Livingstone: Blair guilty of ‘criminal irresponsibility’ over Iraq

December 1, 2015 By administrator

Livingstone blames Tony Blair for London 7/7 attacks

Tony Blair is guilty of “criminal irresponsibility” for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has insisted, while defending his claim that Blair is responsible for the deaths of 52 people in the 7/7 terror attacks.

Livingstone told the BBC on Tuesday the case for war in Iraq was based on information from a discredited local politician who claimed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

He defended comments made last week that Blair “killed 52 Londoners” by ignoring warnings that intervening in Iraq would lead to terror attacks on British soil.

The original comments prompted calls for Livingstone to be removed from his role as co-convener of Labour’s defense review.

When questioned about the comments on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, he said: “I simply told the truth. Everybody knows who saw the website they [the 7/7 bombers] left; they’d actually gone to kill Londoners and give their own lives in order to do that because of our involvement in Iraq. This is the problem,” he said.

“Tony Blair was told by the security services when he took that decision this will put us at risk. We started preparing for that. We spent four years of tests and exercises because we knew that terror attack would come.

“If that had been the truth – that Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction. But to base that whole war on the testimony of one discredited local politician now in retrospect looks like absolutely criminal irresponsibility.”

https://youtu.be/RIXYJLMLUUQ

Livingstone’s comments come as a new book released this week suggests that ahead of the war Blair actively ignored intelligence from South Africa which showed that Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction.

In the book God, Spies and Lies, journalist John Matisonn documents how South Africa had a deep understanding of Iraqi weapons systems as the country had worked with Iraq’s weapons experts during the apartheid era.

According to the Guardian, Matisonn writes that then-South African President Thabo Mbeki had requested a specialist team of South Africans be allowed to enter Iraq prior to the invasion and investigate claims for WMDs.

The team reportedly found no WMDs and their findings were sent to both the US and the UK.

However, Western authorities ignored the findings and a full-scale invasion was launched on March 19, 2003, when troops from the US, UK, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq.

Bush, Blair plotted Iraq war 1 year before invasion had started: White House memo

October 17, 2015 By administrator

Bush and Blair are shaking hands in February 2001. (AFP photo)

A damning White House memo has revealed details of the so-called “deal in blood” forged by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush over the Iraq war.

The document, titled “Secret… Memorandum for the President”, was sent by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell to President Bush on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas, Britain’s Daily Mail reported on Sunday.

The sensational memo revealed that Blair had agreed to support the war a year before the invasion even started, while publicly the British prime minister was working to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

The document also disclosed that Blair agreed to act as a spin doctor for Bush and convince a skeptical public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, which actually did not exist.

In response, Bush would flatter Blair and give the impression that London was not Washington’s poodle but an equal partner in the “special relationship.”

Powell told Bush that Blair “will be with us” on the Iraq war, and assured the president that “”the UK will follow our lead in the Middle East.”

Another sensational memo revealed how Bush used “spies” in the British Labour Party to help him to influence public opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of the Iraq war.

Both documents were obtained and published by The Mail on Sunday. They are part of a number of classified emails stored on the private server of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton which courts have forced her to reveal.

Blair has always denied the claim that he and Bush signed a deal “in blood” at Crawford to launch a war against Iraq that began on March 20, 2003, that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The Powell memo, however, showed how Blair and Bush secretly prepared the Iraq war plot behind closed doors at Crawford.

Powell told Bush: “He will present to you the strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.”

The top US diplomatic official added that the UK premier has the presentational skills to “make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace.”

Powell wrote that Blair will “stick with us on the big issues” but he needs to show the British public that “Britain and America are truly equity partners in the special relationship.”

n March 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding WMDs. But no such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.

More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.

The US war in Iraq cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, according to a study called Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

Source: presstv.com

Blair washes his hands of responsibility for Iraq crisis

June 15, 2014 By administrator

A mask of Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair during a protest in London, England (file photo)

Presstv: Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair has rejected the idea that his decision to support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused the recent surge of violence in the country.

“We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that we caused this”, Blair wrote in an essay published on his website on Saturday, adding that the belief that the US-led invasion of Iraq had led to the current situation was “bizarre.”

The former premier insisted that the invasion of Iraq, which led to the toppling of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was right and that things would have been worse if he had not been ousted from power more than a decade ago.

The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants gained control of parts of Iraq’s northern areas on June 10. The militants first took control of Nineveh Province, including its provincial capital, Mosul. Rights groups say around half a million people have been displaced in and around Mosul.

The terrorists have also vowed to continue their raid toward the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Critics, however, dismissed Blair’s claims, saying that the US-UK invasion of Iraq was the main reason for the current situation in the Arab country.

Michael Stephens, from the Royal United Services Institute, said he thought Blair was “washing his hands of responsibility” and that the Iraq War played a major role in destabilizing the country.

UK forces participated in the US-led invasion of Iraq in a blatant violation of international law in 2003 under the pretext that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq.