All in all, since departing the political landscape in Britain in 2007, Blair has never been more prominent, presented by the country’s liberal establishment as the man who will save Britain from a Brexit process that, unless stopped, will lead the British people off the edge of a political and economic cliff without a parachute. Though many may agree with the second part of the preceding sentence (myself included), the prospect of Blair returning to mainstream political life is an insult to the indescribable suffering his messianic and fanatical belief in the virtues of regime change produced in the former Yugoslavia and, of course, Iraq, the consequences of which the world is still dealing with today.

Blair’s role in helping to facilitate Washington’s disrespect and disregard for the UN and international law must never be forgotten either, helping set a precedent that remains entrenched within a toxic US political culture; with Obama and most recently Trump demonstrating a brutal and callous willingness to resort to aggression and brute imperialism whenever the mood takes. In fact, Blair’s slavish embrace of US hegemony reminds us that it is not the relationship with Brussels from which the British people need to be liberated, but its relationship with Washington.

On the issue of the EU specifically, who will gainsay the fact that Blair is the very embodiment of the free market neoliberal status quo, premised on globalization, which has fueled support not only for Brexit, but also the emergence and rise of anti-EU parties and politicians throughout Europe. The abandonment of the working class and their communities in service to the super-rich, to global corporations and the banks, allowing them free rein, led directly to the global economic crash of 2008, which plunged millions of people into poverty and despair.

And yet despite this we are expected to believe that Blair and his ilk hold the solution to the very problems they created? Are they mad?

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/386847-tony-blair-liberal-elite-hypocrisy/

twelve years between the top toon and today... The man has no shame...

BY Mattathias Schwartz

Two former CIA officials spoke to Insider before the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. They gave a firsthand account of the George W. Bush administration's attempts to misrepresent intelligence and assert a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In fact, the evidence assembled by the CIA suggested that no such connection existed.

 One of these false connections was a supposed meeting that had occurred between Mohamed Atta, the chief 9/11 hijacker, and Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague. In December 2001, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on "Meet the Press" and falsely claimed that the meeting was "pretty well confirmed." A 2003 CIA cable states that "not one" official within the US government had evidence that the Prague meeting actually happened. Nevertheless, it became a key part of the administration's public case for launching the Iraq invasion on March 20, 2003, a conflict that would cost an estimated 300,000 lives.

The officials' combined years of service at CIA totals up to more than four decades. Their identities are known to Insider, and are referred to below by pseudonyms due to the sensitivity of their positions. Their discussion has been edited for brevity.

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Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and John McLaughlin did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Alice: Nobody in Washington comes out and calls Bush a liar. Everybody is too polite. They use some other term for what he did. But he lied. I want to be clear about what I mean by that. He knew what he was saying was not true. He took judgements from the intelligence community that were very uncertain, judgements that we put out there with very clear caveats — "we believe Iraq is continuing its nuclear program, but we have a low degree of certainty, blah blah blah" — he would just come out and state those things as fact. He did this over and over again. Just like Cheney saying that Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague, as a fact. When the truth was, there was a great deal of doubt about it. It was our job at CIA to stand fast, to keep those ridiculous notions under control. And we tried. But there was only so much we could do. The White House wanted a justification for the invasion. The closest they came was this alleged, and apparently nonexistent, help that Iraq gave al-Qaeda [via Atta] in bringing about the attacks. So they tried to trace any kind of contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

Bob: Meanwhile, our Iraqi analysts were saying, quite truthfully, that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime were so far apart in their ideologies — Saddam was a pure secularist, al-Qaeda was a messianic vision of a caliphate and self-consciously Islamic, at least purportedly. That is like cats and dogs, you can't mix those. Of course, Saddam knew al-Qaeda was in his country. He knew everything that happened in his country. As a matter of simply staying in power he had to know. So it's perfectly natural that he would know who was al-Qaeda and what they were up to and that kind of thing. But this was not a working relationship. It was about surveillance.

Alice: Today, people say that Bush was looking to justify the invasion of Iraq. He wasn't. What he was looking for is something different — selling points. The decision to invade had already been made, and there was not any intelligence that was going to change their opinion. So this was not an effort to justify the war. It was an effort to sell the war publicly. That's an important distinction. The Bush administration was very explicit about their Iraq obsession almost immediately when they took power.

READ MORE:

https://www.businessinsider.com/george-bush-liar-cia-mohammed-atta-prague-911-iraq-invasion-2023-3?r=US&IR=T

READ FROM TOP.

WE KNEW THAT. APART FROM BEING LIARS, THEY WERE MURDEROUS HYPOCRITE WAR CRIMINALS. BUSH, BLAIR AND HOWARD SHOULD BE IN PRISON.

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276

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