The latest from the UK is a great piece of writing and an appalling indictment of the times we live in. Tony Blair's hand-picked judge has proived to be a genuine bottom feeder who applies double standards and all but asks the government how he should find on their behalf.
It is a disgrace and a travesty and this piece from the Guardian points out, it isn't even the point.
Meanwhile, the misery of the occupation of Iraq grows, as US and British claims to have liberated the country are exposed as a fraud. While the resistance continues to inflict daily casualties on the occupation forces in the centre and north of Iraq - regardless of the capture of Saddam Hussein - the Shia religious leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani has put himself at the head of a mass popular movement for democracy, opposed by the very US occupiers who insisted they were invading to trigger a democratic revolution across the Middle East.
There are now around 13,000 Iraqis imprisoned without trial; evidence of torture and brutality by US and British occupation forces is growing; and the CIA has warned that Iraq is at risk of slipping into a three-way civil war. For most Iraqis, life has got worse under the occupation and even on the crudest calculus, many more have been killed since Saddam Hussein was overthrown than in his last period in power: as the US-based Human Rights Watch pointed out this week, Saddam's worst atrocities date from the days when he was backed by the west.
This is the legacy of the decision by Tony Blair and George Bush to invade a country that posed no threat either to Britain or to the US. There is no way in which the Iraq war can somehow be put behind us. That is not only because of what is now happening on the ground in Iraq, but because of the increased threat of terror attacks it has brought about, the precedent of pre-emptive war it has created, and the poison released in the British political system by a war launched on a false prospectus. Nor is it enough for the prime minister to say he believed there was a threat at the time. If that is the case, he is guilty of reckless incompetence.
The priority must now be to bring the Iraqi occupation to an end and for those who launched the war to be held to account.
Go read the rest, it is heartbreaking but necessary.
Kay doesn't matter, Hutton doesn't matter, what matters is that 200,000 US and 20,000 other troops are occupyoing a country in the most incompetent, indefensible bad faith that our so-called democratic nations have ever perpetrated. We live in lands where our leaders are war criminals who should be tried and, if found guilty, thrown into a prison till they die.
The dice are cast in Iraq and they will roll to the end and stop in their own way in their own time and we will all live with the shame, and the horror, not only of the catastrophe that we have failed to prevent, but the punishment that the outcome will visit on our kids and our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
We will all be like Lady MacBeth, walking our own towers in the night, trying to wash the blood from our hands. And we will have deserved it.
