Pit Boss:Blair's Dark Kingdom- Chris Floyd

[Clara T]

Pit Boss:Blair's Dark Kingdom

Friday, 24 February 2006

Britain's New Statesman magazine has put together a powerful package of stories detailing how the government of George W. Bush's beloved disciple, Tony Blair, is "persecuting innocent people, tearing up our freedoms and undermining the judiciary." The basis of the stories is a new, blistering report from Amnesty International on the degraded state of civil liberties in the UK today.

The first NS story, Shamed, by Martin Bright, gives an overview of the Amnesty report. Two other stories are not available on the NS website, but your good Uncle Burlesque has kindly provided you with the texts.

The first of these, When Even Actors Aren't Safe,  details the remarkable story of Rizwan Ahmed, who played a leading role in the award-winning new film, Road to Guantanamo. Ahmed played one of the Tipton Three, young Britons who were railroaded into Bush's concentration camp and held there for years, despite a plethora of evidence for their innocence. (I first wrote about them in March 2004: The Pentagon Archipelago: Trapped in a Net of State Terrorism). Ahmed was returning home to Britain after the film's celebrated showing at the Berlin Film Festival when he was nabbed at a UK airport and given the treatment. He was lucky not to have ended up in Guantanmo himself.

The other story, Squandering a Precious Heritage, is from Philippe Sands, one of Britain's leading human-rights lawyers (who, ironically, serves in the same law chambers as one Cherie Booth, better known to the world as Mrs. Tony Blair). Sands has also written an important new book, Lawless World, detailing the reckless destruction of the system of international law built up after World War II.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=500&Itemid=1

[babylonsister]

1. It still amazes me that yet again I've not been aware of what's

going on, at the moment in GB, despite all the reading I do. Citizens are being oppressed in so many places. What else aren't we being told?

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Ironically, the worst of Blair's ideas are often stopped in the unelected

House of Lords (most of them are now appointments for life; a very few are still herediary lords, who were 'elected' by the all of the hereditary lords when most of them were removed). Apart from them, his authoritarian attempts can be stopped by a coalition of the Conservatives, Lib Dems, other minor parties, and rebel Labour MPs - but not many of them rebel frequently.