The BBC reports that Saudi Prince Bandar - known to Dubya as "Bandar Bush" - was the recipient of maybe $2 billion dollars in bribes payments from BAe, the UK's biggest arms manufacturer, under secret deals over more than a decade.

The Thatcher government agreed the kickbacks payments.  Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith halted a criminal probe in December 2006 for "national security".

The funds were paid to two Saudi embassy accounts with Riggs Bank (later busted for money laundering) used by Bandar for his own expenses and other mysterious purposes.  Presumably embassy accounts were free of official scrutiny, money laundering reports and taxation.

Note that Charles Powell, private secretary to Thatcher, negotiated the secret deals.  I wonder if Jonathan Powell, his brother who is chief of staff to Blair, might have helped cover them up.  

I just read this article on Truthout and found it to be pretty shocking and definitely thought it was worth sharing with the community here. Just when I think I cannot be shocked by what's gone on with our dirty dealings with the Saudis and the Brits and just what we're doing in Iraq, and what's been covered up and lied about, I manage to be proven wrong. Here's part of the beginning of the article:

Slush funds, oil sheiks, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney - it's a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you've never heard about it - even though it happened just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is just as thick as the fog of war........On December 14, the UK attorney general, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain's biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family."

The Observer tomorrow reports some encouraging news. The British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is set to give a speech this week in which he will urge that the infamous prison at Guantanamo be shut down.

The decision by the government's chief legal adviser to denounce the detention centre in Cuba as 'unacceptable' will dismay the Bush administration, which has continually rejected claims that the camp breaches international laws on human rights.

But Goldsmith will tell a global security conference at the Royal United Services Institute this week that the camp at Guantánamo Bay must not continue. 'It is time, in my view, that it should close.'

If you've been following the Phillipe Sands story from the UK press to the US, you'll remember that the Commander In Chief was determined that the date for invasion was MARCH 10, 2003.  What was the holdup?

Lord Peter Goldsmith, Attorney General UK, was called into Washington that day to recant his opinion that the war would be in violation of UN 1442.  They worked him over.... and it was the professional torture team that did it.... Cheney, Addington, Bybee, Hynes, Yoo and Gonzales as well as TENET.... gave him what the Brits call "a proper woodshedding"  For three years Goldsmith, when he talks at all, says "They didn't lean on me."

By the 17th Goldsmith had reversed his opinion..... following Gonzales' lead in making the illegal legal.  He learned his lessons well.

The Thursday, February 2 story by Richard Norton-Taylor in London's Guardian reveals information from a memo of a White House meeting on January 31, 2003 between George W. Bush and Tony Blair in which Bush revealed that the U.S. intended to invade Iraq whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons program.

Phillipe Sands, a professor of international law at University College in London, revealed the memo in a new edition of his book, Lawless World.  Professor Sands last year exposed doubts shared by British Foreign Office lawyers about the legality of the invasion in disclosures which eventually forced Prime Minister Blair to publish the full legal advice given to him by Attorney General Lord Goldsmith.  

The new smoking gun reveals a flagrant violation of international law.  Waging war under such circumstances constitutes a breach of the Nuremberg and Geneva codes and the UN Charter, which legitimize such action only in clear and present danger situations involving self-defense.