The Guardian reports:
British and American officials colluded in a plan to hoodwink parliament over a proposed ban on cluster bombs, the Guardian can disclose.
According to leaked US embassy dispatches, David Miliband, who was Britain’s foreign secretary under Labour, approved the use of a loophole to manoeuvre around the ban and allow the US to keep the munitions on British territory.
Unlike Britain, the US had refused to sign up to an international convention that bans the weapons because of the widespread injury they cause to civilians.
Seumas Milne writes:
[B]eyond the dispatches on Prince Andrew’s crass follies and Colonel Gaddafi’s “weirdness”, the leaks do paint a revealing picture of an overstretched imperial system at work, as its emissaries struggle to keep satraps in line and enemies at bay.
Much has been made of the appalling damage supposedly done to the delicate business of diplomacy. No doubt the back channels will survive the shock of daylight. But in any case the United States is the centre of a global empire, a state with a military presence in most countries which arrogates to itself the role of world leader and policeman.
When genuine checks on how it exercises that entirely undemocratic power are so weak at home, let alone in the rest of the world it still dominates, it’s both inevitable and right that people everywhere will try to find ways to challenge and hold it to account.
After the Russian revolution, the secret tsarist treaties with Britain and France were published to expose and challenge the colonial carve-ups of the day. In the 1970s, the publication of the Pentagon papers cut the ground from beneath the US case for the Vietnam war. Now technology is allowing such exposures on a far grander scale.
Clinton complained this week that the leaks “tore at the fabric” of government and good relations between states. Far more damaging is her own instruction to ordinary US diplomats to violate the treaties the US government has itself signed and spy on UN officials, along with any other public figure they happen to meet: down to their credit card details, biometric records – and even frequent-flyer account numbers.
Not surprisingly, US allies and client states come out badly from the leaks.
British government has been a criminal machine since Britan was Britan. Now they are just Washington’s little puppet criminal scum.
Not for nothing was Britain known as Perfidious Albion, but the record under Blair has been particularly shameful. When the Labour Party was formed it prided itself on not following the same imperial outrages perpetrated under the liberal and Conservative parties. That was largely maintained into recent times, but Blair and his toadies preferred the easy path of casino capitalism and subordination to Pax Americana.
It’s a good thing that the surviving rump of Labour is reforming itself around the honourable brother, Ed, and not the tainted David Miliband. It will be needed when Cameron goes the way of Thatcher.