Amnesia is all the rage in the United Kingdom at the moment. Take Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Recently, it was revealed that he and the Labor Party had accepted illegal financial donations, which are now being investigated by the police. Brown blamed predecessor Tony Blair’s time in office for such a state of affairs, insisting he had no idea that he was inheriting such a mess.
Yet not so long ago Brown was at pains to tell everyone that he was an equal partner throughout Blair’s premiership. Even by Brown’s standards--and he’s a man who has turned evading blame into an art form--the about-face was astonishing.
Small wonder during a heated exchange in Parliament, Brown was compared to Mr. Bean, the hapless television character who creates chaos wherever he goes. The opposition Conservative Party is now 11 points ahead of the government in opinion polls, its biggest lead in almost 20 years.
Brown looks vulnerable, and like Blair, it is the Middle East that may deliver the most damaging blow to his plummeting political stock.
In the middle of all his domestic woes, Brown found himself facing a broadside from five former senior soldiers. The officers accused him of showing “contempt“ for British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and failing to provide them with proper equipment, while he was finance minister under Blair.
The government’s former chief of Defense Staff, General Lord Guthrie, insisted troops were killed through the late arrival of equipment that “could have been made available earlier if adequate funding had been found sooner.“ For that, he said, Brown “must take much of the blame.“
This week, the government accepted liability for the death of 14 servicemen, killed when their aging Nimrod surveillance aircraft exploded in midair above Kandahar last year. A report said the age of the Nimrod was a “possible contributing factor“ and underlined the image of British troops going into battle with aging and unreliable equipment that Brown dragged his heels to replace.
Brown was quick to fly out to Iraq for a photo op with troops when he was considering calling an election a few months ago. But during his time as finance minister, he refused to countenance Blair’s calls for more funding for the military.
A recent biography of Blair by Anthony Seldon alleges that during one argument over the budget in 2004, Brown told Blair: “You’re giving away too much and being outrun by those military bastards.“
Criticism from the army has battered Brown’s much-touted reputation for honesty and integrity the most.
There is also the contentious issue of Brown’s “part-time“ defense secretary, Des Browne, who since June, has had to double up as minister for Scotland. The fact that the UK is fighting two wars with a defense minister who has to divide his time between two jobs is ludicrous.
Browne’s second job has meant he has often been at Scottish events while the Ministry of Defense was announcing the deaths of British soldiers.
It’s not like Browne was that sure-footed a defense secretary when it was his only job. Earlier this year he was criticized for allowing the British sailors held hostage in Iran to sell their less-than-glorious accounts of their capture to the media.
The reason he is still in a job, or two jobs, is because Gordon Brown prefers to be surrounded by politicians who display unswerving devotion to him rather than any ability, making his administration look more like a cult than a government.
So where does all this leave the UK’s Middle Eastern policy? Brown’s principle problem is that he has never had much enthusiasm for what he considers to be Blair’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while also lacking the courage to oppose them.
In fact, outside of alleviating Third World poverty, he has shown little interest in foreign affairs.
But Brown’s domestic woes are likely to accelerate the withdrawal of Britain’s troops from Iraq. Parliament’s Defense Committee said last week that the British troop presence in southern Iraq was falling to levels that raised questions about whether it would be able to carry out any role other than self-protection.
With that in mind, there is little point in hanging around in Basra much longer and Brown will jump at the chance to announce that the last British soldier has left Iraq.
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB

A Russian Sukhoi Su-27 takes part in the opening ceremony of the International Aviation and Space salon "MAKS-2007" in Zhukovsky Airfield, outside Moscow, Aug. 21.

Joy of the Malaysian flier who piloted a Russian Su-30 MKM fighter jet at the LIMA 2007 international maritime and aerospace show was understandable.
The Sukhoi corporation has developed a family of two-seater multi-role fighters from the Su-27 Flanker that can form the core of Russia’s combat aviation in the 21st century.
This goal will be reached with a comprehensive MiG and Su modernization program, Yury Balyko, head of a Defense Ministry research institute, said in mid-November.
He said the Su-24 Fencer tactical bomber, Su-25 Frogfoot assault plane, and MiG-29 Fulcrum and Su-27 Flanker fighters would be upgraded to give them the multiple capability to engage both ground and air targets.
An example of such modernization is the Su-34 Fullback, which, Balyko said, can use all types of ammunition, including precision weapons and hit any ground, air or sea targets at any time of day or night, in any weather and within any geographical region.
An important function of modern aircraft is their ability to operate against sea targets away from their airfields. This is needed to fight global terrorism, which is turning into a serious problem of the 21st century: there are about 500 secret terrorist organizations in the world today.
Especially dangerous is maritime terrorism. It can easily knock out an economy depending on the magnitude of sea supplies of energy and materials. A supertanker, if sabotaged in, say, the port of Rotterdam, could disrupt life in several European countries economically dependant on the functioning of the port.
Western sources say Osama bin Laden has even built a naval flotilla of his own consisting of 16-19 small vessels with a displacement of 200 to 300 tons armed with quick-firing automatic cannons, large-caliber machine guns and handheld anti-aircraft missile launchers.
Therefore, Russian Su-34s (or their naval versions Su-32FN and Su-32MF), armed with high-precision weapons, can effectively deal with a terrorist threat on the high seas, acting on their own or as part of an international coalition force.
The effect of air strikes against sea targets is well illustrated by the Falkland conflict of 1982. At that time, the British command underestimated the capabilities of Argentine Air Force’s anti-ship weapons. The era of high-precision weapons was just dawning.
On May 4, 1982, the Argentine patrol aircraft Neptune noticed a squadron of British ships at a distance of 200 kilometers. Five Super Etendard assault planes took off from Rio Grande air base, 850 kilometers away.
Within 46 kilometers of the ships, the pilots switched on their onboard radars for 30 seconds, their screens showing blips of two targets: the guided missile destroyer Sheffield and the frigate Plymouth.
An air-to-surface missile fired by one of the planes crashed through the destroyer’s side 1.8 meters above waterline, but did not explode inside because the delay-action fuse failed.
However, the remaining rocket fuel set fire to electric cables and paint. The compartment was soon filled with poisonous fumes, causing the threat of the ship’s ammunition exploding.
After five hours of efforts in vain to put out the fire, crew members abandoned ship.
The Plymouth fared better: its air defense unit timely released chaff to jam the attack, and the missile meant for the frigate fell into the sea.
But on May 25, a couple of Super Etendards taking off from Rio Grande and refueling in mid-air attacked the British aircraft carrier Hermes. The missiles, however, were knocked off course by aircraft carrier jammers and instead “locked on“ the British transport Atlantic Conveyor six kilometers away, sinking it together with 15 Wessex and Chinook helicopters aboard.
These days no chaff can fool missiles with
television or laser guidance installed on the
Su family of aircraft.
EN.RIAN.RU

CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden has admitted that in 2005 the CIA destroyed two videotapes of interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners, including a central figure in 9/11, Abu Zubaydah. Hayden said the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of the CIA interrogators from members of al-Qaeda and other terrorists who might try to retaliate. He also claims that the tapes were made to safeguard against unlawful treatment of detainees, and that they were only destroyed after it was confirmed that suspects were not being tortured.
At a time when Congressional Democrats are trying once again to pass a torture ban, it’s a given that the revelation is going to further inflame the torture debate--since the tapes apparently showed harsh interrogation techniques.
The assumption will be that the CIA did not want the tapes seen in public because they are too graphic and could lead to indictments.
But more to the point, the revelation will raise another question: What other evidence has the CIA destroyed? And can the CIA be trusted to tell us?
The CIA had told the 9/11 Commission, when it formally requested such materials, that there was no taping of interrogations. CIA lawyers also told federal prosecutors trying the Zacarias Moussaoui terror case that the agency did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge and Moussaoui’s defense lawyers.
The CIA insists that the tapes destroyed were not the ones in question.
I would find it very difficult to believe the CIA would deliberately destroy evidence material to the 9/11 investigation, evidence that would cover up a core truth, such as who really was behind 9/11.
On the other hand I have to wonder what space-time continuum the CIA exists in, if they weren’t able to grasp what a field day the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are going to have with this--especially at a time when trust for the government is plumbing new depths.
I myself have felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists--who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, somehow pulled off by the U.S. government.
For the record, I don’t believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn’t all that good at it, and certainly couldn’t carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.
Still, the people who think 9/11 was an inside job might easily be able to believe that Abu Zubaydah named his American accomplices in the tape that has now been destroyed by the CIA.
It isn’t going to help that the Abu Zubaydah investigation has a lot of problems even without destroyed evidence. When Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, two ATM cards were found on him.
One was issued by a bank in Saudi Arabia (a bank close to the Saudi royal family) and the other to a bank in Kuwait. As I understand it, neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia has been able to tell us who fed the accounts.
Also, apparently, when Abu Zubaydah was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in.
The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16. There’s nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed.
If this sounds like paranoia, it is. But the CIA certainly is not helping by destroying evidence. And they should know better than to destroy evidence in the biggest criminal case in American history.
More than anything what we need right now is complete and total transparency on 9/11.
Robert Bear
TIME.COM