My Lords, this ruinous and ignominious situation, where we cannot act with success, nor suffer with honour, calls upon us to remonstrate in the strongest and loudest language of truth... your efforts are forever vain and impotent - doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and of plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms! -Never! Never! Never!: William Pitt on the American colonies - November 18th 1777

With acknowledgement to Information Clearing House

Mass murder and its perpetrators

From the website of Victor Winstone www.winscribe.co.uk

The world-wide chase goes on to find potential suicide bombers among Islamic communities, and among those who are sympathetic to the cause of self determination and freedom from Anglo-US domination.

And the same old questions continue to be asked:

How do we reconcile draconian new laws with civil liberty? How do we protect ourselves against the bombers?

The answers are as simple as the questions. We can’t, except by one obvious and simple device - get out of Afghanistan and Iraq where we have no business to be, and tell America to tell Israel to get out of UN apportioned Palestine.

We know from history the consequence of ignoring the inescapable; we know it from the British occupation of Iraq in the inter war years; we know it from Ireland; we know it from America itself and the War of Independence.      

There is much debate about the identity and the motives of the people thought to bear responsibility for a second wave of attacks in London. Meanwhile, an innocent man has been shot dead in less than clear circumstances, and hundreds people have been arrested, tortured and imprisoned, though they are specifically excluded from direct involvement in the crimes under investigation. Doubtless they will join the hundreds of others here and in America who must endure years of incarceration without charge or trial, on grounds that may never be revealed.

All this in countries that represent themselves as shining examples of democracy, pointers to the way the rest of the world ought to behave; indeed to the way they will be made to behave if Britain and the US decide that they are stepping out of line.

Yet the responsibility for all that is happening in the world is abundantly clear. Secret services and police forces need look no further than the White House and Whitehall for the guilty men. Bush and Blair are their names. It is they who took the world to war on the strength of lies that are recorded on radio and television as they tumble from culpable lips. It is they who refused the United Nations' inspectors time and opportunity to carry out necessary investigations into so called weapons of mass destruction. It is they who invented documents and arguments to support the case for war, who turned away even from the warnings of their own intelligence services, who were deaf to the lessons of history, who invaded Afghanistan and declared war on Iraq and who gloried in the belligerent words of their own devising - 'Shock and Awe'.

They killed the innocent, dismembered children, caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths. They were the architects of disaster and now they are turning their own countries into police states that have little to learn from the fascist dictatorships of the past. There is no count of the deaths they have caused; no estimate of the human suffering that results from indefinite imprisonment, from isolation, loss of all civil rights, all dignity.

These two guilty men were warned by virtually every religious denomination, and by the world's most respected political leaders, warned that their actions were illegal and were likely to lead to retaliation and to mayhem on the streets of any country that lent its support to their messianic cause.

Now, faced with the consequences of their own actions, they deny that what is happening is retaliation, or that it has anything to do with their private 'war on terror', their own provocative actions. They say, 'Such things happened before 9/11, before 7/7'. They say 'These people are murderers pure and simple, who have committed their vile acts independently of the war on Iraq'. But typically, Blair does not answer the question he is asked. He answers another question, 'Are there any attendant reasons for what is happening on our streets?'

The answer to that, of course, is 'Yes, there is one overriding attendant fact'. It is the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Britain's decision to give away a land it did not own and was given custody of in the exigency of peacemaking in 1919. And of course there are other contingent facts; Britain’s interference in the political and economic affairs of all the Arab states within the frontiers of the dissolved Ottoman empire, for example, and the competitive Anglo-American gluttony for oil.

Blair's former foreign secretary Jack Straw declared time and again that events prior to 9/11 showed that we are fighting 'murderers' not patriots or freedom fighters or legitimate insurgents; not perhaps the equivalent of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.                    

But that is precisely what we are fighting. Men and women who will blow themselves up and die willingly for their cause. That is why we can't win the war that Bush and Blair have landed us in. That is why there will never be peace or safety on our streets until this belligerent duo admits the error of its ways, apologises for the misery it has caused, and withdraws its troops from lands in which they are trespassers.

For background  to Osama bin Laden, go to website, www.winscribe.co.uk LINKS TO THE TRUTH