For the attention of Qasim Salimi at Labour Party HQ

Dear Qasim Salimi

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my e-mail. I write to you as a party member of 20 year’s standing. I campaigned, leafleted, door-stepped and generally assisted the Labour party at both local and national elections throughout the 1980s through to the mid-90s (when I left the UK to work overseas).

Having assiduously replied to each campaign e-mail emanating from your team, I was beginning to wonder if anyone really was taking the time to feel the pulse of the membership, or whether you were all so wrapped up in Tony’s self-belief (or delusion) that us morons out here have somehow got it all wrong, and only he has a hotline to God and the truth.

Your response is comprehensive but completely flawed, and merely parrots your leader’s much repeated arguments. But at least while I have your attention, I would like you to understand that in this day and age, governments can no longer control what their electorate reads, or where they get their information.

It’s not only Alastair Campbell who can surf the net and plagiarise text to then massage to make their propaganda more believable. Any half intelligent, concerned citizen can seek out alternative news sources, especially when they find that traditional Labour supporting newspapers such as the Guardian have been subjected to D-notices for reporting the truth about the trumped up ricin ring. That story is still widely available on several news websites around the world (including North America), along with commentary on the attempt at censorship which must have it’s origin with Charles Clarke.

Now that the election is over, I presume you’ll have more time on your hands, so please entertain me by reading (and hopefully passing on) responses and opinions (inserted into your text, below) from the common party member to each of the well rehearsed defences that have been trotted out by Tony loyalists to the charges that he has deliberately misled the country into a war at the behest of an illegitimate US president.

I will send you more information on the problems that lie ahead for the new Labour government. One piece of advice - dump Tony ASAP. the last thing we (the electorate) want to see is him aping George Bush and telling us that he’s going to spend his political capital. Think about it, he’s back on 36% of a 70% turnout. That means he’s been endorsed by only around 20% of the electorate, when his main opponent was a cartoon character from Transylvania - pass me the garlic!

Regards,

Purveyor of Truth

Original Message -----
From: info@new.labour.org.uk
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 12:04 PM
Subject: Re: Tomorrow

Dear Purveyor of Truth,

Thank you for your email.

The decision to go to war in Iraq was a difficult and controversial one, and many people have strong views about it, both for and against [a nit-picking point, but I do not think that many people have strong views both for and against the war; there are a minority of influential people who have vested view for, and there are the 2 million people who took to the streets to show that they were against the war]. However, the actions of our UN-mandated troops [our troops were not UN-mandated when they invaded] in Iraq are of fundamental importance to building a free and democratic future for the Iraqi people. For all the divisions over the decision to take military action, there is now a consensus within the party [you are deluding yourselves, and the slashed majority ought to shake you from your torpor - your core supporters and members have deserted you in droves] and the international community that we stand by the Iraqi people in helping them build a democratic and prosperous future [does Iraq look more prosperous 2 years (and nearly 1600 body bags) after Dubya declared victory?] as set out in UN Security Council Resolution 1456 agreed last summer.

The Prime Minister made it clear that military action was only used as a last resort to enforce the will of the United Nations [The United Nations did not ask for its will to be enforced; George Bush took that upon himself, and Tony Blair fell into line. George Bush has an agenda of controlling the oil resources of the Middle East - this was spelled out by his oil industry buddies back in the late 1990s. Informed people in this country know all of this. If you are going to order our troops invade countries to share in the spoils, at least admit as much. Allow us to make up our minds on whether we want to be part of such criminality]. For twelve years Saddam Hussein defied mandatory UN Security Council resolutions concerning its weapons programmes [Now I’ve got problems with this too. If Saddam Hussein, in fact, had no WMD (having destroyed them following the 1st Gulf War) how can we claim that he defied mandatory UN Security Council resolutions? We can conclude, in retrospect, that he complied fully with the UN resolutions. And if we are going to rigorously and pre-emptively enforce UN resolutions around the world, when are we going to invade Israel to stop its policy of ethnic cleansing and remove its existing nuclear threat which has started the arms race in the Middle East?]. Even after UN Security Council resolution 1441 gave Iraq a "final opportunity" to comply Saddam failed to do so [See my previous response, nothing could be further from the truth]. Whatever the divisions in the international community in March 2003 about military action, no country on the Security Council believed that Saddam had abided by clear obligations placed upon him [and in that instance, they were all wrong! As a barrister, Tony Blair should surely know that “ignorance is no defence in the eyes of the law”. And amazingly, intelligent citizens who have diligently followed the news since the last Gulf War knew that the US and UK air forces had bombed strategic targets in Iraq several times a year, every year since that war - there was no way that he could have continued developing WMD in secret. The RAF and USAF were still bombing Iraq in the days and weeks immediately leading up to the war at a time when Tony Blair was stating that if Saddam allowed the inspectors to go about their work, he could stay in power. Now, in this election campaign, Tony Blair says that regime change (which is illegal in the eyes of the UN) was the real reason we went to war all along. Blair is a liar, and like all liars he can’t remember from one day to the next which lie he used before.] .

Saddam’s brutal dictatorship [with the technical and financial support and approval of the US, UK, France and Germany] had a long record of repression against the Iraqi people [who can forget the newsreel of Donald Rumsfeld doing deals with Saddam AFTER the chemical attack on Kurds?]. The death and torture camps, barbaric prisons for political opponents and routine beatings for anyone suspected of disloyalty have been well documented and confirmed by evidence discovered following the fall of the regime [Abu Ghraib, Falujah, Mosul - are you so blind to current events that you cannot see that things are worse now than they were then? We now have the unedifying record on film of British forces torturing Iraqi civilians who were merely stealing food. We have American forces torturing and killing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and cleansing Falujah of 300,000 people while British forces cut off their retreat. US soldiers are not facing any charges despite being filmed executing injured captives who were lying on the ground at their feet.]. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross 300,000 people are missing as a result of ’internal repression’. [According to the Lancet, 100,000 civilians are dead as a direct result of the pre-emptive war waged by US and UK forces.] The number of mass graves unearthed since the end of the conflict show the appalling barbarity of Saddam’s regime - and he had used chemical weapons against his own people and Iran. [Gulf War Syndrome = radiation sickness resulting from the use of Depleted Uranium tipped shells. This syndrome has been ignored by the MoD and US Defense Department since Gulf War I even though the evidence is accumulating. Even if you don’t care about the “ragheads”, you do have a duty of care for your own troops and children they will bear! The US is the only country in history to use atomic weapons against another country (Japan, which had already signalled its intention to surrender) - the US has a disturbing record of using chemical warfare against other countries e.g. Indo-china in the 1970s.]

Both main parties [this was not unanimous in either party; some MPs in both main parties showed integrity and foresight] supported the invasion based on [entirely biased misrepresentation of selective evidence of] Saddam’s continued defiance of the UN. The intelligence information available at the time has been shown to have been wrong [this just is not true - the evidence presented by Tony Blair and George Bush has been shown to wrong only because all the caveats that the original intelligence included were removed by two men intent on ring-fencing the Middle East oil reserves] but every other country on the Security Council at the time believed that Saddam did possess weapons of mass destruction [every other country on the Security Council was prepared to wait for a definitive statement to come from UN weapons inspectors. The rush to war was undoubtedly because Bush & Blair knew that the weapons inspectors had no hope of finding either non existent WMD or WMD programmes or intentions to start WMD programmes. We do know that the evidence presented to the UN by Colin Powell was risible and included forged documents of Nigerian uranium sales, photographs of weather balloon equipment and Alastair Campbell’s plagiarised internet surfing] . As the Butler Inquiry [in which a hand-picked civil servant with a remit drawn up by Tony Blair himself - not many criminals have that luxury] has made clear, there was no intention to mislead people and the legal advice from the Attorney General was clear that the military action was lawful on the basis of UN resolutions. [But as we now know after it was leaked during this election, the Attorney General’s full legal advice (which was never shown to the cabinet ministers or revealed to Parliament) stated that British soldiers and politicians could be indicted as war criminals by the ICC. Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General stated that the invasion of Iraq was illegal on the basis of UN resolutions. The case against Tony Blair is now before the ICC, and some MP will renew their moves to indict Tony Blair in Parliament.]

In the summer of 2004 the UN Security Council unanimously agreed resolution 1546 transferred full sovereignty to the Iraqi people [so why are the US forces still making all the decisions?] and set out a process for democratic elections. It also authorised the presence of the multinational forces in Iraq , including those of the US and UK. Eight million Iraqis embraced their new freedom and, in the face of threatened violence, turned out to vote in January 2005 for the first democratic elections [during those “democratic elections” voters were presented with lists of parties for which there were no candidates! They were risking their lives voting for blank names that could be filled in later by the colonial powers.] in 30 years [four months down the line, we have only just discovered who’s in and who’s out of this “elected” Iraqi government after months of horse-trading in which the liar (Chalabi) who peddled most of the false information to the CIA about WMD is almost rewarded with the Oil Ministry.]. Following these historic elections, we must now work with the new Iraqi government to help Iraq ’s democracy grow, to build the capability of the Iraqi forces to handle their own security and to make sure the large sums set aside for reconstruction can be spent to improve the lives of the people of Iraq [mate, US$100m of reconstruction money has gone missing in Iraq. Halliburton (and its subsidiaries) is under investigation for wasting millions if not billions of dollars. One company was found guilty of importing oil at 100s of times the market rate in Iraq, and still didn’t lose its contract. The Americans are spending money on preparing the launch pad for Phase II of the Project for a New American Century - the invasion of Iran. Have a debate with yourself, how do we remove our troops from the next battlefield before Phase II kicks off? Scott Ritter (former US weapons inspector in Iraq) says that we can expect something to trigger events in June this year. He was spot on about Iraq; can you assure me he is entirely wrong about Iran?].

You can find more information at: http://www.fco.gov.uk

[And you can start to open your eyes at:

http://www.informationclearinghouse...
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/i...
http://www.truthout.org/

and if you read nothing else:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
http://www.pnac.info/
http://www.informationclearinghouse...

Regards,

Qasim Salimi
Communications Unit
The Labour Party

Labour - the work goes on