Tony Blair has questioned the Pope's attitude towards homosexuality, arguing that religious leaders must start "rethinking" the issue.

Some older Catholics had "entrenched attitudes", while most congregations were more "liberal-minded", he added.

Mr Blair, who converted to Catholicism after resigning as UK prime minister in 2007, told the gay magazine Attitude that views had to keep "evolving".

But he added that Pope Benedict XVI also stood for "many fantastic things".

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"many fantastic things"? Including?....

see toon at top and those such as this one....

Tony Blair has appeared to wash his hands of the extraordinary rendition scandal, claiming he was not aware of Britain's involvement under his watch as Prime Minister. The former premier was yesterday accused of "evasiveness" and failing to ask "awkward questions" when he was in Downing Street about the UK's role in the rendition of two terror suspects in 2004.

Mr Blair, in an interview, failed to condemn the controversial practice, which the British Government denied involvement in until only February this year, by saying: "The Obama government is going to continue [with them] in certain circumstances anyway."

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The former PM is tipped to become the EU's first full-time president if Ireland ratifies the Lisbon Treaty later this year, after two years as the international community's Middle East envoy.

Mr Blair denied that his role in the Middle East was "atonement" for the war in Iraq. He said he had not got very far in writing his autobiography, but added: "I want to do something different: [to explain] what it is actually like to be a normal person but with this responsibility; what sustains you."

He said he had made a "few friends in the life I've got now", adding: "Only friendships, you have to spend time on, that's difficult. I try to... I believe in friendship."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-and-rendition-wait-for-the-facts-says-tony-blair-1693490.html

Mr Blair's involvement in discussions with Sir Gus O'Donnell over the nature of the hearings was confirmed by Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary. "Of course the Cabinet Secretary discussed this with the former prime minister," Mr Woodward said, "because he obviously will be one of the major witnesses who will be giving evidence to Sir John Chilcot's inquiry".

The backbenchers also pointed to a leaked memo yesterday indicating that the former prime minister had been considering the possibility of going to war without a second UN resolution two months before the invasion.

The note, written by his foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, indicated that Mr Blair and US President George Bush were already discussing ways of legitimising military invasion in case the UN failed to find weapons of mass destruction.

Such documents are likely to go to the heart of the inquiry; suggestions they could be examined in secret provoked uproar among MPs of all parties and senior military and intelligence officers. Mr Brown has already staged a partial retreat by asking Sir John Chilcot, the retired civil servant who will head the inquiry, to hold some sessions in public. But the concession did not go far enough to pacify Labour MPs threatening to support a Tory motion on Wednesday calling for all hearings to be held in public other than for security reasons.

Tony Blair will be called to give evidence to the Iraq war inquiry, its chairman confirmed today.

Sir John Chilcot warned that his team would "not shy away from making criticism" if they uncovered mistakes.

Launching the long-awaited inquiry, Sir John said the former prime minister, who sent British forces into the conflict alongside the US, would be among witnesses called.

He repeated his insistence that, "wherever possible", evidence would be heard in public, perhaps live on television, but some sessions would remain behind closed doors, "consistent with the need to protect national security, sometimes to ensure complete candour and openness from witnesses".

He said the panel had already requested Government documents to begin the task of identifying "the critical issues on which to focus" with the help of legal, military and reconstruction experts.

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Candeur and openess... with porkie and fudge from the master...???? A Catholic/Anglican PM sending troops to war?... Let's see... No two ways about it, since this war was mooted in 2002 by GHB and TB and our own JWH, the reasons for war were concocted to suit the outcome of war. If this inquiry can unravel the giant "double cross" that set this path to war, I'll be stumped...

A whitewash with a dash of tangarine perhaps. see toon at top.

Tony Blair's former chief adviser on the EU has misgivings about the ex-prime minister becoming President of Europe, as the campaign to overturn his bid gathers pace.

Sir Stephen Wall – one of the key architects of the post of EU president – said a high-profile figure such as Mr Blair was "not necessarily a very good idea" and cast doubt on his ability to build consensus among EU leaders. A figure from a smaller state would send a "unifying signal", he added.

The surprise intervention came amid growing signs that a President Blair would not be welcomed by ordinary citizens of Europe, despite their leaders showing support.

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see toon at top and tell your mates (friends) about this fantastic site...

Tony Blair's hopes of becoming the first President of Europe have been dealt a potentially lethal blow by France and Germany. The European Union's two most powerful nations appeared to slam the door on a bid by the former prime minister to become President of the European Council.

At the end of a two-day EU summit in Brussels, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, suggested they had a different candidate in mind for the prestigious post about to be created by the Lisbon Treaty.

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Say what you will, I won't believe the Blair-crash until the European president is elected and.... See toon at top. From it, we can deduce Sarkozy has changed his mind since... but has he?...

from the Guardian

Tony Blair warned Gordon Brown a week ago that his campaign to become the first president of the European Council was doomed after a decisive intervention by the German chancellor Angela Merkel, according to senior Whitehall sources.

To the dismay of key ministers, who wanted Brown to push for Britain to take an economic portfolio in the European commission once Blair's hopes were dashed, Brown insisted on maintaining his candidacy until moments before Thursday's European summit.

The prime minister hailed the summit as a victory after Britain secured one of the two jobs created under the Lisbon treaty – the high representative for foreign policy taken by Britain's current European commissioner, Lady Ashton.

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see toon at top. Note what was known all along from Angela. Ah, the sweet angel...

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Tony Blair will not seek another big international job after being rejected for the new post of "President of Europe", his allies said yesterday.

Close friends of the former prime minister said he was "entirely happy" with his current roles – lucrative public speaking engagements, working as the international Middle East peace envoy, bringing democracy to Africa, tackling climate change, and heading an inter-faith foundation and sports charity.

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Note from Gus: Belgians are internationally well-known for their "BD" cartoonists where the precision of the gags are legendary and very funny... Maybe the new president of Europe has already absorbed some of the ludicrous humour in conflict resolution...

The UK government approved the 2004 rendition of a terror suspect to the Gaddafi regime, the BBC can reveal.

A letter from an MI6 officer refers to Abdel Hakim Belhaj's rendition to Libya. It congratulates the Libyans on the "safe arrival" of the "air cargo".

Mr Belhaj says he was tortured in jail. Successive UK governments have denied complicity in rendition or torture.

But BBC correspondent Peter Taylor says he understands Mr Belhaj's rendition was given ministerial approval.

However it is not clear at what level of government the decision was authorised.

The letter from the senior MI6 officer, Sir Mark Allen, to Col Gaddafi's intelligence chief, Musa Kusa, was found last year in the rubble of Musa Kusa's headquarters, which were bombed by Nato.

As well as congratulating the Libyans on the arrival of the "cargo", it points out that "the intelligence was British".

The letter was sent in 2004 when Mr Belhaj was the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17651797

MI6 and former Labour ministers are facing fresh pressure over Britain's involvement in the rendition of a prominent Libyan dissident as it emerged that the government is offering him more than £1m in compensation for being brutally treated by Muammar Gaddafi's secret police.

The government has offered the money to Abdel Hakim Belhaj in a move that would avoid MI6 appearing in open court, where it would face the prospect of explaining its role and that of ministers, the Guardian has been told.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/10/libyan-dissident-compensation-uk-rendition

American intelligence agencies including the CIA and the FBI have won a court ruling allowing them to withhold evidence from British MPs about suspected UK involvement in "extraordinary rendition" – the secret arrests and alleged torture of terror suspects.

A judge in Washington DC granted permission for key US intelligence bodies, including the highly sensitive National Security Agency, to exploit a loophole in US freedom of information legislation which bars the release of documentation to any body representing a foreign government.

Downing Street underlined the gravity of the torture claims yesterday when it urged police to interview former Labour ministers as part of an investigation into the alleged rendition and torture of a Libyan critic of Muammar Gaddafi. Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary at the time and is expected to be interviewed by detectives, denies any complicity in rendition – as have his successors at the Foreign Office.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cia-wins-fight-to-keep-mps-in-dark-on-rendition-7631357.html

Belhadj was kidnapped in Bangkok, allegedly by CIA agents, and flown to Libya where he was handed over to Gaddafi's goons, spending six years in jail, where he says he was tortured. He is currently the head of Libya's new armed forces and is suing MI6 for being involved in his ordeal. Now, according to the BBC, Belhadj's lawyers have also begun a legal action against Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary at the time of the rendition.

Meanwhile the Metropolitan Police are investigating Belhadj's allegations and, says the BBC, will likely want to talk to Straw.

This all goes back to an interview Straw gave BBC Radio 4 last autumn, when he said: "The position of successive foreign secretaries, including me, is that we were opposed to unlawful rendition, opposed to torture or similar methods and not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it, nor did we turn a blind eye to it." He could not have been clearer.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/46357/belhadj-rendition-why-mi6-spooks-dropped-jack-straw-it#ixzz1sNwAMXBJ

One by one, revelations from the ransacked archives of the old Gaddafi regime in Libya cast fresh doubts on Britain's boast that it is never complicit in torture. First we heard the claims of the former Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhaj who maintains that Jack Straw, as Foreign Secretary, authorised his rendition by the CIA to Tripoli in 2004. Now follow further damaging claims, suggesting that MI5 and MI6 worked hand in glove with Tripoli in 2006 to put pressure on Libyan asylum seekers in the UK to co-operate with the Gaddafi regime.

The Belhaj case was troubling enough. Back in Gaddafi's clutches in 2004 with Britain's apparent blessing, he was imprisoned for six years in one of Libya's most notorious jails. Shockingly, a letter dated 18 March 2004 from a senior MI6 officer congratulated the head of Gaddafi's intelligence on Mr Belhaj's arrival; it is on the basis of this incriminating document that he is demanding an apology both from Mr Straw - now seeking legal aid to fight the case - and from Mr Straw's then master, Tony Blair.

In the Belhaj case, Mr Straw, and potentially Mr Blair, may have condoned his "rendition" to Libya by another power, in this case the CIA. The latest memoranda from Libya point to equally serious crimes. These documents say that in 2006, by which time Margaret Beckett had replaced Mr Straw as Foreign Secretary, MI5 and MI6 were establishing a close relationship with Gaddafi's External Security Organisation, working with the ESO to blackmail Libyan dissidents in Britain into co-operating with Tripoli by agreeing to go home or by becoming informants.

A document dated August 2006 makes it disturbingly clear how far Libyan intelligence's British colleagues seemed ready to go to obtain this goodwill. If one man was to refuse to become an informant, the document reads, "British police will arrest him and accuse him of associating with Libyan secret agents. He will be told that as a non-resident of Britain he could be deported if found guilty."

It must be noted that these files are Libyan, not British, and it is possible that the Libyans misinterpreted pledges that they believed they had received from their British counterparts. It is also true that at the time the Gaddafi government had held out an olive branch to the West by renouncing its programme of weapons of mass destruction, and the British government was eager to make good on this offer in order to secure Tripoli's help in the fight against al-Qa'ida. Nevertheless, unless these newly revealed documents are exposed as forgeries, it will be clear that this process of rapprochement with the Gaddafi dictatorship went much too far. The Tory MP David Davis was right to say that the Belhaj case does not seem to have been a one-off, and that his claims mark only the start of "a continuing intelligence saga" that goes much wider than Britain giving the nod to CIA renditions from far-off places like Thailand.

As Mr Davis went on to say, the suggestion now is that British intelligence deliberately "exposed people who had been given refuge here to the very people they had fled". This business of toying with people's lives in the interests of realpolitik will strike most people as grotesque and shameful.

It is of course also illegal, which is why Mr Davis is also right to demand a much wider inquiry than the one the Metropolitan Police is undertaking into Mr Belhaj's allegations against Mr Straw. Such an inquiry needs to establish whether the British intelligence services were operating without ministerial approval when they hatched what sound like outrageous bargains with their Libyan counterparts. If they were, they need re-organisation. If not, then a number of former ministers, of whom Mr Straw is only one, should face prosecution.

Gaddafi, The UK, & The Truth We Must Be Told

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He continues: "David Lloyd George was talked up during the 20s as a potential second time PM, but it never happened... But Lloyd George remained, as Tony Blair has not, an MP."
 
Blair became Prime Minister 15 years ago this week, and news of his possible return coupled with this anniversary brought more than scepticism from some.

Former Cabinet Minister Lord Tebbit attacked the former Prime Minister in the Daily Mail, branding his political legacy “debt, war, ignorance, welfare dependency, social division”

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/people-news/46634/blair-comeback-will-lord-tony-become-pm-er-no#ixzz1uKqPJlnJ

see toon at top...