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Fallujah in Iraq, destroyed by Nato's stormtroopers in 2004
Sirte in Libya, destroyed by Nato's luftwaffe in 2011
By Felicity Arbuthnot, via Global Research
“Hypocrisy, the most protected of vices.” Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673)
Last week, a little more was learned as to the circumventions in Whitehall and Washington delaying the publication of the findings of Sir John Chilcot’s marathon inquiry in to the background of the Iraq invasion.
The UK’s Chilcot Inquiry, was convened under then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to establish the decisions taken by the UK government and military, pre and post invasion. It ran from 24 November 2009 until 2 February 2011 and cost an estimated £7.5m. The as yet unpublished report is believed to run to 1,000,000 words.
The stumbling block – more of an Israeli-style ‘separation barrier’ in reality – has been the correspondence between Tony Blair and George W Bush, prior to an invasion and occupation that former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan finally told the BBC was “illegal”, and that “painful lessons” had been learned. ‘Lessons’ clearly not learned by the current British government. (16 September 2004)
The communications, in Sir John Chilcot’s words to former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell, related to “The question of when and how the prime minister (Tony Blair) made commitments to the US about the UK’s involvement in military action in Iraq, and subsequent decisions on the UK’s continuing involvement, is central to its considerations.” (Guardian, 17 July 2013)
Further: “Chilcot said the release of notes of the conversations between Blair and Bush would serve to ‘illuminate Mr Blair’s position at critical points’ in the run up to war.”
The inquiry had also been seeking clarification from O’Donnell’s successor, Sir Jeremy Heywood, regarding inclusion of references to “the content of Mr Blair’s notes to President Bush, and to the records of discussions between Mr Blair and Presidents Bush and Obama”. The wall remains in place.
Sir Jeremy Heywood, now the country’s most senior civil servant, was Tony Blair’s private secretary during the period of the trans-Atlantic lies that led to the Iraq war and during the creation of the Blair regime’s ‘dodgy dossiers’.
Interestingly too: “O’Donnell had consulted Blair before saying the notes must remain secret.” Effectively, one of the accused – in an action that has destroyed a country, lynched the president, murdered his sons and teenage nephew and caused the deaths of perhaps one and a half million people – is deciding what evidence can be presented before the court. Chilcot has seen the documents, but seemingly needs the accused’s permission to publish them.
A stitch-up of which any ‘rogue’ or ‘totalitarian’ regime would surely be proud.
Centre to the dispute between the inquiry, Cameron and his ennobled gate keepers is material requested for inclusion in the final report: “to reflect its analysis of discussions in Cabinet and Cabinet Committees and their significance”.
The documents being denied to the inquiry include 25 pieces of correspondence sent by Tony Blair to George W Bush and 130 documents relating to conversations between these lead plotters of Iraq’s destruction. Additionally: “dozens of records of Cabinet meetings”.
Ironically, on 31 October 2006, David Cameron voted in favour of a motion brought by the Scottish National Party and Wales’ Plaid Cymru (‘The Party of Wales’) calling for an inquiry into the Blair government’s conduct of the Gulf war.
On 15 June 2009, in a parliamentary debate, the terms of the Chilcot Inquiry were presented in detail, duly recorded in Hansard, the parliamentary records.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor stated: “In order that the committee is as objective and non-partisan as possible, the membership of the committee will consist entirely of non-partisan public figures acknowledged to be experts and leaders in their fields. There will be no representatives of political parties from either side of this House.”
David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition stated piously:
“The whole point of having an Inquiry is that it has to be able to make clear recommendations, to go wherever the evidence leads, to establish the full truth and to ensure that the right lessons are learned … in a way that builds public confidence.”
Cameron was particularly concerned about: ‘openness’. How times change.
Further, said Cameron:
“The inquiry needs to be, and needs to be seen to be, truly independent and not an establishment stitch-up … The prime minister was very clear that the inquiry would have access to all British documents and all British witnesses. Does that mean that the inquiry may not have access to documents from the USA … On the scope of the inquiry, will the prime minister confirm that it will cover relations with the United States …”
Cameron concluded with again a demand for “openness and transparency”.
In response, Gordon Brown stated:
“I cannot think of an inquiry with a more comprehensive, wider or broader remit than the one that I have just announced. Far from being restricted, it will cover eight years, from 2001 to 2009. Far from being restricted, it will have access to any documents that are available, and that will include foreign documents that are available in British archives. [Emphasis mine.]
However, four years is a long time in politics, and last week, as David Cameron traveled to Sri Lanka for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, it transpired that the documents Sir John Chilcot had been pursuing and been denied for six months have been also blocked by: “officials in the White House and the US department of state, who have refused to sanction any declassification of critical pre-and post-war communications between George W Bush and Tony Blair”.
David Cameron is apparently also blocking evidence “on Washington’s orders, from being included in the report of an expensive and lengthy British Inquiry.”
However, ‘shame’ clearly not being a word in Cameron’s lexicon, he landed in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon, a British Colony 1815-1948) as the above shoddy details broke, in full colonial mode.
Spectacular welcoming ceremonies barely over, he launched in to an entirely undiplomatic, public tirade, at this gathering of the ‘Commonwealth family of nations’ alleging that his host, President Mahinda Rajapaksa, was guilty of war crimes during the civil war with the Tamil Tigers.
It is not disputed that, as in any conflict, terrible crimes were committed on both sides. But these are accusations from the man both covering up the genesis of massacres of genocidal magnitude – and who enjoined in the near destruction of Libya, the resultant lynching of the country’s leader, the murder of his sons and small grandchildren and uncounted others in another decimation of a country that had threatened no other.
Cameron’s Libya is Blair’s Iraq. As in Iraq, the dying continues daily.
The pontification also from a prime minister backing funding for the cannibalistic-orientated insurgents in Syria – the beheading, dismembering, looting, displacing, kidnapping, chemical weapons lobbying, child killing, infanticide-bent crazies – including those from his own country.
In Sri Lanka, he demanded the country ensure “credible, transparent and independent investigations into alleged war crimes” and said if this did not happen by the March deadline he arbitrarily imposed, he would press the UN Human Rights Council to hold an international inquiry.
Further: “truth telling”, he said, was essential. To cite hypocrisy of breathtaking proportions has become a redundant accusation, but words are failing.
In the event Cameron “left Colombo having failed to secure any concessions from President Rajapaksa or persuade fellow leaders to criticise Sri Lanka’s record in a communique”. (Guardian, 16 November)
As the prime minster slunk out, President Mahinda Rajapaksa delivered an apt, withering reaction: “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” he responded.
Ironically, in spite a tragic recent past, Sri Lanka is the only country in South Asia rated high on the Human Development Index. The UK and ‘allies’ recent victims Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan barely make it to the bottom.
David Cameron returned to Britain still having to grapple with how to evade delivering truth to the Chilcot Inquiry.
Hopefully, he will read a letter from writer Lesley Docksey:
“It was British taxpayers’ money that funded the Chilcot Inquiry, and this taxpayer wants her money’s worth. All the British government papers concerning the sorry affair of an invasion of another country belong to this nation – not to the United States, not to Tony Blair and not to the current government. Taxpayers aren’t here to save the faces of politicians.
“Nor is it, in the words of the Cabinet Office, ‘in the public’s interest’ that exchanges between the UK prime minister and the US president are kept secret’ – sorry, ‘privileged’ – from those who are paying their wages. The phrase ‘in the public interest’ only ever means the interests of the government of the day.
“Unless Sir John Chilcot and his team can publish a full and honest report, no lessons will be learnt by future governments. But then, if those lessons were learnt, and we the public knew (as in fact we do) what they were, this country would find it difficult to ever invade anywhere ever again.
“So, Sir John, in the words of a former PM, the Duke of Wellington, ‘Publish and be damned!’” (Independent, 18th November 2013)
Oh, and as David Cameron was lecturing Sri Lanka on ‘transparency’, the Conservatives were removing “a decade of speeches from their website and from the main internet library – including one in which David Cameron claimed that being able to search the web would democratise politics by making ‘more information available to more people’”.
“The party removed records of speeches and press releases from 2000 until May 2010. The effect will be to remove any speeches and articles during the Tories’ modernisation period …”
Comment again redundant.
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Salafist gang carry out a beheading in Syria
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This is the hideous reality of what has been unleashed on the famously tolerant and educated people of Syria. It didn’t come out of nowhere. And it isn’t native to Syria. Our government, along with the US and France, has ordered this and paid for it!
The imperialists, while bragging at home about their ‘progressiveness’ will actively bankroll and support all kinds of mediaeval barbarity if it serves their purposes. This bloodthirsty backwardness is not inherent to the Middle East. It would not even exist in today’s world if it wasn’t for the financing and arming that fundamentalist nutcases have received from the US and Britain over the last 30 years.
And yet the ‘socialists’ of the SWP still try to tell the British people that the death squads in Syria are a ‘people’s revolution’ setting up ‘workers’ councils’. And our ‘anti-war’ leaders are more bothered about accidentally looking like they support the Syrian people’s legitimate government than about opposing these horrific crimes and sabotaging the imperialists’ dirty war on Syria.
Time for an anti-war movement that is worthy of the name, and a leadership that is actually representative of British workers, rather than the cosy little clique of careerist scum dishing out jobs to each other we’re saddled with right now.
No cooperation with British war crimes!
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By Franklin Lamb in Damascus, via Al Manar
Reports from across Syria, increasingly arriving from such diverse locations as Aleppo, Qalamoun and Reqaa, lay bare massive crimes now being perpetrated against the Syrian people in areas under salafist control.
A recent German domestic intelligence service annual report describes salafism as the fastest growing Islamic movement in Syria. And indeed, interviews conducted by this observer recently in Damascus indicate that mainstream salafism, with its emphasis on adherence to the Koran’s principles and standards for correct behaviour towards humanity, is being deeply subverted in the Syrian Arab Republic by forces organised from outside this country.
Historically, salafi methodology has been respected among scholars of Islam. It is a school of thought named after the ‘salaf’ or ‘predecessors’ among the earliest muslims, individuals widely considered to have been examples worthy of emulation.
At the same time, the salafist movement is often thought of as related to, or even synonymous with, Saudi wahhabism, or is perceived at least as a hybrid of it. It is only since the 1960s that salafism has become widely known among muslims, and some attribute this phenomenon in part as the result of the zionist occupation of Palestine and other projects of western hegemony.
These developments have led to a revising of some claimed interpretations of Islam, resulting in the adoption of views more common during periods of history when Islam was threatened. Salafism presents to its followers a literalistic, strict, puritanical interpretation of the Koran. Particularly in the West, and increasingly in Syria, some salafist jihadis espouse violent jihad against the public, even muslim civilians, as a legitimate expression of defending Islam.
Though salafis claim to be sunni muslims, some authorities interviewed by this observer, including scholars at Damascus’ famed Omayyad Mosque as well as sunni sheiks based in Damascus, say that salafis are a sui generis sect, and are thus apart from traditional sunni muslim Koranic interpretations and practice.
One professor of Islamic studies, representing perhaps the minority view, looks upon salafis and wahhabis as essentially the same. The basis of the claim is that salafis do not acknowledge or follow any of the four schools of thought to which other sunni muslims adhere, but rather have their own beliefs and laws, their own leaders and social systems.
It is a theological adherence entailing strict and widely rejected extremist practices, including the commission of crimes targeting civilians, including fellow muslims, for political and financial reasons.
One currently ascendant salafist group in Syria, among more than a thousand or so competing for weapons and fighters, is ‘Daash’. The word is an acronym whose letters stand for ‘the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’.
Daash appeared on the scene about a year ago, and some local observers believe it arrived via Iraq, with large amounts of funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, and with the latter, especially, facilitating its weapons, supplies and access to the north of Syria via Turkish territory. Daash membership figures have expanded recently, partly because it pays its recruits nearly four times the going gunman wage here, or approximately $500 per month, as it competes with Jabhat al Nusra and others to impose some of its frankly bizarre interpretations of Islam.
Damascus presently is awash in tales coming in from Daash-controlled areas – areas around Aleppo and elsewhere. What is being told of is a sheath full of fatwas and orders posted on walls laying down what is expected of the local civilian population.
Reports, some of which have been verified, indicate that the group acts with brutality in enforcing its edicts. A sunni law student from Damascus University Faculty of Law, who has compiled research on the subject over the past few weeks, calls it “an insane frontal assault on Islam by criminal acts against muslims and others of the Book’.
On 27 November, a young lady arriving at the Dama Rose Hotel reported to this observer that in parts of Raqaa, Aleppo and other Daash-controlled areas, if a man from Daash covets something, such as someone’s new car or another man’s wife, he must only say “Allah Akbar” three times. The personal property or the targeted women then belong to him, and he can beat the wife and rape her with impunity.
This latest fatwa obviously causes serious problems both within Daash as well as with other militias. The young lady, who comes from a prominent Dasmascene sunni family, reports that Daash members are currently taking gas, oil and bread at will from non-Daash villages for distribution to members of their cult of approximately 5,000 members.
Also according to recently televised reports, it is now permissible for Daash members to rape any woman who is not muslim, as well as muslim women who support the Assad government.
Some recently reported Salisfist practices spreading in Syria include, but are not limited to the following:
· Females in Daash-controlled areas of Aleppo and elsewhere are being prevented from wearing jeans and sweaters and must wear only the islamic dress Abaya and Barkaa. They are forbidden from putting on any make-up, and now, as of two weeks ago, to even leave their homes without a male escort. Some women in parts of Aleppo and Raqaa now refer to their neighbourhoods as Tora Bora, Afghanistan, given the similarities of repression between Taliban and salafist treatment of women.
· As of 15 November, force is used to prevent smoking and use of arguila (water pipes) by men and women in some villages.
· Some barber shops for men are being shuttered in order to prevent the shortening of hair and ‘modern’ haircuts. Barrettes for young people are also forbidden.
· It is now forbidden in Daash areas to display any sign or advertisements for cosmetics and skincare products in women’s hairdressing shops. Violators are subject to penalties of 70 lashes. Any business that employs women must have two work-day shifts, one for men and a separate one exclusively for female employees.
· No women’s clothing can be displayed in shop windows. In the event a woman should enter a tailor’s shop, the shop must shut its doors to men until she leaves.
· The Daash militia has long prevented women from seeking medical attention from male doctors, but recently it put into place prohibitions against women visiting doctors of either sex. Also it is not permissible for a woman to wear orthodontic devices such as teeth braces because straight teeth might attract men, and in any case their bodies are under the stewardship of their husbands or fathers only.
· Daash has proclaimed that women who swim in the sea are in fact committing ‘adultery’, even if they wear a hijab. This is due to the fact that Arabic nouns, as in the case with many other languages, are gender specific. ‘Sea’ is masculine, and when water touches the woman’s vaginal area she becomes an ‘adulteress’ and must be punished.
· Women are also forbidden from eating certain vegetables or even touching cucumbers, carrots or bananas due to their phallic imagery, which may tempt them to deviate. It is also unacceptable for women to turn on their air conditioning at home when their husbands are absent as this could be a sign to neighbours that they could commit adultery with her.
The Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm in its 15 November edition reported that Daash-variety fatwas regard women as strange creatures created solely for sex, and that the organisation’s members consider the voices of women, their looks and presence outside of their homes as an ‘offense’ – while some salafists regard women in general as ‘offensive’.
Among the practices permitted by Daash is the widespread acceptance of wives lying to their husbands concerning politics. Daash believes that if the husband forbids her from being supportive of their agenda and control of Syrian villages in Aleppo and Raqaa, for example, she may then, through dissimulation, support them while pretending to be against them.
During interviews in Syria, one religious advisor to Daash opined to this observer that marriage to ten-year-old girls should be allowed in order to prevent their deviating from the correct path.
Needless to say, school attendance by girls is also prohibited, even if the school is close to their homes, and one Daash fatwa states that a marriage is annulled if the husband and wife make love with no clothes on, while another sanctions the use of women and children as human shields in violent demonstrations and protests on the grounds that these are jihads to empower Islam.
Yet other fatwas forbid muslims from greeting christians or forbid muslim cab drivers from transporting christian priests. And still others criticize Egypt’s Al Azhar, considered by many to be one of the oldest and most prestigious Islamic universities in the world, for withdrawing its fatwa that instructed women to ‘breastfeed’ male acquaintances, thereby making them relatives and justifying their mixed company.
Men are now being physically assaulted by Daash milita on the street if they are clean shaven or wear tight trousers. Men who suffer from erectile dysfunction can, however, watch pornographic movies provided that the participants in the porno flicks are islamists.
Education is focused on boys in Daash areas, where schools, at both the elementary and secondary levels, are being run like Pakistani madrassas, with education limited to memorising every word of the Koran while severely limiting any instruction in the sciences or secular subjects – this in a country heretofore acknowledged as having particularly high standards of education.
Last month a new Daash fatwa proclaimed that “all those who support Bashar al-Assad, even the word, or who are in favour of the National Coalition or agree to a dialogue with him, must have his head separated from his body, including the beheading of all members of the coalition favouring Geneva II or dialogue”.
One much respected sunni sheik from Tripoli, Lebanon currently residing in Damascus and with whom this observer has become friends over the course of many visits to Syria, is Sheikh Abdul Salam El Harrach, Symposium Coordinator of Muslim Scholars in Akkar, in north Lebanon. Sheik Harrach is a strong supporter of the Hizbollah-led resistance to the zionist occupation of Palestine, as well as an advocate for the Syrian people. He favours dialogue – and he has run afoul of Daash.
Sheik Harrach is hopeful about Geneva II and believes that the settling of some of the existing problems between Iran and the US could bear fruit for Syria. Moreover, he argues that the Syrian people must decide in the coming presidential election who their leaders will be – not those countries sending militias to create chaos in the country while turning a blind eye to salafist, un-islamic criminal campaigns.
As a result of his political stances, the sheikh has been targeted for assassination more than once by Daash/al Qaeda types, and is rumoured to have a large bounty on his head from Jabat al Nursa, Daash and others in Tripoli who oppose sunni-shia rapprochement, either in the Levant or globally.
One assassination attempt, which wounded his son Wael, took place in the north Lebanon town of Aaat during a Ramadan Iftar event held in tents outside his home. Some blamed the March 14th coalition and extreme islamic elements.
Sheik Harrach offers the view that the assault on his son and other such armed attacks are perpetrated against a background of incitement against sunni muslims from extremist elements. Some of these, he concludes, have the complicit backing of some of the security services.
But it is his endorsement for reform and development in Syria under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad that has turned him into a target, he believes – this along with his support for the resistance and his outright rejection of the US and zionist project for Lebanon and the region.
To his credit, and in solidarity with the people of Syria, Sheik Harrach vows to continue working with the growing sunni/shia joint resistance to Daash and like-minded salafist militias until they are expelled from Syria. He insists that if someone wants to learn about Islam they need only come to Syria to study, and that they need not fall victim to ‘Islamic instruction’ from foreign-manipulated fanatics/fundamentalists seeking the establishment of a Levant-wide or global Caliphate.
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Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University for the 2013/14 academic year. Lamb volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Programme (sssp-lb.com) and is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com.
