A Damming COE Report on Extraordinary Rendition, would Mr Blair care to reconsider his position?

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The Council of Europe investigation into Extraordinary Rendition is to report tomorrow and according to Newsnight [listen to a 4mb Lo Fi mp3 grab here]. It is a damming indictment of US and European complicity in a spiders web of rendition flights spun across the globe.

It accuses 14 countries of being involved.

It was only through the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European Partners that this web was able to spread also over Europe.

It finds evidence that there are indeed 'black sites' or secret prisons in Europe, in Poland and or Romania, and that the British Government have handed people over into the rendition and Black sites process.

So perhaps Mr Blair would like to reconsider his recent protestations of ignorance, made at a press conference last December. Do listen, it's only a 200k mp3 file.

I, I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all, and I'm not going to start ordering inquires into this, that and the next thing when I've got no evidence to show whether this is right or not - and I honestly, and you know, it's like all this stuff about camps in Europe or something - I don't know, I've never heard of such a thing.
I can't tell you whether such a thing exists - because, er - I don't know.

Now Mr Blair does know, I wonder if he has anything to add to his previous Home Secretary's protestations of ignorance?

The Guardian has a bit more

The Guardian has a bit more with a breakdown of the extent of European collusion.

"This legal approach is utterly alien to the European tradition and sensibility, and is clearly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

I wonder if anyone will now be held accountable or is that too much to hope for?

It's one thing pandering to

It's one thing pandering to mass public opinion ie France and Germany stance on Iraq invasion. But if these fuckers were not democracies, Arab and Persian oil land would have been invaded long ago.

But rendition, it's secret, it can be denied and fuck those brown people for living in the hot desert on top of black gold.

This is going to get far worse than at present.

"But if these fuckers were

"But if these fuckers were not democracies, Arab and Persian oil land would have been invaded long ago."

Umm, they were invaded a long time ago.

Doughnut, don't expect

Doughnut, don't expect *anyone* to be aware of 20th century history. How many people can tell you when oil was discovered in Persia? Or what British hero first used WMDs on Iraquis? How many people know who Mossadegh was, and what Project AJAX was, and why SAVAK is relevant to the events of 1979? In the US *or* the UK?

If you consider every one of our fellow citizens to be functioning amnesiacs, unless proven otherwise, it'll be much better for your blood pressure...

One of my readers suggested this, inspired by Jonathan Swift. We invite Blairwatch fans and admin to take advantage of the prefab agitprop-on-the-cheap ;)

It seems the Prime Minister

It seems the Prime Minister does not want to talk about rendition.
Ming Campbell raised the issue at PMQs and got nothing but evasion.

The prime minister resorted to the sort of non-answer he has deployed before on this highly-sensitive and potentially damaging issue.

There was nothing new in the latest report so he had absolutely nothing to say about it.

BBC

See?? Usual 'So what?'

See?? Usual 'So what?' response.

Anyone read Blair`s comments

Anyone read Blair`s comments on Fridays raid+shooting? Its on the Indie online page, but here`s a choice excerpt:

"Organised crime is far more vicious. The issue of drugs in crime makes for a sense of lawlessness that is far more profound than before and you have got a general disrespect on the part of certain groups of people. I am quite sure you cannot solve some of these law and order problems unless you are prepared quite profoundly to change and rebalance the system of criminal justice so that you have more summary justice, more summary powers, more ability for quick and effective action to be taken, even if it will cross the line that most people normally think of as there in terms of civil liberties."

So, y`see, the guy really doesn`t give a toss what anyone thinks about what he says and does; he`s just so beyond all that pleasing public opinion stuff now. So his blahblah-sodoff response today to Ming Campbell`s question was only to be expected. He sees himself as some kind of doomed heroic figure, while we see him as an unholy hybrid of El Duce and Thatcher.

A few yobs cause bother on

A few yobs cause bother on the streets and it's 'goodbye human rights, hello police state'. Is he mad? What about social conditions, the design of the urban fabric, economic deprivation? He refuses to address the causes of the problem (you can throw in Iraq as an igniter for jihadi terrorism here) because he's partly to blame for them (remember his pledge to fix sink estates back in 1997?) The Someone Else's Problem field is getting stronger by the day as the walls of the bunker close in.

Right-wingers always justify their laziness by complaining that they'd do something if only there weren't so many rules.

Is he mad?

Is he mad?

It is often untreated mania. He gets fat when he's taking his medication.

Take a look at some news images. Notice how he can look twenty years younger in some of them. Notice how he's sometimes clearly off his trolley.