Outrage at ban on Blair inquiry demo

By Paddy McGuffin, Morning Star

Anti-war campaigners have accused the police and government of attempting to prevent lawful protest outside the Iraq inquiry when Tony Blair gives evidence on Friday.

Organisers said that negotiations with police over the planned mass protest had broken down.

The vigil outside the QE2 conference centre in Westminster was due to take place on the patch of green immediately in front of the inquiry venue.

Campaigners have now been told that the area is private property, but that other locations further from the centre may be available as an alternative.

Both CND and Stop the War condemned the decision as politically motivated in a bid to spare Mr Blair's blushes.

A Stop the War spokeswoman said: "This is a denial of our democratic rights and we will now call for the widest possible mobilisation not just to express the majority view in this country that Tony Blair should be held to account for war crimes but in defence of the right to protest."

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "We have worked with Stop the War Coalition for some time now to try and accommodate their requirements to protest on Friday.

"We have had a useful dialogue and we were aiming to finalise plans for the exact location they will be able to protest. This decision was never ours alone to make - it is for the QE2 to decide who they allow onto the QE2's land."

QE2 centre chief executive Ernest Vincent said that, while they were co-operating with police, they had little input in the discussions and denied any political motivation.

"We are a commercially run organisation. The Iraq inquiry is but one event taking place on Friday and we have to respect all our occupants," he said.

CND chairwoman Kate Hudson described the decision as "disgraceful."

She said: "The police have stated they have no security objections to our vigil being held outside the inquiry. So we can only assume this is an attempt to protect Tony Blair from the overwhelming anti-war sentiment that exists in this country.

"It is only proper that he should see and hear those of us who have been proved right in our opposition to his war, particularly the many family members of those he sent to die."

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Blair gives evidence to Iraq war inquiry

AFP story via The Sydney Morning Herald:

Former British prime minister Tony Blair began giving evidence to the public inquiry into the Iraq war on Friday, starting an eagerly awaited day of questioning into his account of the conflict.

Relatives of some of the 179 British soldiers killed in the conflict were among the audience watching the proceedings in a central London conference venue.

The chairman of the inquiry, retired civil servant John Chilcot, said the point of the questions would be to establish "Why did we invade Iraq?".

Chilcot acknowledged that Britain's involvement in Iraq "remains a divisive subject, it's one that provokes strong emotions" especially among the relatives of the British forces who died in the war.

However, he reiterated that his committee intended to identify the lessons to be learned from the conflict, but was not a court, adding: "The inquiry is not a trial." Related article: Blair slips past protesters

In reference to the anti-war protesters outside the conference centre, and reports that some of the members of the public inside were planning some kind of demonstration against Blair during the evidence, he urged calm.

"The committee hopes we can go about our business in an orderly way," Chilcot said, adding: "The right of our witness to respond must be respected."

He said Friday's session would focus on the run-up to the US-led invasion in 2003, the chaotic immediate aftermath of the war and the subsequent surge in violence.

US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs'

After 40 years of defeat and failure, America's "war on drugs" is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America's longest "war" may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.

The "war", declared unilaterally throughout the world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as its strategists start discarding plans that have proved futile over four decades: they are preparing to withdraw their agents from narcotics battlefields from Colombia to Afghanistan and beginning to coach them in the art of trumpeting victory and melting away into anonymous defeat. Not surprisingly, the new strategy is being gingerly aired in the media of the US establishment, from The Wall Street Journal to the Miami Herald.

Prospects in the new decade are thus opening up for vast amounts of useless government expenditure being reassigned to the treatment of addicts instead of their capture and imprisonment. And, no less important, the ever-expanding balloon of corruption that the "war" has brought to heads of government, armies and police forces wherever it has been waged may slowly start to deflate.

Prepare to shed a tear over the loss of revenue that eventual decriminalisation of narcotics could bring to the traffickers, large and small, and to the contractors who have been making good money building and running the new prisons that help to bankrupt governments – in the US in particular, where drug offenders – principally small retailers and seldom the rich and important wholesalers – have helped to push the prison population to 1,600,000; their imprisonment is already straining federal and state budgets. In Mississippi, where drug offenders once had to serve 85 per cent of their sentences, they are now being required to serve less than a quarter. California has been ordered to release 40,000 inmates because its prisons are hugely overcrowded.

At the same time, some in the US are confused and fear that the new commission proposed by Congressman Eliot Engel, a man with a record of hostility to the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, may prove to be a broken reed. As he brought in his bill he added timidly: "Let me be absolutely clear that this bill has not been introduced to support the legalisation of illegal drugs. That is not something that I would like to see."

Part of the reason for the slow US retreat from the "war" is that the strategy of fighting it in foreign lands and not at home has proved valueless. Along the already sensitive frontier with Mexico the effect of US attempts to enforce a hard line by blasting drug dealers away has been bloody. Anxious to keep in check the flood of illegal immigrants into territory that once belonged to Mexico, Washington is building a wall and fence comparable to that which once cut through Berlin and that which is today causing havoc between Israelis and Palestinians.

In the areas of Mexico closest to the US frontier the toll of deaths in drug-related violence exceeded 7,000 people in 2009 (1,000 of them dying in January and February). This takes the death toll over three years to above 16,000, figures far in excess of US fatalities in Afghanistan. The bloodshed has continued despite – or perhaps because of – the intense US pressure on President Felipe Calderon to station a large part of the Mexican army in the region. It is deploying 49,000 men on its own soil in the campaign against drugs, a larger force than the 46,000 Britain sent to take part in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. But still the blood flows.

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