Big heist in Belfast
The police in Northern Ireland have claimed the IRA was behind the Northern Bank robbery. Police raids on republican areas of Belfast have been made with the aim of cowering them. They have come up with no evidence.
New Labour's Northern Ireland's Minister Paul Murphy, relying entirely on the police's unsubstantiated assertions, has also blamed the IRA. The IRA has denied involvement.
The effect of the raid has been to take the heat off Paisley and his refusal to accept the evidence on decommissioning. The failures in the peace process can now be placed at the door of the IRA. New Labour has always hated Sinn Fein's ability to act independently of them and wants them to be brought to heel.
The raid is very convenient for Blair. It lets him off the hook in to having to pressurise the Democratic Unionist Party. The UK press have speculated that the IRA pulled off the raid to finance pensions for its members no longer on active service.
My Uncle in the Yemen has a more logical explanation for the raid. For several years MI6 has been running a campaign to discredit one of the leading fighters for Croatian independence, General Ante Gotovina. One of Ante's closest supporters and the person in charge of his personal security is Tony Cascarino. Tony - known as the Striker - was a leading member of the IRA who went to Croatia to fight against the Serbian invasion. MI6 have been spreading rumours that Tony was behind the bank heist and the money is being used to support Ante.
As my uncle pointed out (once I had decoded his emails) nobody accepts Northern Ireland bank notes outside of Belfast and the brand new ones were never going to be easy to shift. It was always possible, as has now happened, for them to be withdrawn. The press have dropped a number of hints that those pulling off the robbery had inside help. Any inside help would have immediately explained that brand new notes would be no good.
All the evidence, my uncle says, points to an MI6 operation. Blair stood to gain the most and the IRA the least. "Elementary, Mr Watson, as your great detective Sherlock Holmes would have said."
Iraq
It is difficult to make an exact assessment about what is happening in Iraq. One doesn't want to cry wolf. However as the elections get closer there is an impression that the UK and US troops are loosing control. It looks more and more like a Vietnam-style quagmire.
The following items indicate that something serious is happening and it will have serious political consequences throughout the world.
- The US announced just before Bush's inauguration (the timing not being a coincidence) that they have stopped looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Partly because there are none and partly because it has got too dangerous to go out looking.
- Robert Fisk reported in the Independent that the majority of the non-embedded media correspondents no longer leave their compounds in Baghdad for fear of kidnapping or death. The last six months have seen a massive deterioration in everyday security in the city.
- It is so dangerous that the US has flown Saddam Hussain to their base in Qatar.
- John Maude, the former Tory Shadow Foreign Secretary, has written an article in the Times entitled "Why I was wrong about Iraq". He explicitly says that chaos will flourish in the Middle East if Bush's policy continues unchanged. While not going as far as calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops he does make an explicit comparison with Vietnam.
- The newly elected pro-western President of the Ukraine is withdrawing his troops from Iraq.
- The US and the UK have sent extra troops. General Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, has said that 65,000 UK troops have already served in Iraq.
- Because of the huge influence of the Iranian secret service amongst the Iraqi resistance the US is sending Special Forces into Iran and preparing for air strikes.
- The US are using Special Forces assassination and kidnapping squads in Iraq. They are also funding various Iraqi contra groups. Their model is drawn from their campaign against leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. The Iraqi stooge interim President Allawi supports this option. This is not a tactic to produce a stable government through an election. Some elements of the resistance have countered this shadow war by hiring contract killers to take out members of the occupying army. The situation is so desperate the going rate can be as low as $50 per soldier killed.
What is happening in Falluja
The US marines lost more than 50 dead and hundreds wounded in their six-week assault on Falluja. There have also been hundreds of troops who are suffering from mental health problems. The few independent eyewitness accounts of the city write of huge destruction. Those few families who have returned have immediately left as their houses have been completely demolished. Falluja was systematically bombed and rocketed before the marines entered. Most of the insurgents slipped out of the city before the final assault. The handful left took on the marines in the six week battle. The US claim that 1200 insurgents plus a handful of civilians were killed. There has been no independent verification of these figures.
The independent observers who have managed to slip through the US cordon report dead people lying in houses unburied with no evidence they were carrying weapons. The effect of the assault has been to create 300,000 implacable enemies of the occupation. It is no wonder that many of them are saying they will not vote in elections while the US and UK troops remain.
Deaths in the tsunami and deaths in Iraq.
Below is an extract from Tom Engelhardt's website. It also contains some interesting stuff on the CIA.
Only one small spot in the vast Indian Ocean basin "seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to come -- the ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary "aircraft carrier" for the war in Iraq. It also houses "Camp Justice," one of the secret little hideaway resorts the administration has set up, or contracted out for, on prime global real estate to hold "high value" prisoners in the war on terror. The camp, named by someone who must have had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by the Bush administration -- two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and practices far from the prying eyes of the American public and its court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored in that jewel-in-the-crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo to devotees) -- a grim prison camp set up on territory in Cuba that is close at hand, U.S.-controlled, and yet -- or so Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year -- beyond the reach of our courts.
On military bases like Diego Garcia and in special military- or CIA-controlled prisons like Guantanamo, the "war on terrorism" was to be carried to its informational climax by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had. Whether in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, on Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, on U.S. Navy ships at sea, or outsourced to the friendly jails of allied nations whose interrogators practice torture, this varied and ever developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of criminal imprisonment -- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for "World War IV," the war after the Cold War and expected by neocon devotees to last at least as long. Now, according to the latest report from Dana Priest of the Washington Post, the administration is considering exactly how to turn forever into a series of post-penal establishments capable of coping with the realities of life imprisonment beyond all charges and to the end of time.
Pensions
By the end of 2006 European Union legislation has to be brought into the UK to prevent discrimination against older people. New Labour will bring in the law at the last possible minute, October 2006, to reluctantly comply with the minimum standards. Instead of using the opportunity to bring in legislation to prevent ageism and to give workers the right to work as long they want to and are able to, they have joyfully capitulated to demands from the CBI. The law the government is bringing in enables the bosses to choose who they can employ after 65. At the same time they have spread rumours they are thinking of making people wait until they 70 before being eligible for state pension. The effect has been to bring the TUC into line over the 65 retirement. New Labour have also raised the minimum age at which you can retire on a private pension from 50 to 55.
Giving the bosses the whip hand over when workers can retire has important consequences for everyone who wants to retire with a good state pension. The bosses want to control the pension age for five reasons:
- They like to control things so they want to choose who works
- Older staff cost more being higher up the pay scale
- Older staff know too much
- They are prejudiced against the old
It would only need 2 or 3 per cent of the population to work beyond 65 and the rest of us would be able to collect our state pensions at 63, or earlier, with no overall rise in contributions.
A lot of people do have jobs they are really interested in, and strong anti-age discrimination would enable people to go for jobs that they would perhaps like or take risks with. Most of us probably won't continue beyond 60 never mind 65. Paying for this would become considerably easier if a few per cent of people carried on working.
This is because although the gap between what we are paying and what we take out is rising, the government always quotes it in billions of pounds; as a percentage spread over 30-50 years it is not so much. Relatively small changes in work practices would eliminate it. The gap begins to lessen after the baby boomers begin to die off so the gap is only temporary. People living longer is a function in the main of how wealthy a country is therefore this can be paid for out of the general wealth growth of the country.
Eliminating the right of bosses to decide when we stop working would allow some of us to continue. The impact of the pensions would be multiplied threefold.
This is because those who would work on:
- Are not themselves drawing out of the pension pot
- Are contributing longer to everyone's pension pot
- Will draw less from the pension pot
It would be a win-win situation for everyone ... except the control-freak managers.
New Labour Watch: Global Warming
In our last Umbrella we highlighted how Blair was retreating from previous agreed targets on climate change. New evidence of his secret anti-environmental manoeuvres were exposed in the Observer on Sunday 16th January . His government repeatedly tried to lower European Union carbon dioxide targets, the purpose being to avoid any clashes with the United States government and its big-business backers.
But the story gets murkier. Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser, is being targeted by right-wing American lobbyists. They pursue him from meeting to meeting across continents to attack his assessment that human activity is responsible for global warming. King argued in the journal Science that global warming is more dangerous than terrorism. This is a direct attack on Bush who has prioritised the war on terrorism and is in denial over global warming.
Blair has not supported his chief scientist over carbon dioxide emissions.
The other problem Blair has with King is his scientific approach to nuclear power. King has not ruled out using nuclear power but, unlike James Lovelock, he has argued that we cannot proceed until we can properly deal with the radioactive waste and that the public are comfortable with the decision. Blair has already deliberately delayed any decisions on nuclear waste and as he has shown over GM food he ignores public opinion when it gets in the way of capitalists making money.
Blunkett and the kite
Blunkett was probably right to take a rest from his sleeping with the enemy activities as can be seen in his responses below (noted by The Register).
Essentially, at RAF Fairford last year, some protesters turn up, arrested, Blunkett says they were "armed anarchists".
Blunkett was questioned about it in Parliament.
Blunkett says they had "cudgels and swords".
Blunkett questioned some more. Says they didn't have cudgels.
Blunkett questioned some more. Says they didn't have swords.
Blunkett questioned some more. Says they had a kite.
The Royals, New Labour and fascism
Harold Windsor's appearance at fancy dress party dressed in a Nazi uniform has attracted a lot of press comment. The theme of the party was "Colonialists and Natives". Perhaps if he had gone dressed as some right-wing colonial dictator or blacked up as a Zulu chief he would have attracted less comment. What is amazing is the number of people who tried to defend him and to defend the low life scum at the party who did nothing to prevent him prancing around. In fact the scum are actively looking for the publicly spirited person who took the photograph. Mr Plod should investigate this whole crowd of ne'er do swells. They are connected with the Countryside Alliance and seem to be involved in a plot to undermine the rule of law. Given New Labour's complete obsequiousness to the upper classes this won't happen.
In fact they are being taken over by them. The new Minister for Education went to the top private schools. She is also alleged (and she has refused to deny this) to be a member of the reactionary Roman Catholic cult Opus Dei. This organisation is famous for its support of the fascist Franco in Spain.
And I do not expect Mr Plod to take Mark Thatcher from his mother's house to explain his involvement in the military plot to overthrow the Government of Equatorial Guinea.
-- Half-Celestial Khan
