The EU Summit, Hampton Court, Thursday 27th October.
Below
is a leaflet prepared by Roshan Pedder,
handed out to passing members of the public during the demonstration organised
by KPC on Hampton Court Bridge during the arrival and departure of the European
Heads of State (see photo).
1.0 “THE SECURITY
OF OUR CITIZENS”
The
above is one of the items on the agenda being discussed by EU heads of
government at a meeting hosted by our Prime Minister Mr. Tony Blair.
As citizens living in a democracy, as citizens who are likely to be
targets of the next terrorist act, we ask you too to consider whether the
Bush/Blair war in Iraq and the continued presence of our troops there makes us
more or less secure here at home. Below
is a small selection of facts and quotations- from pillars of the
establishment.
On February
10 2003, a month
before the onslaught on Iraq, Whitehall's joint intelligence committee told
Tony Blair that "al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent by
far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that threat
would be heightened by military action against Iraq". It
added that the collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical
and biological warfare agents or technology finding their way into the hands of
terrorists.
The Downing Street memo.
Leaked to the Sunday Times just before the election, contained a slew of striking
revelations. It minuted a meeting of Blair, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon and
a clutch of top officials back on July 23 2002
- when both Bush and Blair were adamant that no decision had been taken - and
confirms that, on the contrary, Washington had resolved to go to war. Despite
Straw's insistence that the case against Saddam was "thin", the
course was set. According to the memo, Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6,
explained that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action,
justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy."
On the 18th July ’05, the Royal Institute of International Affairs
published a paper co-written by Paul Wilkinson, a professor at the University of St Andrews. He is no radical polemicist, rather an epitome of
conventional wisdom. "The UK is at particular risk," warns the paper, "because
it is the closest ally of the United States" and joined US-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. It says a key problem facing the government is that it
"has been conducting counter- terrorism policy 'shoulder to shoulder' with
the US, not in the sense of being an equal decision-maker, but rather as a
pillion passenger compelled to leave the steering to the ally in the driving
seat".
Lord Steyn the recently
retired Law Lord agreed with Justice Lord
Alexander of Weedon that the Iraq war was unlawful and "in its search for a
justification in law for war the government was driven to scrape the bottom of
the legal barrel". And, finally, the coup de grâce: "After the
dreadful bombings in London we were asked to believe that the Iraq war did not make the world a more dangerous place. Surely,
on top of everything else, we do not have to listen to a fairy tale." Comment:
“Blair is using
the London bombing to further deplete our rights and those of others, as Bush
has done in America. Their goal is not security, but
greater control. The memory of their victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere demands the
renewal of our anger. The troops must come home. Nothing less is owed to those
who died and suffered in London on 7 July, unnecessarily, and
nothing less is owed to those whose lives are marked if this travesty endures.
The London bombers were to blame for attacks on civilians that
are neither morally nor politically defensible. But the prime minister - who
was warned by British intelligence of the risks in the run-up to the war - is
also responsible for knowingly putting his own people at risk in the service of
a foreign power.” Seamus Milne The Guardian 14-07-05
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