[continued from previous message] 
  
 No better example of British depthless floundering , was fellow 
 speaker, Muwaffaq Al Rubaie, Iraq's 'government security advisor'. 'The 
 security of Basra is one of our main responsibilities. I address, 
 directly, the governor, the general commander of the security forces in 
 Basra, the provincial council and the people of Basra. Will you agree 
 with militias? Will you engage in corruption? Will you go easy on 
 terrorism?' Asked Rubaie. Thus under the nose of and with General 
 Binns, was speaking the man many respected Iraqi and Middle East 
 experts allege is actually Karim Shaboori, an Iranian, who came in with 
 the invaders and changed his name and acquired himself an Iraqi 
 passport to which he has, allegedly, no entitlement. If correct, stones 
 and glasshouses, again come to mind. 
  
 So unphased by the lynching of Iraq's legitimate President and the 
 horrifying scenes around his body,  Rubaie/Shaboori responded: 'This is 
 the tradition of the Iraqis - when they do something they dance around 
 the body and they express their feelings' - a ' tradition' no Iraqi 
 seems to be aware of. Does General Binns know that Iraqis joke that the 
 dominant language in the 'Iraqi Ministries' in the Green Zone is Farsi 
 (and indeed say many Iraqis, in their Embassies abroad , along with 
 Kurdish, not Arabic.) 
  
 The British stole even the myths and legends from Basra. They took the 
 city known to children world wide, as from where Sinbad left for his 
 magical journeys and named a killing spree on the population (dressed 
 in press briefings as a 'security crackdown') as: 'Operation Sinbad'. 
 They are now illegally inhabiting the airport, of which the city was so 
 proud, when they had rebuilt it, opening again in 2000. Hope returned. 
 The British and Americans of course, bombed it, but damage was repaired 
 within days, to be bombed, repaired again ... Having subsequently 
 destroyed homes, history, lives, 'our boys' are now again doubles 
 'restructuring' the airport. 
  
 What else has Britain's illegal invasion and occupation contributed to? 
 A snapshot : 2.4 million internally displaced; 2.2 million fled (UNHCR) 
 1.1 million  dead  (Just Foreign Policy) 3 million wounded  ('a 
 conservative estimate') 4 million in need of emergency aid  (ICRC) 5 
 million orphans (Iraqi 'government' figures.) As the tireless Dahr 
 Jamail writes: 'Iraqs population at the time of the US invasion in 
 March 2003 was roughly 27 million and today it is approximately 23 
 million. Elementary arithmetic indicates that currently over half the 
 population of Iraq are either refugees, in need of emergency aid, 
 wounded, or dead.' Is this genocide, a holocaust, deliberate 
 de-population, or will the usual suspects just mess around with 
 semantics? 'What we have done in Iraq, are tears in the fabric of 
 history', comments Hussein Al Alak of the  (UK) Iraq Solidarity 
 Campaign. 
  
 Basra's dead have been hard to enumerate (but then the British, 
 historically, were always better at keeping the lid on atrocities for a 
 while. Not 'Perfidious Albion' for nothing.) However, Iraq 'government' 
 figures, in a rare glimpse, revealed  in May 2006, that the previous 
 month, under British Army watch, one person had died violently every 
 hour. The killing after April 2006, certainly did not miraculously 
 stop. How many have the British disappeared, how many are still in 
 British custody, how many have died in British custody - and how many, 
 in the 'hardback', have been handed over to those who will drill their 
 heads and chuck them in to the garbage? Figures are, to say the least, 
 elusive. 
  
 There have been a number of kidnappings (including ones the West 
 noticed, like Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley. Iraqi ones, shamefully, 
 rarely are, in their uncountable numbers) where the request has been to 
 release Iraqi women prisoners (usually held by the occupiers as a 
 bargaining chip for men in the family - totally illegally.) The word 
 was that, as the US denied they held any women , they had in fact 
 transferred them to British custody in Basra. Still, as yet, impossible 
 to prove or disprove. When I heard the story denied by Anthony Charles 
 Lyndon Blair QC., however, I thought again of MP George Galloway, who 
 recounted, as a little boy in Glasgow, running home to tell his Father 
 excitedly: 'Dad, Dad, my teacher says "the sun will never set on the 
 British Empire". ' 
  
 'Aye, son', said his father: 'That's because God would never trust the 
 British in the dark'. 
  
 Meanwhile, Ann Clywd MP (who for years has been dubbed 'Mrs. Talabani' 
 by many) Blair's formerly silent 'human rights' advisor on Iraq, said 
 this week that she was 'right to support the war' to rid the country of 
 brutality. Is she psychologically challenged., or just delusional.? 
 However, as founder of the CIA funded INDICT (launched in the House of 
 Parliament) and a close friend of  the embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, who 
 fed  fairy tales of non-existent weapons of mass destruction  to the 
 British government, the words culpability and duplicity come to mind 
 regarding Ms Clywd. 
  
 As  George Orwell (real name : Eric Arthur Blair) spins in his grave, 
 the other Blair is reinvented as 'Middle East Peace Envoy' and 
 reiterates he has no regrets. He knows 'it was the right thing to do,' 
 and 'I'd do the same thing again'. The terminal patients that are Gaza 
 and Iraq,  the threats to the rest of the region, the misery and 
 torment heaped on the region's humanity, have taken second place to his 
 finding time to appear in a Christmas video with Barney, George Bush's 
 dog, once described as the only sane being in the White House. It 
 shouldn't happen to a dog. And sorry for the pun, but is - as many have 
 speculated for a long while - Blair truly 'barking'? 
  
 The joys of Eid Al Adha escaped Basra and Gaza. The Chaldean Bishop of 
 Basra has 'cancelled' Christmas, as has happened throughout Iraq (with 
 the Eids) for many years now. How can we celebrate amid such death, 
 destruction, deprivation, misery, fear and poverty? he asked. 
  
 In a BBC Panorama programme, aired on 17th December, the night before 
 Eid Al Ahda, presenter Jane Corbyn asked a woman in Basra, who had 
 returned to Iraq after thirty years, after the fall of Saddam Hussein : 
 'What have the British left you?' 
  
 'Nothing', she replied: 'Just misery.' 
  
 And in a December surprise, three days before Christmas and little over 
 a week to the anniversary of  the lynching of  Iraq's legitimate 
 President, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, QC., has announced his 
 conversion to Catholicism. He was received into the Church by the 
 Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O-Connor. 
 Having  morally bankrupted the Palace of Westminster, he has now done 
 the same to its Cathedral. Hope they have enough cleaning staff to wipe 
 the blood from his hands off the church furniture after his visits. As 
 former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray  remarked: 'Perhaps the 
 Catholic church has a dearth of mass murderers in their congregation.' 
 It is all 'madness'. 
  
 (c) 2007 By Felicity Arbuthnot 
  
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