Covers the current situation in Khazakhstan. One of the most chilling chapters deals with what can happen to protestors in Khazakhstan.
Even more chilling, how the ruling elite manipulate the international press.
If you don’t hate Tony Blair already, this will help you cross that line in a big way.
https://www.amazon.com/Kleptopia-Dirty-Money-Conquering-Worl...
I work in an investment bank, on the trading floor, and when I hear reports on how we're supposed to be and act, I feel it is so different from how people actually are and think. For instance, they ignore incompetence and always assign to malice, they think being legit is less important to us than robbing money, they always describe us as amoral, parasitic, conspiratorial. It's an enticing narrative each time, but except when they have actual email exchanges (like the Millenium emails during the Maddoff SEC investigation - that painted the right picture, professional, missing information, imperfect but not anti-blue collar conspiracy lol), I can't really trust it anymore.
The FinCEN files by BuzzFeed were so trash, it was surreal to hear... We gave regulatory reports they leaked irresponsibly about suspicious activity by our fee-paying clients we are forbidden to tip off by refusing to talk to them, and we're now "hiding crime", maybe even "facilitating" it, tsk. They warned a lot of people that day, good job.
It’s focused on the UK, but portrays the US legal and regulatory as system pretty positive compared the UK/EU (early 2010s).
When justice happens, it tends to happen in America.
Organizations like the FBI, FDIC, and US Attorneys are very powerful compared to their European counterparts.
Courts are much less corrupt as well.
I'd correct you buy saying: "when justice happens in the US, it tends to be very punitive and detailed", maybe ? I really don't think the U.S. provides fairer reparation than Germany or Sweden, it's just difference legal ideologies.
Corrupt politicians use innuendo and hatred to corrupt politicians to attack their opponents in the West.
As their opponents are often corrupt themselves, you can’t just look at the narrative. After all the narrative is: “corrupt politicians are doing these horrible things; stop them!”
This sort of reporting is very hard and very fact dependent.
It contains horror stories of the Khazakh leader using Western courts to persecute his opponents.
That’s possible because (a) the opponents aren’t saints, and (b) money is necessary to buy justice.
The dictators use money to hire western lawyers, western lawyers to win court cases, won court cases to establish facts, facts to destroy opponents legal status, fewer opponents to get more power, and power to get more money.
Power -> money -> lawyers/consultants (Tony Blair) -> truth -> power.
I don’t get it.
Prime Minister in the UK cannot go to war without parliament’s approval.
Parliament approved invasion with 412 to 149 votes.
Is Tony Blair the scapegoat?
Can someone explain?
But again, did Tony Blair know it was a lie and misled the Parliament?
I remember the Chilcot report, but never read it. It's on my reading list now!
But from your quote, I don't see anything related specifically to Tony Blair?
Again, my point is, the executive power (Government/Prime Minister) came to the legislative power (The Parliament) with a motion to invade another country.
Both powers were using the same intelligence that they believed were genuine at the time, debated it for days, and then decided with 412 to 149 votes to start the invasion.
Why Tony Blair is singled out, for something in hindsight, and the other 411 people are given a pass?
My very simplistic understanding is that he is singled out because he was responsible for pressing on it and the thing was voted based on the “evidence” he was presenting.
My understanding is also that Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld are treated equally to Blair by some people.
That's unfortunate. The fact of the matter is that it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who personally architected the lie. Bush, Blair, et al, deserve plenty of blame for abrogating the duties of their leadership, but the history lesson here is that you don't ever let people like Cheney and Rumsfeld through the front door. Not because they're malicious (I admittedly always found Rumsfeld's politics beguiling), but because they're instigators and prime movers that won't hesitate to abuse power for their desired ends. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Notably, the Bush campaign and administration had plenty of warning (including from conservatives) about who they were inviting into their inner circle. That, of course, makes Bush doubly culpable for a failure in leadership. But Bush's failures are of a different kind, and if we equivocate with those of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their undersecretaries, we'll have learned nothing.
Didn't the US and UK both fabricate "evidence"? Even then, it was obvious to many observers that the evidence simply wasn't credible, and the only outcome was disaster.
The Hutton Report claimed that the dossier was not sexed up (as the BBC claimed) and that it's all the BBCs fault. A few years later, Chilcott report basically said that the government did lie.
Your point that the legislature voted on the invasion is a reasonable one, but Blair's government gave them incorrect information on which to base their vote.
Blair was the head of the government that produced that bad intelligence. It makes sense to single him out.
"The buck stops here," and all that.
Yes. This is why the British troops were under-equipped because Tony Blair was intentionally holding back the knowledge that the choice to invade had already been made but he couldn't do this while also requesting parliament to fund war funding.
He was holding two narratives open at the same time. The public one where everything was above board, following all approved channels, ratified by the UN and due to WMD that he used to gain approval from the UK and a private one where it was clear the UK would go to war with the US regardless of what transpired.
Now, you may ask yourself why would Iraqi scientist store WMD in glass beads, when those shatter easily and offer nearly nothing in return (maybe WMD doesn't react with glass, but then just use a glass canisters)? Was that some anal fetish or something?
It's because "" The source "" used Michael Bay movies as inspiration.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obv...
They put the nasty stuff into test tube, then melt the tube shut. The result is a glass bubble filled with poison.
This makes it easier to store, move etc.
The movie portrayed glass bubbles of nerve gas as a way to deploy nerve gas, which makes no sense.
It also portrays glass a fragile, which isn’t true.
But scientists in a laboratory storing toxic chemicals in “glass beads” is very much something that “checks out.”
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/politique-canad...
"Their proof wouldn't even convince one of the local court judge here!"
"If we begin to remove every dictator, who's going to be next? Why not Robert Mugabe? They told me he's not the same than Saddam. Well of course he doesn't have oil!"
Many people may not remember or may be too young. Those Feb and March protests were the biggest protest ever in history across the whole western world. "According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of 15 and 16 February." (WP) Police estimates for London, UK were 750k, but they were likely higher.
I left work one evening when they first began bombing and marched through the streets of Toronto and the energy was crazy. The following saturday protest was 100,000 people at least and a lot calmer, but outside the US embassy the atmosphere was intense, angry and electric. It was much larger in Montreal if I recall.
I’m very glad Canadians made their voices heard, and their leaders listened.
But those protestors weren’t exactly questioning the (non-existent) evidence, as they were saying “fuck the Americans.”
It reminded me of footage from the Seattle 1999 WTO protests.
It’s better that be said before a war, rather than during. But still not fun to watch.
I don't have a reason to believe this is false, but do you have a reliable source confirming this?
In 1999 Blair used "Queen's Consent" (the notional requirement that consent of the monarch must be sought in order to substantially alter their powers, but in practice these are government powers and so consent is sought from the government) to get rid of a Bill that would actually have required this, the "Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill".
This isn't because Blair couldn't have won a vote and disposed of the bill but because he knew it would be embarrassing and indeed the embarrassment anyway resulted in the (non-binding) Approval bill you cited which has 412 Aye votes.
Even having a vote ("Division") is embarrassing. It forced Labour members who might have told their electorate over and over that they oppose war to choose, stick by their principles that war is abhorrent, and risk deselection for coming out against the stance of their government and many populist pro-war newspapers, or, bend over, vote for the government and hope voters forgive them when it inevitably all goes wrong.
Now, ultimately Parliament is sovereign and so you can argue everything "requires parliamentary approval", but only in sense that silence signifies approval because as a sovereign entity it could intervene but it does not.
If Parliament really didn't want the UK to go to war it can in principle get rid of the Prime Minister and install one who won't start a war. If the Speaker tries to stop them (e.g. by refusing to recognise a member who stands to propose "That This House Has No Confidence In Her Majesty's Government" so as to bring down the Prime Minister) the Commons can convene "The Committee of the Whole House" which is identical to the Commons except that they're picking who runs things, whereupon they can get rid of that Speaker, choose a new one, reconvene the Commons and call No confidence. But it isn't going to do that in fact.
Even for Brexit, while there was majority opposition to the obviously disastrous "No deal" plan, there was no majority in support of any other definitive course of action, including replacing the Prime Minister, all that was done was more kicking of cans down the road, until there was no more road.
The invasion of Iraq was an open and blatant breach of the UN charter [0], it was an illegal war of aggression based on lies.
Lies that were so blatant that the whole situation lead to the largest global protest event in human history [1].
And that doesn't even go into the direct consequences of that; Refugees all the way into Western Europe, among them many disgruntled people who felt wronged, serving as potential recruits for an AQ that had by then become world famous thanks to the US.
What that lead to were the first major Islamic terror attacks in Western Europe [2], among them the 2005 London bombings by AQ, which were a direct response to the UK participation in invading Iraq, just like the 2004 AQ attack in Madrid, Spain.
In that context it's not really difficult to see why Tony Blair is such a controversial personality.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
[2] https://www.datagraver.com/case/people-killed-by-terrorism-p...
* Very poorly thought out creation of Scottish Parliament. While not a bad thing, he didn’t consider it to be all that important. Not like it could destroy the United Kingdom or anything.
* Very poorly thought reform of House of Lords. Again not a bad thing, but it hasn’t really improved much.
* Very poorly thought out creation of “Supreme Court.” It was presented as a simply a rebranding of the law lords, but now it’s much more powerful, which was never the intent.
* Not terribly interested in privacy.
* Unhealthy dependence on the EU. His motivation for the above was “the EU will take care of this so who cares.” This was a problem before Brexit.
* Incompetence, and lack of care. Notice how many of these points say “not itself a bad thing.” He lots of “not bad itself” things in a bad manner.
* Fucking Rupert Murdoch’s wife.
Why should we hate him for this? Sounds like its own punishment.
And the ex-Mrs Murdoch probably has a case of buyers remorse.
Would lack of UK support have been sufficient to deter the US? Who knows, probably not given the neocon lunatics in the White House at the time. Harold Wilson's decision to keep the UK out of Vietnam was in retrospect a wise decision, and no doubt Blair would have had a better reputation had he made the same choice.
That all said, Blair's post-PM career seems to involve toadying up to every dictator left on the planet (in marked contrast to his successor Gordon Brown's work supporting refugees and global vaccination) so maybe his reputation is well-deserved after all.
I don't get this.
He cannot just "decide to take Britain to Iraq", since the UK Government cannot start a war without Parliament's approval.
He came to the Parliament with the available intelligence at the time, and after days of debates, 412 people voted in favour of the invasion.
I would understand the hate if he knew the "irrefutable evidence" shown to United Nation by the Secretary of State was a lie at the time of the vote in Parliament.
But as far I know, he wasn't aware of that.
Is this just a blind hate of a scapegoat? Why are the other 411 people given a pass?
Had Blair decided not to go to war, there would not have been a vote. He was leader of the Labour Party and instructed his whips to ensure MPs voted for war.
> He came to the Parliament with the available intelligence at the time, and after days of debates, 412 people voted in favour of the invasion.
We now know, from the Chilcot inquiry, that Blair knew the intelligence was poor and either deliberately misled Parliament or allowed his belief to blind his judgement. Either conclusion is damning.
Declaring war and deploying troops is a power held by the Crown (which will do it on request of its government). Parliamentary approval is not required, parliament merely can hold a no-confidence vote and remove the government afterwards if it disagrees.
The Afghanistan war just a bit earlier was debated in parliament, but not actually voted on by parliament.
For Iraq, there was a formal vote for the first time, but again, not a formal authorization that would have had legal force - although loosing it realistically would have collapsed Blairs government once he committed to having the vote. (And also made any Labour MPs voting against it not just the MPs who were against the war, but also the MPs who forced their government to fail).
Admittedly, I'm not sure there's much of a meaningful difference between the two. If an MP doesn't want to go to war, I'd think that a big enough difference if opinion to vote no-confidence. As such if a majority of Parliament didn't want to go to war, they may have taken that step.
Not only that, the 2005 London bombings most likely wouldn't have happened, that was direct retaliation for UK participation in the "coalition of the willing", willing to invade and occupy Iraq as part of a "crusade" on terror.
That aside, Parliament doesn't have to authorize via binding vote on these matters. They get a debate opportunity by normative convention, but any vote they took to override would not be binding unless they were willing to remove the PM.
Nonetheless I think it's fair to place a sizeable portion of the blame on Parliament: They can't decide to go to war, but they do have some levers of power that would stop it, if they were willing to remove their PM. I certainly don't know where I put % blame here, but I'm equally sure Parliament was checking complicit on the issue.
Specifically, the Khazakh leader was giving a speech in the Uk at the same time he was suppressing protests with torture and rape.
Blair wrote up talking points for him to help with damage control.