Be Careful Who You Sleep With
It's swell to be reminded that we still have some influence in the big world out there. Superpower we may no longer be, thanks to the dick, the rummie, the chimp and all those others, but it's only fair that the election outcome should thoroughly roil and stain some shoulders in the UK too. Maybe the superpower concept needs to be scrapped, and if that be the outcome of this most amazingly dismal of American ventures wouldn't it be interesting to have a future judgement of the smirking not-even-a-chimp be to credit him for taking us down? How would his current 31% or so of deluded supporters feel about that?
The original article here spoke of "Sympathetic Labour Pains" and "Tony Blair's Post-Election Panic Attack." I call it Anglo-American Blood Poisoning.
They say the fountain in London's Trafalgar Square turned the color of
blood on Armistice Day last weekend, as Britons in the hundreds of
thousands trudged out in the November gloom to commemorate the end of the
First World War, and lament the dead in all the wars thereafter.
But the turning of the water was no miracle, no divine judgment on the
leader whose fateful partnership with George W. Bush is producing - week
after week, month after month, year after year - fresh cause for future
mourning. The color came from the thousands of fake poppies tossed into the
fountain in what The Observer called "a spontaneous act of remembrance": an
offering of the ubiquitous charity emblems worn by most of the population
in the week leading up to the memorials.
In any case, Tony Blair never saw the vision of blood in the Square; he
was in Hyde Park, with the Queen and other worthies, conducting formal
ceremonies where no free action or unscripted word from the public was
allowed to intrude. These offices of the dead were a fitting end to a week
which saw Blair and his ministers launch a massive new fearmongering
campaign, promising a "generation" of terror, war and tyrannical security
measures in a "long and deep struggle" against his own nation's Muslim
minority.
In a season already notable for the official demonization of British
Muslims (see "Long Black Veil," Truthout.org, October 23), the new assault
twisted the screws even tighter. It is obvious that Blair has been badly
stung by his American partner's rejection at the polls, which makes his own
fanatical devotion to Bush and the bloodsoaked folly in Iraq look even more
absurd. His frenzied waving of the terror flag is, in part, Blair's
panicked response to the political diminishment of the Washington regime
that has been a mainstay of his own power.
That power is now at its lowest ebb. His party is politically bankrupt,
with its worst poll numbers in more than 20 years - largely due to the
cynicism, distrust and revulsion bred by the Iraq War. Blair himself is now
under criminal investigation for allegedly selling peerages in exchange for
campaign donations and huge private loans to Labour which party leaders
then hid from auditors. He is to be questioned "under caution" - i.e., as a
target of the probe - by police in the coming weeks.
And yet another corruption investigation is now cranking up, the Times
reports, centering on Blair's personal intervention in the sale of a $50
million military air traffic control system to debt-wracked Tanzania -
which has a grand total of eight military airplanes. Despite objections
from the World Bank that Tanzania could have obtained a civilian system for
a tenth of that price, Blair overruled his own cabinet, which had also
rejected the deal, and forced it through on behalf of BAE Systems, the UK
defense contractor and Carlyle Group partner. Another beneficiary was one
of the UK's most powerful banks, Barclays, which loaned Tanzania the money
for the deal. The African nation repaid this debt with foreign aid money
that Blair's government had given it - ostensibly to support public
education - while BAE allegedly slipped big-time baksheesh to Tanzanian
officials to clinch the deal. In the end, Blair essentially served as a
bagman for a bribe-greased transfer of public money to Barclays and BAE.
-clip-
And so, just two days after the US elections, the latest operation
designed to terrorize the British public began with an unprecedented speech
by MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. The UK's spymaster rarely speaks
in public, and almost never divulges details of intelligence operations;
yet there was the redoubtable double-barreled spook at the podium, throwing
out scaremongering numbers like Senator Joe McCarthy in days of yore,
waving around his ever-changing enumerations of "known Communists in the
State Department."
In a speech pre-leaked for maximum effect, Manningham-Buller doled out
artfully vague, impossible-to-verify "intelligence" of "more than 30 active
terrorist plots" in the works among more than "200 terrorist networks" in
Britain with at least "1,800 active terrorists" (all Muslims, natch)
threatening the nation with "mass casualty suicide attacks" which could use
"chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and" - wait for
it - "even nuclear technology."
Manningham-Buller was somewhat less forthcoming on why MI5 was allowing
1,800 known and identified active terrorists to swan around the country
building nuclear bombs, but in a follow-up to her speech, the nation's top
policeman, Sir Ian Blair (no relation to the PM), gave a clue, citing the
"inflexibility" of the nation's justice system, which apparently gives
accused terrorists too much leeway to gum up the works with all that legal
rights jazz. Sir Ian obviously prefers the kind of flexibility that led his
officers to kill a Brazilian man strolling through a London subway station
last year because he "looked" like some kind of Muslim darky about to blow
up a train.
-clip-
The well-cooked, carefully packaged elixir of fear has intoxicated
America and Britain for five years now. Last Tuesday, the American people
began to shake off their stupor, at least for the moment. But in the Mother
Country - where national elections are still three, perhaps four years away
- the old hootch seems as potent as ever, blurring the vision of dissidents
and government officials alike.
But on one point, of course, Porter is right on the money. There is a
death cult threatening Britain from within, fomenting terrorism and Islamic
extremism with its irrational philosophy, and led by sinister figures who,
in Blair's own stirring words last week, "want to entice young people into
something wicked and violent but utterly futile." But the locus of this
dangerous cult - which has facilitated the killing of hundreds of thousands
of innocent people - is not to be found in Britain's multifarious Muslim
community.
No, it was there in plain sight on Armistice Day and Remembrance
Sunday, dressed in a suit and tie, surrounded by royalty, singing hymns and
laying wreaths. Meanwhile, on that same weekend, four more British soldiers
- and almost 300 civilians - were slaughtered in the wicked, violent and
utterly futile act of state terror perpetrated by the Bush-Blair death cult
in Iraq.
The original article here spoke of "Sympathetic Labour Pains" and "Tony Blair's Post-Election Panic Attack." I call it Anglo-American Blood Poisoning.
They say the fountain in London's Trafalgar Square turned the color of
blood on Armistice Day last weekend, as Britons in the hundreds of
thousands trudged out in the November gloom to commemorate the end of the
First World War, and lament the dead in all the wars thereafter.
But the turning of the water was no miracle, no divine judgment on the
leader whose fateful partnership with George W. Bush is producing - week
after week, month after month, year after year - fresh cause for future
mourning. The color came from the thousands of fake poppies tossed into the
fountain in what The Observer called "a spontaneous act of remembrance": an
offering of the ubiquitous charity emblems worn by most of the population
in the week leading up to the memorials.
In any case, Tony Blair never saw the vision of blood in the Square; he
was in Hyde Park, with the Queen and other worthies, conducting formal
ceremonies where no free action or unscripted word from the public was
allowed to intrude. These offices of the dead were a fitting end to a week
which saw Blair and his ministers launch a massive new fearmongering
campaign, promising a "generation" of terror, war and tyrannical security
measures in a "long and deep struggle" against his own nation's Muslim
minority.
In a season already notable for the official demonization of British
Muslims (see "Long Black Veil," Truthout.org, October 23), the new assault
twisted the screws even tighter. It is obvious that Blair has been badly
stung by his American partner's rejection at the polls, which makes his own
fanatical devotion to Bush and the bloodsoaked folly in Iraq look even more
absurd. His frenzied waving of the terror flag is, in part, Blair's
panicked response to the political diminishment of the Washington regime
that has been a mainstay of his own power.
That power is now at its lowest ebb. His party is politically bankrupt,
with its worst poll numbers in more than 20 years - largely due to the
cynicism, distrust and revulsion bred by the Iraq War. Blair himself is now
under criminal investigation for allegedly selling peerages in exchange for
campaign donations and huge private loans to Labour which party leaders
then hid from auditors. He is to be questioned "under caution" - i.e., as a
target of the probe - by police in the coming weeks.
And yet another corruption investigation is now cranking up, the Times
reports, centering on Blair's personal intervention in the sale of a $50
million military air traffic control system to debt-wracked Tanzania -
which has a grand total of eight military airplanes. Despite objections
from the World Bank that Tanzania could have obtained a civilian system for
a tenth of that price, Blair overruled his own cabinet, which had also
rejected the deal, and forced it through on behalf of BAE Systems, the UK
defense contractor and Carlyle Group partner. Another beneficiary was one
of the UK's most powerful banks, Barclays, which loaned Tanzania the money
for the deal. The African nation repaid this debt with foreign aid money
that Blair's government had given it - ostensibly to support public
education - while BAE allegedly slipped big-time baksheesh to Tanzanian
officials to clinch the deal. In the end, Blair essentially served as a
bagman for a bribe-greased transfer of public money to Barclays and BAE.
-clip-
And so, just two days after the US elections, the latest operation
designed to terrorize the British public began with an unprecedented speech
by MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. The UK's spymaster rarely speaks
in public, and almost never divulges details of intelligence operations;
yet there was the redoubtable double-barreled spook at the podium, throwing
out scaremongering numbers like Senator Joe McCarthy in days of yore,
waving around his ever-changing enumerations of "known Communists in the
State Department."
In a speech pre-leaked for maximum effect, Manningham-Buller doled out
artfully vague, impossible-to-verify "intelligence" of "more than 30 active
terrorist plots" in the works among more than "200 terrorist networks" in
Britain with at least "1,800 active terrorists" (all Muslims, natch)
threatening the nation with "mass casualty suicide attacks" which could use
"chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and" - wait for
it - "even nuclear technology."
Manningham-Buller was somewhat less forthcoming on why MI5 was allowing
1,800 known and identified active terrorists to swan around the country
building nuclear bombs, but in a follow-up to her speech, the nation's top
policeman, Sir Ian Blair (no relation to the PM), gave a clue, citing the
"inflexibility" of the nation's justice system, which apparently gives
accused terrorists too much leeway to gum up the works with all that legal
rights jazz. Sir Ian obviously prefers the kind of flexibility that led his
officers to kill a Brazilian man strolling through a London subway station
last year because he "looked" like some kind of Muslim darky about to blow
up a train.
-clip-
The well-cooked, carefully packaged elixir of fear has intoxicated
America and Britain for five years now. Last Tuesday, the American people
began to shake off their stupor, at least for the moment. But in the Mother
Country - where national elections are still three, perhaps four years away
- the old hootch seems as potent as ever, blurring the vision of dissidents
and government officials alike.
But on one point, of course, Porter is right on the money. There is a
death cult threatening Britain from within, fomenting terrorism and Islamic
extremism with its irrational philosophy, and led by sinister figures who,
in Blair's own stirring words last week, "want to entice young people into
something wicked and violent but utterly futile." But the locus of this
dangerous cult - which has facilitated the killing of hundreds of thousands
of innocent people - is not to be found in Britain's multifarious Muslim
community.
No, it was there in plain sight on Armistice Day and Remembrance
Sunday, dressed in a suit and tie, surrounded by royalty, singing hymns and
laying wreaths. Meanwhile, on that same weekend, four more British soldiers
- and almost 300 civilians - were slaughtered in the wicked, violent and
utterly futile act of state terror perpetrated by the Bush-Blair death cult
in Iraq.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:54 PM
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