Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter Brands Bush & Blair "War Criminals"

Laureate blasts Iraq war 'lies'
Harold Pinter brands President Bush and Tony Blair "war criminals" over the Iraq war, in his Nobel Prize speech.

Pinter is outspoken critic of the UK and US governments
George W Bush and Tony Blair must be held to account for feeding the public "a vast tapestry of lies" about the Iraq war, writer Harold Pinter said.

The playwright launched a scathing attack on US and UK politicians in his lecture as winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

Most politicians "are interested not in truth but in power and the maintenance of that power", the 75-year-old said.

He said politicians feel it is "essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives".

He called for President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to be "arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4505874.stm

he can say that again.

thanks for posting - he's had some choice words to say about Bush before...

(snip)
He called for President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to be "arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice".

"But Bush has been clever," Pinter said. "He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice."

Nevertheless he added that "thousands, if not millions" of people in the US were "sickened, shamed and angered" by their government's actions.

"As things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet."
(/snip)

Here is the whole speech:

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html

:hi:


---------------------------

Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

"Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish."

thank you for the link :toast:

this man really lays out the terrible reality we are all suffering and fighting through

peace

--------------

Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

peace

I have the video up (I converted the RealMedia file) into Flash 8 and downloadable as a WMV file from here

http://www.chris-floyd.com/pinter/

It's a tribute page of sorts. Please spread the word. It's important that people see this video or read the speech and they are both on this page.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/pinter/

Cheers

DD.