Brown’s Fixer Explains How It’s Done:
Jon Mendelsohn and the Secret Tape
Boasted £11 million donated by Tesco cut tax bill by £20 million. It was a stunning admission
Boasted £11 million donated by Tesco cut tax bill by £20 million. It was a stunning admission
The tooth fairy, Santa Clause, WorldCom profits, the Easter Bunny, al-Qaeda.
The cruel, evil jerks who blew up the London subway last week, despite appropriating al-Qaeda’s name for their website and T-shirts, have about as much to do with al-Qaeda as a Beatles tribute band has to do with the Fab Four.
Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has “IMPEACH HIM” written all over it.
The top-level government memo marked “SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL,” dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Greg Palast on HST
It was Princess Di’s photographer who told me to shave the hair on top of my nose. That was when I was famous, famous for a whole week. I was famous only in England, an island off the coast of Ireland, but it was fame nonetheless. The entire front page of the Mirror, a London tabloid newspaper, was splashed with a ghastly photo of my head (hair on nose, not on head), an attack on my investigation of Tony Blair.
LOBBYIST JON MENDELSOHN HAS BEEN RENTING HIS INFLUENCE WITH GORDON BROWN FOR A DECADE
From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
ON THE first Wednesday of July 1998, on the floor of the House of Commons, Britain’s prime minister rose to defend himself. According to the news reports, for the first time since his election the year before, Tony Blair’s hands were shaking. The PM denounced the American reporter whose exposé of wholesale corruption in his cabinet “had not one shred of evidence”. Meanwhile, Blair’s press spokesman, a former pornographer named Alastair Campbell, grabbed every newsman he could find in the hallway to whisper that they should not trust a “man in a hat”, while Peter Mandelson, known as Prince of Darkness, and the power behind the power of the prime minister, hissed a warning about “the man with an agenda”.
I read the news today. Oh, boy.
When Tony met Enron I was there to witness love at first sight. New Labour was warned about Enron and its number crunchers, Arthur Andersen, after the office of Jack Cunningham, then Tony Blair’s Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, rang me in New York at 5am on 21 September 1995.
Britain’s two leading editors and a reporter face jail for printing a story embarrassing the government – but objections to this assault on freedom of the press were slow and timid.
GREG PALAST reports on how Britain’s journalists learned to love the censorship that lashes them.
Poor Tony. With the election of George W Bush, the Prime Minister is like a poodle left behind when his owners have moved house.
A truly curious letter appeared in the New York Times two years ago headed, ‘It’s time to repay America’, by one Tony Blair. In it, he thanked Bill Clinton and the whole of the US for introducing him to the pleasures of governing the American Way. That, he wrote, meant ‘results, not theology… free from preconceptions and bureaucratic wrangling… Government should not hinder the logic of the market!’
It was the morning of 8 June. I was surprised by a fax I had received overnight, a copy of the Trade and Industry Select Committee Report on energy policy. And why was it surprising? Because the report had not yet been released. It was due to be published the following day.