18 July 2004
The media’s response to the Butler ‘report’ has been tediously predictable, with most of the press pundits seeming to emit a collective sigh of relief as if, more even than the government, they can’t wait to see the back of Iraq and get on with what they know best – hobnobbing with their pals in Parliament and propping up our ‘failed state’.
2 February 2004
“I saw evidence that was categoric on Saddam possessing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Now I saw the evidence, so did the Prime Minister, so did other cabinet ministers. That informed our decision to go topple him. I think we were right in doing so, but let’s wait and see what the jury finds out in the end.”
So says Peter Hain, Leader of the Commons and former anti-apartheid activist and if you believe this statement, you’ll believe anything.
But what is this statement based upon? The September 2002 dossier? The ‘dodgy’ February 2003 dossier or the stuff that nobody else has ever seen? Perhaps it’s Hans Blix’s final report to the UN? Perhaps it was the fairies at the bottom of the garden?
13 September 2003
How the government’s never-ending stream of propaganda and the complicity of the media has sold a giant lie to the public over the reasons for the invasion of Iraq and continues to do so even as the lies become ever more outrageous and brazen
23 August 2003
The media’s complicity in putting spin on the spin
The media’s response to the ‘revelations’ of the Hutton inquiry reveals more about the nature of corporate journalism than it does about the role of the government’s propagandists. And especially, the back-peddling being performed in an attempt to justify the complicity of the media in not seeing what was patently obvious to anyone who cared to look, namely that the government lies and lies on a consistent basis about its reasons for invading Iraq.
13 August 2003
The government’s propaganda campaign to scare the populace into accepting an unacceptable war, has, with the grovelling complicity of the media, including the so-called liberal arm of the press, entered a new but depressingly familiar phase.
21 July 2003
Who was Dr David Kelly?
Head of the infamous Porton Down, Britain’s own WMD factory from 1984 to 1992, and who in 1989 was approached by MI6 to help debrief a Soviet defector from the Soviet Union’s CBW programme, it seems inconceivable that a man with this kind of background and over such a long period of time, wasn’t privy to the most confidential government information, which gives the lie to the claim by the government that he was approached some time in 2002 to supply information to the September document simply because he was the most knowledgeable person in the field, unless he was utterly trustworthy on a political level. Moreover, there was a six month delay between the announcement of publishing the document and the date of its actual publication, a delay which hasn’t been explained.
21 July 2003
Who was Dr David Kelly?
Head of the infamous Porton Down, Britain’s own WMD factory from 1984 to 1992, and who in 1989 was approached by MI6 to help debrief a Soviet defector from the Soviet Union’s CBW programme, it seems inconceivable that a man with this kind of background and over such a long period of time, wasn’t privy to the most confidential government information, which gives the lie to the claim by the government that he was approached some time in 2002 to supply information to the September document simply because he was the most knowledgeable person in the field, unless he was utterly trustworthy on a political level. Moreover, there was a six month delay between the announcement of publishing the document and the date of its actual publication, a delay which hasn’t been explained.
28 June 2003
Will it never end? Obviously not, because in upping the ante, the government has introduced yet another layer of dissembling in trying to shift the focus from the government’s web of lies onto its spin doctors, headed by Alistair Campbell. So if and when the shit hits the fan, it’ll be Campbell who gets covered, not the ministers in government, principally Blair and Straw, at least that’s the theory. What is critical about the display we’ve been subjected to over the past week, is what it reveals about the nature of what passes for governance in this ‘new’ imperialist epoch.
26 June 2003
A reader sent me the following note after reading my essay, ‘Exaggerate’ on Jack Straw’s dissembling over the use and definition of words: A letter he’d read on Ceefax:
‘posed the question that Straw’s use of the word ‘current’ by any definition means that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD was not ‘immediate’, ‘imminent’ or even a mere 45 minutes away but precisely as the dossier was being compiled. However as Straw clearly states if the evidence didn’t justify a very soon to be realised threat, then it equally cannot justify a threat existing at the very time the dossier was being written.’
26 June 2003
‘The charge against the Government is not one of lying, but that it failed to tell the whole truth’
This is the London Independent’s incredible editorial headline today (26/06/03) over the lies told by the UK government to justify the invasion of Iraq. Okay, for the sake of argument, we’ll accept the Independent’s outrageous head and ask the question, what is the whole truth? What did the government fail to tell us?
Investigating Imperialism 