Invading Iraq is what we did instead of tackling climate change

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Original article well said by Adam Ramsay republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

OPINION: Instead of launching a war, the US and UK could have weaned us off the fossil fuels that pay for the brutal regimes of dictators

Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George 'Dubya' Bush
Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George ‘Dubya’ Bush

Twenty years ago today, [20 March] war was once again unleashed on Baghdad. In the UK – and much of the rest of the world – people sat in front of their TVs watching the skies above the ancient city flash with flame as buildings were rendered to rubble, the limbs and lives inside crushed.

The real victims of George Bush and Tony Blair’s shock and awe were, of course, the people of Iraq. Estimates of violent deaths range from a hundred thousand to a million. That doesn’t include the arms and legs that were lost, the families devastated, the melted minds and broken souls, trauma that will shatter down generations. It doesn’t include anyone killed in the conflict since then: there are still British and US troops in the country. It doesn’t include the poverty resulting from crushed infrastructure, the hopes abandoned and the potential immolated.

And that’s just the 2003 war: Britain has bombed Iraq in seven of the last 11 decades.

But in far gentler ways, the war was to shape the lives of those watching through their TVs, too. The invasion of Iraq – along with the other post-9/11 wars – was a road our governments chose irrevocably to drive us down. And we, too, have been changed by the journey.

The financial cost of the Iraq war to the US government, up to 2020, is estimated at $2trn. The post-9/11 wars together cost the US around $8trn, a quarter of its debt of $31trn. Much of the money was borrowed from foreign governments, in a debt boom which, some economists have argued, played a key role in the 2008 crash.

It was in this period, in particular, that China bought up billions of dollars of US government debt. Just before Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Beijing had overtaken Tokyo as the world’s largest holder of US Treasury bonds. Today, America’s neoconservatives are obsessed with China’s power over the US. What they rarely mention is that this was delivered by their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Britain’s financial contribution was more meagre – in 2015 the UK government estimated it had spent £8.1bn on the invasion of Iraq, and around £21bn on Afghanistan. But these are hardly figures to be sniffed at.

Also significant, in both cases, is where this money went: the Iraq war saw a revolution in the outsourcing of violence. In 2003, when the war began, the UK foreign office spent £12.6m on private security firms. By 2015, just one contract – paying G4S to guard Britain’s embassy in Afghanistan – was worth £100m.

Over the course of the wars, the UK became the world centre for private military contractors – or, to use the old fashioned word, mercenaries. While many of these are private army units, others offer more specialist skills: retired senior British spooks now offer intelligence advice to central-Asian dictators and, as we found out with Cambridge Analytica during the Brexit vote, psychological operations teams who honed their skills in Iraq soon realised how much money they could make trialling their wares on the domestic population.

This vast expansion of the military industrial complex in both the US and UK hasn’t just done direct damage to our politics and economy – affecting the living standards of hundreds of millions of people across the world. It has also distorted our society, steered investment into militarised technology when research is desperately needed to address the climate and biodiversity crises.

Similarly, the war changed British politics. First, and perhaps most profoundly, because it was waged on a lie, perhaps the most notorious lie in modern Britain, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Acres of text have been written about the rapid decline in public trust in politicians in the UK in recent years. Very few grapple with the basic point – that, within the memory of most voters, a prime minister looked us in the eye, and told us that he had to lead us into war, based on a threat that turned out to be fictional. There are lots of reasons people increasingly don’t trust politicians – and therefore trust democracy less and less. But the Iraq war is a long way up the list.

Obama – who had opposed the war – managed to rally some of that breakdown of trust into a positive movement (whatever you think of his presidency, the movement behind it was positive). So did the SNP in Scotland.

But often, it went the other way. If the war hadn’t happened, would Cleggmania have swung the 2010 election from Gordon Brown to David Cameron? Probably not. And this, of course, led to the second great lie of modern British politics, the one about tuition fees and austerity.

Without the invasion, would Donald Trump have won in 2016? Would Brexit have happened?

There is a generation of us – now approaching our 40s – who were coming into political consciousness as Iraq was bombed. Many of us marched against the war, many more were horrified by it. The generation before us – Gen X – were amazingly unpolitical. Coming of age in the 1990s, at the end of history, very few got involved in social movements or joined political parties.

When I was involved in student politics in the years following Bush and Blair’s invasion, student unions across the UK were smashing turnout records. Soon, those enraged by the war found Make Poverty History, the climate crisis, the financial crisis and austerity. A generation of political organisers grew up through climate camps and Occupy and became a leading force behind Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, helping organise a magnificent younger cohort of Gen-Zers which arrived after us.

But I shouldn’t end on a positive note. The disaster predicted by the millions across the world who marched against the war has played out. Hundreds of thousands have died. The Middle East continues to be dominated by dictators.

This war was justified on the grounds that Saddam was a threat to the world. But while his weapons of mass destruction were invented, scientists were already warning us about a very real risk; already telling us that we had a few short decades to address the climate crisis.

Rather than launching a war that would give the West access to some of the world’s largest oil reserves, the US and UK could have channelled their vast resources into weaning us off the fossil fuels that pay for the brutal regimes of dictators. Instead, we incinerated that money, and the world, with it.

Original article well said by Adam Ramsay republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingInvading Iraq is what we did instead of tackling climate change

Events and aftermath of July 2005

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It was the Neo-cons Bush and Blair era, following the illegal wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. I had been an activist against the 2003 Iraq war and later against Blair. 

Before the 2005 G7 conference at Gleneagles, Scotland the Privy council passed a motion prohibiting criminal prosecution of G7 atendees.

I was at the demonstrations against the G7 in Scotland. I believe that there were failed attempts to apprehend me by UK authorities on 6 July 2005. Then boss of the Metropolitan Police [17/2/22 ed: Ian Blair] was unashamedly extremely supportive of Tony Blair. Tony Bliar was extremely unpopular at the time.

On the morning of July 7 2005, at the end of the G7 summit, there were explosions on the London underground and the made for television bus event. 

My analysis suggests that the tube explosions were dust explosions and that there were many previous but less serious dust explosions on the London underground. This leaves the bus explosion as fake manufactured terrorism. One country is particularly experienced at fake terrorism bus explosions. Then London mayor [ed: Ken Livingstone] sacked Robert 'Bob' Kiley following the publication of my the danger of dust explosions on the London underground article. 

London's Metropolitan Police followed the script provided by Efraim Halevi (sometimes spelled differently because it's a translation from Hebrew) in the Jerusalem Post on 7 July 2005. The explosion times were presented as simultaneous when they weren't. 

If the London explosions were dust explosions and the bus event was fake manufactured terrorism then there were no bombings or suicide bombers. 

21 July 2005 there were copy-cat unsuccessful bombings on the London underground. 

22 July 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered at Stockwell tube station. Ian Blair almost immediately stated that the Met Police assumed full responsibility for the death suggesting that it was not the Met that killed him. Official teams of foreign killers were operating in London following the London non-bombings. 

Many lies were promulgated by Met Police immediately after Jean Charles de Menezes murder. Untrue comments such as wearing a coat too warm for the weather, jumping barriers and the later "Houston, we have a problem" were crafted to relate to myself personally, to harass me, to make clear that I had been watched by UK authorities in depth for an extended period. 

One reason for murdering Jean Charles de Menezes was to support the suicide bombers narrative of & [ed: 7] July i.e. there are suicide bombers because, we're looking for them and killed someone by accident. I published an article demonstrating why Jean Charles de Menezes was selected to be killed on Bristol Indymedia on 27 June 2005 [ed: 28 Aug 2014] a few hours before the server was seized by British Transport Police. [ed: that doesn't seem correct][ed: Don't think that date is correct. Was the server seized 3 times - 2005, second time, 2014? The 2005 date is too early.]

Current Met Police boss Cressida Dick was apparently in charge when Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered. My alternative narrative suggests instead that it was foreign agents that murdered de Menezes and that the official narrative was a fabrication.

13.03 This post republished at the original uri / url because it was getting cut & paste messed up 

[17/2/22 7 July 2005, 2 + 5 = 7 ]
Continue ReadingEvents and aftermath of July 2005

Amber Rudd and UK government promotes imaginary, unfinished anti-ISIS software

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UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd and the UK government are promoting imaginary, unfinished software that is so wonderful that it makes breakfast.

Claimed to detect ISIS-videos with 94% accuracy before they’re even been imagined but it’s not even been written yet.

She could instead have 100% accuracy by watching the SITE intelligence group that makes and publishes ISIS videos.

14 February 2018

The Government Has Spent £600,000 On An Online Extremism Detector, But No Major Websites Are Signed Up

“… the algorithm is still in development and it is only making it public for the first time.”

“still in development” means unfinished, not written yet. How is it 94% effective and 99.5% accurate if it’s unfinished, not written yet?

Continue ReadingAmber Rudd and UK government promotes imaginary, unfinished anti-ISIS software

FAKE, MANUFACTURED TERRORISM: FBI fake, manufactured terrorism

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Related to my recent post What it’s like to be a suspected terrorist

The article quoted below reports that the FBI creates terrorists and promotes the false narrative of a terrorist threat.

I think that it’s done differently in UK and Europe – it’s more about staging an act and attributing the blame to suspected terrorists. Suspected terrorists can be arrested  apprehended beforehand or the act can be set to coincide with his/her arrival (fancy that, there may even be CCTV in such a case). later edit: Jean Charles de Menezes returned onto the bus and travelled to Stockwell tube station where he was murdered because Brixton tube station was closed.

Once you’re arrested in UK e.g. for criminal damage which can be quite minor, your home is routinely searched. They’re going to be straight round there in an apparent terrorism case to get your passport for when you’re shot dead to avoid any awkward trials.

They know your every movement and intended movement of course because they following  your every move in real-time. You routinely go to the pub every Saturday afternoon, then it will be on the way to the pub. You text or ring someone “I’ll meet you there at 3.30”.

Gathered surveillance data is shared far and wide almost instantly. The US and Mossad will have it probably within seconds. This is what is meant when terrorist anti-terrorist spooks and politicians talk about information sharing to defeat the terrorist threat.

ed: I didn’t emphasize enough how widely surveillance data is shared almost instantly. Everyone and their dog will have it – it will be available to all UK, US and other allied states agencies concerned with terrorism.

David Murdoch-Cameron: Poisonous ideologues, conspiracy theorists are extremists …

 

Government agents ‘directly involved’ in most high-profile US terror plots

Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the “direct involvement” of government agents or informants, a new report says.

Some of the controversial “sting” operations “were proposed or led by informants”, bordering on entrapment by law enforcement. Yet the courtroom obstacles to proving entrapment are significant, one of the reasons the stings persist.

The lengthy report, released on Monday by Human Rights Watch, raises questions about the US criminal justice system’s ability to respect civil rights and due process in post-9/11 terrorism cases. It portrays a system that features not just the sting operations but secret evidence, anonymous juries, extensive pretrial detentions and convictions significantly removed from actual plots.

“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.

Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman explain the pattern followed by the FBI

The known facts from this latest case seem to fit well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots.

First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups.

They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target.

Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked.

Continue ReadingFAKE, MANUFACTURED TERRORISM: FBI fake, manufactured terrorism

What it’s like to be a suspected terrorist

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I think that it started over thirty 0dd years ago. My insane radical political parents involved me in their radical political protests while I was in my early teens. I was neglected and    abused and starved of love and affection.

Want a zebra crossing? You need a can of white paint for that. Let’s occupy the the Dept of Trade and Industry boardroom, British Steel Wales boardroom, let’s picket Bob Scholey British Steel’s boss’s house. Thatcher lied about creating a Welsh fourth television channel – now S4C. “Who, where, when and why made the Queen tell a lie?” aping a Telegraph advertising campaign at the time. At fifteen I was arguing with nuclear power PR men and wiping the floor with them.

We were used to being routinely followed and it was accepted that the phone was tapped by local Special Branch (political police). It was easier then because they couldn’t hide so easily. There was a story about a real-world experiment at that time: posting unexposed camera film to many addresses and virtually none of it arrived undamaged. They weren’t that bright – it was clumsy and coarse – but you knew they were the enemy. How is it different to repressive regimes where they open your post and listen to your phone calls if you’re a political dissident?

Police magicked a story about a mini being seen at the scene of a Welsh holiday-home arson and – as if by coincidence – I was driving a mini that had been stored away in a garage for a couple of years. That was a fantastic car with a hundred and forty thousand miles on the clock. You could really throw it about and slide it sideways. I took it through a deep flood on the road with people standing around their much larger wet stopped cars – feel the power of a splash guard on the distributor and WD40.

In my teens I was a radical political activist taking part in some variously successful campaigns. They were scared. There’s a very capable youngster here opposing Capitalism and nuclear BS. And then there was that other thing about names, dates and numbers which I knew nothing about at the time.

So once you’re suspected of being a suspected terrorist you’re watched for ever. Everything you do is watched like a hawk and interpreted in the most perverse ways but it’s much more than that.

All the people you meet are tainted so that they are also suspected terrorists – at least until they are cleared. Their financial transactions are delayed until it’s clear that they do actually want to expand their business. Your doctors surgery starts treating you like shit until you twig that they’ve been served a non-disclosure disclosure notice – we want to know everything about your suspected terrorist and if you tell anyone else we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks.

I’ve got an old – some would say classic – motorbike, a bicycle or two, lawnmowers and other petrol garden tools, an old yacht to maintain and I also maintain a close friend’s old 1.9 IDT. I need to buy parts for them but it’s not accepted that I buy parts to maintain these vehicles. It’s what sort of bomb can he make with all these filters? What bomb can he make with this acetone (to clean carburettors)? Is he making a water bomb with that coolant temperature sensor?

The 1.9 IDT was owned from new. It was delayed for hours on it’s first 1000 miles service while our own hidden police radio was fitted.

[7/10/17 There was a persistent drain on the battery recently so that the car refused to start if unused for a couple of days. I had to learn how to do a parasitic drain test and identified the drain as the shared power feed to the air conditioning and OBD2 diagnostic port. The OBD2 port would be an ideal place to feed a hidden police radio – on a new car it would not be expected to be used for many years. I would expect such a hidden police radio to be based on mobile phone technology and that after fourteen years or so the battery is worn out. Problems have been experienced using the ODB2 port.]

A real problem is that once you’re a suspected terrorist all your rights vanish. One of the messages of the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes is that suspected terrorists can be murdered with immunity. ed: Actually the message is all we need to do to conduct a political execution is to call you a suspected terrorist.

Everything is interpreted according to their twisted logic: He must be a terrorist because we’ve been watching him for 30 years. The flaw here of course is that if he’s a terrorist, then why has he never done any terrorism?

Fake terrorism bullshit looks very different from my perspective as a suspected terrorist. All this fake, manufactured terrorism BS. Terrorism at election time? It doesn’t take much to see through that one does it?

Suspected terrorists are killed dead so that there is never a trial and they always take their passports along? I believe that there has been entrapment like that trying to kill me. They’ll say well he was well known to authorities, we’ve been watching him for thirty years.

Blair’s butler Ian Blair was a real Fascist. He attacked me personally for cutting political critique i.e. attacking his master. He was quite simply a blatant Fascist murdering bastard. I’m sure that there is loads of fictional BS on me from his master’s Fascist era.

ed: I may expand this post

25/8/17 This may be a draft for a better-written article. There’s a lot to include.

About contacts being regarded as suspect. I think it was Snowden that revealed that contacts up to 3 steps removed are checked. For example I am registered to email lists that offer items for free so that they are kept from the rubbish tip. So, everyone offering by email or reading or receiving emails would be the first step, all their contacts would be the second step and all their contacts would be the third step.

Obviously this is a huge and futile practice involving a lot of wasted effort. It follows that a large part of it will be automated so that totally innocent peoples’ computers, phones, etc will be hacked by GCHQ automatically. In the past I’ve been regularly unsubscribed from such mailing lists by the spooks so that they can avoid this futile heavy workload.

31/8/17

This was probably about 6 or 7 years ago. I went to a local concert as part of a local festival. It was about 9pm and it was the end of it. I got there and bought a pint. I was clocked by a mounted policeman. Ten minutes or so later two fire engines turned up to a hotel nearby on a false alarm.

Local police are much better in recent years. They’re probably aware now that it’s politically-motivated BS.

I saw a sniper watching me on a roof while I was at Swansea Marina very recently.

[7/10/17 It was very strange. He was on a roof about 150m away with a good view of me as I emerged from the cabin in the morning. The trouble is that you climb a few steps to emerge from the cabin so you tend to be looking upwards – in this case at rooftops. He scurried away soon as I was watching. It could have been somebody dressed in black just hanging around on a roof early on a cold morning.]

I want to stress again that this is about politics and nothing to do with counter-terrorism. Ian Blair, former boss of the Metropolitan Police was blatantly promoting Tony Blair’s government. There is likely to be all sorts of BS on police records from that era. The effect is harassment of political activists.

Counter-terror programme is “doing a fantastic job” insists Home Secretary Amber Rudd during Leeds visit

 

6/8/17 [About this blog]. I’m sure that there has been efforts to hide the popularity and influence of this blog from me. All stats – even ones that I’ve installed have been useless. The popularity of this blog varies wildly partly because it’s often not updated for extended periods. There have been times when it was massively popular which is seen in indirect feedback other than stats.

There’s also the absence of comments. While I do use Kismet spam filter, I’m sure that I also have a secretary at GCHQ censoring many comments before it reaches Kismet. I’ll get about one genuine comment a year. Not even abuse gets through. Surely this blog is offensive enough to attract abuse?

11/10/17

Internet security: While I do the basics like run Linux, a firewall and ensure that my system is kept up-to-date with security patches I recognise, appreciate and accept that I am one individual against huge odds. I have some understanding of computer security issues e.g. I understand Edward Snowden and Julian Assange (he needs to get out more) and can program a little but I’m no match for government agencies and many others. Is there a defence against zero-day exploits that insecurity agencies buy and develop? Mobile devices are a serious security issue. It’s probably best to simply accept that security is illusory unless there’s a dedicated team addressing it, and even then …

I noticed someone vulnerability scanning [me] many years ago. It came from Royal Mint Square, E1 very close to Tower Bridge. There are a lot of companies there – I didn’t pay much attention to who it was although it was a private company. I ping flooded them back. They didn’t notice until I ramped it up so not that good at it.

Getting noticed: I tend to use bank cards a lot so that I am easily monitored. Riding a motorcycle (with the number plate on the back) and sailing a little I avoid Auto Number Plate Recognition (ANPR). What it means is that I can surface somewhere unexpectedly.

Generally, it’s not anything near as bad as it was under the Fascism of the Blairs. I get surprised by attacks from unexpected sources. I was surprised by the blatant attacks from Ian Blair. I have recently been surprised by attacks from a GP. People follow different agendas.

13/12/17 People follow different agendas … and in the case of army and police they follow the agendas of the people in charge of them. On occasion I have been followed to protect me.

12/7/18 I get the impression that during the Blair era that there was a continuous forever emergency crisis so that the army was deployed against political critics. I certainly saw that with Chinook helicopters watching me in an urban area. Not subtle, that.

Continue ReadingWhat it’s like to be a suspected terrorist