Convinced of Britain's guilt?

Gordon Brown chose the Daily Torygraph to signal his intention to prevent magistrates from issuing arrest warrants against visiting war criminals. Brown, as a sponsor of Israel's ethnic cleansing arm the Jewish National Fund, was obviously embarrassed by the arrest warrant issued last November for former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. He explained his planned restriction of "politically motivated arrest warrants" to the Crown Prosecution Service by insisting that Britain's standing in the world could be "compromised" by "tolerating such gestures." What a curiously truncated vision he must have about what constitutes the world.
Israel is, of course, up in arms about having its war crimes described as such and its war criminals at risk of facing trial, as others from Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia have. Former US secretary of state Colin Powell - the man who presented fraudulent evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the UN to justify invasion of Iraq - is also said to be worried about the possibility of being arrested in Britain.

Far from the rest of the world seeing Britain's standing in the world compromised by identification of the likes of Livni and Powell as having a war crimes case to answer, a substantial section of the global population is already convinced of their guilt. For good measure, the same assessment goes for Brown, Tony Blair, Geoff Hoon and Jack Straw, who were up to their necks in the duplicitous process to construct a false prospectus to justify a US war that was never about weapons of mass destruction. The intention was always regime change, which is illegal under international law, and it was designed to bolster US global hegemony and control of Iraqi oil and gas resources. Brown brazenly asserts that "politically motivated" organisations and individuals are simply seeking headlines because there is no realistic chance of a successful prosecution, but the wave of popular anger that greeted the Iraq invasion and the murderous Israeli assault on Gaza casts doubt on his certainty. And how would Brown, a politician, determine when a course of action is "politically motivated?"

Is Richard Goldstone "politically motivated?" He carried out the UN inquiry into Israel's war on Gaza and was forced by the facts to conclude that there was evidence of war crimes. He spotlighted Palestinian use of rockets against Israeli civilian targets, but the bulk of his report was directed against Israeli forces, who killed 1,400 people and wounded over 5,000. The Goldstone report catalogued Israel's "numerous instances of deliberate attacks on civilians" and the deployment of white phosphorus and high explosive artillery shells against civilian targets in Gaza, labelling these acts "violations of humanitarian law." Since then, an Israeli death squad has forged passports from a number of countries, including Britain, to enable it to kill Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in the United Arab Emirates. Israeli politicians played their usual game of refusing to confirm or deny Mossad involvement, while giving a nod and a wink to indicate that Tel Aviv would continue to flout international law. Only the aforementioned Livni openly applauded the killing and she has the gall to resent being called a terrorist. Brown's avowed intent to change British legislation at Israel's behest augurs badly for the government's supposed "full investigation" into the forgery and misuse of British passports in Dubai.