"Official Secrets"/Bush 1 & 2 and Blair should have been jailed for war crimes

[RSherman]

Last edited Thu Mar 28, 2024, 08:45 PM - Edit history (1)

“All warfare is based on deception.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Recently, the movie “Official Secrets” popped up on the Youtube channel. It tells the story of Katharine Gun who was a British linguist who worked as a translator for the GCHQ. She leaked an email which requested aid in a secret operation to bug the UN offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. These were the six "swing nations" on the UN Security Council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq. The government charged her with an offense. Many people stepped forward to urge the government to drop the case, among them Daniel Ellsberg (the US government official who leaked the Pentagon Papers). The case came to court in February 2004. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. In May 2019 The Guardian stated the case was dropped "when the prosecution realized that evidence would emerge ... that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful." The British government further tried to lean on Gun by trying to deport her husband. (Much like the Bush administration outing CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame because her husband was broadcasting the truth).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_(film)#:~:text=To%20exert%20pressure%2C%20the%20British,certificate%2C%20proving%20the%20relationship's%20authenticity.

Tony Blair: From the start of the War on Terror, Blair strongly supported the foreign policy of George W. Bush, participating in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was controversial, as it attracted widespread public opposition and 139 of Blair's own MPs opposed it. As a result, he faced criticism over the policy itself and the circumstances of the decision. Playwright Harold Pinter and former Malaysian prime minister accused Blair of war crimes. In an October 2015 CNN interview, Blair apologized for his "mistakes" over the Iraq War. The Chilcot Inquiry gave a damning assessment of Blair's role in the Iraq War.

Bush 1 pushed the US into the first Gulf War using similar lies and propaganda. First, Bush claimed: Within three days, 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then that I decided to act to check that aggression.” The Pentagon stated that satellite photos showing a buildup of Iraqi forces along the border were the source of this information, but this was later alleged to be false. A reporter for the St. Petersburg Times acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images made at the time, which showed nothing but empty desert.

Next, Hill & Knowlton, an American PR firm, arranged for an appearance before a group of members of Congress in which a young woman identifying herself as a nurse working in the Kuwait City hospital described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and letting them die on the floor. The story helped tip both the public and Congress towards a war with Iraq: six Congressmen said the testimony was enough for them to support military action against Iraq and seven Senators referenced the testimony in debate. The Senate supported the military actions in a 52–47 vote. However, a year after the war, this allegation was revealed to be a fabrication. The young woman who had testified was found to be a member of Kuwait's royal family and the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US. She hadn't lived in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion. After finding no evidence to support the fake testimony, President Bush repeated the incubator allegations on television, over and over.

GE, which profited from the Gulf War, owned NBC and provided more propaganda. The government of Kuwait was a major GE shareholder.

Bush 2 pushed the US into Iraq a second time, again, based on lies about weapons of mass destruction. His administration outed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame. Her identity as a covert CIA operations officer was leaked by officials in the Bush White House to undermine the credibility of her then-husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson, after he criticized the administration's decision to invade Iraq. “I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," he wrote in a NYT op-ed after he was sent to Niger by CIA officials on a mission to investigate the country's sale of uranium to Iraq. Eight days after Wilson published his op-ed, columnist Robert Novak identified Plame as an "agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," and cited two senior administration officials in his piece "Mission to Niger.” The revelation culminated in the conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2007 for lying to the FBI and obstructing justice in the investigation into the leak of Plame's identity. Libby's sentence was commuted by Bush and he was pardoned by Trump.

So, Bush 1, Bush 2, and Tony Blair lied, ruined the lives of their own citizens who opposed the war and exposed the lies, and are responsible for the deaths of members of their militaries and of Iraqi citizens. And, none were held accountable. Terrible.