George Monbiot's campaign to have Tony Blair arrested for his involvement in starting the Iraq war is trundling along (with Desmond Tutu creating some added anti-Blair publicity recently) - Bounty Paid for Blair Arrest Attempt.
On Tuesday the Arrest Blair campaign will pay Tom Grundy £2,400 for his attempt to arrest Tony Blair during a public event in Hong Kong.
The campaign was established to uphold the principle that no one is above the law. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, commissioned by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, meets the definition of a crime against peace, established by the Nuremberg Principles and described by the Nuremberg Tribunal as “the supreme international crime.”
The 2003 Iraq war caused the deaths of between 100,000 and one million people, depending on whose estimate you believe. A series of leaked documents shows that the Bush and Blair governments knew they did not possess legal justification. Without it, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder, committed by those who launched it.
Though the former leaders of other states have been prosecuted under international law, none of those responsible for the Iraq war have yet been charged. The aim of Arrest Blair is to ensure that this illegal war is not forgotten, and to maintain international pressure for charges to be brought.
The campaign, which was set up in 2010 by the journalist George Monbiot(4), encourages people to attempt non-violent citizens’ arrests of the former prime minister. Donations are made by the public to a bounty fund. When an attempt is judged to meet the Arrest Blair rules, a quarter of the money in the pot is paid to the person who carried it out. Tom Grundy’s attempt is the fourth that meets the campaign rules. Almost £11,000 has now been paid.
Guy Rundle has a meandering piece of commentary at Crikey looking at the minority governments in the UK and Australia which closes with a note about the cancellations of Tony Blair's planned signing of his auto-biography at Waterstones in London - Faith, hope and clarity? Nah, it’s faith no more.
Desperation and bad faith is the leitmotif of our final contestant, Tony Blair, who has just announced that he will be pulling out of his anticipated huge book signing at Waterstone's on Piccadilly, after a Dublin signing was turned into chaos by protesters.
The Waterstone's signing, with a page of security instructions, was to b a late fixture in the protest calendar; hundreds if not thousands would have turned up to bear witness against this delusional mass murderer one last time. By tonight, Blair must have realised that that was all it would be remembered for. There is already a proliferating campaign to reshelve his portentous work in the "crime" section. Blair's response to the gathering storm: he was cancelling his signing because of the possible presence of British National Party protesters.
Yah, right. Faith gone bad is the word.
Tony Blair figured prominently in Roman Polanski's latest film, "The Ghost Writer", which I saw recently and thoroughly enjoyed.
The movie is based on a novel by Robert Harris, involves an unrepentant former British prime minister who took the UK into the war in Iraq.
It includes thinly disguised portraits of Cherie Blair and the late Robin Cook and floats an interesting theory as to why Blair was so unconditionally supportive of the neoconservative war in the middle east, mentioned glnacingly here in this HuffPo review:
The novel by Harris -- he was a friend of Blair who broke with him over the Iraq War -- is very good. As is the basic story, good enough for me to know the novel well and still enjoy the twists and turns of the film.
Blair, the only Labour Party leader in the history of Britain to win three national elections -- beginning with his Obama-like popular ascension to the office of prime minister in 1997 -- was well on his way to becoming the global statesman of the age before he fatefully threw in with with the seemingly far more conservative Bush/Cheney White House. Together, they invaded Iraq and pursued ruthless tactics in what was called the war on terror.
Which, in the end, left many wondering in astonishment and anger how Blair could have been such a down-the-line, uncritical partner in disastrous policies. And which left Blair himself, struggling to explain, saying that he would have invaded even had he known that the intelligence he'd had spun up to present an imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction was illusory, dodging angry crowds of protesters to testify before an official inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War in late January.
But before that, Blair, long the favorite to become the first president of the European Union, found himself last fall in the same city as Polanski. The director was in Zurich because he was in jail there following his shock arrest on a three decade-old sex charge. Blair was in Zurich to meet with Swiss financial and corporate power brokers to try to save his candidacy for the European presidency.
While Polanski, to the surprise of many, was able to complete the production of The Ghost Writer while incarcerated, Blair's time in Switzerland proved less successful. He delivered a speech to appeal to leaders of the continent's dominant center/right faction, arguing that government intervention into markets should not go too far. But leaders from the right still found him too liberal and leaders from the left could not forgive his tight alliance with Bush and Cheney on Iraq and the war on terror.
Harris's story (he co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski) provides an answer as to why Blair, Adam Lang in the thinly fictionalized version, threw in with Bush and Cheney. It may be outrageous balderdash, but it is quite logical.
And for many, as Blair undoubtedly knows, a logical explanation will do.
Which is why he, along with Polanski, is quite likely a ghost of what he'd been.
A group of prominent experts on Friday called for a full inquest into the death of government weapons inspector David Kelly, whose apparent suicide in July 2003 plunged then prime minister Tony Blair into crisis.
The eight senior figures said in a letter to The Times newspaper that the official cause of death in the Kelly case, haemorrhage, was "extremely unlikely" in the light of evidence since made public.
The signatories included a former coroner, Michael Powers, a former deputy coroner, Margaret Bloom, and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.
Kelly was found dead in woods near his home in Oxfordshire, in 2003 after he was exposed as the source for a BBC story that alleged that Blair's government had "sexed up" intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The then Lord Chancellor, the government's chief law officer, Charles Falconer, suspended an inquest into the death before an inquiry began, and the inquest was never resumed.
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