dodgy dossier
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Damn! What a Week (and it’s only Wednesday) By William Bowles
Hard to know where to begin what with Blair desperately seeking solutions. Kay, Jones, Powell and co, all spilling the beans (not, I add of the ricin kind) and jumping ship in what now looks remarkably like a total rout for the imperium. Blair protests in Parliament that Saddam’s ‘plans’ are pretty much the same… Continue reading
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It’s the spies wot gets the blame By William Bowles
“I saw evidence that was categoric on Saddam possessing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Now I saw the evidence, so did the Prime Minister, so did other cabinet ministers. That informed our decision to go topple him. I think we were right in doing so, but let’s wait and see what the jury… Continue reading
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Coitus Interruptus By William Bowles
“US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD”. So goes the headline in the Observer(01/02/04) but the reality is that the US government knew in 1991 that Iraq possessed no WMD as did the UK government. So what’s the argument all about? Why is it so important that a ‘battle royale’ is being conducted… Continue reading
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Franchising the news or how to whitewash a whitewash By William Bowles
In 2002 when I first returned to the UK after many years abroad and started my long period of readjustment to this malignant society, a major part of the process was getting a handle on the media here. I read many of the leading ‘papers, listened to the news and of course watched it on… Continue reading
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Some Old White Guy Does The Whitewash By William Bowles
Do politicians lie? Do fish swim and birds fly? It’s difficult to know where to start with this ‘inquiry’ except to say that Hutton has transformed what was meant to be an investigation into the events surrounding the alleged suicide of Dr David Kelly and his being ‘outed’ by the government into a total whitewash… Continue reading
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The war on everything By William Bowles
There is a direct correlation between imperialism’s increasingly desperate economic state and its urge to go to war, only now it’s declared war on the entire planet, a sure indication of capitalism’s inability to deal with its inbuilt and rapidly escalating contradictions. Consider the wars it has declared over the past 100 years: the ‘war… Continue reading
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9/11: “That’s some bad pilot” By William Bowles
Winning the war against Communism, contrary to all our expectations (the ‘peace dividend’ etc) were not to be realised. Instead, the way was open for the West to conquer those parts of the world and its resources that had been denied to it. But in order to rationalise its reinvigorated imperialist objectives a new ‘enemy’… Continue reading
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Iraq: The Big Lie Gets Even Bigger By William Bowles
With the willing complicity of the mass media, including the craven BBC, the real story, occasionally alluded to but never pursued, is that the decision to invade Iraq was made at least a year ago if not immediately after 9/11. And the government’s ‘attack’ on the BBC following the Kelly ‘revelation’ was an attempt to… Continue reading
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Iraq: Flawed, selective, distorted and mistaken? Selling the big lie By William Bowles
About the only thing the media won’t entertain is the idea that invading Iraq was always the basis of Blair’s policy and that all the squirming and changes of justification flow from this basic premise. How else does one describe the way the media worms its way through the mire and deliberately avoids the lies… Continue reading
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A marriage made in hell By William Bowles
The media’s response to the ‘revelations’ of the Hutton inquiry reveals more about the nature of corporate journalism than it does about the role of the government’s propagandists. And especially, the back-peddling being performed in an attempt to justify the complicity of the media in not seeing what was patently obvious to anyone who cared… Continue reading
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Dr David Kelly, the real deal: preserving the integrity of the state By William Bowles
17 August 2003 It is instructive as well as fascinating to follow the convoluted trail of disinformation and hyperbole in the government and the media’s attempts to transfer the blame from one individual to another in the agenda of diverting attention from the central issue, namely why we went to war. Continue reading
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Discovered! Shoal of Giant Red Herrings By William Bowles
The government’s propaganda campaign to scare the populace into accepting an unacceptable war, has, with the grovelling complicity of the media, including the so-called liberal arm of the press, entered a new but depressingly familiar phase. Continue reading
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The Death of Dr David Kelly: Opening a can of worms By William Bowles
It is being suggested that he went through some kind of ‘sea change’ last year during his frequent visits to Iraq as part of the Unmovic inspection team and that he was convinced that Iraq had indeed, destroyed its CBW weapons. According to an unnamed analyst quoted by the Independent, he became disillusioned with the… Continue reading
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Opening a can of worms By William Bowles
And at last, we have official confirmation that the claims by the government that Iraq got uranium from Niger at any time, is completely untrue. According to the report in the Independent, The French Ambassador, Denis Vène told the Sunday Telegraph that it was “impossible for uranium to leave the country without French officials knowing… Continue reading
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Mind your language! By William Bowles
In this critical situation, as the Imperium girds its loins in preparation for the next round of recolonisation, it’s important that we keep our eye on the ball. Will the Kelly affair divert us rather than inform us? I can already see the questions; ‘Did he jump or was he pushed?’ What is clear is… Continue reading
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A conspiracy of silence? By William Bowles
This morning, on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, Jack Straw went through a tortuous process of trying to cover his tracks and if it hadn’t been for the fact that the interviewer, John Humphries, let him off the hook at every critical stage of the interview, he would have been revealed for what he is,… Continue reading
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Blair: Tense about Tenses By William Bowles
Backtracking like crazy, the UK government is in a real dilemma. The US which, as we all know, lives on another planet, has let the cat out of the bag and left Blair swinging in the wind with its acknowledgement that the infamous ‘Niger’ fakes were long known to be fakes, indeed well before the… Continue reading
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The never-ending story: 45 minutes from Niger By William Bowles
The dossiers of September 2002 and February 2003 are revealing for a number of reasons. Firstly, they illustrate just how unsure the government was about its ability to convince an extremely skeptical public and the lengths it was prepared to go to in order win us over. Continue reading
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Exaggeration By William Bowles
The farce of an ‘investigation’ into the ‘rush to war’ continues in the UK as does the media’s complicity in presenting the reasons entirely divorced from the context and history of the trajectory of Western imperialism. The main argument being advanced by ‘critics’ of the war in Parliament, is that the government ‘exaggerated’ the threat… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 