Blair – Coward or Liar? – Moon of Alabama

February 15, 2008

Blair – Coward or Liar?

Did the corrupt Saudi dictator family threaten to blow up London, or did Tony Blair lie to investigators about such a threat to get a new arms deal done?

That is the question coming up in front of a British court.

The British arms manufacturer BAE payed a £1 billion bribe to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia. When the Serious Fraud Office inquired into this, then Prime Minister Blair intervened and stopped the investigation on grounds of national security.
From the Guardian’s take:

[Prince Bandar] was accused in yesterday’s high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.
…
[A] paper trail set out in court showed that days after Bandar flew to London to lobby the government, Blair had written to the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and the SFO was pressed to halt its investigation.

The Independent adds:

Ms Garlick[the SFO’s assistant director,] said the Attorney General had also asked for her advice, and she described attending a meeting at the Foreign Office where "we had been told that ‘British lives on British streets’ were at risk". Ms Garlick stated: "If this caused another 7/7 [bomb attacks on London on 7 July 2005] how could we say that our investigation, which at this stage might or might not result in a successful prosecution, was more important?"
…
Lord Justice Moses suggested that, in reality, the Saudi threat involved saying that Britain would not be told if the Saudis learnt that someone was going to "blow you up". Mr Sales said the threat of withdrawal of co-operation went wider.

Did mighty Britain cave in to terror blackmail by an oil sheik?

Did Blair invented this threat and interfered with the judiciary to further a new arms-sale by BAE?

Those seem to be the only possible interpretations here.

Independent of which one will turn out to be right, Blair should not ever again have any role in government issues, except as defendant in a war crime suit.

Please sign the Petition against the nomination of Tony Blair as "President of the European Union"

Posted by b on February 15, 2008 at 13:39 UTC | Permalink

Comments

This affair is somewhat overblown. Kickbacks to Saudi Princes have been a standard part of deals with Saudi Arabia since the 1970s. Nothing new here, except perhaps the large sum involved. When I worked for a company with a Saudi contract in the 1980s, it was understood that 10% was for the minister involved, and we acted as his agent for his personal business in London, buying cars, houses and doing things which I wouldn’t have known about. I would think that nearly all Saudi contracts are like that. Not very nice, but it is really a problem for Saudi Arabia, and not for us particularly. There were, and I presume still are, all sorts of methods of recycling (public) oil money into private pockets, and this is just one. The West’s preferred method, selling them arms they don’t need and can’t use, is another, as we were discussing the other day.

Posted by: Alex | Feb 15 2008 14:16 utc | 1

Thanks b for posting the petition link. I wanted to post an update in the next open thread.
It’s amazing as of now there are 16208 signature in not yet two weeks. Here is also the LINK to the page for those who would like to access the petition in an other language than English or who would like to mail it to their non-English speaking friends. 🙂

Posted by: Anonymous | Feb 15 2008 15:23 utc | 2

#2 was me! 🙂

Posted by: Fran | Feb 15 2008 15:27 utc | 3

I think their concerns were in vain. If anything, it is the grotesque fraud that the Saudis are our “friends and allies” in the War on Terror that will surely result in more 7/7’s and 9/11’s. For an analysis of what the much heralded cooperation of the Saudis has gotten us over the years, check out “Part 4” here:
http://www.asecondlookatthesaudis.com
The conduct of the British and American governments toward the Kingdom has been nothing short of treasonous.

Posted by: Bill in Chicago | Feb 15 2008 15:45 utc | 4

@4 – So who believes in the War on Terror? bit discredited now.

Posted by: Alex | Feb 15 2008 16:16 utc | 5

In June last year when the kickback story broke, London Yank wrote an engrossing diary at Daily Kos:
Bandar Bush the Black Ops Bagman

Old CIA hands like Bush 41 and Robert Gates had a problem in the early 1980s. Congress had outlawed CIA funded deathsquads, assassinations, false flag operations and other methods beloved of black ops specialists.
What to do? Go to your closest ally, Britain, whose like-minded leader, Thatcher, will help you set up an arrangement for plausible deniability. Go to your favorite like-minded Saudi intelligence thug Prince Bandar to act as procurement agent and bagman for the terrorist cells, assassinations, deathsquads, false flag operations and coups you want engineered.
Wrap the project up as the Al-Yamamah contract to sell jet fighters from near-bankrupt UK defense company BAe (formerly British Aerospace) to Saudi Arabia with kickbacks to accounts of Bandar for spending on black ops worldwide. Then give BAe lots of Pentagon contracts to fund the process.
Voila! You can start funding Saddam, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, the Nicaraguan Contras and other pet projects with no fingerprints!
(snip)

A fascinating thought exercise! So… What if Blair is no more a coward or liar than his predecessors, and likely his successors, too? What if we are talking about *Deep Empire* here? (And the threat, “we’ll stop cooperating,” sounds a lot more interesting when one remembers what happened when Saudis stopped funding Al Abbsi’s group in Lebanon.)

Posted by: Alamet | Feb 15 2008 17:56 utc | 6

Interesting story Alamet – could be true …

Posted by: b | Feb 15 2008 18:14 utc | 7

Reading Alamet, which makes perfect sense to me, it would seem that the Saudis are being pressured to do something against their own interests again. If they have hesitated they are getting a taste of what it means to stand up to the empire.
though I share your disgust of bliar, I doubt that you would have seen a different response from ANY british pm, past, present, or future. it is the role they play in the great game.

Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 15 2008 18:23 utc | 8

& that role dan of steele – is as a valet of the empire with the ridiculous pretensions of empire- a conception that has remained ridiculous since loyd george

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 15 2008 18:42 utc | 9

coward or liar?
is “both” an option or am I only allowed to select one?

Posted by: DeAnander | Feb 15 2008 20:52 utc | 10

bliar is such a vile piece of work – the mere glance at his mush on the television makes me more ill than i already am -it is his hollowness that turns my stomach the most
i once believed in class enemies – but i preferred them monstrous like a hearst, or a rockefeller but this bliar is so without substance
he is more a stain left by history than a personnage
yes, that is what he is
a stain
nothing more

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 15 2008 21:05 utc | 11

@rgiap,#11. Quite right. Hearst was above, Rockefellers more so, Tony Blair is below, and I hope no relative of Eric, who once managed a used bookstore.

Posted by: plushtown | Feb 15 2008 23:07 utc | 12

My concern about these stories is that they re-inforce the notion of Arabs as being savage and corrupt when in practice the reverse is true. Whatever the Saudi government and it’s royal family is, is what USuk have demanded it be.
For it is the west who have enforced the strict dictatorships on the ME the better to get the oil as cheaply as possible, much less having to deal with issues like the theft of Arab land and murder of Arabs in Palestine.
The repression of pan-Arab nationalism to ensure that the ME is comprised of artificial tiny states surrounded by a sea of oil, which in turn are surrounded by much larger states with huge populations and no oil is the root of this mess.
There is nothing new to see here really. Maybe Giap remembers the ‘beat up’ scandal when the english ATV made a docudrama back in the 70’s called “death of a princess” about a woman from the house of Saud who fucked up and was killed. I think it was in the 70’s under Thatcher’s reign over the english.
Anyway the Brit government tried to hush up the play to prevent it from being broadcast insisting all the while that the Saudis “made them do it” Of course the fact that Shell and BP had a great deal to lose was never debated. Then when brit business was damaged as the Saudis reacted to the slander, the docu-drama was fiction, the english media had another crack at the Saudis for being ‘blackmailers’.
That’s the thing we should always remember about these ‘evil Saudi’ stories. The Saudis can always find alternative markets for their oil if the populace of some western state decides they are beyond the pale. It is that western state which will struggle to find an alternative energy source that has the most to lose and is most likely the culprit behind any censorship.
english and amerikan war mongerers like Raytheon, BAE, or Bendix regard bribery as part of doing business. This is not just in arab or asian countries either. They have been caught bribing pols in many ‘western’ nations as well. In fact if you consider this CNS story you will see that it was amerikan pressure and leaks which blew the lid on the BAE deal. Now considering the amount of bribery that amerikan arms dealers get up to this expose is unlikely to be coming from a moralist stance. More likely it is sour grapes from an unsuccessful competing briber. In fact one could argue that the amerikan strictures and laws against bribery have been constructed specifically to create a new form of amerikan protectionism in the so called global free market. The laws exist to allow amerikan arms dealers a free hand to bribe contracts. For it is amerikan companies which inform amerikan authorities of breaches if their bribe – sorry bid – was unsuccessful.
Bliar and co can attempt to pass the buck to Bandar and Co for these bribes but they paid them and probably as the result of a bidding process between BAE and other equally corrupt arms dealers.
I’m not quite sure if people realise how little choice other nations have when it comes to buying arms off amerika, or one of it’s captains like england france or germany. There is no declining an offer to ‘refurbish’ your airforce. try that one and all sorts of ‘accidents’ can occur.
As far as USuk are concerned a substantial proportion of the money they pay for oil must be paid back in the form of arms contracts there is no shilly shallying. Naysayers not wanted.
So when confronted with a standover like that why wouldn’t Bandar (who I concede is no virtuous prince)decide to angle a share. That share will be getting split many ways too.
Looking at it from the Saudi point of view they have every right to be extremely pissed off. They get arm twisted into these mad weapons contracts they neither want nor need, every carpetbagger and wheeler-dealer in christendom turns up in their country ‘greasing palms’ to win the contract at no encouragement from the saudis. Once a deal has finally been agreed upon the english leak like sieves, blow the whole deal and then try and make the Saudis look like the bad guys.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 16 2008 2:51 utc | 13

The technique of excusing or justifying actions with the capitulation to threats from an ally, – as in fake, or supposed, or hinted at, or downright acted out in glorious splendor – is common in the smallest units (family) to the largest (nations.)

Posted by: Tangerine | Feb 17 2008 15:45 utc | 14

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