Quick review: Murder in Samarkand by Craig Murray

Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror by Craig Murray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a strange book – part political thriller, part confessional, part sexcapade. He isn’t a journalist and not really a hero, more like a normal person with faults but decides to not be part of the lies that feed the horrific work of US and British politicians and military strategists (terrorists). I was hoping it would be grittier.

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The Chill in the Bones of the Puppet Masters

Nice title.  I could sell it to a hack novelist. 🙂

George Galloway writes in The Morning Star:

-o-

All the lies deployed to justify the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan took this great lie as their premise – that the West must bomb and blast the people of those countries into “democracy” because they are incapable of changing their societies themselves.

The fall of Ben Ali and the rise of the Egyptian masses has put paid to that essentially racist stereotype. The women in Egypt – young and old, with hijabs or not, university educated and from the slums – are showing that they do not need Laura Bush or Cheri Blair giving a faux-feminist gloss to F16s to liberate them. The sisters are doing it for themselves alongside men drawn from across the base of Egyptian society.

And the US State Department, British Foreign Office and French Quai d’Orsay don’t like it one bit. It’s not only their close personal connections with the torturing regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak which now stand fully exposed. We know a little about Tony Blair, who still found Mubarak a force for good as the death toll from his clinging onto power climbed above 300.

More is at stake than these politicians’ personal connections with Mubarak. The cornerstone of decades of US and Western policy of holding down the mass of the people in the region in the interests of oil, corporate control of trade and investment and Israel is shattering. Every Arab despot ruling the region almost without exception from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf knows it. Which is why the wind of change that is intoxicating their people is bringing a chill to each of those regimes.

-o-

Obama and Clinton, get on the bandwagon!

I wonder if we can make Obama and Clinton sign this petition.

Click here to stand with the Egyptian protesters

Join citizens around the world standing with the democracy protestors in Egypt: sign the statement of solidarity! The internet blackout can’t block radio signals–so the number of signatures will air on radio stations in neighboring countries that reach over the Egyptian border.

-o-

And please no more doublespeak

Bush’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Witness Found Dead

FROM A.N.S.W.E.R.

The cover-up of Bush-era crimes is taking a shocking but not unexpected turn. A fateful move has been made and it is certain to backfire.

A prisoner who was horribly tortured in 2002 until he agreed – at the demand of Bush torturers – to say that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam Hussein is suddenly dead. Several weeks ago, Human Rights Watch investigators discovered the missing inmate and talked to him. He had been secretly transferred by the administration to a prison in Libya after having been held by the CIA both in secret “black hole prisons” and in Egypt.

Under conditions of extreme torture, the prisoner, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, agreed in 2002 to supply the Bush-ordered interrogators what they sought as a political cover for Bush’s marketing of the pending war of aggression against Iraq. Mr. Libi agreed to tell them whatever they wanted in exchange for an end to the torture. The now famous Torture Memos providing legal cover for the torture were written at the same time starting in the summer of 2002.

Libi’s tortured and knowingly fabricated testimony was the source of information used by Bush to sell the war to the U.S. Senate, and the source for Colin Powell’s bogus and lying presentation to the United Nations in 2003.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are now running around saying that the torture regime “protected the country from terrorist attack.” But the torture was used for the personal political goals of Bush and Cheney: namely, to sell their Iraq invasion to a very skeptical and disbelieving country.

Having been discovered by human rights investigators two weeks ago, Mr. Libi’s story coincided with the release of the Torture Memos and the growing clamor for criminal prosecutions of Bush officials.

His testimony is the smoking gun that would reveal that the torture regime was not for “national security” but for the personal political aims of Bush and Cheney.

He was Exhibit A in the indictment that alleges that tortured confessions and the contrived legal justifications of torture set up by Justice Department lawyers in July/August 2002 were central to the launch of the war against Iraq.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died and tens of thousands of U.S. service members have either been killed or badly wounded in a war that was based on lies fortified and promoted by the most sadistic torture.

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Tiny Seeds of Terrorism: Nano-thermite?

A very good friend from another part of the world told me about this video.

Myths and Bloodstains

“I am deeply alarmed by the current escalation of violence
in and around Gaza. This is unacceptable.”
Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary General
30 December 2008

“Israel has been supplying comprehensive humanitarian aid
to the Gaza Strip and has even been stepping this up by the day.”
Tzipi Livni, Israeli Foreign Minister
31 December 2008

It may be hard for anyone to imagine
I was once a little girl,
filling a small pot with handfuls
of moist soil, making room
for a fragile seedling.

Now I can’t remember
the last time I planted
something that took time
to grow.

Today I had someone do my fingers
after a cleansing.
The faintest hint
of pink, nothing darker.

Soon three more ministers
and a president will try
to give me a squeeze.
Like all others, their hands
will grow weak as I stand
on burgundy heels.
My firm smile alone
will make them squirm.

I wonder if I should put on
that elegant black suit
worn only once, next to Condee
Rice, a string of pearls
tracing the lines on my neck.
I would have preferred
a choker. Even so, I made her look
even smaller.

This pair of earrings,
twisted “O”s,
will make my hair seem
less stiff and straight.

Details are forever crucial.
I know.

-o-
Land Theft

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