Katharine Gun and Claire Short have to break the OSA to reveal what our agencies have been up to, like spying on the security council’s six swing nations pre-US-led invasion and Kofi-Annan’s UN office. Hans Blix had the same treatment; while fellow ex-weapons inspector Richard Butler says he had to hold meetings out of office and on foot as the only way of guaranteeing secrecy. Such espionage is banned by the Vienna Convention and in the terms of the the UN’s own laws. The US’ agencies set a far better example of transparency than the UK’s intelligence services, where spying/national security is confused with politics: ie, in the manipulation of the dossier for invasion. Big ears Blair, who you can see as the type of tool into James Bond, rounds on Gun, even though there was clear political-electoral motivation (further covering up of the Iraq mess=reputational reward) to drop the case against her, and Short, who is of course “deeply irresponsible”.

With that in mind, we liked this link to Il Manifesto. Basic Italian will help:
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/oggi/immagineprima.htm

As I tried to get into work today, I got to Finsbury Park then I saw a huge fence blocking my way to the other bus stops. I sacked it off, went back and plotted jihad against my work/existence-deniers.

Not really, but this is becoming daily life for Palestinians in Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya and throughout the West Bank, which if it hasn’t suffered enough is now having the physical insult of a 750-kilometre security fence/wall encroach on and into its borders because Israelis can’t trust Palestinians and more importantly refuse to take the bigger steps that would bring about an end to the intifada. A legally-unbinding Hague-based International Court of Justice is currently hearing evidence (from both Israelis and Palestinians) against the in-places-eight-metres-high wall, much of it on land illegally occupied since 1967. The UN is keen to see some sort of damning verdict, while the US, EU and UK are playing mute. Anti-Zionist rabbis were there. Understandably there is much support from Arab states as well as nations such as Cuba. Back in the West Bank, the IDF teargases ‘Day of Rage’ demos against the wall.

Israel maintains the barrier is essential to protect its citizens from suicide attacks. Yet it won’t stop attacks like the one on Sunday in Jerusalem that killed eight. Think of the desperate suicide bomber and his determined backers – they’ll find a way to get through. “It is a clear preventive measure... We will continue building it because it saves lives,” Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said.

“The international community’s road-map relies too much on the tried and failed model of small trust-building steps,” says Independent contributor and Middle East Policy Initiative Forum chief Gabrielle Rifkind. This is another example of classic Sharon short-termism – does he really think building a physical barrier to the Palestinians’ very existence is going to stop the breeding grounds for terrorism? “A majority is turning away from a two-state solution to the bloody phantasm of an anti-apartheid struggle for civil rights and the end of Jewish Israel,” she adds.

It’s also classic Sharon attrition. Just like with the gesture (which may or may not be acted on) of promising to bring an end to settlements in the wasteland at the other end of Palestine that is Gaza: fuck things up so much, then offer a paltry olive branch which no-one with any dignity would accept, then blame the Arabs’ damned recalcitrance.

And no, Melanie Phillips, none of this makes WhoreCull anti-Jewish, or indeed anti-Zionist. How demonstrably unjust does a situation need to become before supporters of the dispossessed are no longer seen as prejudiced?

Phillips’ article: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1153419,00.html
West Bank mayor’s lobbying:
http://www.nsu-pal.org/
John Keane’s exhibition:
http://www.linst.ac.uk/events/2004/Spring%202004.pdf

Sensing growing public unrest (Blair couldn’t avoid this as the Commons reverberated to cries of “this is rubbish” from the gallery), both Bush and Blair ordered ‘independent’ ‘bipartisan’ inquiries this week into the accuracy of intelligence leading up to the invasion of a sovereign nation. The CIA and M16 are not surprisingly trying to defend their integrity.

The American inquiry is likely to be the more in-depth, looking into the whole basis of intelligence gathering on rogue nations and leading less on Bush’s specific distortions. Senior administration figures like Condoleezza in recent weeks have been backtracking on/changing the terms of the raisons de guerre, though. Cheney is still insistent on these damned ‘mobile biological weapons units’ (and is anyone else seeing the sheer hypocritical effrontery in him presenting crystal doves to the Pope?).

In the stiff-upper-lip UK, however, Lord Butler is the latest establishment stooge to Blair, while there was also news that the BBC decided not to appeal the Hutton findings even though their lawyers said it was a ‘sham’, in esoteric legal terms. Not knowing whether the claim referred to battlefield weapons, TB’s laughable insistence that history will (judge and then) forgive him is looking less likely. Elsewhere, John Howard cries happy and sees no need for an Aussie inquiry.

CIA man George Tenet has been latest on the scene, saying that his experts never implied that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US. Nor did it up ‘tailor’, ‘sex up’ or ‘spin’ those facts. Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack was a little more measured in an exhaustive Guardian article. He showed that Saddam’s WMD capability declined and rose sporadically since the Gulf war, but by the final exit of UN weapons inspectors was likely to amount to very little: “The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programmes, although not to the extent that many people believe. The administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build support for military action.” i.e.: CIA and M16 gather the information but unfortunately they had little influence on how that information is manipulated, particularly when atavistic shits like Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld and Blair, Campbell and the hapless Hoon on this side see Mesopotamia as an opportunity for a huge commercial protectorate.

The whole debate is calculatedly moved on so quickly that we publics are supposed to be left bewildered by the presentation of new details and revelations on WMDgate. The inquiries, only the most pathetic sop to public opinion, are yet more smokescreens, yet more buying of time by desperate leaders, to take you further away from protesting about the illegitimate invasion.

But you never know – all this momentum might be moving in the right way so that we might get an admission of facts rather than this endless sophistry based on redefinition and reinterpretation. Something along the lines of: The information was as accurate as any ‘intelligence’ but you both wanted a strong basis for going to war. Unhappy with the intelligence you received, you both twisted the facts in such a calculated way that you were happy with your justification. You lived with your own culpability and invaded, because you hadn’t heeded the public’s position anyway.

We should remember that both these knobbers are still up for a Nobel for deposing Saddam – and never mind their hyperbolical justification for invasion. You can lobby your complaint against this motion at The Petition Site.