Iraq inquiry: Britain rejected regime change as illegal in 2001
On its opening day of public hearings, Sir John Chilcot’s public inquiry into the invasion heard that British diplomats heard the “drumbeat” of war emanating from Washington even before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
...Sir William Patey, head of Middle East policy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the time, told the inquiry that he wrote a briefing paper on the options for Iraqi policy.
“We had at the end the regime-change option,” he said, “We dismissed that at the time as having no basis in law.”
Sir William said that the UK knew that some in the new US administration wanted to topple Saddam. “We were aware of the drum beats from Washington. Our policy was to stay away from that,” he said.
The inquiry heard that in 2001, the settled view of the UK government was that attacking Iraq would have been illegal under international law.
Sir Peter Ricketts, then the political director at the FCO, told the inquiry: “We quite clearly distanced our self from regime change. It was clear that was something there would not be any legal base for.”
The diplomats’ evidence will focus attention on the decisions that led Mr Blair to change Britain’s policy and support the military action that removed Saddam in 2003.
“We heard people in Washington suggesting that there might be some link between Saddam and [Osama] Bin Laden.” he said. “We began to get that sort of voice early on.”
Sec of State Powell and NSA Rice Speaking about Saddam in February and July of 2001
Main Entry: rogue
Pronunciation: \ˈrōg\
Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1561
1 : vagrant, tramp
2 : a dishonest or worthless person : scoundrel
3 : a mischievous person : scamp
4 : a horse inclined to shirk or misbehave
5 : an individual exhibiting a chance and usually inferior biological variation
Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were professors at Columbia University who in came up with the idea that someone could cause the fall of capitalism by overloading the government with impossible demands causing society to fall into crisis and collapse the economy.
“Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.”
The best example of the use of this strategy was when George Wiley who was a Black militant organizer (who currently is running the George Wiley Foundation) founded NWRO and gathered a bunch of the poor and held sit in to demand that they receive every penny the government owed them on their welfare payments. (This is an Alinsky tactic: making your enemy play by their rules to the letter.) This was very successful it more than doubled (4.3 million to 10.8 million) the number of the nations single parent welfare households in a period of relative stable economy (1965-1974). The welfare system bankrupted New York City in 1975 and almost the whole state. This woke up Americans and started the welfare reform movement.
The thing about Cloward and Piven is that it doesn’t have to be any one place in the Bureaucracy just a weak place. So that brings us today and today’s current crisis.
]]>Michele Bachman is running a patition to stop funding for good to this organization. She also gives a good history of ACORN receiving of your tax money. Here is her website click on the action link http://www.michelebachmann.com/
Here is a link to an interview between Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann
July 20, 2009 US House of Representives Report on ACORN’s criminal Activities
http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/7-23-09-ogr-acorn-report.pdf
First paragraph of the summary:
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has repeatedly
and deliberately engaged in systemic fraud. Both structurally and operationally, ACORN
hides behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protections to conceal a criminal
conspiracy on the part of its directors, to launder federal money in order to pursue a
partisan political agenda and to manipulate the American electorate.
We have the right to succeed or fail by our OWN efforts, our own unique abilities, determination and hard work, with the voluntary help from our families, friends, churches, charities, luck and God. We also have the freedom to voluntarily choose who to help if we so desire. Our Constitution and laws protect us from unfair interference of our individual pursuits by government, criminals, invaders, and religious leaders.
Most of the constitution protects us from the government. Our founders understood that all of human history has proven that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our constitution was carefully crafted to put checks and balances on governmental power in order to restrict governments encroachment on our natural instinct that yearns to be free.
We are guaranteed equal opportunity, but not equal outcome. Equal outcome is IMPOSSIBLE because all humans are unique individuals with different desires, talents, strengths, weaknesses, abilities, disabilities, and emotional makeups. No two people are alike. As such, it is only possible to guarantee individual freedom and opportunity, not equal happiness, not equal wealth, not equal housing, food nor health-care. We are free to try to acquire our desires in a free society, unfettered by government, religion, criminals and foreign powers.
]]>Upper-Bracket Tax May Be Needed for Afghan War Cost, Levin Says
Nov. 21 (Bloomberg)—Higher-income Americans should be taxed to pay for more troops sent to Afghanistan and NATO should provide half of the new soldiers, said Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
An “additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000” a year, could fund more troops, Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.
]]>Leaked documents reveal No 10 cover-up over Iraq invasion
• Inquiry to hear how Blair hid true intentions for war
• Military ‘ill-prepared’ for aftermath of invasion
Military commanders are expected to tell the inquiry into the Iraq war, which opens on Tuesday, that the invasion was ill-conceived and that preparations were sabotaged by Tony Blair’s government’s attempts to mislead the public.
They were so shocked by the lack of preparation for the aftermath of the invasion that they believe members of the British and US governments at the time could be prosecuted for war crimes by breaching the duty outlined in the Geneva convention to safeguard civilians in a conflict, the Guardian has been told.
The lengths the Blair government took to conceal the invasion plan and the extent of military commanders’ anger at what they call the government’s “appalling” failures emerged as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, promised to produce a “full and insightful” account of how Britain was drawn into the conflict.
The documents, leaked to the Sunday Telegraph, are “post-operational reports” and “lessons learned” papers compiled by the army and its field commanders. They refer to a “rushed” operation that caused “significant risk” to troops and “critical failure” in the postwar period.
...Blair had in effect promised George Bush that he would join the US-led invasion when, as late as July 2002, he was denying to MPs that preparations were being made for military action. The leaked documents reveal that “from March 2002 or May at the latest there was a significant possibility of a large-scale British operation”.
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