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The Daily Mail reports:

Tony Blair yesterday launched an extraordinary attack on the Iraq inquiry - as the chairman warned that he and others could be recalled over 'gaps' in their evidence.
In an outspoken interview in the U.S., the former prime minister dismissed the inquiry as part of a ' continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy'.
Speaking on Fox News he said critics of the war were obsessed with conspiracy theories, and refused to accept that his motives were 'genuine'.

The biggest conspiracy theory of 1999 was that Yugoslav forces were committing genocide in Kosovo. Tony Blair peddled it.

The biggest conspiracy of the Noughties was that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed WMDs. Tony Blair peddled it.

And the biggest conspiracy theory currently doing the rounds is that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Tony Blair is peddling it.

Tony Blair: the world’s greatest conspiracy theorist.

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This excellent letter, from our friend and regular commenter Neil Craig, appears in the Morning Star.

During the former attorney general's testimony to the Iraq inquiry the word "precedent" was used 16 times, overwhelmingly in regard to the precedent established by bombing Yugoslavia.

This was said to have been justified on the "new legal theory" that "a reasonable case could be made - I'm sorry, there was a reasonable case," to quote this eminent legal authority's testimony, that it was lawful to bomb people.

The interesting thing is that, whatever we may suspect about the honesty of the case made for WMD in Iraq, we know for an absolute fact that the case for the Yugoslav war - that Milosevic was engaged in genocide - was not only untrue but a deliberate lie. Like Iraq, Kosovo was a war undertaken without UN authority - and we never even attempted to get authority.

The real precedent provided by Kosovo, as Goldsmith said, is that "simply it is enough to say there is a reasonable case," however dishonestly, and that you can get away with murder. Mass murder.

Whatever whitewash we see at the Iraq inquiry, the case that Blair and his supporters are guilty of war crimes is undeniable. Indeed in Kosovo we saw the NATO-armed KLA, reappointed as NATO police, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people carried out under NATO command authority.

The NATO-funded war crimes commission has charged many Serbs largely on the grounds that they were part of a "joint criminal conspiracy." It can hardly now be denied that Blair, his supporters and at least his entire party organisation, were part of a joint criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes - and probably twice.

Neil Craig
Glasgow

The importance of the Yugoslavia ‘precedent’ cannot be underestimated.
As I argued here, and elsewhere, the road to Baghdad began in the Balkans, and, as Neil Craig says, the fact that Blair got away scot-free with an illegal and deceitful war in 1999, only emboldened him to do it again in 2003.

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Forget the Lion King. Pinocchio is back!
And he's clearly going for the Guinness World record for the number of lies anyone can tell in one day!

Here's Seumas Milne's take on today's events:

Once again, the chance to hold Tony Blair to account is being squandered by questioning that has ranged from the feeble to the shamefully complicit. Faced with such embarrassing cosiness (Lawrence Freedman plumbed the lowest depths), the former prime minister quickly overcame his initial nervousness. Far from conceding any ground over the aggression against Iraq, he repeatedly argued that the same "calculus of risk" now demanded similar action against Iran. The fact that he remains the Quartet's man in the Middle East should be cause for the deepest alarm.....

It's been classic Blair: the lawyerly evasions over the wording of the September 2002dossier, the self-deprecating asides over his Fern Britton interview gaffe, the deliberation conflation of the 9/11 attacks and Iraq's weapons programmes, real or imagined.....

Most outrageous, though, was his repeated and so far barely challenged assertion that Iraq was in "material breach" of repeated UN resolutions. In reality, the fact that Iraq had destroyed its WMD stocks in the 1990s means that it was not in significant breach of the resolutions at all. Even Blair's repeated claims that Iraq was failling to comply with resolution 1441 over inspectors' right to interview officials is simply not supported by Hans Blix's reports of the time.


And here you can read Mehdi Hasan's list of Pinocchio's ten worst Iraq war porkies.

And do you know what was the biggest lie of all? That Pinocchio genuinely believed that Iraq possessed WMD. Because if he had, we can be sure that he would never have attacked the country.

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The intention is to encourage repeated attempts to arrest the former prime minister. We have four purposes:
- To remind people that justice has not yet been done.
- To show Mr Blair that, despite his requests for people to “move on” from Iraq, the mass murder he committed will not be forgotten.
- To put pressure on the authorities of the United Kingdom and the countries he travels through to prosecute him for a crime against peace, or to deliver him for prosecution to the International Criminal Court.
- To discourage other people from repeating his crime.

We have no interest in people’s motivation, as long as they follow the rules laid down by this site. If they try to arrest Mr Blair because they care about the people he has killed, so much the better. But if they do it only for the money, that is fine too, and we will have encouraged an attempt which would not otherwise have taken place.
The higher the bounty, the more people are likely to try to arrest Mr Blair.

More details of the bounty here. (It's almost up to £10,000).
And bravo to George Monbiot for launching this initiative.

P.S.
If you're still unconvinced of the criminality of Tony Bliar, then please read this, this and this.

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Your hero Tony Bliar is a war criminal and will end up in a prison cell.

Nor will we ever forget the role that warmongering journalists like you played in propagandising for a blatantly illegal and immoral conflict.

Oh, and here’s the latest news from oh so democratic ‘liberated’ Iraq.

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This article of mine appears in The First Post.

Neil Clark: A trial would be warmly welcomed by millions – so what happens next?

Tony Blair's extraordinary admission on Sunday to the BBC's Fern Britton - that he would have gone to war to topple Saddam Hussein regardless of the issue of Iraq's alleged WMDs - is sure to give fresh impetus to moves to prosecute our former prime minister for war crimes.

The case against Blair, strong enough before this latest comment, now appears rock solid. Going to war to change another country's regime is prohibited by international law, while the Nuremburg judgment of 1946 laid down that "to initiate a war of aggression", as Blair and Bush clearly did against Iraq, "is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole".

Blair's admission, that Saddam would have been attacked anyway, is also an acknowledgement that he lied to the House of Commons on February 25, 2003, when he told MPs: "I detest his [Saddam's] regime. But even now he [Saddam] can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. I do not want war... But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation."

The view that Blair is a war criminal is now mainstream: when comedian Sandi Toksvig, host of Radio Four's News Quiz, called him one on air, the BBC, according to the Mail on Sunday, did not receive a single complaint.

But while it is easy to label Blair a war criminal, what are the chances of him actually standing trial - and how could it be achieved?

You can read the rest of the article here.

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By his own admission.
'Regime change' may be popular with neocon fanatics, but it is illegal.

And when you read Bliar's latest comments, think back to the speech he gave to the House of Commons on 25th February 2003.

"I detest his regime....but even now, he (Saddam) could save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. I do not want war ... But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation."

What a liar.

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The Mail on Sunday reports:

Tony Blair was accused of a 'gross betrayal' of the Queen and Parliament last night after it emerged that the Government's chief law officer warned him eight months before the Iraq invasion that regime change would be illegal.

In a previously undisclosed memo, described as 'the most vital piece of the jigsaw so far', Attorney General Lord Goldsmith told the then prime minister that the war would be a blatant breach of international law.

But rather than slow his rush to war, Mr Blair froze Lord Goldsmith out of Cabinet meetings and sent two of his closest allies to menace him into changing his mind. Lord Goldsmith was so furious at his treatment he threatened to resign- and lost three stone as Mr Blair and his cronies bullied him into backing down

What lovely people Bliar and his cronies are, don't you think? Starting blatantly illegal wars. Bullying those who get in the way of their plans.

Tony Bliar, the man the neocons wanted to be EU President- is now a totally disgraced figure. He- and his few remaining supporters- need to be treated with utter contempt. But that's not enough. There is abundant evidence that Bliar is guilty of war crimes. The 'supreme' international crime is to launch a war of aggression against a sovereign state- and that's what Bliar did in 2003.
He- and his US counter-part George W. Bush- and the neocon fanatics who pushed so aggressively for war, need to be brought before a war crimes tribunal as soon as possible.

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The Sunday Telegraph reports:

Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action. In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.

Throughout most of 2002, Mr Blair’s consistent line was that – though military action could not be ruled out – no decisions had been made, no British military preparations were in train, and any action had to be pursued through the UN. That, today’s documents make clear, was not correct.

You can read more here from the Iraq war files here and here.

Tony Bliar misleading MPs and the public? Who’d ever have thought it!!

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The man pictured above is the new EU President. His name is Herman van Rompuy, but for all I care it could be Herman Munster. The most important thing is that his name is not Tony Blair. In the words of Kool and The Gang ‘Celebrate’.

Neo-cons sneered at the campaign to block Blair from becoming EU President. They sneered at our petitions and they sneered at those of us who wrote articles opposing Blair’s candidacy.
The Wall Street Journal, which attacked me here in one of its editorials- called those of us who didn’t want Blair to be EU President to be part of an ’angry, fading movement'.

But the movement that is fading, as we saw from last nights announcement, is the one which tried to get an unindicted war-criminal appointed as EU’s President. As far as arrogant, elitist movements go, the campaign to get Blair - a man loathed across the continent- the top job in the EU, really took the biscuit. Blair’s appointment would have been the culmination of the neo-con dream. But happily it failed.

p.s.
Uber neo-con commentator Daniel Finkelstein does not find the appointment of Baroness Ashton, a former Treasurer of CND, as the EU’s first Foreign Minister, to be ‘reassuring’.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I find the fact that a hardcore neocon like Finkelstein doesn’t find Ashton’s appointment ‘reassuring’ to be most reassuring.
Take it away, Kool.


video: Abrutis50.

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The Mail on Sunday reports:

Tony Blair has been in talks with Tesco about helping them open supermarkets in the Middle East - allegedly in return for up to £1million.
It is believed the discussions between the former Prime Minister, now a peace envoy to the region, and the supermarket chain, whose slogan is 'Every little helps', ended after the two sides failed to agree terms.
The disclosure could further damage Mr Blair's hopes of becoming the first President of Europe, as critics will seize on it as evidence that he is as interested in making money as he is in reviving his career as a statesman.
According to one source, Mr Blair's proposed role for Tesco would simply have been to act as a figurehead for their drive to break into the Middle East market.

Tony Bliar 'interested in making money'? Never!!

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