SATURDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2007
100,000 SAY TROOPS OUT - NO TRIDENT
Up To 100,000 marchers joined the Troops Out/No Trident demonstration on 24 February, calling for all occupying troops to be withdrawn from Iraq, no replacement of Britain’s nuclear weapons system and no attack on Iran.
Miles de personas, entre ellas activistas, políticos y familiares de soldados, se manifestaron hoy en dos ciudades de Reino Unido para exigir el retiro de las tropas británicas en Irak y externar su preocupación por la crisis con Irán.
Las manifestaciones tuvieron lugar en Londres y Glasgow, capital de Escocia, convocadas por la coalición Alto a la Guerra, a tres días de que el primer ministro Anthony Blair anunció el calendario para el retiro gradual de las tropas británicas de la nación musulmana.
"Tenemos que intensificar nuestra demanda del retiro completo de las tropas de Irak y exigir que nuestro país se aleje de las políticas del presidente estadunidense George W. Bush", afirmó Lindsey German, vocera de Alto a la Guerra.
Los manifestantes, incluidos líderes religiosos, expresaron también su rechazo al sistema de misiles Trident de Reino Unido y a una posible guerra contra Irán, ante los reportes que indican que Estados Unidos prepara un ataque contra esa república islámica.
German declaró que "el gobierno (británico) parece adicto a la guerra, ... dice que retirará algunas tropas de Irak, pero enviará más a Afganistán. Está preparando la renovación del sistema de misiles, y ayuda a Bush a iniciar sus proyectos de guerra".
Afirmó que el primer ministro británico "dice que la guerra en Irak no es un fracaso. El nos metió a la guerra con mentiras y por ello es responsable de la muerte de 655 mil iraquíes y de nuestros soldados que han muerto allá".
Además, Blair busca gastar una millonaria suma de dinero en el sistema de defensa de misiles en lugar de invertir en escuelas y hospitales, criticó.
La demanda es unánime, personas de todo el país viajaron a Londres para tomar parte en las movilizaciones, dijo German ante los asistentes en la céntrica Plaza Trafalgar, donde se reunieron luego de marchar desde el Hyde Park.
En Glasgow, las demandas de quienes se reunieron en la Plaza George fueron las mismas y al igual que en Londres los manifestantes gritaban frases como "No a una guerra con Irán", "Alto a la invasión en Irak", "Tropas británicas a casa", y "No al sistema de misiles".
Tony Blair took us to war on Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction. There were none. 655,000 Iraqis, over 3000 US soldiers and 130 British soldiers have died in that illegal war. Now Blair wants to spend up to £76 billion on new Trident nuclear weapons for a ‘defence’ policy based on indiscriminate killing of millions.
Stop the War, CND and BMI are calling a national demonstration on 24 February to say no to these insane policies of death and destruction.
Here in the UK, we have just paid off our 60 year lend-lease debt to the US from the Second World War. After a shocking credit rating for so long, and the kow-towing that comes with it, it is not now unreasonable for us to reclaim our foreign policy and remove American military bases and nuclear warheads from our soil. We need neither.
It would be tempting to say that the current UK 'Government' ended the day Anthony Blair failed to make a statement on the vile, repellant, rotten and disgusting show trial and execution of Saddam Hussein. Given that capital punishment is illegal in the UK, and that Saddam Hussein was armed and supported throughout the period of his crimes against humanity by British and American Governments, the moral bankruptcy of the entire occupation of Iraq - itself a litany of crimes against humanity with the goal of oil theft - found its perfect echo in that silence. Unfortunately Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was too busy holidaying in a millionaire mansion in the Florida sun to comment - a holiday in the location where George W Bush was not elected in 2000.
However, a more accurate (and less extraordinary) rendering of this current Government is that it never actually existed at all. It was a bizarre postmodern experiment that accompanied the dot.com/telecoms/energy boom of the late 1990s. The Millennium Bug was not that predicted by doomsayers. It was, instead, the collapse of that bubble, perhaps the largest in human economic history.
Nothing sums up the confused, unreal nature of the 'New Labour' project more than the following anecdote. It is merely a vignette in the history of the past nine years. However, it speaks volumes.
In 1998, Anthony Blair endorsed a Downing Street statement backing a campaign for the release from prison of Deidrie Rachid. Alas, that campaign would not today qualify for inclusion on the Million Campaign Homepage. Rachid was a character in a soap opera. From its birth, this doomed project confused hype with reality, soundbites with substance, acting with reality. It was, like the bubble that gave birth to it, insane and schizoid from day one.
The 'New Labour' party conference in Blackpool, 1998, was sponsored by Enron. Enron also sponsored the Presidential campaign of George W Bush, who was not elected US President in Florida in 2000, and that of William Jefferson Clinton. We have, indeed, been blessed with the most hopeless plutocracy money can buy. Like Enron or WorldCom, these false 'Governments' are woeful pyramid schemes. Ask Albanians - they will tell you that every pyramid scheme in history has collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
The current axis of evil between Bush and Blair and whoever Bin Laden is or was is collapsing, and its graves are Iraq and Afghanistan. Addiction to oil is the death of all of them. The Middle East is the primary source of oil in the world, the Caspian Basin the second. The 'wars' of error we have endured since September 11th 2001 - after the bubble had already burst - have been all about peak oil, and nothing else. Not WMD, democracy, justice for war crimes, security, anti-terrorism, or anything else.
Oil supply has either peaked, or will do very soon. Demand rises each day.
That is not sustainable. We switch to alternatives now or we face premature human extinction.
The choice is ours. The choice is not that of our so-called 'Governments'.
Anthony Blair's silence speaks a thousand words. In the UK "Independent" newspaper this week, former Iraqi Defence Minister Ali Allawi and US Retired General Wes Clark, a Democrat Presidential candidate in 2004, have written cogent pieces on the civil war in Iraq which, if not entirely ethically perfect, are at least infinitely superior on a pragmatic basis to the current debacle. Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also just introduced a War Profiteering Act, which aims to impose stiff fines and prison terms on war profiteers. This was a direct result of the public response to the phenomenal film "Iraq for Sale" - an example of re-democratisation from the grassroots.
Let us have a spring clean in 2007. The cobweb voices of characters like Bush and Blair, and their phoney soap operas, have ended. In a time of universal deceit civil disobedience is a citizen's right and duty. We must all follow the 7th Recommendation of the World Tribunal on Iraq - "We recommend that citizens of the UK and US launch immediate non-violent action against the corporate profiteers of the illegal war in Iraq."
A 'surge' (in English, escalation) is suicide. It shall happen over our dead bodies. 2007 is the year for troops OUT, not troops IN.
At the first weblog listed at the top of this post please find links to two superb films currently available for free on line, "Ludicrous Diversion" and "Oil, Smoke and Mirrors".
The spotlight of relentless interrogation (although not quite Guantanamo Bay style, we trust) now turns on the events of September 11th 2001. The attack was either the fruit of Machiavellian machinations in the destabilisation of the Soviet empire, or it was an inside-job to license oil grabs in the Middle East and the Caspian basin.
In other words, al-Qaeda - from New York on September 11th 2001 to London on July 7th 2005 - is either the result of the disorder of geopolitical polis-tricks behind the scenes or, in the worst case scenario, a covert, false-flag Frankenstein's monster concoction from a CIA database.
The fact that George Bush's father and Bin Laden's father supped together as the Twin Towers crumbled at the Carlyle Group, the largest arms traders in the world, is either the greatest irony of human history, or the ugliest networking session of human history - at least since Hitler and Stalin's carve-up of Poland.
Either way, none of us ever voted for any of that, any of them, or any of it.
The other bitter legacy of the insanity of this decade has been a concentration camp archipelago from Guantanamo Bay to Uzbekistan, linked together by 'extraordinary rendition' flights. An Iron Curtain made up of spectacles of mass distraction in the corporate media has descended as a smokescreen on this network. We are indebted to intrepid investigators such as Dick Marty, the Swiss Parliamentarian and Rapporteur for the Council of Europe's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, and Craig Murray, the former British diplomat who lost his job and was publicly discredited by the 'Government' after he blew the whistle on Uzbek torture. One day we will open up all these concentration camps and forensically document what occured in them. Unlike General Pinochet, who hid behind infirmity and plutocratic friends like Mrs.Thatcher, the architects of this litany of criminality must not escape justice.
The new era we are in is the era of peak oil and global warming. The solution is not fighting infantile conflicts over declining resources. The solution is developing alternative energy sources, and massively cutting global consumption.
One is making a living. The other is making a killing.
Please watch both videos.
Add 2 and 2 together.
In Orwellian world they make 5.
In the real world, they might make another number, depending on the connections that WE make, and the evidence that comes with proper, fair, free, independent, public inquiries.
The mathematics all depends on whether we are still living in the lunacy of deregulated financial markets that gave us the pre Millennial bubble, or in the 21st century, where the bubble has burst, oil has (or soon will) peak, and there is a difference between a facade and a reality.
Today the UK is divided. Half of us are gazing in the rear-view mirror at a 1990s past that is no longer with us. The other half are coming to a new road.
A new road needs new roadmaps.
Only truth and reconciliation will re-unite us.
IT'S THE ECOLONOMY, STUPID!
LOG ON
TUNE UP
ROCK OUT
LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS!!!
UK GLASNOST!!!!!
NEWSFLASH - The war crimes trial of Anthony Blair, the warm-up. In May in London's Tricycle Theatre a play entitled "Called to Account - the Indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the Crime of Aggression against Iraq - a Hearing" opens.
The case for the prosecution will be spearheaded by Philippe Sands QC, Scott Ritter, Bob Marshall-Andrews MP, Clare Short MP, and Sir Michael Quinlan, former permanent under-secretary at the Ministry of Defence.
Also, on Monday 15th January, "The Trial of Tony Blair" opens on Channel 4's More4 Channel.
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT IN THE HAGUE AWAITS!!!
YA BASTA!!!
BRITISH LABOUR PARTY IN EXILE (TURKMENISTAN CLP)
http://matthewedwards.typepad.com
