Revealed - the Two Faces of Tony Blair. They're Both Ugly.

A lot of people realized when Tony Blair jumped aboard the Bush/Cheney bandwagon to conquer Iraq that he was a two-faced weasel.  Now, courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, any lingering doubt about Blair's integrity has been erased, obliterated.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair offered to act as a secret adviser to Rupert Murdoch during his media empire's phone-hacking scandal, suggesting the firm follow steps he took to calm public anger over the Iraq war, a London court has heard.

Rebekah Brooks, the ex-boss of Murdoch's British newspapers, wrote an email to Murdoch's son James detailing advice Blair had given her during an hour-long phone call in July 2011 at the height of a furore over phone-hacking allegations at the media mogul's News of the World tabloid.
 
"He (Blair) is available to you, KRM and me as an unofficial adviser but needs to be between us," said the email from Ms Brooks to James Murdoch, who at the time ran News Corporation operations in Britain. KRM refers to Rupert Murdoch's initials.

 

Ms Brooks said Mr Blair had counselled: "It will pass. Tough up." Four days later she quit her job and she was arrested by police two days after that.

The email was sent the day after News Corporation closed the 168-year-old News of the World in the face of huge public anger over revelations that its staff had hacked into the voicemail messages of a murdered schoolgirl.

Mr Blair's suggestions to Ms Brooks contrast with a public statement he made three days before their phone call, when he had denounced the hacking scandal as "beyond disgusting".

The email also demonstrates just how close Ms Brooks and Rupert Murdoch were to Britain's elite, a relationship critics said allowed him to use his British newspapers to influence politicians for the benefit of his business interests.

Greasy Tony, greasy - you despicable, jumped up little shit.

Do We Really Need Des to Tell Us This?

Desmond Tutu wants Tony Blair and George w. Bush tossed into the prisoners' dock before the International Criminal Court.   The Archbishop wants the pair tried for the invasion of Iraq.

Tutu, a Nobel peace prize winner and hero of the anti-apartheid movement, accuses the former British and US leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction and says the invasion left the world more destabilised and divided "than any other conflict in history".

Writing in the Observer, Tutu also suggests the controversial US and UK-led action to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003 created the backdrop for the civil war in Syria and a possible wider Middle East conflict involving Iran.

"The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain," Tutu argues, "fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us."

But it is Tutu's call for Blair and Bush to face justice in The Hague that is most startling. Claiming that different standards appear to be set for prosecuting African leaders and western ones, he says the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict is sufficient on its own for Blair and Bush to be tried at the ICC.

"On these grounds, alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague," he says.

Unfortunately the noble Archbishop doesn't get the doctrine of "victors' justice" that guarantees the world will have to do a considerable degree of changing before any head of state of countries like the U.S. or Britain will be standing before the International Court of Justice.  

For his part, Tony Blair, wasted no time responding.

In a statement, Blair strongly contested Tutu's views and said Iraq was now a more prosperous country than it had been under Saddam Hussein. "I have a great respect for Archbishop Tutu's fight against apartheid – where we were on the same side of the argument – but to repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown.

Yeah, sure, Tony.

Hans Blix on Iraq War: "I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war"

Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix pulled no punches in his appearance before the independent panel examining Britain's part in the Iraq war.   As far as he's concerned it was an illegal war.

"Some people maintain that Iraq was legal. I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war.  There can be cases where it is doubtful, maybe it was permissible to go to war, but Iraq was, in my view, not one of those."

From the Global Security Newswire:

"I think the U.S. at the time was high on military," Blix, a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at today's hearing. "They felt that they could get away with it (an invasion), and therefore it was decided they would do so."



Blix said today that U.N. inspectors checked 500 facilities but found very little proof of illicit weapons efforts in Iraq in the months before March 2003, the BBC reported. He cited missiles with ranges beyond what was allowed by the United Nations, missile engines and records among the discoveries.


"We carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time," Blix said."All in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction."


He added that it was difficult for Iraq "to declare any weapons when they did not have any."


Blix argued that U.N. resolutions issued before the invasion did not create a legal standing for the war.