Blah Blah Flowers

Apparently Obama's plan to close down Guantánamo Bay is to dump inmates on other countries. Let's hope that the unfortunates that the British Government decide to take are also given the full range of psychiatric care to get over their experience.

Labels: Barack Obama, The War Against Terror

Labels: Harold Pinter, The War Against Terror, YouTube

Brown-skinned fellas accused of terrorism despite having no plans in place. It's only brown-skinned people that do terrorism.

Labels: Al Qaeda, terrorism, The War Against Terror

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop making guns and selling them to people so that they can use them to kill us when we illegally invade their countries.

Labels: Afghanistan, arms industry, Iraq, petitions, The War Against Terror

Tony Blair demonstrates exactly why Alistair Campbell once told a reporter 'we don't do God'.

Now that we know that Tony Blair really is quite religious indeed I wonder whether this would have had much of an effect on the last five or six years if he'd been open about it? The rantings of deranged Islamists aside, would the public have been even more against a war that could be shown to be a new Crusade? Would Labour have done any worse in the last election?

Labels: Fundamentalists- Christian, religion, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

Well, Tony Blair's gone, Bush is into his last 365 days and the troops will be pulled out 'soon', so it must be time for the fragile left-wing anti-war coalition to fall apart, and to do it quicker than you can say "What ever happened to the Popular Front Reg?" All coalitions are like a family, and in this family Class War are like Kevin the Teenager, sitting in their bedroom, sulking.

An Open Letter To The Stop The War Coalition. I suppose we should be thankful, if this were fifteen years ago Class War would probably be LULzing out with 'your so gay' rather than hil-lar-ious flaccid dick jokes.

Labels: stupidity, The War Against Terror

A huge Pentagon study finds no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Despite the fact the American military have trashed the place, Saddam is dead and the report's existence wasn't exactly going to be sung from the rooftops, Shrubya is stopping it from being generally released, presumably in the hope that if it isn't published, it isn't true. Send an SAE to the Pentagon and they'll send you the report on a CD.

Labels: George 'Shrubya' Bush, Iraq, The War Against Terror, United States

A cynic might suggest that The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President by Jacob Weisberg is a book designed to appeal to me the most. An attack on George W. Bush from the left, it uses the two common views of him, as an empty cypher for the villanous policies of Cheney, Rove et al, or are the bloodiest mass-murderer in American history. Anyone following the Great British pantomime at the Royal Courts of Justice will be aware that it seems increasingly difficult in the modern age to define objective facts about people any more and, given that the Bush family obviously didn't help with the book and are not given to public introspection anyway, it would be fair to point out that all of Weisberg's suppositions are based on his reading of history. That said, it's a thrilling reading of the story, casting Shrubya as a largely empty vessel who has defined his adult life by trying to surpass his father by doing the same as him in the hopes of doing better, hence his laughable business career followed by the transition to politics. Weisberg points to mistakes in his father's era in the Presidency that could be argued to inform how the son became Texas Governor and then President.

Weisberg reserves most ire for Cheney and Rove, the former a Machiavelli who knows exactly how to push Bush's buttons to get him to do what Cheney wants while the latter worships Bush to such an extent that he's willing to dismantle the American Constitution on his behalf.

I did enjoy zipping through The Bush Tragedy but I expect that one's appreciation of the book will depend on how strongly one believes the central premise about the key players before they even pick the thing up.

Labels: American Presidency, books, George 'Shrubya' Bush, The War Against Terror, United States

After Shrubya's latest crass attempt to justify torture by invoking the 7th July London bombings one of the people caught up in that,
Rachel from north London responds.

Labels: George 'Shrubya' Bush, terrorism, The War Against Terror, torture

I have now received three student papers that discuss Iraq's attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11...

Meanwhile, the tragic and brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto does mean that her supporters don't need to worry about her apparent cosying up with Pervez Musharraf (trying to ingratiate herself with someone she saw as remaining the main power in Pakistani politics, or ingratiating herself in order to persuade him to step aside?) and forget about all the corruption that happened last time she was in power.

Labels: 11/09/01, Fox, Iraq, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, The War Against Terror

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Stop seeking to further extend pre-charge detention.

Anyone suspected of having committed an extremely serious offence, such as murder, can be held without charge for a maximum of 4 days. Police can already detain people under anti-terrorism legislation for seven times as long (28 days). Prolonged detention without charge or trial undermines fair trial rights, including the right to be promptly informed of any charges, the right to be free from arbitrary detention and the presumption of innocence.

Everybody arrested is entitled to be charged promptly and tried within a reasonable time, in proceedings that fully comply with fair trial standards, or to be released. The UK already has by far the longest period of pre-charge detention of any Common Law country. Any further extension of pre-charge detention risks being counterproductive, damaging community relations and undermining the UK’s moral authority around the world.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Close Charring [sic] Cross Gender Indentity [sic] Clinic.

Charring [sic] Cross G.I.C. should be closed down due to it's failiure to comply to the standards as laid out by Harry Benjiman [sic]. They bring thier [sic] own personal wiews [sic] into work with them and only select those who fit thier [sic] idea of what a woman / female is and should be each person is different, no two people are the same, we should therefore not be treated as stereotypes in one catagory [sic].

(Aside: As all the petitions are supposedly personally vetted by someone before they are posted for people to vote on you'd think they'd run them through a spell-check first)

Notice the first person to sign this petition seems less interested in Miss Sommer's thrust and is just against the surgery for anyone.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Hold a referendum on ID cards and the National Identity Register.

There are any number of ID Card petitions up on the site there, yet supposedly one of the criteria for turning down a new petition is if it covers the same ground as other petitions. I got one turned down a few months back which asked Gordon Brown specifically to give up the scheme.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to to not allow the import of biofuel from countries which are destroying rain forest to grow the crops..

We need to cut down on the current forms of travel, rather than transfer to using up a different natural resource.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Hold a public referendum on Trident and the defence of our country.

Labels: Government, ID cards, petitions, sex/gender, The War Against Terror, transport

Another white guy with a bomb who isn't called a terrorist and who the media weren't that interested in reporting.

Labels: Islamophobia, terrorism, The War Against Terror

Rob Liddle: God’s role in politics is not to underwrite bad ideas.
Hell, you think to yourself, even Jesus Christ admitted to the occasional mistake. But not [Tony Blair].

Labels: Christianity, religion, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

The British Government has proved consistently reluctant to do anything to help the Iraqis that have put their lives on the line to help the British troops invading their country. According to The Times, the Government is using every excuse it can think of to turn their asylum applications down.

Labels: Government, immigration, Iraq, The War Against Terror

From the geniuses that brought you: "Hey, let's arm these Taliban guys to fight the Commies for us!" comes the sequel: "Hey, let's arm these Pakistani tribes to fight the Taliban for us!"

Labels: Pakistan, The War Against Terror, United States

Ten years ago, Shrubya thought invading Iraq was a terrible idea. Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. [via The Huffington Post]

Labels: George 'Shrubya' Bush, Iraq, The War Against Terror

Tariq Ali on the state of Pakistan as it turns sixty.

Several years after the split with Bangladesh in 1971 I wrote a book called Can Pakistan Survive? for Penguin. It was publicly denounced and banned by the dictator of the day, General Zia-ul-Haq, but pirated in many editions. I had argued that if the state carried on in the same old way, some of the minority provinces left behind might also defect, leaving the Punjab alone, strutting like a cock on a dunghill. Many of those who denounced me as a traitor and a renegade are now asking the same question. It’s too late for regrets, I tell them. The country is here to stay. And it’s not religion or the mystical ‘ideology of Pakistan’ that guarantees its survival, but its nuclear capacity and Washington.

[via Blogadoon]

Labels: Fundamentalists- Islamic, Pakistan, The War Against Terror, United States

De Menezes shooting: Police found guilty but, as of yet, no-one is willing to stand up and take responsibility for the killing of an innocent man. It's got to be Cressida Dick and Sir Ian Blair in the frame for this one, and I'd quite happily open up the door of redundancy and kick them through, it's not like they won't find cosy private sector jobs which pay more money after they leave anyway. Plus, The Sun make it mandatory to give people like them newspaper columns to bitch about how the Government is being soft on crime but not bringing back burning at the stake for first offences.

Labels: Jean Charles de Menezes, London, metropolitan police, police, Sir Ian Blair, The War Against Terror

At the Anti-War March.

Labels: Flickr, House of Commons, The War Against Terror

It's true what they say about the left-wing. If you give two people two loudspeakers, do you think they'll synchronise their chants? Will they fuck...

Labels: lefties, London, stupidity, The War Against Terror