Blair And Iraq - The Damning Evidence

Intelligence officers have disclosed that just the day before Mr Blair went to visit president George Bush in April 2002, he appeared to accept this but returned a "changed man" and subsequently ordered the production of dossiers to "find the intelligence" that he wanted to use to justify going to war.

This and other secret evidence (given in camera) to the inquiry will, The Independent on Sundayunderstands, be used as the basis for severe criticism of the former prime minister when the Chilcot report is published.

Mr Blair is said to have "realised" and "understood" that Libya was the real threat and that he knew "it would not be sensible to lead the argument on Saddam and the WMD issue" according to evidence of a conversation on 4 April 2002, the day before he flew to the US to spend a weekend with Mr Bush. MORE

Blair Scorned at Home - Builds Business Empire Abroad

Blair Scorned at Home Builds Business Empire Abroad - Bloomberg: "In his new incarnation, Blair is taking on highly paid roles that don’t sit well with Britons still agitated by what they saw as Blair’s foreign adventurism when he was in office.
He’s a paid adviser to the Abu Dhabi Executive Affairs Authority, which is chaired by Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. He’s helping to arrange deals with China Investment Corp., the country’s $482 billion sovereign wealth fund.
Blair also is advising President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, whose administration has paid Blair’s team of advisers 8 million pounds a year since the spring of 2011, including fees to Portland Communications, a PR firm set up by his former deputy press secretary Tim Allan.
Human Rights Watch Inc., a New York-based nonprofit advocacy group, condemned the Kazakh government for the shooting deaths of 12 striking oil workers during a clash with police in December 2011.
In 2012, Blair signed an agreement with Geraldo Alckmin, governor of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, to assemble a team of advisers to help modernize the state’s public services."

This is What The De-Stabilisation of Syria Looks Like (Graphic)

This is fucking madness.

Hidden War Crimes in Iraq | Black Agenda Report

Freedom Rider: Hidden War Crimes in Iraq | Black Agenda Report: 

“Rates of cancer, leukemia, and infant mortality are higher in Fallujah than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they were bombed with nuclear weapons in 1945.”

FBI interviews Petraeus at his Virginia Home

FBI interviews Petraeus at his Virginia home: report - Yahoo! News: "An official close to the FBI investigation told Reuters the report was "not inaccurate" but declined to elaborate. Petraeus' lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
Agents removed materials from Broadwell's North Carolina home in November as part of the FBI probe.
Petraeus and Broadwell have separately told investigators they did not share security secrets.
Petraeus was credited with helping pull Iraq from the brink of all-out civil war as commander there and President Barack Obama turned to him to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan before moving to him to the CIA in 2011."

'A New Year Greeting' By W.H. Auden

WH Auden reads his own poem 'A New Year Greeting' HERE

True costs of Iraq War whitewashed by fuzzy maths

True costs of Iraq War whitewashed by fuzzy maths - The National: "That the perpetrators of an aggressive war should accept the lowest costs for their folly is unsurprising. What is less explicable is why so many supposed critics of the war are crediting the same estimate. Brown University's Costs of War project and the Centre for American Progress's Iraq War Ledger use it as their main source.
This is particularly puzzling when there are two peer-reviewed epidemiological surveys that give a far more comprehensive accounting of the war's human cost. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Survey published in the Lancet, and the Iraq Public Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave figures of 655,000 and 400,000 excess deaths respectively. (Both were concluded in June 2006, a month before the violence peaked, suggesting the actual toll is even higher)."

Suicide blast kills 25 at Iraq campaign meeting

Suicide blast kills 25 at Iraq campaign meeting - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "Supporters of Muthanna Ahmed Abdulwahid, a Sunni Arab candidate for the Azimun Ala al-Bina (Determined to Build) party, a small local list, had been gathered at around lunchtime in the restive city of Baquba, 60 kilometres north of Baghdad.
As they were meeting, a militant threw a grenade before a suicide bomber then blew himself up, a police colonel and a medic at Baquba hospital said."

Suicide bomber kills 7 at police HQ in Iraq's Tikrit

Suicide bomber kills 7 at police HQ in Iraq's Tikrit - FRANCE 24:

"Most of the casualties in the city 160 kilometres (100 miles) north of Baghdad were police, the sources added.
The bombing comes ahead of provincial elections scheduled for April 20, due to be held in 12 of Iraq's 18 provinces, the country's first polls since a parliamentary vote in March 2010."