Media silence over Jonathan Powell’s bloody hands
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/media-silence-over-jonathan-powells-bloody-hands
The British press has welcomed Keir Starmer’s new National Security Adviser without any mention of his deep, central involvement in the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — but history remembers, writes IAN SINCLAIR
“THE US media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission,” William Blum, historian and fierce critic of US foreign policy, once astutely observed. “It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies.”
Blum’s evergreen maxim very much applies to the British media, too.
Take the press response to Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently appointing Jonathan Powell to be his new National Security Adviser.
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Given the job description for his new position, amazingly, none of the five newspapers thought it pertinent to mention Powell’s central role in the illegal and aggressive invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and Britain’s subsequent military occupation. Or, for that matter, Powell’s role in Britain’s (also illegal) 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent occupation.
If we judge Powell’s political career in the 2000s using the limited, liberal framing endemic to these newspapers, his record is a disaster.
The British military interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan are now widely understood to have been catastrophes, leading to the deaths of hundreds of British soldiers. The presence of British troops in both countries energised the armed resistance.
The Taliban are now back in control of Afghanistan, and Iraq’s social fabric was torn asunder to such an extent that Isis was able to take control of around 40 per cent of the country in the mid-2010s.
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If we judge Powell’s career using a moral lens, then he arguably becomes a blood-soaked, criminal political figure. He was, after all, one of the key individuals in Blair’s inner circle in the run-up to the invasion when this cabal repeatedly misled the cabinet, parliament, media and British public.
He attended the infamous July 23 2002 meeting recorded in the leaked minutes which have become known as the Downing Street Memo.
Summarising recent talks Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, had had in Washington, the minute’s note: “Military action was now seen as inevitable” but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The minutes also note foreign secretary Jack Straw said the “case [for war] was thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his [weapons of mass destruction] capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Powell was at Blair’s side when the September 2002 dossier was compiled, with little regard for the actual evidence, to strengthen the case for war. In fact, Powell “instructed intelligence chiefs to change the … dossier to make it appear that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was much greater than they believed,” the Guardian reported in September 2003.
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[T]he ramifications of the historical record are clear. Rather than returning to Downing Street, Powell — like Blair, Campbell and Brown — should be heading to The Hague.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/media-silence-over-jonathan-powells-bloody-hands
