Iraq - a war crime in Fallujah? + my new book

A study has revealed that birth defects suffered by children in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are greater than those inflicted by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Since a ruthless American attack in 2004, there has been a twelve-fold increase in childhood cancers, and a fourfold increase in cancer overall.

Children have been seen with grotesque deformities – an eye or nose in the middle of the forehead, and so on. The suspicion is that the Americans’ use of depleted uranium and other “special weapons” is to blame, but the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson pointed out last night that US law would make it virtually impossible for the victims to hold the USA to account. Maybe Americans will feel they should hand over some of the $20bn they’re extracting from BP? No, thought not.

The Fallujah revelation comes just as we are learning that in 2002, the then head of Britain’s secret service MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was warning Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair that if he joined in the attack on Iraq it would expose Britain to a greatly increased risk of terrorism. Blair and his Labour cronies ignored this, of course, just as they ignored the biggest mass protest in history by the British people. We are now paying the price.

*My new book London’s Disasters: from Boudicca to the Banking Crisis is out! Published by the History Press, ISBN: 9780752457475. City AM was kind enough to write about it yesterday:-
http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/allister-heath/why-britain-needs-save-far-more

Building a police state - 2

If you wanted to take a picture of a policeman, Sunday would have been a good day for it – in fact, the last good day. From now on if you photograph one of our friendly coppers, you could find yourself sent to gaol for 10 years. It’s all part of a new law presented by Labour as essential to – you’d never have guessed – the War on Terror. Oh sorry, the alleged Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told Labour MP’s they mustn’t call it that anymore.

Still, lighten up you might say, Labour would never use the law to prevent, for instance, the exposure of wrongdoing by a policeman, or to arrest a harmless tourist who didn’t understand that Britain was now a police state. Oh no? Opposition MP Damian Green had his offices searched by anti-terrorist police for exposing inconvenient truths about the Labour government, an 80 year old Auschwitz survivor who dared question Jack Straw was silenced under anti-terrorist legislation, and anti-terrorist laws have been used by police to question 7,000 trainspotters just in the North-East of England! God knows how many have been stopped over the whole country.

I could go on. No wonder even Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, now thinks it’s all getting out of hand, and has protested at the way Labour is stoking up people’s fears in order to destroy our civil liberties. Mind you, our MP’s must have kicked up a hell of a stink when that “snap a bobby, go to gaol” law was going through Parliament. Funnily enough, I don’t remember hearing a peep out of them.