I should like merely to understand how it happens
that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so
many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant
who has no other power than the power they give him;
who is able to harm them only to the extent to which
they have the willingness to bear with him; who could
do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to
put up with him rather than contradict him.
“Who determines that money is more valuable than life? Who determines that those with money are more powerful? What is money in the end? It is paper. It is metal. It cannot be eaten. The paper can be burned for heat. But it is nothing. It is nothing except what we make of it. It is nothing except what we pretend it to be.”
The EU granted export licenses for €834.5m worth of arms exports in the first five years after the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004
2009 is the highest amount ever: €343.7m
Italy is the top exporter, with €276.7m over the five years
The UK got off to a big start in 2005, with €58.9m of the €72.2m total.
UK licenses over the five years are worth €119.35m
Malta saw some €79.7m of guns go through the Island en route to Libya in 2009 - apparently sold via an Italian company.
"Baroness Manningham-Buller disclosed that she had warned the then Labour Prime Minister that the UK would be at greater risk of terrorist attacks if he pursued military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The former director general of the domestic security service, who retired in 2007, described the Iraq conflict as a “distraction” from efforts to tackle al Qaida and warned that more terrorist attacks on British soil seemed likely.
Her comments, in an interview to mark the start of her three Reith Lectures, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this week, represent the most outspoken criticisms to date of the 2003 conflict by such a senior figure in the intelligence services.
Mr Blair, and his former communications director, Alastair Campbell, have faced repeated criticism over the Labour government’s public case for military action.
Downing Street infamously claimed that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) within 45 minutes of an order to do so, although no evidence of such a WMD programme was ever found."
"Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated."
