Links?

In the 3 or so weeks since the first bombings in London, there has been a 600% increase in reported religious 'hate crime' against those nasty Muslim darkies who carried out the attacks. So much for the attacks not changing anything. Nobody challenges that the two are linked, everybody accepts it. Yet posit the theory that in turn the London bombings may be linked to the mainly white brutalisation of their Muslim 'brothers' in Iraq and you're told that you are wrong. Isn't that odd?

Dominic Grieve, the shadow Attorney General, has said that the London bombings are "totally explicable" because of the deep anger felt by many British Muslims over Iraq. Of course, the Tory leadership has backed away from his comments and Hazel Blears, quite possibly the simplest person ever to hold a ministerial position (against some stiff opposition since Bliar started stuffing the government with mediocrities), has said

"I think people can fundamentally disagree with policy issues, with foreign policy ... but I don't see any justification for people blowing themselves up and murdering hundreds of other people."

Two wrongs do not of course make a right. No one is saying that the invasion of Iraq justifies any suicide bombings anywhere but to deny that there is any link at all insults the dead on all sides and seriously hampers our ability to prevent further attacks from happening.

The latest authoritative figure to confirm a link is Robert Baer who spent 20 years in the CIA, mainly in the Middle East. (thanks to Matt for link) Mr Baer says

"Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it's an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere."

With the BBC presently reporting the deaths of another 14 US marines in a roadside attack this morning, isn't it the duty of our leaders to listen to people like Mr Baer and Professor Pape who know what they are talking about and are not concerned with fickle matters such as public opinion? The only reason Bliar continues to deny a link between Iraq and London is that, as one of the men who started the war, he would be admitting culpability in the deaths of 52 people on 7th July.

Headlines like this don't help either.

Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs

Interrogated General's Sleeping-Bag Death, CIA's Use of Secret Iraqi Squad Are Among Details

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 3, 2005;

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.

It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. Two days before, a secret CIA-sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working with Army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using fists, a club and a rubber hose, according to classified documents.

The sleeping bag was the idea of a soldier who remembered how his older brother used to force him into one, and how scared and vulnerable it made him feel. Senior officers in charge of the facility near the Syrian border believed that such "claustrophobic techniques" were approved ways to gain information from detainees, part of what military regulations refer to as a "fear up" tactic, according to military court documents.