John Pilger: Blair, War, Olympic Deals, and a Glimpse of Another Britain

[JohnyCanuck]

This is a story of two letters and two Britains. The first letter was written by Sebastion Coe, the former athlete who chairs the London Olympics Organising Committee. He is now called Lord Coe. In the New Statesman of 21 June, I reported an urgent appeal to Coe by the Vietnam Women's Union that he and his IOC colleagues reconsider their decision to accept sponsorship from Dow Chemical, one of the companies that manufactured dioxin, a poison used against the population of Vietnam. Code-named Agent Orange, this weapon of mass destruction was "dumped" on Vietnam, according to a US Senate report in 1970, in what was called Operation Hades. One estimate is that today there are 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange, many of them shockingly deformed children.

In his reply, Coe describes Agent Orange as "a highly emotional issue" whose development and use "was made by the US government [which] has rightly led the process of addressing the many issues that have resulted." He refers to a "constructive dialogue" between the US and Vietnamese governments "to resolve issues." They are "best placed to manage the reconciliation of these two countries." When I read this, I was reminded of the weasel letters that are a specialty of the Foreign Office in London in denying the evidence of crimes of state and corporate power, such as the lucrative export of terrible weapons. The former Iraq Desk Officer, Mark Higson, called this sophistry "a culture of lying."

I sent Coe's letter to a number of authorities on Agent Orange. The reactions were unerring. "There has been no initiative at all by the US government to address the health and economic effects on the people of Vietnam affected by dioxin," wrote the respected US attorney Constantine Kokkoris, who led an action against Dow Chemical. He noted that "manufacturers like Dow were aware of the presence and harmfulness of dioxin in their product but failed to inform the government in an effort to avoid regulation."

snip

For this reason, Coe's mention of "reconciliation" is profane, as if there were an equivalence between an invading superpower and its victims. His letter exemplifies the London Olympics' razor-wired, PR- and money-fuelled totalitarian state within a state, which you enter, appropriately, through a Westfield mega shopping mall. How dare you complain about the missiles on the roof of your flats, hectored a magistrate to 86 residents of London's East End. How dare any of you protest at the "Zil car lanes," reminiscent of Moscow in the Soviet era, for Olympic apparatchiks and the boys from Dow and Coke. With the media in charge of Olympics excitement, as it was for Shock and Awe in Iraq in 2003, now enter the man who played a starring role in making both spectacles possible.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Blair-War-Olympic-Deals-by-John-Pilger-120719-735.html

[JohnyCanuck]

1. Olympics setting the stage for return of war criminal Tony Blair to public life?

Another snip from the link in the OP above:

On 11 July, a so-called Olympics evening, "a coming together of the Labour tribe," declared the Labour Party leader Ed Milliband, celebrated its "star guest" Tony Blair and his 2005 "gift" of the Games and "provided the perfect opportunity for Blair's return to frontline politics," reported the Guardian. The organizer of this contrivance was Alistair Campbell, chief spinner of the bloodbath Blair and he gifted to the Iraqi people. And just as the victims of Dow Chemical are of no interest to the Olympic elite, so the epic criminality of Labour's star guest was unmentionable.