacuated from King’s Cross tube station in London and not to worry as she would get a bus to work.”

Given her declared determination to get to work, there was no reason, in principle, why she should not have done so eventually, at least in time to meet a lunchtime appointment she is also understood to have made. Nevertheless, since she has been declared dead as of the Thursday morning we know she could not have arrived, either at her office desk or for lunch.

Not only must we ask ourselves how the Hymans might have known about their daughter’s second crucial ‘phone call that morning (which did not involve either of them), but we should also question what purpose it may have served as far as they were concerned, given Miriam’s earlier personal assurance that she was safe and well.

The key detail of the alleged conversation is that Miriam was advised not to continue on to work (at Canary Wharf). The Hymans (and anyone else) might then reasonably suppose, at least initially, that if she didn’t arrive at her office that day it was because she had been told not to bother.

(This state of affairs is a dark and subtle reflection of the McCanns’ various references to their daughter’s en passant remarks, whereby they manage indirectly to suggest that she was alive when she made them).

Nick Kollerstrom (author of Terror on the Tube) has researched the events of 7/7 in considerable depth and posted the following comment on an internet forum discussing the case:

“From King’s Cross, one gets to Canary Wharf by bus travelling Eastbound, by taking the 30 bus half way then changing. There is no way you would walk back to Euston, which is in the opposite direction, to get the no. 30 bus, which by the way left Euston station before she rang her Father at 09.45 – when she said she was at King’s Cross. So, one must agree with what the Father was quoted as saying, about his daughter’s fate. When I spoke to him (today, a second time) he denied having said this, and said he had been misreported.

“Speaking to her father, on the ‘phone, he confirmed that she had rung him at 09.45, however he denied that she had rung her place of work at ten o’clock. He is convinced she was dead by then.”

That makes three people (John, Mavis and Esther Hyman) all separately misreported by at least three different media outlets.

So what, exactly, has John Hyman retracted? His doubts about Miriam’s having boarded the no. 30 bus, obviously, as well as his daughter’s conversation with colleague(s) at Canary Wharf, about which he couldn’t have known in the first place – except he did. That was prior to his acceptance of the ‘official line’, which then made the office ‘phone call story (as an explanation for Miriam’s non-arrival at work) redundant. The bus bomb was ultimately considered to have taken care of that.

One cannot but feel sympathy for any truly grieving parent, and I have no wish to impugn the Hyman family. However, in the light of what appear to be something other than trivial contradictions on their part, together with the lack of any categorical confirmation by them of exactly what they knew and when they knew it, there are genuine grounds for suspecting their daughter Miriam did not fall victim to a bomb at Tavistock Square, but to a bullet at Canary Wharf, and that her 10.00 a.m. ‘phone call to work was a ‘storyline’, fed to the Hymans, so as to defer further inquiry until such time as a more appropriate location for their daughter’s demise could be decided upon. Either that, or (heaven forfend) it was a storyline constructed by the Hymans.

Stereotypes

Nick Kollerstrom again:

‘On 10th July 2005 the Observer reported that “Police have put a tracking device on Miriam’s ‘phone so that if it is activated they will be able to find her.”‘

Whereabouts in relation to Miriam’s body was her ‘cell phone eventually found? It was clearly functional after the bombings that morning or the Police couldn’t have downloaded a tracker ‘app’ onto it; something there would scarcely have been any call for beforehand. The answer – it was never reported as having been found. That is not to say of course that it was never actually found.

Miriam’s mother Mavis is Indian, born in Kolkata. Miriam was therefore of mixed race (Jewish-Asian), and exhibited traits of each. Being an artist/picture editor, and based professionally at Canary Wharf, might she perhaps have been carrying a camera, a lap-top computer bag or portfolio case, and did these various characteristics conspire to appear suspicious when viewed through a telescopic gun-sight?

Answers to these several questions are provided by the Jewish Chronicle Online (29 April, 2010) in commenting upon the belated inquest into the many deaths, five years previously, on 7/7. Albeit lengthy, the following passage from the Jewish Chronicle is richly informative:

“The family of Miriam Hyman, who died in the 7/7 terror attack, was forced to wait four days to be officially told of her death, even though identification documents were found on her body.

“In the High Court this week, lawyers acting for the Hyman family and that of Israeli Anat Rosenberg, who was also killed by the Tavistock Square bus bomb in July 2005, urged the coroner to resume the inquests and investigate whether the security services failed to act upon information known about the bombers before the attack.

“The hearing heard that many families had suffered long delays in being informed of the deaths. One had to wait 11 days.

“Counsel Janine Sheff told the court that relatives of Ms Hyman, a 32-year-old picture researcher from Hampstead Garden Suburb, had to wait "four agonising days" to be told she was among the 52 victims.

“Ms Sheff said: "She was found with her bag strapped to her, with numerous documents with her ID on her."

“She added that the parents of Ms Hyman were unable to travel to London and search hospitals, instead relying on her friends, who were told the police had no information.

“Ms Sheff said: "So troubled were they from the lack of information from the police - who said they had to live with that lack of knowledge - that they sought a [bomb] survivor to help them understand what happened."

“Ms Hyman's mother, Mavis, said: "Those four days of no news were unquestionably the most horrendous of my life. Nobody had any suggestion as to what had happened. Her family and friends couldn't just sit still and we spoke to the media and survivors to try to get any information we could.

"The police were not helpful and gave us little information. We would have appreciated knowing about the identification found."

Indeed.

Note how "She was found with her bag strapped to her, with numerous documents with her ID on her."

Whether taken in or out of context, this is an altogether extraordinary turn of phrase, no doubt originating with the person(s) who actually ‘found’ Miriam in the first place.

Miriam is not described as having ‘a bag over her shoulder’ nor, however unlikely, ‘wearing a rucksack or back-pack.’ Instead her bag is ‘strapped to her’, conjuring up images elsewhere of an explosive waistcoat. To which we are invited to add ‘numerous documents with her ID.’ Well it was London, so I suppose even a pedestrian might be expected carry one or two means of identification – but numerous examples?

All we have to do here is bring forward the conventional wisdom of the day (that suicide bombers were wont to deposit evidence of their identity at the scene of their martydom, as Mohammed Sidique Khan is posthumously accused of having done at two locations on the London Underground, despite being credited with only one bomb) and we have the Blair government blueprint for a long-haired, dark-skinned terrorist.

And yet there was no mobile ‘phone, nor any information of immediate interest to the parents for four whole days?

Miriam may well have been found with ‘her bag strapped to her body,’ but where exactly was her body at the time?

It gets murkier.


Distortions in Space-Time

This from Esther Addley of the Guardian (6.5.2011):

“At around 9.45am one sunny morning in July 2005, John Hyman took a call from his daughter Miriam. There had been some sort of problem at King's Cross, she said, and she had been evacuated from the tube. She was fine, though, and he wasn't to worry. Her father suggested she find a coffee shop and wait until things calmed down.

“In the hours and days that followed the terrorist attacks on London, the Hyman family clung to that phone call like a lifebuoy, desperately telling themselves the call had come after 9.49am, the moment when 18-year-old Hasib Hussain blew himself up on the upper deck of a number 30 bus to Hackney.

“Four days later, after touring the capital's hospitals, putting up posters and making appeals via the media, they were at last told by a police family liaison officer that Miriam had been identified by her dental records. She had been sitting directly in front of Hussain at the moment of explosion, and was blown from the bus and on to the pavement, where she died very shortly afterwards.”

We ought here to interpolate another statement by Esther Hyman, again recorded within the Guardian video of the same date, which specifies even more precisely the location of Miriam’s corpse, an observation shortly to assume particular significance:

“She was thrown from the bus onto the pavement directly outside the entrance of the BMA building.”

Notice how this Guardian article allocates Miriam two additional minutes in which to catch the no. 30 bus, how the police somehow knew whose dental records to track down (presumably from the ID they were decidedly reluctant to reveal to the parents), and exactly where this lady was sitting in relation to other passengers on board the bus. (Reported at the inquest to have had an inboard seat, she is nevertheless catapulted onto the nearside pavement).

It doesn’t end there. The Guardian continues:

“The Hyman family made an even more striking discovery. They had been contacted, two years after the bombings, by Clive Featherstone, who had been working in Tavistock Square when the bomb went off, and who had held Miriam's hand in her final moments. "At first we didn't get back in touch with him … [But] since then we've become very close with him."

“It was only during the inquest process that they discovered the existence of another man, a passer-by called Richard Collins, who had gone to Miriam's side after Featherstone had been told to move along by a policeman. Initially they thought he must have been mistaken and confused Miriam with another victim, but no. "Richard told us afterwards: 'I would have felt a bit silly if it had turned out not to be Miriam, as I actually had her initials tattooed on my chest.' It's his only tattoo but it turned out that he had been so moved that he had this indelible mark put on himself. We find that exceptional."*

The Hymans thought at first that Richard Collins had been mistaken, yet he had sufficient confidence in his identification of their daughter as to have her initials tattooed on his chest afterwards. Thus confirmation of Miriam Hyman’s last moments becomes a pre-requisite for validation of Collins’ tattoo! We are not told the basis for Clive Featherstone’s identification of her.

Featherstone and Collins’ displayed their separate acts of sympathy toward the same young lady, whom counsel at the inquest would make every effort to identify as Miriam Hyman. There were however several dark-skinned female victims aboard the no. 30 bus, two of whom are known to have taken their last breaths at the roadside. Neetu Jain was 37 years old and originally from Delhi. Gladys Wundowa was black. Both are said to have been occupying nearside window seats.

In March 2006 Michelle Du-Feu, a doctor, described having treated a middle-aged Middle-Eastern or Asian-looking woman lying on the road at the rear of the bus. At the Inquest in January 2011 she said that when shown a photograph of Miriam Hyman a year earlier she had become confused, “because things obviously weren’t how I had remembered them.“

Despite attempts by lead counsel Hugo Keith to get Dr Du-Feu to admit she had treated Miriam Hyman, she did not do so. Ms. Gallagher, counsel for the Hyman family acknowledged that Dr. Du-Feu was thus “not so sure” to have treated and seen Miriam.

A Dr Michael David Peters, who was also invited to testify at the Inquest, said that when he came out from the BMA building he saw a torso:

“There was a sort of mass of sort of tissue, red, about one metre by a metre there. And then, on the other side, to the left as I was looking from the square in, there was a body of, I think, a black woman who was wearing a dress. The body seemed to be swollen, motionless, and I presumed she was dead.“ 

Although Hugo Keith once again tried to convince Dr. Peters that he may actually have seen Miriam Hyman, Peters insisted the woman he saw was black.

Hence two critically injured females were immediately attended in the road (or on the pavement), one of them Asian. Yet neither was identifiable as Miriam Hyman. According to ‘the Mirror’ (20.1.2011) Clive Featherstone described at the Inquest how Miriam “kind of moved to try and lift herself up or towards me” as he knelt beside her. However, the first thing Dr Peters noticed on exiting the BMA building was a torso. If this were Miriam’s body, which, according to her sister Esther, had landed in that very entrance, then she would have been killed instantaneously and there could have been no attempted movement whatsoever.

When asked about an earlier statement he had made concerning the absence of Miriam’s left leg, Richard Collins replied:

”From the knee down, halfway across the knee down”. Loss of the lower half of one lower limb does not represent a ‘torso’.

Unless, therefore, an additional female body is known to have been lying in the immediate vicinity, then there are few grounds for believing Miriam was ever there, especially given the death also of Shahara Islam, another Asian female on board the no. 30 bus, positioned originally, it is supposed, among the group of seats directly across the aisle from the exploding bomb.


The eyes have it

Bearing in mind that Featherstone and Collins each claimed to have comforted the same individual, it is worth recording their respective observations regarding her facial appearance, especially as they were complete strangers to each other.

First Featherstone:

“I noticed that she had these little polystyrene balls in her eyes, which apparently later I heard was from the padding of the seats.”

And now Collins:

“Looking at my witness statement, I recalled that her eyes were green, if that is the case. So obviously, I was looking in her eyes, but I don't recall any polystyrene balls.”

Miriam Hyman’s eyes were unquestionably hazel brown, as one might expect of a lady of Asian extraction. Extraordinarily however, the eyes of 20 year old Shahara Islam, herself a victim from the rear of the upper deck, were considerably paler, and might easily have been taken for green. (See: HuffPo (Or below Ed)

Both Featherstone and Collins comforted the same badly injured, green-eyed lady, not an incomplete corpse. That lady was clearly not Miriam Hyman, and Richard Collins’ subsequent tattoo does not make it so. The inquest account of the state in which Miriam was found does not include mention of where, nor does it lead one to suppose that her body was other than intact, despite Esther Hyman’s announcement of her sister’s last known whereabouts in death, and what that would necessarily imply.

As http://aldeilis.net/bpb/london/ further informs us:

“According to the Daily Star, inquests were opened on 13 July 2005 into the deaths of Miriam Hyman and others. No family members, however, were invited to attend the hearing which was held at St Pancras coroner’s court. It has not been explained why no family members were invited to attend. Dr. Reid then adjourned the inquests until after the end of police investigations.“

Miriam Hyman is said, conventionally almost, to have died aboard a no. 30 bus, in a misguided attempt to reach her place of work at Canary Wharf. Her name is after all included on a wall plaque placed in memory of the Tavistock Square victims. It is a bus she could not have caught, unless of course one subscribes to the Times Group account of 28 December 2005, which renders the father‘s contention false from start to finish:

“Miriam Hyman, 32, a freelance picture researcher was travelling to work, but was told by her agency not to bother coming in. Amid the chaos, she was evacuated from the Tube train she was travelling on at King's Cross. She walked to Tavistock Square, from where she rang her parents to let them know she was alright. She then alighted the doomed number 30 bus.”

John Hyman’s story is indeed questionable, especially the part where he describes a later ‘phone call he could have known nothing about unless informed of it by someone else. Miriam could have walked to Tavistock Square, where, according to the Times, she actually got off the ‘doomed no. 30’ bus, rather than on it.

Such verbal carelessness however hardly inspires confidence in the content of the report, or the belief that John Hyman’s own twice confirmed account was significantly incorrect.

That being the case there is only one place Miriam Hyman could have died that morning, and it would not have been as the result of any random act of terrorism.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has publicly lamented the deaths of British soldiers sent to fight in Iraq, as well as the many hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, who also perished as a direct result of the West’s unprovoked ‘War on Terror‘. It is tempting to speculate that his dogmatic refusal to authorize a public inquiry into the London bombings of 7/7 stemmed, at least in part, from his being unprepared to countenance the revelation of an innocent British citizen, a Londoner, being shot dead on the streets of their own capital, and by a member of their own security services. The state-sanctioned murder of Jean Charles de Menezes a fortnight later proved difficult enough to handle - and he wasn’t even British.

Dr Martin Roberts

Blair attends 7/7 memorial, full of contrition no doubt.

* Not as much as I find it unbelievable. Ed

Briton Tom Grundy Attempts Citizens Arrest On Tony Blair In Hong

Two separate reports; the first and smaller of the two, deals as much with the purpose of Blair's speech in Hong Kong, though falling as it does into the, shit you couldn't make up category. In fact I think it borders on 'one of us is insane' and I know who it ain't.

The other, longer piece with photo's, deals primarily with the incident.

Tom Grundy, the Briton who attempted to arrest Tony Blair in Hong Kong, said the act was symbolic

Protester heckles former British PM Blair in Hong Kong
14 June 2012

HONG KONG: A lone protester on Thursday heckled former British prime minister Tony Blair as he prepared to make a speech on religion and globalisation at the University of Hong Kong.

The man shouted about breaches of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war during Blair's years in office as the ex-leader took the stage.

"I wouldn't come any further... you can go," Blair said as the man approached the podium where he was standing.

The unidentified man, who spoke with a British accent, came within metres (feet) of the former prime minister before being blocked by university staff and escorted peacefully from the room.

"That's democracy for you," Blair said as the man was led away.

Blair went on with his speech apparently undeterred by the incident, telling his audience that the forces of globalisation were "multiplying and intensifying the impact of religion" around the world.

He said the world needed more "platforms of interfaith dialogue and action" to improve understanding between people of different belief systems.

Blair, who was Labour prime minister between 1997 and 2007, took Britain into the US-led war in Iraq in 2003, as well as sending troops into Afghanistan as part of the US-led operation in 2001.

He was appointed envoy for the Middle East Quartet comprising the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia in 2007 but his role has come under increased scrutiny recently as efforts for peace have stalled.

He was speaking in Hong Kong as the founder of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which seeks to promote understanding between the major religions.

"The 20th century battle ... between left and right is gone," he said, adding that he believed the biggest threat to world peace in the 21st century was religious conflict.

"This issue cannot be minimised, it cannot be treated as anything other than it is, and it's got to be studied." channelnewsasia

Briton Tom Grundy Attempts Citizens Arrest On Tony Blair In Hong
By Dina Rickman
14 June 2012

A British activist in Hong Kong has attempted to perform a citizen's arrest on Tony Blair, claiming it was his "moral obligation" to hold the former PM for war crimes.

Tom Grundy, a 29-year-old Briton living in the country, attempted the arrest at 5:40pm local time, around 11am in Britain, as the former prime minister gave a speech about faith and globalisation at Hong Kong university.

The activist told The Huffington Post UK he had planned the action two days before the speech, and sat waiting for the former Labour leader for an hour before the attempted arrest.

Grundy said he wanted to "renew awareness" about Blair, who he claims had violated international law in his support for the Iraq War.

"In 2009 Blair admitted he would have gone to war regardless of WMDs and international law forbids wars for reasons of regime change. So that's why I tried to perform a citizen's arrest," he said.

"I want him to fear that wherever he goes and I hope it may stick one day."

Grundy denied he was harassing Tony Blair saying: "I took one-to-two minutes of Mr Blair's time to make this point. I wouldn't call that harassment in any way. There's nothing legally ambiguous with regard to standing up and speaking loudly. He's a public figure and he's an ex-leader and he's still making public appearances like this… He's not immune simply because he's no longer in power."

He said during the incident he said he got "as close to him as I could."

"I was a metre or two directly in front of him but there was a gaggle of photographers and his men in front of me preventing me to go any further. I put it to him that he'd caused the death of at least 100,000 people during the Iraq War,

"I closed by telling him he can't talk about religion when he has set back religious tolerance by decades."

Grundy, who said he informed news agency Reuters about his plans before the arrest, claimed Blair's speech about faith was hypocritical, saying: "He has enraged the entire Muslim world, [and] endangered British citizens. When there was a terrorist attack on 7/7 those involved admitted that it was related to British foreign policy."

After the incident, which lasted for one or two minutes, Grundy said he looked directly at Blair before leaving of his own accord. More HuffPo

John Pilger: War, the Media and the "High Moral Values" of Tony Blair

Among other things, Pilger reserves, not for the first time, his usual place of little regard for the BBC's Andrew Marr. But in fairness, he hasn't a lot good, to say about anybody else for that matter.

John Pilger: War, the media and the "high moral values" of Tony Blair

Standing in Downing Street on the night of the assault on Iraq, the BBC's political editor rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised "to take Baghdad without a bloodbath".
By John Pilger
1 June 2012

Rupert Murdoch is a bad man. His son James is also bad. Rebekah Brooks is allegedly bad.

The News of the World was very bad; it hacked phones and pilloried people. British prime ministers grovelled before this iniquity.

David Cameron even sent text messages to Brooks signed "LOL", and they all had parties in the Cotswolds with Jeremy Clarkson.

Nods and winks were duly exchanged on the BSkyB deal.

Shock, horror.

Offering glimpses of the power and petty gangsterism of the British tabloid press, the inquiry conducted by Lord Leveson has, I suspect, shocked few people. As the soap has rolled on, bemusement has given way to boredom.

Tony Blair was allowed to whine about the Daily Mail's treatment of his wife until he and the inquiry's amoral smugness protecting him were exposed by a member of the public, David Lawley-Wakelin, who shouted, "Excuse me, this man should be arrested for war crimes."

His Lordship duly apologised to the war criminal and the truth-teller was seen off.

Why Murdoch should complain about the British establishment has always mystified me. His interrogation, if that is the word, by Robert Jay QC, was a series of verbal marshmallows that Murdoch promptly spat out. When he described one of his own rambling, self-satisfied questions as "subtle", Jay received this deft dismissal from Murdoch: "I'm afraid I don't have much subtlety in me."

As the theatre critic Michael Billington reminded us recently, it was in the Spectator in 1955 that Henry Fairlie coined the term "the establishment", defining it as "the matrix of official and social relations within which power in Britain is exercised".

For most of my career as a journalist, Murdoch has been an influential and admired member of this club: even a mentor to many of those now casting him as a "bad apple".

His deeply cynical mantra, "I'm only giving the public what they want", was echoed by journalists and broadcasters as they lined up to dumb down their work and embrace the propaganda of corporatism that followed Murdoch's bloody move to Wapping in 1986.

More than 5,000 men and women were sacked, and countless families destroyed and suicides committed; and Murdoch could not have got away with it had Margaret Thatcher and the Metropolitan Police not given him total, often secret support, and journalists not lain face down on the floors of buses that drove perilously through the picket lines of their former, principled colleagues.

Cheering him on, if discreetly, were those now running what Max Hastings has called the "new establishment": the media's managerial middle class, often liberal to a fault, that was later to fall at the feet of Murdoch's man Blair, the future war criminal, whose election as prime minister was celebrated in the Guardian with: "Few now sang England Arise, but England has risen all the same."

Leveson has asked nothing about how the respectable media complemented the Murdoch press in systematically promoting corrupt, mendacious, often violent political power whose crimes make phone-hacking barely a misdemeanour. The Leveson inquiry is a club matter, in which a member has caused such extraordinary public embarrassment he must be black-balled, so that nothing changes.

What jolly fun to hear Jeremy Paxman grass on Piers Morgan who, he gossiped, described to him how to hack phones. Paxman was asked nothing by Jay about the essential role of the BBC and its leading lights as state propagandists for illegal wars that have killed, maimed and dispossessed millions.

How ironic that the lunch Paxman attended at the Daily Mirror appears to have been in 2002 when the Mirror, edited by Morgan, was the only Fleet Street newspaper uncompromisingly opposed to the coming invasion of Iraq: thus reflecting the wishes of the majority of the British public.

And what a wheeze it was to hear from the clubbable Andrew Marr, the BBC's ubiquitous voice: he of the super-injunction. Just as Murdoch's Sun declared in 1995 that it shared the rising Blair's "high moral values", so Marr, writing in the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister's "substantial moral courage".

What impressed Marr was Blair's "utter lack of cynicism", along with his bombing of Yugoslavia which would "save lives". By March 2003, Marr was the BBC's political editor. Standing in Downing Street on the night of the assault on Iraq, he rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised "to take Baghdad without a bloodbath".

The diametric opposite was true. In hawking his self-serving book in 2010, Blair selected Marr for his "exclusive TV interview". During their convivial encounter they discussed an attack on Iran, the country Hillary Clinton once said she was prepared to "obliterate".

In the text messages disclosed by Leveson between Murdoch lobbyist Frederic Michel and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, there is this one from Michel: "Very good on Marr as always". In a cable leaked to WikiLeaks, the US embassy in London urged Hillary Clinton to be interviewed by the "congenial" Marr because he often "sets the political agenda for the nation" and "will offer maximum impact for your investment of time". Inquisitor Jay showed no interest.

When Alastair Campbell "gave evidence", Jay waved a copy of Blair's A Journey and quoted Blair's view of his chief collaborator as "a genius".

"Sweet," responded Campbell.

"And with great clunking balls as well," continued Jay QC, awaiting the laughter. The silence of 780,000 Iraqi widows was a presence.

Not a single opponent of the institutional power of the media has been called by Leveson, though farce is welcomed. Richard Desmond, who owns the Daily Express and a section of the British porn industry, during his appearance damned the Daily Mail as "Britain's worst enemy" and said the Press Complaints Commission "hated our guts".

Shock, horror. Or just sweet. johnpilger.com

Exclusive Extracts From 'Dial M for Murdoch'

If this is anything to go by, then the book should be a good read.

Exclusive extracts from 'Dial M for Murdoch'
Tom Watson
20 April 2012

Few people have done so much to force the News International phone hacking scandal into the public eye as Tom Watson, the Labour MP. Here, in exclusive extracts from a sensational new book (written with The Independent's Martin Hickman), he reveals how he and other members of the Commons select committee were targeted by a media empire that, he claims, ruthlessly discouraged unwelcome attention




Watson told yesterday's launch of Dial M for Murdoch that the News of the World's former chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, had "targeted" MPs who were investigating News International's activities. The tale begins in July 2009...

Unbeknown to members of the Culture Committee, the NOTW established a team to investigate their private lives. For several days, as chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck would later tell Tom Watson, reporters searched for any secret lovers or extra-marital affairs that could be used as leverage against the MPs.
Thurlbeck said: "All I know is that, when the DCMS [Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee] was formed or rather when it got onto all the hacking stuff, there was an edict came down from the editor and it was find out every single thing you can about every single member: who was gay, who had affairs, anything we can use.
"Each reporter was given two members and there were six reporters that went on for around 10 days. I don't know who looked at you. It fell by the wayside; I think even Ian Edmondson [the news editor] realised there was something quite horrible about doing this."
Separately, a NOTW figure tasked with talking to Watson and other committee members to glean their question plan let them know that Rebekah Brooks believed Watson and [fellow MP Paul Farrelly] were the inquiry's "ringleaders". Watson was privately told by Downing Street insiders that Wapping was using its connections to persuade senior politicians to urge him to hold back.
Gordon Brown called Watson to tell him that Rupert Murdoch had phoned Tony Blair to tell him to call Watson off.
The book claims that Mr Blair has denied this, with Gordon Brown saying he cannot remember the phone call to Watson. Mr Blair's spin doctor Alastair Campbell remembered intimidation, however...
Speaking three years later, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former communications director, recalled the "bullying culture": "I recall Rebekah Wade telling me that so far as she was concerned, with Tom Watson it's personal, and we won't stop till we get him...."
As the committee continued its work, News International had another assignment for a surveillance expert who had worked for the NOTW since 2003, Derek Webb, whose firm was called Silent Shadow.
The former policeman had legally watched dozens of pop stars, footballers and royals. In 2005 he had followed Angelina Jolie, Delia Smith, Gordon Ramsay and the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke (whose responsibilities included the police); in 2006 George Michael and the comedian Rik Mayall; and in 2007, the Duke of Westminster. Typically, his work would involve tailing a target for five days and noting down where they had gone and who they had met.
From 28 September until 2 October 2009, at the last Labour Party conference before the general election, Webb was ordered to follow the every move of Tom Watson. He had difficulty tracking the MP down. Ironically, on the first night, 28 September, Webb would have been more successful had he phoned the NOTW's political editor, Ian Kirby, who had spent the night drinking with Watson, the Sunday Mirror's Vincent Moss and the Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire in the bar of Brighton's Grand Hotel, where they sang songs round the piano until the early hours.
Tight security because of the presence of the Cabinet made following Watson difficult, but Webb billed the paper £1,125 for seven and a half shifts. Before and after following Watson (who was unaware of the surveillance) he tailed Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary.
The MPs had no knowledge of what NI was doing behind their backs. In January 2010 the committee decided that it wanted to hear from Rebekah Brooks, who was by then chief executive of NI...
The MPs decided they should hear from Brooks herself and asked her to give evidence. In a letter to John Whittingdale on 4 January 2010, she contemptuously dismissed the invitation to answer questions about the "supposed incongruity" between the treatment of Clive Goodman and Matt Driscoll, the "For Neville" email and misbehaviour by News International journalists, which, she said, related to the News of the World, not to other News International newspapers "any more than they do to any other national newspapers".
She asked whether the committee intended to call chief executives of other newspaper groups, said that the News of the World's editor had outlined the measures to end improper behaviour and that as chief executive she would "ensure the proper journalistic standards continue to be applied across all our titles"...
Although the committee wanted Brooks to give evidence, its members, whose private lives News International had pored over, capitulated and decided not to summon her. On the day the committee met to discuss the issue, two Labour MPs close to Tony Blair, Janet Anderson and Rosemary McKenna, were absent. The gay Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price – who in September unexpectedly announced that he would leave Parliament at the next general election to take up a Fulbright scholarship in the US – claimed that the committee's members had been warned that if they had called Brooks, their private lives would be raked over.
Mr Price said later: "I was told by a senior Conservative member of the committee, who I knew was in direct contact with executives at News International, that if we went for her, they would go for us – effectively they would delve into our personal lives in order to punish [us]."
The mystery phone call that led to a hidden trove of email evidence
In 2008, Max Mosley, the former head of motorsport's world governing body, and the son of the 1930s British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, won a landmark privacy case against the 'News of the World'. A story had been published in the Sunday tabloid, written by Neville Thurlbeck, falsely accused him of taking part in a "sick Nazi orgy" which had been secretly photographed. The story appeared with pictures of Mr Mosley indulging in what was claimed to be a five-hour sadomasochistic sex session with prostitutes.
'Dial M for Murdoch' explains how Max Mosley's extraordinary next move – and a phone call from a stranger to Tom Watson – blew open the criminal wrongdoing at News International...
Two years after he had been turned over by the News of the World, Max Mosley was about to strike again. During the summer of 2010, from Monaco, he had been taking an ever closer interest in the phone hacking story and had become determined to ensure the police would not be able to cover up the Screws' seedy past.
He had started talking to Nick Davies at The Guardian and had also acquired a highly confidential source, Mr X, who had told him that Scotland Yard was holding extensive evidence about hacking at the NOTW. Mosley decided the best way to intensify the pressure was through cases in the civil courts which, through disclosure, would unlock the secrets of Mulcaire's files. But there was a problem: money. Under English law, litigants could be liable for costs, which could be crippling, and were often a severe deterrent to potential litigants.
Mosley agreed to underwrite the risk for several claimants, in both the emerging civil privacy cases against the News of the World and in the judicial review against Scotland Yard being coordinated by Tamsin Allen at Bindmans. If the cases were lost, his costs could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, but Mosley was a multimillionaire.
He had decided he would risk half his fortune, if necessary, to fight Rupert Murdoch; ordinarily that half would have gone to one of his two sons, Alexander, but he was a regular drug user and had died of cocaine intoxication in May 2009. By early 2008 Alexander had temporarily managed to come off drugs but the News of the World's exposure of his father's sado-masochism had devastated him and was, his father believed, a contributory factor in his death. On 12 September, five days before Mosley returned to London at the end of his presidency of the FIA, Allen began judicial review against the Met at the High Court on behalf of Chris Bryant, Brian Paddick and Brendan Montague; they were joined a week later by John Prescott.
Sitting in his London mews house in Kensington in 2011, Mosley said: "I saw it as a much bigger thing than giving the News of the World a bit of their own back, or privacy generally, because I feel the Murdoch empire is a really sinister presence undermining the whole of our democracy. They are capable of suborning the police, Parliament and the government." He suspected the police had been reluctant to inform the victims "because they knew damn well there would be writs flying down to the High Court and their friends in Wapping would be upset".
In a memo to the Home Affairs Committee that was sent in October 2010, the lawyer Mark Lewis suggested several reasons why the police might not have properly investigated hacking in 2006, including a lack of resources, high-priority terrorism cases – and the closeness of the relationship between senior officers and News of the World executives. With the benefit of legal privilege over parliamentary affairs, he speculated whether the two officers who had said there were few victims, Andy Hayman and John Yates – both of whose own phones had been hacked – had been fearful of press coverage.
Lewis wrote: at the relevant time, Mr Hayman had reason to fear that he was a target of Glenn Mulcaire and the News of the World. It became public knowledge that throughout the period of the investigation into voicemail hacking, Mr Hayman was involved in a controversial relationship with a woman who worked for the Independent Police Complaints Commission and was claiming expenses which were subsequently regarded as unusually high. The same, of course, is also true of John Yates who, we now know, at the time when he responded to The Guardian's stories about Gordon Taylor's settlement with News Group, was involved in a controversial relationship with a woman who worked for the Met press bureau.
Lewis offered no evidence that the officers' behaviour towards the News of the World had been unduly influenced by fear, and Yates and Hayman both later denied that their conduct had been compromised by their relationships. With pressure building on the Met, News International became ever more determined to marginalise those making its life uncomfortable.
On 27 December [2010], high up in the peaks of the Yorkshire and Derbyshire border, a phone call transformed Watson's mood. Over previous weeks, a new source had been tantalisingly close to revealing important information. The source, who had very detailed knowledge of the information technology architecture of News Corp around the world, contradicted Watson's belief that data had been lost irrevocably.
As they talked for over an hour, Watson frantically wrote notes on small pieces of paper in his pockets, taking the names of the senior IT people and those that had recently left. He probed the contact while trying not to betray his increasing sense of euphoria.
Back in 2005 when Mulcaire and Goodman were conspiring to hack phones, the company bosses felt they were untouchable. They had politicians and police in their pockets, and they had no "predators"; Watson's logic was that with that level of power you would feel invulnerable – and if you thought yourself invulnerable, you would become complacent and make mistakes. He already knew that Brooks was complacent with her digital fingerprints because of the text message about him which she had sent in April 2009 to someone close to the Prime Minister. If others shared her arrogance, there would be a rich source of information on that second server that the police could use to crack the case. He did not know at that point that data had been or was being destroyed. But just as he had been losing hope, this new discovery reinvigorated him.
How lawyer stumbled on Soham scandal
Under conditions of secrecy in a windowless room at Scotland Yard, victims could inspect the notes about them, though they were not allowed to photograph or copy them. As the actress Leslie Ash and her husband Lee Chapman read Glenn Mulcaire's references to them [early in 2011], they accidentally discovered the "News of the World" had targeted Leslie Chapman – who was not Leslie Ash using her husband's surname, but the father of one of the two children killed at Soham in 2002.
The abduction and murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, at the hands of school caretaker Ian Huntley, horrified the public.
Charlotte Harris, the couple's lawyer, recalled: "Leslie Chapman's papers were in front of us and the police were saying of the address: 'Yeah, well it's Fulham,' but it wasn't a Fulham postcode and I was looking at it, and being so familiar with Glenn Mulcaire's handwriting, I said: 'It doesn't say "Fulham", it says "Soham".'" Independent

John Pilger: It's Time We Recognized the Blair Government's Criminality

It's Time We Recognized the Blair Government's Criminality
by John Pilger
16 February 2012

In the Kabuki theater of British parliamentary politics, great crimes do not happen and criminals go free. It is theater after all; the pirouettes matter, not actions taken at remove in distance and culture from their consequences. It is a secure arrangement guarded by cast and critics alike. The farewell speech of one of the most artful, Tony Blair, had "a sense of moral conviction running through it," effused the television presenter Jon Snow, as if Blair's appeal to Kabuki devotees was mystical. That he was a war criminal was irrelevant.

The suppression of Blair's criminality and that of his administrations is described in Gareth Peirce's "Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice," published in paperback this month by Verso. Peirce is Britain's most distinguished human rights lawyer; her pursuit of infamous miscarriages of justice and justice for the victims of state crimes, such as torture and rendition, is unsurpassed. What is unusual about this accounting of what she calls the "moral and legal pandemonium" in the wake of 9/11 is that, in drawing on the memoirs of Blair and Alistair Campbell, Cabinet minutes and MI6 files, she applies the rule of law to them.

Advocates such as Peirce, Phil Shiner and Clive Stafford-Smith have ensured the indictment of dominant powers is no longer a taboo. Israel, America's hit man, is now widely recognized as the world's most lawless state. The likes of Donald Rumsfeld now avoid countries where the law reaches beyond borders, as do George W. Bush and Blair.

Deploying sinecures of "peacemaking" and "development" that allow him to replenish the fortune accumulated since leaving Downing Street, Blair's jackdaw travels are concentrated on the Gulf sheikhdoms, the US, Israel and safe havens like the small African nation of Rwanda. Since 2007, Blair has made seven visits to Rwanda, where he has access to a private jet supplied by President Paul Kagame. Kagame's regime, whose opponents have been silenced brutally on trumped-up charges, is "innovative" and a "leader" in Africa, said Blair.

Peirce's book achieves the impossible on Blair: it shocks. In tracing the "unjustifiable theses, unrestrained belligerence, falsification and willful illegality" that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she identifies Blair's assault on Muslims as both criminal and racist. "Human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently ... in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations'." Whole societies were reduced to "splashes of colour" on a canvas upon which Labour's Napoleon would "re-order the world."

The very concept of war was wrenched from its dictionary meaning and became "our values versus theirs." The actual perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, mostly Saudis trained to fly in America, were all but forgotten. Instead, the "splashes of colour" were made blood red - first in Afghanistan, land of the poorest of the poor. No Afghans were members of al-Qaeda; on the contrary, there was mutual resentment. No matter. Once the bombing began on 7 October 2001, tens of thousands of Afghans were punished with starvation as the World Food Program withdrew aid on the cusp of winter. In one stricken village, Bibi Mahru, I witnessed the aftermath of a single Mk82 "precision" bomb's obliteration of two families, including eight children. "TB [Tony Blair]," wrote Alistair Campbell, "said they had to know that we would hurt them if they don't yield up OBL [Osama bin Laden]."

The cartoon figure of Campbell was already at work on concocting another threat in Iraq. This "yielded up," according to the MIT Center for International Studies, between 800,000 and 1.3 million deaths: figures that exceed the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the genocide in Rwanda.

And yet, wrote Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiqués reveal no dissent." Interrogation that included torture was on "the express instructions ... of government ministers." On 10 January 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed his colleagues that sending British citizens to Guantanamo Bay was "the best way to meet our counter terrorism objective." He rejected "the only alternative of repatriation to the United Kingdom." (Later appointed "Justice Secretary," Straw suppressed incriminating Cabinet minutes in defiance of the Information Commissioner). On 6 February 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett noted that he was in "no hurry to see any individuals returned to the UK [from Guantanamo]." Three days later, Foreign Office Minister Ben Bradshaw wrote, "We need to all that we can to avoid the detainees being repatriated to the UK." Not one of the people they refer had been charged with anything; most had been sold as bounties to the Americans by Afghan warlords. Peirce describes how Foreign Office officials, prior to an inspection of Guantanamo Bay, "verified" that British prisoners were being "treated humanely" when the opposite was true.

Immersed in its misadventure and lies, listening only to their leader's crooned "sincerity," the Labour government consulted no one who spoke the truth. Peirce cites one of the most reliable sources, Conflicts Forum, run by the former British intelligence officer Alastair Crooke, who argued that to "isolate and demonise [Islamic] groups that have support on the ground, the perception is reinforced that the west only understands the language of military strength." In willfully denying this truth, Blair, Campbell, and their echoes planted the roots of the 7/7 attacks in London.

Today, another Afghanistan and Iraq beckon in Syria and Iran, perhaps even a world war. Once again, voices such as Crooke's attempt to explain to a media salivating for " intervention" in Syria that the civil war in that country requires skilled, patient negotiation, not the provocations of the British SAS (Special Air Service) and the familiar, bought-and-paid-for exiles who ride in Anglo-America's Trojan Horse. johnpilger.com

Kuala Lumpur: Bush Blair Found Guilty of War Crimes

How much more than symbolic this verdict is, remains to be seen, still it's a start I guess.

Bush, Blair Found Guilty of War Crimes

By Press TV
November 25, 2011

A War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia has found former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair guilty of war crimes for their roles in the Iraq war.

The five-panel Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal decided that Bush and Blair committed genocide and crimes against humanity by leading the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a Press TV correspondent reported on Tuesday.

In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction allegedly stockpiled by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.


Bombings and other forms of violence became commonplace in Iraq shortly after the US-led invasion of the country.

In their ruling, the tribunal judges also stated that the US, under the leadership of Bush, fabricated documents to make it appear that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

However, the world later learned that the former Iraqi regime did not possess WMDs and that the US and British leaders knew this all along.

Over one million Iraqis were killed during the invasion, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.

The judges also said the court findings should be provided to signatories to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and added that the names of Bush and Blair should be listed on a war crimes register. ICH

Watch The Trial of Tony Blair

The Wonderful World of Tony Blair: Dispatches CH4 Video

h/t ICH for bringing this to my attention, but sad to say their copy of The Wonderful World of Tony Blair, Dispatches CH4 is very low res. No harm, you can watch a better quality stream via CH4 Youtube. Link below.

Not had chance yet to watch it myself, probably later.

Yes, I'd look fucking embarrassed too.

The Wonderful World of Tony Blair

Since resigning in June 2007 Tony Blair has financially enriched himself more than any ex-Prime Minister ever. Reporter Peter Oborne reveals some of the sources of his new-found wealth, much of which comes from the Middle East.

On the day Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister, he was appointed the official representative Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East. By January 2009 he had set up Tony Blair Associates - his international consultancy - which handles multi-million pound contracts in the Middle East.

It is so secretive we don't know all the locations they do business in. Dispatches shows that at the same time as Blair is visiting Middle East leaders in his Quartet role he is receiving vast sums from some of them. If Blair represented the UK government, the EU, the IMF, the UN or the World Bank, this would not be permitted. watch

Nice company Mister Blair

The UK Riots and the Criminality of Jack Straw

We live in dangerous times, and I'm not talking about the Iraq war. What I do have in mind is the threat to our civil liberties posed knee jerk reactions by a huffing and puffing ineffectual wanker who is totally out of his depth. Call me, bollocks to due process, or just call me, bollocks Cameron. Jesus H, I should hate to see how this wanker would react to a real crisis.

How are things going in Libya, that Arab Spring thing, the spreading of democracy via the blunt end of NATO bombs? Shame about the casualties though, but then I don't suppose you can have a regime change without a few sand niggers getting blown to pieces. Serves 'em right for living there on top of all that oil.

The UK riots and the criminality of Jack Straw

What price justice when war criminal Jack Straw is free to call for more prisons to be built so young people caught stealing a £3.50 case of water can be jailed for six months?

By Robin Beste
Stop the War Coalition
14 August 2011




Jack Straw, former foreign secretary in Tony Blair's government, was quick to his feet, following David Cameron's speech on the UK riots in Parliament on 11 August.

"We need more prisons," Straw told Cameron and the House of Commons.

He may get his wish, looking at some of the sentences that have already been handed down in the hundreds of cases rushed through emergency courts -- no doubt at the government's bidding, to show that instant retribution will take precedence over justice.

A mother of two, who was asleep at home during the riots, has been given a five-month jail sentence for accepting running shorts stolen by someone else.

A 23-year-old student got six months for stealing a £3.50 case of water from a supermarket.

A 43-year-old man is in jail pending sentence for stealing items worth £1 from a newsagent.

But, if Jack Straw is right and we need more prisons, he should be one of the first inmates, alongside Tony Blair, who he served so loyally throughout the 13 years of New Labour government.

Jack Straw was foreign secretary during the run up to the Iraq war in 2002-3. He was, the Iraq Inquiry tells us, the only member of Tony Blair's cabinet to be fully informed of the prime minister’s discussions, negotiations and plans.

Straw knew that when George Bush and Tony Blair met at Bush's Texas ranch in April 2002, they "signed in blood" a secret deal to invade Iraq, whatever the views of the United Nations or the people of the United States and Britain.

Just prior to that meeting, Straw told Blair in a secret memo that "legally there are two potential elephant traps". Firstly, that "regime change per se is no justification for military action". And secondly, that "the weight of legal advice here is that a fresh mandate [from the United Nations] may well be required".

And it was Straw who was central in the attempt to bounce the United Nations into that second resolution to give a fig-leaf of legality to a war of unjustified aggression. He was rarely off our screens in 2002 telling us how Iraq was not giving access to the UN weapons inspectors, knowing that this simply was not true, as Hans Blix the chief UN inspector has pointed out, noting Straw's "incorrect answers" -- better known as lies -- to the Iraq Inquiry.

And Straw knew it was a lie when on 11 February 2003, a few days before the biggest anti-war demonstration in British history, he said: "We have to strain every sinew, even at this late stage, to avoid war."

Straw had already told Blair in his March 2002 memo that the US was going to war regardless, and later he was left in no doubt by the US secretary of state Colin Powell in March 2003, who told him, "We are going to war whatever Saddam does."

The only sinew Straw was straining was to find a way to justify a war which was going to happen regardless of legality or whether most countries and most people in the world opposed it.

This is why he rejected the advice of his senior legal advisor at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Sir Michael Wood, who told him in a memo that invading Iraq "would amount to the crime of aggression" and would be illegal under international law. It was the only time in Wood's career, before or since, that his legal advice had not been accepted by a minister.

And this is why Straw was dismissive of Sir Michael's deputy FCO, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who stated in her letter of resignation in March 2003, " I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second [UN] Security Council resolution."

Yet, despite all this evidence to the contrary, Jack Straw told the Iraq Inquiry that he would never "have been a party" to a war of regime change, which he said would be "improper and self-evidently unlawful".

Straw is clearly a congenital liar whose ability to speak untruths is limitless. But he knew what would be the consequences of the war on Iraq, legal or not, because he described them in February 2003: more stopwar.org.uk

Check out Robin Beste's other articles in the sidebar.


Related:
Jack Straw: Porkies!
Blair Too Spineless To Confront Bush
Iraq Inquiry: Goldsmith Bottle Going
Blair Roundup: Regrets I've Had a Few

Tony Blair 'Ere Son You're Nicked!

Not that this is likely to happen, but as the organisation that is offering the reward readily concedes, an arrest is not the object of the exercise, but rather to raise public awareness that Blair is a continuing target of the campaign.

Listening to the girleen from Dublin (first video) describing the security that surrounds Blair was more than interesting. Thus prompting me to dig out one or two more clips of Blair's book signing trip to the Dublin branch of Easons.

Citizen's arrest on Tony Blair worth $4,500
25 July 2011
Press Release: Global Peace And Justice Auckland
by John Minto




GPJA is encouraging interested New Zealanders to earn thousands of dollars by making a citizen's arrest of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for war crimes committed during the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Up to one million Iraqi civilians have been killed since the 2003 attacks led by Tony Blair and former US President George Bush using lies and deceit to justify the outrage. Iraq posed no immediate threat to any other country, there were no weapons of mass destruction and no plans or programme to develop WMD. Tony Blair knew this but deceived the public and a gullible media because British multinationals wanted their share of the massive Iraqi oil reserves.



Tony Blair is coming to Auckland on Thursday to speak at a corporate fundraising lunch at Eden Park and anyone able to make a citizens arrest according to the criteria below will earn $4,500.

The details of the reward payments are here http://www.arrestblair.org/ and involve
1.. A non-violent "citizens arrest" of Blair which involves
2.. Getting close enough to utter the words "Mr Blair, this is a citizens' arrest for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq. I am inviting you to accompany me to a police station to answer the charge."
3.. Having the attempt published in a mainstream news outlet (as opposed to a blog etc)



The money comes from donations received by the website which was started by the UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot.

Whoever makes the arrest will receive a quarter of the pool available which now stands at almost 10 thousand pounds. It's a chance for someone to earn some serious money from a good cause. Three payouts have been made so far from the site but no New Zealanders .yet.

We advise anyone wanting to attempt the arrest to try at the airport when he arrives on Wednesday evening or leaves on Thursday afternoon. Alternatively at his hotel or at the Eden Park dinner.



For example an investment of $495 for a ticket could bring a return of $4,500 within a few hours. Even Tony Blair would approve such a sure-fire investment.

Meanwhile protestors will be gathering outside the Walters Road entrance to the park from 11am this Thursday 28th July. scoop.co.nz

- - -

This site offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, for crimes against peace. Anyone attempting an arrest which meets the rules laid down here will be entitled to one quarter of the money collected at the time of his or her application.

Money donated to this site will be used for no other purpose than to pay bounties for attempts to arrest Tony Blair. All the costs of administering this site will be paid by the site’s founder.*

The intention is to encourage repeated attempts to arrest the former prime minister. We have four purposes:

- To remind people that justice has not yet been done.

- To show Mr Blair that, despite his requests for people to “move on” from Iraq, the mass murder he committed will not be forgotten.

- To put pressure on the authorities of the United Kingdom and the countries he travels through to prosecute him for a crime against peace, or to deliver him for prosecution to the International Criminal Court.

- To discourage other people from repeating his crime.

More at http://www.arrestblair.org/

What a douchbag he is. Listen as Blair has the unadulterated bloody nerve to quote infant mortality as one of the justifications for invading Iraq, conveniently failing to mention that the horrific mortality rate amongst children prior to the invasion was due largely to the result of over a decade UN sanctions. Not to mention the UN's deliberate policy of bombing the shit out of Iraqi infrastructure, denying not just children, but the populace as a whole, to the basics to sustain life.



Richard Dawkins takes the piss.


Part two

Unless of course, these lads take it into their heads to effect an arrest proper. I don't think you could put anything past them.

Related: The Trial of Tony Blair video.

The Trial of Tony Blair

This is a re-up in conjunction with the post above.

If you haven't already enjoyed The Trial of Tony Blair below, then do treat yourself to this excellent bit of wishful thinking

The Trial of Tony Blair

Television puts Tony Blair on trial

In a new TV drama, the Prime Minister is brought to account over the war in Iraq. James Rampton meets its creators

Tony Blair is hunched over the basin at his posh new home in Connaught Square, central London. He is cleaning his hands with soap – at first gently, then more and more furiously. His wife, Cherie, appears at the bathroom door and watches her husband's actions with increasing horror.
Like a man possessed, he is now scrubbing with a scarily obsessive vigour. Two words spring to mind: Lady Macbeth.

Set in 2010, Alistair Beaton's drama envisages a Britain in which Blair (played with a messianic glint in the eye by Robert Lindsay, who also incarnated the Prime Minister in A Very Social Secretary) has finally and very reluctantly ceded power to his arch-rival, Gordon Brown (Peter Mullan).

This Blair is fixated on securing his legacy, declaring that "The world needs me, as Britain once needed me. But I've done Britain, Britain's sorted. I've outgrown Britain. I need a bigger stage now."

But his obsession with establishing his place in history blinds the former prime minister to something much more serious: the imminent threat of being indicted on war crimes charges in the Hague for leading his country into an illegal conflict in Iraq.

As Blair tries frantically to shut out the increasingly disastrous news from Iraq, he begins to be haunted by victims of the seemingly endless war there. In one particularly chilling scene, he has a nightmare that he is carrying the corpse of a young Iraqi boy killed in the fighting. As the aforementioned "Lady Macbeth" scene demonstrates, this is a man with a lot on his conscience.

The Trial of Tony Blair taps into the deep vein of public dissatisfaction with the war. Whatever the Prime Minister's protestations to the contrary, it is the catastrophe in Iraq that will be his legacy.

I am on the set of The Trial of Tony Blair at Loseley House, a splendid 1562 country pile outside Guildford, which is doubling for Chequers. I am watching a tense scene in which Brown agonises over whether or not to block the indictment of Blair. Extras dressed as police patrol the grounds, and a props van on the driveway is filled with protestors' placards proclaiming: "Tony Blair: war criminal, no matter where he lives."

UK Plans to Exploit Iraq's Oil Reserves Were Discussed a Year Before Invasion

How's the humanitarian mission going in Libya?

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq
By Paul Bignell
19 April 2011

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as "highly inaccurate". BP denied that it had any "strategic interest" in Iraq, while Tony Blair described "the oil conspiracy theory" as "the most absurd".

But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very different picture.

Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: "Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis."

The minister then promised to "report back to the companies before Christmas" on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."

After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: "Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq."

Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time".

BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf's existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world's leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take "big risks" to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world.

Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002.

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq's reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

Last week, Iraq raised its oil output to the highest level for almost decade, 2.7 million barrels a day – seen as especially important at the moment given the regional volatility and loss of Libyan output. Many opponents of the war suspected that one of Washington's main ambitions in invading Iraq was to secure a cheap and plentiful source of oil.

Mr Muttitt, whose book Fuel on Fire is published next week, said: "Before the war, the Government went to great lengths to insist it had no interest in Iraq's oil. These documents provide the evidence that give the lie to those claims.

"We see that oil was in fact one of the Government's most important strategic considerations, and it secretly colluded with oil companies to give them access to that huge prize."

Lady Symons, 59, later took up an advisory post with a UK merchant bank that cashed in on post-war Iraq reconstruction contracts. Last month she severed links as an unpaid adviser to Libya's National Economic Development Board after Colonel Gaddafi started firing on protesters. Last night, BP and Shell declined to comment.

Not about oil? what they said before the invasion

* Foreign Office memorandum, 13 November 2002, following meeting with BP: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP are desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity to compete. The long-term potential is enormous..."

* Tony Blair, 6 February 2003: "Let me just deal with the oil thing because... the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It's not the oil that is the issue, it is the weapons..."

* BP, 12 March 2003: "We have no strategic interest in Iraq. If whoever comes to power wants Western involvement post the war, if there is a war, all we have ever said is that it should be on a level playing field. We are certainly not pushing for involvement."

* Lord Browne, the then-BP chief executive, 12 March 2003: "It is not in my or BP's opinion, a war about oil. Iraq is an important producer, but it must decide what to do with its patrimony and oil."

* Shell, 12 March 2003, said reports that it had discussed oil opportunities with Downing Street were 'highly inaccurate', adding: "We have neither sought nor attended meetings with officials in the UK Government on the subject of Iraq. The subject has only come up during conversations during normal meetings we attend from time to time with officials... We have never asked for 'contracts'." Independent