NATO strike a civilian area, Majer, Libya

A report [by Mark  Urban] on tonight’s Newsnight [BBC2] [18th Jan 2012] has revealed that – contrary to the statements that the British Government ministers made to Parliament, the press and the people – British forces were aiding and abetting the 2011 uprising in Libya with Special Forces and armaments.

The arguments about how far the UK should go were thrashed out in a series of meetings of the National Security Council at Downing Street. Under the chairmanship of Prime Minister David Cameron, its key members were:

• Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir David Richards
• Defence Secretary Liam Fox
• Foreign Secretary William Hague

Mr Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, was a key voice in urging action following start of the Libyan revolution last February, say Whitehall insiders . . . key figures in the Downing Street discussions were convinced that air strikes alone would not achieve the result they wanted. At sessions of the National Security Council, Gen Richards and Mr Fox made the case for planning to provide training and equipment for the revolutionary forces of the NTC.

This is in clear breach of any international law – the interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state which has not been sanctioned by the UN or any other international body.

It is no surprise that at the centre of the plot to deceive Parliament were the now-disgraced Liam Fox, and William Hague – the man who, according to Wikileaks transcripts of US Embassy documents, promised before the last election to increase Britain’s expenditure on US weaponry if the Tories got back into power.

The report raises serious questions about what is being currently done in Syria – which as various commentators have been pointing out – is currently being destabilised in a similar way to Libya.

The British coalition Government, along with other NATO/ US stooges such as Sarkozy, paraded themselves alongside the shadowy replacements for Gadaffi, trumpeting slogans of victory for democracy soon after his murder.

However, the truth of what is happening in Libya, now that the ravenous media of the West have moved on to Syria, following their masters’ whistle and spouting the same mix of rumour and infotainment from ‘intelligence sources’ – is much murkier.

An article by Franklin Lamb in Counterpunch reveals that since the West {US/UK Axis] moved on to Syria, the Libyan ‘revolution’ has become increasingly fragile;

There is clear and growing pro-Gadhafi political and military activity here and it is why NTC leader Mustapha Abdul Jalil, the other day warned against the Gadhafi children raising an insurrection.  Aisha Gadhafi, given Saif’s current incarceration, is perhaps the likely leader.

Every night more pro-Gadhafi graffiti appears on street walls, buildings and around Green (Martyrs Square).  Activists, and there appear to be more every day, assert that so far the NTC has not attacked them and they feel fairly free to speak  out and even organize.  It is anyone’s guess how long this situation will exist before a violent crackdown and open fighting.

It is difficult to gage the anti-NTC/ pro-Gadhafi mix and the extent to what extent each is propelling increasingly unpredictable events in Libya.

There is also a growing awareness of the cost of NATO’s bombing campaign, unreported in the Western mediatainment;

NATO has already lost much of its claimed public relations boost following its Halloween night ending of the bombing.  One suspects that this is because of an accumulation of many more recently discovered cases of NATO bombing of civilians in Libya. The population today in Libya is increasingly furious because more and more cases are coming to light concerning the high numbers of children who have been killed by NATO.

In addition to the fury caused by the urinating GIs, NATO officials are being ridiculed for all their denials that their bombing missions here in Libya, numbering more than 11,000, caused civilians deaths and their claims that NATO forces conducted themselves according to  higher moral and military standards, and sometimes put themselves at risk to avoid civilian casualties. The claims remind some of a generation of similar ludicrous public relations campaign undertaken regularly by the Israeli government.

As a previous post demonstrated, the plan to overturn legitimate [if repressive or unstable] regimes in a number of countries over a five-year period was first formulated by the cabal inside the Bush regime headed by Cheney and his fellow travellers.

Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and eventually Iran – these were the countries on the list handed to General Wesley Clarke from ‘upstairs’ within days of the 9/11 Massacre – an event which was used by the Washington regime to justify both internal repression inside the USA itself, and a war without end across the globe.

By Any Means Necessary

Since our last posting during the civil unrest that rocked through the English cities in the hot months of 2011, the collapse of corporate capitalism is slowly being transformed into a ‘consensual’ police state.

The riots – as always – were used to justify a wide scale rounding -up of suspects and fellow travellers; the imposition of harsher and more punitive sentences which go unquestioned in the public domain for fear of being guilty of sympathetic thought; even greater degrees of surveillance imposed at personal and public levels [remember the Blackberry outage anyone ? - remember the servers are  in Slough, UK;

August 20, 2011 — CSO — Executives at the main social media networks and messaging outlets - Facebook, Twitter and RIM's BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) - have been called to meet Home Office ministers on Thursday to discuss their products' usage in the UK riots].

Flat-bed lorries have been parked in shopping centres with blurred photos of ‘rioters’ blown-up to the size of posters, doors have been hammered down at six in the morning to arrest teenagers suspected of having stolen two left shoes, six month sentences handed out for looting a six-pack of mineral water and not even getting to drink it.

Meanwhile, the super yachts are built from the rare woods of ancient forests, cut down for the mining concessions that make the proud new captains so rich; the land ripped apart for the rare earths in the mobile phone that record your every movement through the alleyways and boulevards; and trace your friends and family into a spider’s web of data that traps us even as it attracts us.

The people of Greece are told that they face a generation or more of poverty , and it becomes the first urbanised country in modern times to see a flight to the countryside.

Across Europe social programmes which are funded by the taxes paid by many generations of workers are being closed down, and communally-owned buildings and land are being appropriated by the wealthy.

In Britain the Government discusses which state-owned assets might be sold-off to pay the debt. That is, of course, the debt owed to the banking class by the Government, or the governing class. It represents the money owed on all those junkets in first-class travel, meals at Claridges, armoured convoys travelling through the busy traffic with gun-toting goons guarding some hapless time-server who sits there thinking his time has really arrived; and the invisible web of control behind the facade that keeps it all ticking over.

And what they sell off will be the assets of the nation, earned by the sweat and blood of millions over centuries. And who will it be sold off to ? one might ask in some ironic way; for of course it will be to the very people  who have decided that the debt should be paid.

Food for thought

And then the  recent revelations that there are  undercover police planted in every little group who might have the misguided belief that they are a free people with the right to express their opinions and dare to challenge the way that things are done. Cycling campaigns (Reclaim the streets] and environmental activists have been the main targets of these people who are paid to betray people that they get close to - how low can you actually go?

Not ‘terrorists’ or organised crime,  both of which – we are led to believe – have flourished in the last twenty years; which is why your local bobby now looks like robocop on a hunting trip; why railway stations and West End plazas are every so often transformed into the fantasy landscapes of kids raised on Call of Duty with grim-faced, overpaid para-police in flak jackets toting automatics like they’d spray the square if a bar fight gets out of hand, or they spot some suspicious guy in a turban.

Meanwhile, on some estate two miles away, a war pensioner gets mugged on the corner by kids whose mum can’t get it together on the subsistence benefit because she can’t steal, duck and dive; or has just some scrap of dignity left, which means she won’t turn tricks to buy them chips.

***

This response to the riots was totally predictable – the British ruling class, although richer and more profligate than at any time in history, are also aware that the wolves are at the gates of Rome.

The vast and complex machinery of corruption based in the City of London, which has been robbing people of the fruits of their labour for over two hundred years is more visible, and detested than ever before. The tentacles of this octopus, which stretches from the towers of Manhattan and Canary Wharf have been flailing around looking for new sources of energy. Europe was abandoned years ago – its social welfare programmes and workers’ rights made it ‘unfriendly’ to profiteers. It has nothing to do with ‘building a business’ or enterprise, it is merely interested in exploitation; and the neediest people are the most easily exploited.

So the asset-strippers and beancounters moved in on businesses which had reached compacts with their workers; and literally moved the plant and capital  across the globe to those areas that our Empire had already reduced to poverty. There they could pay the poor to work harder for much less in conditions the European workers would consider untenable. Of course, with true imperial arrogance, these financiers never thought they would see the day that the ‘natives’ would learn all the tricks of their ‘masters’ and play them just like they were once played.

The result is that we are now seeing the octopus in its dying agony, tearing itself apart from within.

The recent ‘downgrading’ of France by Standard and Poor is part of the USA’s attempt to ‘fix the game’; S&P is no more than a deniable agency controlled by the US Treasury – its part in the 2008 Crash is in no doubt. It was giving the banks in Iceland  AAA+ status only days before they crashed in spectacular fashion; when it was revealed that their debts, running into hundreds of billions, far exceeded anything that could ever be backed up by the country itself, and its people.

But as long as the US can extend the ‘crisis in the Eurozone’, attention is deflected from the fact that the USA is well past bankrupt; its people already impoverished without even a proper healthcare or education system to help them back on their feet again.

And yet the US regime spend more than the rest of the world put together on armaments; more than half their Government spend each year on the machinery of death and destruction; that is their business now – WAR.

The only candidate in the forthcoming election who has even mentioned the distortion in the US economy, and how it is leading the country into a disaster it won’t be able to roll back on, is Ron Paul. He is virtually ignored by the media, despite his popularity; and probably knows he would never be alive long enough to start dismantling a rifle, let alone the US war machine, if he ever got near the White House.

Despite the economic [and moral] bankruptcy of the ruling classes in the UK and USA, we are yet again being led into a war. The sort of inter-communal solidarity so well exemplified in the marches against the Iraq War – which were so contemptuously ignored by the government of  Tony Blair, a man who has both committed and profited from war crimes – will probably not be seen again this time around.

No-one believes that peaceful protest in this country has ANY effect anymore, and participation in any protest in the UK has long been treated as a reason for intrusive surveillance, police violence and criminalisation of the demonstrators. Just as in the USA, all protest is depicted as either ‘misguided’ or downright subversive.

The only alternative, in the forthcoming war, will be campaigns of civil disobedience.

The security state is already racheting up the tension in preparation for the Olympic Charade; winding up the fear factor with talk of ‘Mumbai massacres’ [another false flag operation] and bio-weapons, thus excusing the theft of £2bn from the public purse for Olympic Security.

And as Chomsky pointed out so succinctly, if the Nuremberg Laws were applied to the NATO axis – which now seems to [shamefully] include both France and East European countries [who should know better] – then our leaders would be on trial for their lives; but, hey! we’re living in the candy-coloured country , a New Jerusalem, the home of freedom and democracy.

Oh,  and all that stuff about 14 million children living in poverty by 2012, just forget it . . . it’s just the hard surface behind the fuzzy screen.

We can’t say that we weren’t all warned – the cornered beast will take down everything else when it goes . . . .

And for a great analysis of the West’s secret war on the Syrian state, read this . . .

What we are seeing in Syria is a deliberate and calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government so as to replace it with a regime “more compatible” with US interests in the region.

The blueprint for this project is essentially a report produced by the neo-conservative Brookings Institute for regime change in Iran in 2009. The report – “Which Path to Persia?”  - continues to be the generic strategic approach for US-led regime change in the region.

A rereading of it, together with the more recent “Towards a Post-Assad Syria” (which adopts the same language and perspective, but focuses on Syria, and was recently produced by two US neo-conservative think-tanks) illustrates how developments in Syria have been shaped according to the step-by-step approach detailed in the “Paths to Persia” report with the same key objective: regime change.

The authors of these reports include, among others, John Hannah and Martin Indyk, both former senior neo-conservative officials from the George W Bush/Dick Cheney administration, and both advocates for regime change in Syria. Not for the first time are we seeing a close alliance between US/British neo-cons with Islamists (including, reports show, some with links to al-Qaeda) working together to bring about regime change in an “enemy” state.

After the trashing of Iraq and the dismemberment of Libya, we can look forward to the destruction of Syria followed by an all-out war with Iran.

One suspects that the Russians are not standing idly by – they and their vast natural resources under the melting permafrost of Siberia are what the boys at World.com [USA] have their sights trained on – and once it starts moving, just watch Taiwan, home of 90% of the worlds hard-disk manafacture.

2012, here we come . . . 

Riot police in Hackney 2011

A quick update on the Riots reviews being carried out in the media [The Guardian together with the LSE] and the state [the IPCC].

Today it had been revealed that not only was there no evidence – DNA, fingerprints or location – which linked the gun allegedly in Mark Duggan’s possession to him; but the cab in which he was traveling was moved from the crime scene by the police and only later ‘returned’ for the IPCC’s investigation.

A report in the Evening Standard [12.12.11] states;

Today Michael Mansfield QC, representing the Duggan family, told North London coroner’s court the gun was found “14 feet away behind a railing” as he accused the IPCC of issuing “misinformation” and obstructing the family’s own investigations by failing to disclose information. In a heated series of exchanges, Mr Sparrow said it had been a “mistake” to have initially suggested Mr Duggan had been killed in a “shoot-out”.

After continually refusing to answer questions that could prejudice the criminal inquiry, Mr Sparrow nodded his head as Mr Mansfield bluntly summed up: “No blood, no gun, no DNA relating to Mark Duggan?”

Mr Sparrow said claims were also being investigated that witnesses saw a police officer throwing the gun over a fence at the scene.

The court heard that the IPCC had failed to provide the family with an interim pathologist’s report on the trajectory of the bullet that killed him, and refused to let the family’s own pathologist meet the commission’s pathologists.

Mr Mansfield accused the IPCC of failing to secure the crime scene and of moving the minicab Mr Duggan was travelling in when he was shot in Ferry Lane. These claims have since been strongly denied by the IPCC.

Mr Sparrow said the investigation was not due to be completed until April next year.

Along with evidence taken across the country from participants in the riots by the Guardian and the LSE which concludes that there is a widespread disaffection with the police – particularly London’s force, the Met [Metropolitan Police] – it is clear that the riots were not a simple case of people popping out to do a bit of looting.

It is also clear that unless the police start being held to account in the UK, and governed by the rule of law – as they expect everyone else to be – the riots of 2011 will return.

And as our political class are realising, public dissatisfaction with both them and their paymasters in the City; as well as the resentment of an increasingly impoverished society supporting a tiny group of hedge-fund managers and public school careerists, is the sort of recipe that ends up with a guillotine set up in Trafalgar Square.

And between them, and the people are the ‘thin blue line’ who are even now being equipped with the sort of weaponry used against civil crowds in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From a report in The Daily Telegraph;

A shoulder-mounted laser that emits a blinding wall of light capable of repelling rioters is to be trialled by police under preparations to prevent a repeat of this summer’s looting and arson.

It has impressed a division of the Home Office which is testing a new range of devices because of the growing number of violent situations facing the police.

The developer, British-based Photonic Security Systems, hopes to offer the device to shipping companies to deter pirates. Similar devices have been used by ISAF troops in Afghanistan to protect convoys from insurgents.

The laser, resembling a rifle and known as an SMU 100, can dazzle and incapacitate targets up to 500m away with a wall of light up to three metres squared. It costs £25,000* and has an infrared scope to spot looters in poor visibility.

The Home Office has been considering new forms of non-lethal equipment since the August riots, with the limited range of tasers and CS gas leaving a “capability gap”.

A Home Office spokesman said scientists at its Centre for Applied Science and Technology believe the use of lasers “has merit” and that it will be piloted by at least one police force. However, they will have to be satisfied the technology does not cause long-term health damage before it can be approved by the Home Secretary.

Other technology being studied includes ‘wireless electronic interceptors’ that can be fired a greater distance than Tasers, and long-range chemical irritant projectiles, the newspaper said.

The Metropolitan Police is exploring the possibility of buying three water cannons at a cost of £4m. Currently the only police force in the UK to operate water cannon is the Police Force of Northern Ireland (PSNI), which has six. Scotland Yard is also increasing the number of officers trained to fire plastic bullets, as a direct response to the riots.

[*£25,000 would be the salary of a full-time youth worker or a librarian. That's where this Government's priorities really lie . . .]

So that’s alright then;  the answer to a despised police force is to buy them more weaponry –  with the peoples’ dwindling taxes – to ensure that the people can’t ever get close to those who are creating the most unequal society in the Western world.

Occupy protesters Nov 2011

Democracy US style

Democracy US style 2; US-Police-Lt-Pike-pepper spraying-seated-students

And in Egypt they keep up the struggle

Tottenham Alight August 2011

As the smoke drifts away and the nation draws its breath, the questions about the English Revolts of 2011 are already being framed in the traditional way.

A definition of madness is performing the same action again and again and expecting a different outcome; this is why this cycle of revolt has come around  again and again, in ever-decreasing circles, in ever-increasing violence and chaos.

When this society works, it is a melting pot; but when the pressure is turned up it becomes a black hole, and this is why it is important to identify the causes of this revolt; as every tree has a seed, and if this environment remains the same, this poison tree will grow stronger and will consume the earth it’s planted in, the earth we all live on . . .

This article is a news article. We will not be passing judgement on any party ; we are merely trying to assemble the relevant facts which might indicate why the cities of London descended into chaos over five days in August, 2011.

The first fact is this;

On Wednesday August 3rd 2011 the police descended on the Pembury Estate in Hackney in a massive dawn raid. In an article called  Police go to The Wire in dawn raids to target London gang, the London Evening Standard reports on a massive ‘anti-gang’ raid ;

More than 300 officers swooped on the Pembury Boys gang – whose members are allegedly linked to a series of shootings, rapes, assaults and major drug dealing.

A total of 32 addresses were raided at dawn across east London in a hunt for 26 known gang members and their associates. By midday 23, including two women, had been arrested.

Searches recovered a large quantity of class A drugs, including crack cocaine and heroin, an imitation firearm and more than £8,000 in cash. Officers also recovered 40 mobile phones and more than 60 Sim cards.

Detectives likened the operation to the fictional TV series The Wire, set in the US city of Baltimore, because of its length, the fact it targeted the senior and middle-ranking echelons of the gang and its use of covert tactics.

Commander Peter Spindler, the head of covert operations at Scotland Yard, said police had thrown the “full might of covert policing” against the gang including the use of “human intelligence, technical surveillance and covert surveillance”. Sources said the arrests came after an 18-month operation, the longest covert inquiry conducted by the Met.

Most of the arrests took place on the Pembury estate in Hackney. The Pembury Boys are reputed to be one of London’s most violent street gangs.

Since last Wednesday, this ‘massive operation’ – to quote ‘the longest covert inquiry conducted by the Met’ and probably one of it’s largest mass raids ever, has not been mentioned in the press.

However, the Pembury Estate was central to the riots, and there the central focus was not looting, but a battle directly against the police. The reports on August 9th told of a battle lasting hours, in which the police repeatedly attempted to ‘take control’ of the estate, but were driven back again and again by the ‘insurgents’ on the street;

For three hours mayhem ruled in Hackney’s Pembury Estate, the centre of the violence in east London. The police were there, but there was no doubt who set the law in the estate, comprised of local authority mansion-blocks of flats.

Masked youths – both men and women – helped carry debris, bins, sticks and motorbikes, laying them across the roads to form a flaming boundary to the estate.

The crowd in Hackney – numbering at least 300 – appeared larger than any from previous nights of rioting.

Fact 2; From the Guardian on Tuesday 10th August;

Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked London‘s riots, did not fire a shot at police officers before they killed him, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said on Tuesday.

Releasing the initial findings of ballistics tests, the police watchdog said a CO19 firearms officer fired two bullets, and that a bullet that lodged in a police radio was “consistent with being fired from a police gun”.

One theory, not confirmed by the IPCC, is that the bullet became lodged in the radio from a ricochet or after passing through Duggan.

Duggan, 29, was killed last Thursday in Tottenham, north London, after armed officers stopped the minicab in which he was travelling.but it had no evidence that the weapon had been fired. It said tests were continuing.

The IPCC said Duggan was carrying a loaded gun,

but of course, they had originally told the press on Friday August 5th;

A father of three died instantly after an apparent exchange of fire when police attempted to arrest him in north London, it emerged on Friday.

A police marksman escaped with his life when a bullet lodged in his radio during the confrontation that ended in the death of Mark Duggan, 29.

To continue with the revised version, which is now slipping from most people’s memories;

Officers from the Met’s Operation Trident and Special Crime Directorate 11, accompanied by officers from CO19, the Met’s specialist firearms command, stopped the silver Toyota Estima minicab in Ferry Lane, close to Tottenham Hale tube station, to arrest Duggan. He was killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest, and received a second gunshot wound to his right bicep. He was pronounced dead at the scene at 6.41pm.

The IPCC’s statement said the bullet lodged in the police radio was a “jacketed round”. This is a police-issue bullet and is “consistent with having been fired from a [police] Heckler and Koch MP5″, it said.

The non-police firearm found at the scene was a converted BBM Bruni self-loading pistol. The gun was found to have a “bulleted cartridge” in the magazine, which is being subjected to further forensic tests.The officer whose radio was hit was taken to Homerton hospital where he was examined and discharged later that night. The minicab driver was not injured but was badly shaken by what he saw, the IPCC said. His account, as well as those of the officers, is being examined along with the forensic evidence.

So in one week, in one small area of London, the police carried out mass arrests and then shot a well-known local man dead who had not – it now appears – drawn a gun on them.

And they were ‘taken aback’ by the violence ?

Broadwater Farm - 1985 -Tottenham Riots

The biggest ‘surprise’ about the riots, which spread like wildfire out from the Pembury Estate to the rest of London, and then across the country was that after those two events recorded above, that the police seemed ‘totally unprepared’ for what followed. From The Guardian August 5th . . .

After a peaceful vigil outside the local police station, where the family waited for five hours without any senior officer being sent to see them despite being promised that this would happen – dusk fell, and the street started to fill up with youths.

What happened over the next four hours is subject to debate, but what is clear is that tensions gradually escalated, as police made only limited attempts to talk to the demonstrators. Some who were present described seeing a younger, more aggressive crowd arrive around dusk, some carrying weapons. “These people were prepared,” said Bill Dow, a bystander. “They had fireworks and petrol cans.”

Protest organisers denied this, and said police failed to engage with them. Eventually a chief inspector came out and spoke to Duggan’s relatives but, organisers said, he conceded a higher-ranking officer should talk to them. Stafford Scott, a community organiser, said police were “absolutely” culpable for not responding to their requests for dialogue.

“I told the chief inspector personally that we wanted to leave before nightfall,” Scott said. “If he kept us hanging around after nightfall, it was going to be on his head. We couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t get out of control.”

Scott said the chief inspector promised a higher ranking official would speak to the crowd. When no one came, organisers said some younger men turned their anger to two police cars, which were set on fire.

There were two notable comments by Cameron in the Houses of Parliament today.

• One was that this was ‘gang directed’ violence – a subject that has not been touched upon previously.
• The second was concerning the cuts to the police budget, along with changes to the pay structures and conditions of work – which numerous reviews have pointed out are excessively ‘easy’ in a ‘time of austerity’.

 This article is not a commentary on the social or ethical causes of this riot, but merely attempting – in some way like a forensic team at a crime scene – to rewind back before the traumatic wave of chaos and find some pattern in the madness.

This investigation will continue . . .

Heinz Fuchs, poster, Germany, 1919

An  article in Counterpunch reveals the true legacy of the Murdoch newspaper empire stretches back to those defining years just after World War One at the beginning of the last century.

Sir Keith was “not rich” only by Rupert’s standards, and the disclosure of the mess at Gallipoli owed at least as much to the Daily Telegraph’s reporter, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, as to him.

Rupert’s father, Sir Keith, founded the dynasty during World War I as a dirty-tricks minion for “Billy” Hughes, probably Australia’s nastiest prime minister.

At Versailles, Keith was Billy’s ever-present aide in striving to make the Peace Conference into a vicious cock-up, rich in racist and imperialist content. Curiously, the pair would have had zero leverage but for the failure of a plot of Keith’s, which sought in 1918 to remove Australia’s battlefield commander on the Western Front, John Monash, for being an unheroic Jew. (Monash wrote home that it was a bore having to fight a “pogrom” at the same time as fight Ludendorff.) The overall commander, General Douglas Haig, wouldn’t play: and Monash’s divisions led the British breakthrough at Amiens which, ruining Ludendorff, put Germany – suddenly, unexpectedly– at the Allies’ mercy. Haig and other soldiers hoped there might be space for a decent peace. But politicians of various brands thought otherwise and none outdid Keith’s boss in vengeful demagoguery,  destroying at last all the credit Monash had gained for Australia. Billy and Keith weren’t prime authors of the Versailles debacle in 1919. But none toiled harder in its cause.

Murdoch’s other smokescreen – that he is an outsider battling the Establishment; a representative of the common man is also demolished in another Counterpunch article called The Phony Populism of Rupert Murdoch ;

The ‘Dirty Digger’ himself might have lacked the right accent, but even when he was first challenging the newspaper establishment, he was scarcely proletarian. Murdoch inherited his first paper, the Adelaide News, from his father, Sir Keith; he did his schooling at Geelong Grammar, a quintessential finishing college for the rich and entitled that also educated a young Prince Charles.

The journalist David Marr tells of attending a lecture in which Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son, denounced the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for drawing attention to his shenanigans in the mobile phone business: the particular program in question was, he said, a ‘disgracful and biased attack’ by ‘our media elite’. So powerful has the peculiar vocabulary of New Class anti-elitism become that a man born into the most powerful media dynasty the world has ever seen can still present himself, without any trace of irony whatsoever, as an outsider being done down by society’s rulers.

Since Murdoch’s appearance at the Parliamentary Committee, a number of other significant developments;

• Evidence given by James Murdoch to the Committee concerning his knowledge of the endemic phone-hacking at News International has been called into question by various ex-NI executives and ex-employees.His agreement to a massive payout to keep a case out of a public court now looks like an attempt to pervert the cause of justice.
• A laptop and phone in a bag found near Rebekah Brooks’ house has been claimed by her husband, who claims that she has nothing to do with either, and is attempting to retrieve said items from the police. This story was covered extensively for two days, and then disappeared from the media. Mr Brooks is an old Etonian racehorse owner.

Sean Hoare, the former NOTW journalist; the first to claim Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking.

• Sean Hoare, a real journalist and the first real ‘whistleblower’ in this story,  a 47-year-old who was sacked by the NOTW by then-editor Andy Coulson because of drink and drugs “problems,” was found dead at his London residence by police last Monday, 18 July [from here - a site that strangely comes very near to the top of a Google search on this subject, which seems to suggest that the public is not as convinced by the 'no suspicious circumstances' line as the British media].As one of the comedians on the BBC ‘satire’ the Now Show put it – it’s been investigated by the police – the same police who’s top officers are currently resigning in the wake of this scandal. So that’s alright then . . . 
• Two of the Met’s top police officers, including Sir Paul Stephenson, the Chief Commissioner,  have resigned over their links with the News International corporation. The other is John Yates, the policeman who twice resisted calls to reopen the investigation into phone hacking, and who resigned as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police over his relationship to Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World.
• Les Hinton, NI Chief Executive and old friend of Murdoch has also resigned from the company, pending investigations into his time at the NOTW. Ex-editor of The Sun and the NOTW Rebekah Brooks has been arrested over suspicions of involvement in phone-hacking and the corruption of police officers.

This toxic seam has only just started to reveal a corruption that has spread throughout the ruling class of Britain – it is impossible to say how much further the Establishment will let the investigations proceed.

Needless to say, there are probably more than a few people who saw the news about Sean Hoare and thought it might be better to keep their lips carefully sealed; and a few others who are checking their backs, waiting for their Brutus to bring them down; especially the ones who – as on old friend of mine from the East End commented ‘know where the bodies are buried . . . ‘

Good luck folks !

Rebekah Brooks leaves NotW earlier - NewsCorp on the run . . .

For those of us living in South East London, the scandal which could yet do for Murdoch’s NewsCorp empire and has led to the demise of the world’s biggest-selling English language newspaper is the culmination of a long, sordid story that has been running like a sceptic sore through the whole of British society for over 30 years.

Murdoch first came to public notice in the UK as the son of a millionaire newspaper magnate who acted as the shock force for the Thatcher Government’s assault on the unions in the early 1980′s, when he moved his titles to an automated plant at what became known as Fortress Wapping.

The plant had been set up and equipped secretly; with the aim of introducing automation to the extent that most of the printers would be left without jobs.

A strike developed into nightly battles outside the plant, with vast fleets of TNT lorries being escorted past the rioting crowds by armies of police. For Thatcher the benefits were twofold.

Murdoch could break the power of the print union – one of the workforces who had managed, since the Second World War to actually take a share in the vast profits of the capitalist class. Secondly, she was able to rely on Murdoch, who laughingly called himself a ‘libertarian’ but is in fact the worst sort of old monopolist capitalist. He duly provided support for the Conservatives until the public finally revolted after 18 years, and he quickly switched allegiance to the neo-con patsy Tony Blair.

And one for the memories ! Thatcher leaves No. 10

With the ‘death of the print’ came the slow decline of many inner city East End and South East London communities;  their pubs, old jazz bands, and local Labour [not Nu Labor] parties. After the death of the docks –  when dockers were replaced by containers and some guy in a crane – the death of ‘the print’ was the final straw. It also set the model for other industry post the ‘white heat of technology’ revolution proclaimed in the Wilson era; when workers, instead of working less and being paid more, would end up working more to produce more profit for less pay, with less rights than their parents.

If you were not prepared to accept the new debt-slavery, you would join the millions of other unemployed on the scrapheap that increasingly piled up at the base of the pyramid.

And meanwhile Rupert would steer his papers to clean up through a mix of scandal, bile and witch-burning bigotry  - thus obscuring even more the real social news of the country; in which the world he and his media helped create was becoming increasingly cruel, stupeified and unequal. Like the republicans in the USA – whose cause he has unfailingly promoted – he could make the poor vote for their own oppression, with a combination of ignorance, misdirection and tawdriness, reducing life to twitching net curtains, stained sheets and a trail of blood.

And that leads to the other untold tale of how the Murdoch Empire has corrupted the body of everyday society in the UK.

Daniel Morgan - still awaiting justice after 24 years

The story concerns a private eye [PI] in South-East London beheaded in the car park of a pub called the Golden Lion in Forest Hill, South East London on Tuesday 10 March 1987.

Involved in the plot – in a away that at least five police ‘investigations’ and two court cases have not been able to fully determine – are a sordid bunch of fellow PI’s and ex-policemen, who have been convicted of other crimes including drug running and framing a woman on a cocaine charge in a divorce case.

They were working for the News of the World when it was edited by Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s Director of Communications in 10 Downing Street; digging the dirt on anyone and everyone – and that’s all we know so far.

Rebekah Brooks, now Chief Executive of News International actually had the lead Detective investigating the murder followed and bugged whilst she was editor of the News of the World. She later told police that she thought he might have been having an affair with a fellow officer [who was, in fact, was obviously his wife].

Andy Coulson’s evidence at the Tommy Sheridan ‘trial’ is now also being called into question – which could lay him open to a charge of perjury and throw more doubts on the case against the Scottish socialist leader.

The corruption which was endemic in the London police in the 1980′s, especially the drug squads – and was hinted at in various inquiries into the Stephen Lawrence murder - and its effect on the street from then until the present day was in no short measure due to the pernicious, deceptive media of Murdoch. By making his papers so viscious and tacky but profitable – where you had no professional printers to pay, and no journalists because you’d replaced them with phone hackers, gossips, snitches and smut peddlers – he was slowly dragging all the others down into the same gutter.

It will be interesting to see how the dice fall now – these people built the gallows for enough – often innocent – people. It will be interesting to see how they fancy taking the long walk themselves now, as their masters scramble to distance themselves from their once so-loyal minions . . . .

Guardian Online - front page 30/06/11

A report in the Guardian on the 30th June 2011 has revealed what we all suspected [see previous blogs] with the release of information about the true extent of the disaster in the Japanese nuclear plants following the earthquake and tsunami.

With the hard evidence of leaked emails between Government and the nuclear industry, the Guardian article details just how far the spin has extended to an attempt to cover-up the amount of radioactive leaks and their effects on the surrounding population in Japan, as well as its spread across the globe.

Here are just some of the articles in Counterpunch in recent weeks, which reveals the amount of alarm in the scientific and medical communities not being reported in the general media.

Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of Fukushima Fallout?

Same Old Tricks From the Nuclear Gang ; The People Who Brought You Fukushima

Will GE Get Whacked for the Catastrophic Failure of Its Fukushima Reactors? ;The Hubris of Nuclear Engineers

~These articles are interesting as a different perspective on the problems of global warming, and attempts by the nuclear lobby to manipulate the whole debate, using it as a way of persuading desperate environmentalists [eg. George Monbiot ] that nuclear power is the only solution.

In the Midst of Fukushima: Ahoy There, Nuke-Loving Greens, Welcome to the Real World!

How Global Warming Rescued the Atomic Lobby ; The “Green” Nuclear Cabal

Bi-Partisan Atomic Flackery ; Nuclear Power Madness

And also a couple of activist sites with handy updates on the crimes and cover-ups of the nuclear industry around the world . . .

nukefree.org (USA)

Envirovideo

And now a report that a French reactor is in trouble . . .

and in the UK;

Jellyfish shut down nuclear reactors

Both units at Torness power station closed after jellyfish found in seawater filters

]]> http://www.fantompowa.net/blog/?feed=rss2&p=264 2 http://www.fantompowa.net/blog/?p=238 http://www.fantompowa.net/blog/?p=238#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:37:42 +0000 editors http://www.fantompowa.net/blog/?p=238 There are continuing and increasing  risks of further major radiation leaks in Japan and the USA , even as the UK Government announces that it will support the building of 8 new reactors and Obama’s corporate administration agrees to help fund a whole new series of nuclear investments in the USA.

Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant under water

As wildfires threaten the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory , and Fort Calhoun struggles with maintaining pumps and power to prevent floodwater, leading to meltdown and contmination, there is a threat of flooding to yet another US nuclear plant ;

A second Nebraska nuke plant declared an “unusual event” as floodwaters approach. At the Cooper Nuclear Station in Brownville, NE:  “Personnel have been proactive in preparing the station for flood conditions by filling sandbags, constructing barricades, procuring materials and supplies, and reinforcing the access road…”(ncnewspress.com)

The threat of environmental factors to the stability and safety of nuclear plants is becoming more apparent as time moves on and those certainties which allowed the original sites to be seen as ‘safe’ look increasingly fragile. This is even more worrying for the rising populations around plants in the USA and a new study published in Scientific American magazine (the  June 2011 issue ) has demonstrated how many of the plants are built in areas of risk;

Compiling reactor data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and seismic hazard data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the SciAm graphic shows that there is already a handful of U.S. nuclear power plants located in earthquake-prone areas of the country. The threats aren’t just to reactors in California and Washington State; some located in South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri are also along the fringe of seismically active regions.

In Japan, the continuing disaster at Fukushima is now being joined by another accident at a reactor which is threatening the safe maintenance of the site;

The NY Times reports another plutonium reactor in Monju is involved in a “precarious struggle” 300km southwest of Fukushima, and nearer Kyoto. It seems that a “3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods.”

Of course the plant operator tried to cover it up, because that’s the modus operandi at nuclear plants: “…the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster.” (NY Times).

An article in the e-magazine Counterpunch describes how;

Tokyo now features “hot spots” of significant radiation. Sewage slag containing “170,000 Bequerels/kilogram” radioactivity has been detected and recycled into building materials! Soil in Koto Ward of Tokyo measured “2,300 Bq/kg.”

A report by Bloomberg tells of soil samples about 25 kilometers to the northwest of the Fukushima plant, “with radiation from Cesium-137 exceeding 5 million becquerels per square meter.” Other test sites 30km from the plant, “showed radiation exceeding 1.48 million becquerels per square meter.” At greater distance, 75 miles from the plant Professor Iwata Takahiro detected “500,000 becquerels per kg” in the roof drains at Yamagata University.

What is probably more worrying still, in terms of both health and its effect on a tremulous economy, is the report concerning Japanese green tea being exported to France;

Japanese green tea containing “1,000 Bq/kg” radiation was found and seized by customs in Paris, France. The French went from “oui” to “no, no, no…” The tea was shipped from Shizuoka Prefecture in central Japan, which should raise even more concern, being quite a bit southwest of Tokyo.

There are reports emerging of  excessively high radiation levels in people further and further away from the site of Fukushima;

A group of doctors has found that the estimated level of accumulated internal radiation exposure for people living in Fukushima Prefecture has exceeded 3 millisieverts.
The researchers, including doctors who have provided medical care to A-bomb survivors, conducted analysis on the food and urine of 15 residents in Iitate Village and Kawamata Town in Fukushima Prefecture. These areas are about 40 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
They estimate that residents have been internally exposed to up to 3.2 millisieverts for about 2 months, measuring from the date of the accident in March until early May.
Three millisieverts is 3 times higher than the long-term annual limit for ordinary people recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

An article here puts the dilemna quite succinctly;

WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.

“They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

This June the president of the Italian Association of Medical Oncology, Carmelo Iacono spoke in Chicago at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting:

“Nuclear radiation is the most carcinogenic thing that exists, and it cannot be kept under control, as the Fukushima tragedy proved.”

The “most carcinogenic thing that exists” says a world-renowned cancer specialist. . . .

Fukushima nuclear plant - all under control ?!!