[ 20 March 2003 ] On 20 March 2003, Britain joined the United States in an illegal military assault on Iraq in order to enforce regime change and eliminate the country’s alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ even though London was aware that there was no credible evidence for their existence. As the chief UN weapons…
19 May 2003 On 19th May 2003, Indonesia deployed Hawk-200 fighter jets, supplied and made by the U.K., to front its assault on the Free Aceh Movement. The Guardian’s John Aglionby observed that ‘ the Hawks were used primarily to scare and intimidate people on the ground by flying low over targets already attacked with rockets…
16 April 1999 As of 16 April 1999, it was three weeks into the bombing campaign against Serbia and the RAF was still regularly missing its targets. The assault was not only flattening extensive areas of Belgrade, killing many civilians and creating a huge flood of refugees but it was also provoking Serb forces in…
23 December 2005 Today in 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair, his wife Cherie and four children flew off to Egypt on, as his spin doctor Alistair Campbell politely put it, ‘another of his controversial holidays.’ Campbell also noted in a footnote to the diary entry that ‘Blair had previously been criticized for accepting hospitality from…
19 October 2001 On 19 October 2001, during the American and British air strikes on Afghanistan, Tony Blair became frustrated over legal objections to some of the targeting on the basis that innocent civilians might be killed. Alastair Campbell, his Director of Communications, recalled in his diary that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral…
24 September 2002 At 8 am on 24 September 2002, only thirty minutes prior to the deadline for the headline in the Evening Standard‘s first edition, Charles Reiss, the paper’s political editor, was allowed to see the government’s intelligence dossier on Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). After reading about Iraq’s ‘strategic missile systems’ and its…
17 September 2001 In 2001, Alastair Campbell, as Tony Blair’s director of communications, was one of the few officials in almost daily contact with the prime minister. On 17 September, six days after the attack on the World Trade Centre, he noted in his diary that the PM had lunch with the Italian prime minister,…
21 August 1998 On 21 August 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair gave his full backing to a U.S. cruise missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in the suburbs of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, declaring ‘I strongly support this American action against international terrorists.’ The Guardian reported that Blair’s unequivocal support was given ‘against the advice…
9 April 2003 [ 9 April 2003 ] Unlike other ministers, Clare Short, the secretary of state for international development, was not afraid to voice her opinion, within and outside Cabinet, that the Iraq war was both illegal and a disproportionate use of force. Tony Blair and his communications director, Alastair Campbell, both viewed her…
25 March 2004 On 25 March 2004, Tony Blair embraced Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi in a Bedouin tent outside Tripoli, and declared he was hopeful for a ‘new relationship’ between Britain and Libya. The Prime Minister was exuberant over Gaddafi’s promise to privatise Libyan state assets. Even before they had finished their negotiations, it was…
