Forget the Lion King. Pinocchio is back!
And he's clearly going for the Guinness World record for the number of lies anyone can tell in one day!
Here's Seumas Milne's take on today's events:
Once again, the chance to hold Tony Blair to account is being squandered by questioning that has ranged from the feeble to the shamefully complicit. Faced with such embarrassing cosiness (Lawrence Freedman plumbed the lowest depths), the former prime minister quickly overcame his initial nervousness. Far from conceding any ground over the aggression against Iraq, he repeatedly argued that the same "calculus of risk" now demanded similar action against Iran. The fact that he remains the Quartet's man in the Middle East should be cause for the deepest alarm.....
It's been classic Blair: the lawyerly evasions over the wording of the September 2002dossier, the self-deprecating asides over his Fern Britton interview gaffe, the deliberation conflation of the 9/11 attacks and Iraq's weapons programmes, real or imagined.....
Most outrageous, though, was his repeated and so far barely challenged assertion that Iraq was in "material breach" of repeated UN resolutions. In reality, the fact that Iraq had destroyed its WMD stocks in the 1990s means that it was not in significant breach of the resolutions at all. Even Blair's repeated claims that Iraq was failling to comply with resolution 1441 over inspectors' right to interview officials is simply not supported by Hans Blix's reports of the time.
And here you can read Mehdi Hasan's list of Pinocchio's ten worst Iraq war porkies.
And do you know what was the biggest lie of all? That Pinocchio genuinely believed that Iraq possessed WMD. Because if he had, we can be sure that he would never have attacked the country.
3 comments:
Ah, very good. I posted my own Pinocchio post this morning.
Look, I feel deflated. In the end, all this double-speak and incomprehensible nonsense has won out; at least legally speaking.
It was truly disgusting to see him smirking throughout, but you know what? I think I would too if I had committed a war crime and the stiffest bit of questioning comes from five bumbling arseholes, two of whom have a mancrush on the questionee.
A truly shameful day.
The Attorney General's testimony the day before made it quite clear that he changed his mind to make this war "legal" because of the "precident" of Kosovo producing a "new legal theory" that if anybody can manufacture what looks like a reasonable case then that makes it legal.
Without the "precedent" of support of war criminals like Cook, Short, Livingston & the LibDims supporting going to war to promote genocide on a lie against Yugoslavia there is no way Bliar could have done it again in Iraq.
More and more the ruling-class look like a pre-revolutionary ancien regime.They destroy the capitalist system through laziness,as if sinking the Titanic without hitting an iceberg.They have got used to staying in power by pandering to homeowners and their never-ending appetite for the bribe of house price inflation (which does its part in ruining the economy).They tell lies about Iraq and Afghanistan and the public can't stomach their fiddling their expenses.The next election could be very odd with record low turn-out and what votes cast in favour of some very strange parties indeed.
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