The accumulated evil of the whole

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War crime case against Tony Blair is now rock-solid
Tony Blair's extraordinary admission on Sunday to the BBC's Fern Britton - that he would have gone to war to topple Saddam Hussein regardless of the issue of Iraq's alleged WMDs - is sure to give fresh impetus to moves to prosecute our former prime minister for war crimes.

The case against Blair, strong enough before this latest comment, now appears rock solid. Going to war to change another country's regime is prohibited by international law, while the Nuremburg judgment of 1946 laid down that "to initiate a war of aggression", as Blair and Bush clearly did against Iraq, "is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". Blair's admission, that he "would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam]" regardless of the WMD issue, is also an acknowledgement that he lied to the House of Commons on February 25, 2003, when he told MPs: "I detest his [Saddam's] regime. But even now he [Saddam] can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. I do not want war... But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation."

The view that Blair is a war criminal is now mainstream: when comedian Sandi Toksvig, host of Radio Four's News Quiz, called him one on air, the BBC...did not receive a single complaint.
Let's not forget the bookkeeper. Brown was up to his wonky eyeball in this too.

Tongues are loosening

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Intoxicated by power, Blair tricked us into war
The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible. Who is any longer naive enough to accept that the then Prime Minister’s mind remained innocently open after his visit to Crawford, Texas...

Ominously for the former Prime Minister, his growing distance from power appears to be loosening some well-placed Whitehall tongues. It seems that the contempt felt by some mandarins for his fancier footwork around the weapons of mass destruction is finally showing in a belated settling of scores. Discretion is fading like toothache and the feast of revenge is as tempting as it is cold.

I love AA Gill. End of story.

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AA Gill reviews Aqua Nueva
The menu is a promise of fiddliness and front-teeth chewing. I started with an egg yolk in jelly; it was like a big wine gum of pus, only not that nice. It was cheek-puffingly foul. Roast foie gras with a mango confit, herb salad, melon and black-tea sauce was edible, but not pleasurable. The Iberico ham was good — it’s always good. It’s not always £18 a plate. Spanish ham sets a palatine bar that exposes the flat-footed pygmy grub of Iberia. These combined dishes had a weird taste of torture and fashion diets. It’s a style of rigidly unrelaxed, thoughtless modernism that has grabbed Spanish food by the cojones. The best thing we could do is not eat any of it for a couple of years, until they get over themselves. And it’s expensive, very expensive. You don’t need to know exactly how expensive, ’cos you’re not going. You can’t park. And the lavatories are gender-confusing.

David Milliband is a cunt

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Binyam Mohamed case: David Miliband steps up bid to hide proof of torture
Efforts will be stepped up tomorrow to suppress evidence of British involvement in the unlawful treatment of a UK resident, Binyam Mohamed, who says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan before being secretly rendered to Guantánamo Bay. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, is appealing against six high court judgments ruling that CIA information on Mohamed's treatment, and what MI5 and MI6 knew about it, must be disclosed.

All I Want For Christmas...

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Italy's PM Silvio Berlusconi gets punched in the face

He gets a couple of teeth knocked out. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Oh, wait, I forgot Blair for a moment.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been hit in the face and knocked to the ground after a political rally in the centre of Milan. Two of his teeth were broken and he received a minor nose fracture and cuts to his lip after being punched or hit with an object, initial reports say.

Payback?

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Demos, national service and the community ideal

"Citizenship itself is a reactionary ideal. It formulates a collective, equal relationship between people who are not equal in status or power, and for whom key interests are opposed. It elides the economic inequalities that are the key to the ’social fragmentation’ which the report seeks to challenge. It is also a reactionary manner in which to motivate people to address problems resultant from inadequate social spending in areas like education. To give an example, the report suggests civic service could include young people mentoring at primary schools or in lower school."
Via Though Cowards Flinch

Obama and the 7 deceptions

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Answering Obama's Afghanistan deceptions
Barack Obama's December 1 nationally televised address to announce a further escalation of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan cemented his role as a war president who bears responsibility for the U.S. war on that country. It also marked Obama's assumption of the task of providing the justifications, alibis and obfuscations needed to cloak U.S. military aims in an aura of legitimacy.

Eric Ruder goes through Obama's speech and counters seven of Barack Obama's worst half-truths and lies about Afghanistan.

Global warming is the future

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The great green land grab
The environment was outside the big tent. Now it’s inside and it makes absolutely no difference what opinion polls or referendums say. It matters nought that the Green party has singularly failed in every democracy. It doesn’t matter that they’re all as boring and righteous as goodness. It doesn’t matter that scientists fake messages and bury statistics, that they do everything in secret. None of this matters now. It doesn’t even matter if it’s actually going to happen. All that matters is that the people who matter think it matters.

Can't we just disown this cretin?

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 A dedicated foe of tyranny... until there's a £90k speaking fee up for grabs

I met Mr Blair before he was famous and concluded that he was an empty-headed soap actor, chosen by the Labour Party to be the plausible front-man for its slow-motion coup d’etat. Then I had to watch the ludicrous transformation of this man, who to my personal knowledge did not know in 1997 that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, into a supposed World Statesman, the victor of Kosovo and the scourge of Saddam.These two wars, one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle. But how can they now, after Mr Blair’s trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory?

The speech which he gave was such concentrated, congealed drivel that it probably had to be carried into and out of the room in a spittoon. That is not all. Far worse than this piece of prostitution (he is said to have been paid £90,000 for his appearance) is the fact that he consorted, while in this sinister little country, with its President, Ilham Aliyev. Like Mr Blair, I have been to Azerbaijan. Unlike him, I met opposition politicians and heard about its miserable history of censorship, repression and despotism.
Tony Blair told by Azerbaijan victims: 'Give your £90,000 speaker's fee to charity'

Tony Blair is under pressure to give to charity a fee of at least £90,000 he was paid for making a speech in Azerbaijan, which is notorious for its human rights abuses.