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It's interesting, though, to think back through events in England re Iraq. I remember reading the whopping poll figure of 80% of the British people opposed to the Iraq War. How could the government ignore that? Here it was 60% (all polls, Feb. '03, just before the invasion). But it's not difficult to understand Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld spitting on U.S. public opinion (with the New York Slimes' help). That's what they were all about. They were a corpo-fascist junta. Blair, however, never really fit their mold, despite what a shit he was (and is). It's kind of like imagining Kerry or Obama bombing/invading Iraq and slaughtering a hundred thousand innocent people in the first weeks of bombing alone, in defiance of public opinion. Either one of them is capable of continuing an occupation (Iraq) and a war (Afghanistan), but starting one, in defiance of a huge majority, abandoning even lip service to world peace and international law? Even Obama's lawless bombing of Libya has involved only a limited commitment and no invasion. He didn't start it (that we know of, anyway); he's just sort of riding in on it, with NATO cover. And Blair seemed like that kind of "liberal." So I was actually surprised when he hooked up with the Bushwhacks on their murder and mayhem binge. I could only figure that England badly needed the oil, and their oil corps, war profiteers and global trade interests were kneecapping the "poodle" and overriding any concerns he may have had about public opinion. Or something like that. He was awfully gung-ho, though.
Anyway, thinking back about Murdoch during that period and his wiretapping and hacking ops, you gotta wonder about blackmail.
Something else that occurs to me is the media hounding of David Kelly--the insider whistleblower, who told the BBC about the pre-war "sexed up" WMD intel report (the "Dodgy Dossier"), Kelly questioning the premises of the war (which was raging in Iraq at the time--summer '03). He spoke anonymously, and the BBC protected his identity--infuriating the Blair government. They instituted a high profile "hunt" for the whistleblower. There were all sorts of mysterious things happening around his identity becoming known. Somebody ratted on him, apparently, which prompted him to go to his bosses and admit talking to a BBC reporter anonymously. British intel authorities interrogated him at a "safe house" and threatened him with the Official Secrets Act. Blair was informed (on 7/7/03*--Hutton Report) that Kelly "could say" some "uncomfortable things" if he was forced to testify before a Parliamentary defense committee. He went before the committee and partially recanted. At this point, his photo was splashed on every newspaper and TV screen in England. It was a media frenzy. The government then sent him home, without protection and apparently without surveillance. He turned up dead, ten days later, in highly questionable circumstances. (Kelly, a top bio/chem scientist, supposedly sat down under a tree, on his routine walk near his home, slashed one ulnar artery--generally not a fatal injury--with a pocket knife and bled to death outdoors all night under the tree. In the phony Hutton inquiry, nobody ever asked where his "watchers" were while this was happening. For surely they were watching him!)
Figuring Murdhoch into this sequence of events--Kelly getting identified, Kelly being the center of a media frenzy, Kelly getting no protection from government and ending up (very likely) murdered for having called the war into question at a crucial moment (or for something else he knew, and had not yet disclosed, on the same subject)--makes you wonder, as to the coziness of Murdoch with government officials. Murdoch spying is possibly a new to factor in the Kelly story.
One other thing: The Blairites viciously attacked the BBC, and that attack is not over. The BBC is suffering downsizing, drastic staff cuts, defunding, etc., and has become corporate propagandistic on at least one issue--the Latin American left. I've been quite shocked by some of their reporting on Latin America, it is so biased. And of course a truly independent public news broadcaster--most especially one with the prestige and reputation of the BBC--would clearly be seen by Murdoch as a "target" to be taken down.
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*(Valerie Plame was outed one week later, on 7/14/03. Kelly found dead on 7/18/03. And Plame's Brewster-Jennings front company--front for the CIA WMD counter-proliferation project--was outed on 7/23/03. Kelly outed and probably murdered, and Plame outed and some of her agents/contacts around the world probably murdered, all within two weeks. Given the Bushites' and the Blairites' contempt for public opinion, I don't think either of these things had to do with bad publicity about the war--i.e., Joe Wilson's op-ed (7/6/03) and Kelly's whistleblowing (late May '03). I think they had to do with something harder to see--possibly a plan to seque the Iraq War right into Iran, then and there, by a false "find" of WMDs in Iraq that were traceable to Iran--a plan that got foiled--for which the Plame outings were retribution and the murder of Kelly was a coverup, preventing him from disclosing something about the WMD plot. The WMD's would have had to be imported to Iraq. Kelly had contacts in Iraq. He had been a UN weapons inspector in Iraq. Plame was a WMD expert on Iran. This was not about publicity. It was an internal government struggle over widening the war, which wasn't resolved until Rumsfeld was ousted in 2006, which I think was Bush Sr.'s doing, in collaboration with the CIA and the military brass, who did not want to take on Iran, a much better-defended country--one of the risks being a Mideast-wide nuclear war with China, Russia and Israel coming into it.)
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