Blair on the Road to Chilcot, While Britain Buries David Kelly Again

While former Prime Minister Tony Blair prepares to testify before Britain's Chilcot Commission investigating the circumstances surrounding Blair and the British governments lies to go to war with Iraq in 2003, England has put the country on "severe" terror alert. What Islamic terrorist would want to stop this information from becoming public? What the British fear is their own people, outraged by revelation of how their government sucked up to America and helped game the evidence for going to war.

The script for war was sent out to the satraps in the Commonwealth, as evidenced by the near-identical, word-for-word speeches given at the time by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Austalia. Watch, for both the laughs, and the tears:



H/T whitewidow at Daily Kos, in comments thread on a diary covering the news that Lord Hutton of Britain has locked away the evidence around the death of David Kelly for 70 years!

Re David Kelly and the second round of cover-up surrounding his death, see The Brits Buried Evidence on David Kelly’s Death over at FDL/Emptywheel.

As I wrote last December:

Kelly was reportedly believed to be behind a leak to "the source of a [BBC] story that Tony Blair's government 'sexed-up' its dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq." According to the Daily Mail, Kelly predicted he might be killed. Yet the coroner's investigation into his death was halted by the British government, which declared an inquiry by cronies of British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be sufficient.

Whether it's covering up the evidence of a government killing in Great Britain, or here in the U.S., where a scandal over the attempt to paint torture murders at Guantanamo as "suicides" has recently exploded, the larger picture is of a world in deep, deep trouble. The leaders of the world stand exposed as criminals. They promote war to enrich the "defense" industries, they lie about "terror" threats, while soaking up billions of dollars in what is essentially a shake-down protection scheme. Meanwhile, the economy remains in the hands of the drunken millionaries and billionaires who tried to drive it over the cliff, and hang on with a death grip to the steering world, demanding they remain in control.

If there's anything even worse than all this, it's the cowardice or corruption (most likely both) of the mainstream U.S. press, and particularly its supposed exemplars, the New York Times and the Washington Post, who have reported on none of the above. (At least, that's true of late. The Post, for instance, carried some AP stories on the Chilcot inquiry, and one story by staff reporter Walter Pincus. But neither have done more than perfunctorily run a wire story on the Guantanamo murders.)

A live and thriving blogosphere, and the presence of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, plus the courage and ongoing work of crusading bloggers and journalists like Marcy Wheeler, Jeremy Scahill, Andy Worthington, Jason Leopold, and others, keeps the news from being totally throttled. Access to the press online in other countries, like al-Jazeera or the British and Canadian press, is a way to keep up to date. But in America, the capitalist land par excellance, the cultivation of ignorance and denial in the face of terrible crimes and ongoing abuses is honored and respected by the educated elite, while the public feeds on hi-def sports and trivial spectacle.