Steve Bell on coverups of political scandals

[muriel_volestrangler]

Story: arrest over cash for peerages scandal

[lligrd]

1. Hmm, I Always Thought Blair Did Bush

But I am beginning to wonder now.

[Eurobabe]

2. That's Cheney, look at the size of his ass!

[Prophet 451]

3. Still hoping

I'm a Brit and still hoping the scandal ends up with Blair being arrested. Doesn't matter if he's convicted, the arrest alone would ruin him here. Still, even if it doesn't, he has perhaps eight months to go.

[lligrd]

4. I'll Raise You That Hope By One Bush Being Arrested

Heck we still have nearly 2 years to go.

[Prophet 451]

12. Assuming he goes

I still have some very dark suspicians that he'll somehow manage to stay in office. Here, that can't happen because if Blair refuses to step down, the monarch has the power to dissolve Parliament on his behalf whereas Bush has spent years dismantling every check on his power.

[Lasher]

5. Better put Blair away if you can.

Otherwise he'll be back to haunt you later. Just two examples:

Eliot Abrams pled guilty to Iran-Contra affair crimes that he committed during Saint Gipper's reign, but Poppy pardoned him just before leaving office. Junior appointed Abrams to the post of Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. He planned the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 against Hugo Chavez. Junior appointed him Deputy National Security Advisor in 2005. Abrams is a member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and one of the key neoconservatives who signed the January 1998 letter to Clinton urging him to invade Iraq.

John Poindexter was convicted of multiple felonies associated with the same Iran-Contra affair. The convictions were reversed in 1991 on the technical grounds that the prosecution's evidence may have been tainted by exposure to his immunized testimony before the joint House-Senate committee investigating the matter.

Poindexter was appointed in 2002 as Director of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) in our Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). There he employed a program called Total Information Awareness (TIA) to develop an Orwellian mass surveillance system. The TIA program name was changed to Terrorism Information Awareness in 2003 in a vain attempt to deflect critics of its domestic spying. In 2004 Congress defunded TIA and specifically directed that the IAO be closed. But several TIA projects were just moved to classified segments of Defense appropriation where they are not subject to public scrutiny, such as those of the National Security Agency (NSA). These projects then became part of what we know today as the ongoing scandal that started in 2005 on account of warrantless NSA domestic spying.

[Prophet 451]

11. Slightly different situation

It's very unusual here for former PMs to stick around making a nuisence of themselves. Normally, once they leave office, they're "kicked upstairs" to The Lords. Since The Lords has almost no power these days, that leaves them plenty of time to write their memoirs, make after-dinner speeches and so on. It's also considered something of a faux pas for former PMs to pass comment on the current government.

Still, I'd love to see the bastard nailed to the wall.

[zanne]

8. About a year ago...

I heard that Tony Blair only had a year to go. What's up with that?

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. He's said he'll go before the next party conference

which is in September or October. He's also said he expects to be at the next G8 summit in June.

[Prophet 451]

13. He's promised to retire

He's said that he'll be gone by the next party conference (late September/early October usually) and since the country is increasingly sick of him, we're going to hold him to that. Of course, he's trying to spin it out as long as he can.

[zanne]

6. Why is Santa giving Tony a hummer? nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Those are the ceremonial robes of a member of the House of Lords

[Hubert Flottz]

7. Tony sez...

"Nobody can say I ever failed to protect a whistle-blower Karl."