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Showing posts from April, 2005

Damning evidence of Blair's dishonesty

I have never told a lie, Tony Blair insisted on Sky TV last night. But within half an hour, a devastating bombshell on Channel 4 News blew his credibility to smithereens and proved conclusively that over Iraq he was again lying through his teeth. No longer is there any room for doubt. This Prime Minister not only took Britain to war on false pretences. He also misrepresented the confidential legal advice from Attorney General Lord Goldsmith to give a dishonest summary to MPs and even his own Cabinet. Mr Blair has insisted all along that the war was unequivocally legal, that he had been given no caveats or conflicting advice and that the Attorney General had never changed his mind. But those words are now exposed as utterly false. Lord Goldsmith warned that failure to secure a second UN resolution authorising war would force the Government 'urgently' to reconsider its legal case. He warned that to invade Iraq without a second resolution, "we would need to demonstrate hard e

Gut Check

  Chris Floyd Published: April 22, 2005   With fresh indictments last week, the UN oil-for-food scandal took an unexpected turn into the Labyrinth -- the tangled skein of war profiteering and state terrorism that has seen the Bush Family's lust for blood money emerge in three of the darkest criminal episodes in modern American history: Iran-Contra, Iraqgate and the BCCI affair.   Texas oil baron David Chalmers of Bayoil and his partners were hit with criminal charges for allegedly cutting deals with Saddam Hussein in the notorious skim operation that outflanked UN sanctions and diverted funds intended for humanitarian relief. Prosecutors were shocked -- shocked! -- to find such collusion and corruption in the oil business.   Of course, the fact that three U.S. presidents -- the two George Bushes and their new best pal, Bill Clinton -- actually brokered massive backroom oil deals for Saddam that dwarfed Bayoil's petty chiseling, plus the fac

Message in a Bottle

How Coca-Cola Gave Back to Plachimada By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Plachimada, Kerala. W hizzing along the road in the little Tata Indica, driven prestissimo by Sudhi, we crossed the state line from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, branched off the main road and ended up in the settlement of Plachimada, mostly inhabited by extremely poor people. There on one side of the street was the Coca-Cola plant, among the largest in Asia, and on the other a shack filled with locals eager to impart the news that they were now, as of April 2, in Day 1076 of their struggle against the plant. Coca-Cola came to India in 1993, looking for water and markets in a country where one third of all villages are without anything approaching adequate water and shortages are growing every day. Indeed India is facing a gigantic water crisis, even as Coca Cola and other companies haul free water

COMANDANTE!

Oliver Stone Comandante Interviewed by Jen Foley I think honestly, without blowing my horn he did respect me JFK , Nixon, and Natural Born Killers... Oliver Stone has never been one to shy away from controversial topics. Now he turns his hand to documentary filmmaking with Comandante, a portrait of Fidel Castro. Getting a cinematic release in the UK, the film was dropped by American TV network HBO in the wake of the Cuban leader's decision to imprison 75 dissidents and execute three hijackers earlier this year. You've made many films about historic icons, but this is the first time you've used the documentary format. Why now? In 1999 I did Any Given Sunday, which was a very exhausting feature film for me, and it was time to take a little bit of a break. As you know, in the 90s the budgets in Hollywood movies got so big - what was costing $19m in the early 90s wa