In this issue:

Tony Blair Gets Dizzy Spinning O'Neill Revelations

British Insider: Rug Pulled Out From Under Blair

Diana Inquest: Will Charles Be Sidelined?

Scotland Yard Diana Probe Challenges French Findings

New 'European Left' Countergang Established

Death of Synarchist Norberto Bobbio

Paris UNESCO Forum: 'There Is No Clash of Civilizations'

Solana Pledges Closer European Cooperation with Iran

From Volume 3, Issue Number 3 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Jan. 20, 2004

Western European News Digest

Tony Blair Gets Dizzy Spinning O'Neill Revelations

Following the release of excerpts of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's revelations in The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill (written by Ron Suskind), British Prime Minister Tony Blair has cooked up a new explanation for whatever happened to Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Blair told BBC, "In a land mass twice the size of the United Kingdom, it may well not be surprising you don't find where this stuff is hidden. You can't be definitive at the moment about what has happened."

Asked if he mis-spoke when he had earlier cited Iraq's WMD as the "main justification for the war on Iraq," Blair told BBC, "You can't say that at this point in time. What you can say is that we received that intelligence about Saddam's programs and about his weapons, that we acted on that."

British Insider: Rug Pulled Out From Under Blair

Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage and an insider in British politics, when asked by EIR about the impact on Prime Minister Tony Blair of the release of the O'Neill/Suskind book, The Price of Loyalty, said, "Blair has had the rug pulled out from him internationally, nobody believes in his decision-making any more."

He stressed that "Whatever the final Lord Hutton report says [on the July 2003 death of arms expert Dr. David Kelly], the whole Hutton inquiry process is one more nail in the coffin for him.... Blair will suffer a vote of no-confidence in Parliament, within the next three months. Then, we will face an 'Anthony Eden' situation." Eden, the British Prime Minister in the mid-1950s, was forced to resign, a blithering idiot in psycho-physical collapse, after the Suez War debacle.

Brooks-Baker also noted that the British economic situation is becoming "untenable," with prices soaring, tourism collapsing, and so on.

A second London insider told EIR that there is now "a debate at the highest levels, whether to maneuver Blair out of office. This reflects the deeper issue, that what leading figures in Britain assumed was the way the world is, is no longer the reality. Britain can no longer play the role of bridge between the U.S. and Europe."

Diana Inquest: Will Charles Be Sidelined?

A well-informed Washington source reported over the Jan. 10-11 weekend that the royal inquest into the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed is being used by some powerful City of London factions to remove Prince Charles from the royal line of succession.

The source linked the move to larger British efforts to insulate the pound sterling from the financial woes in the United States and continental Europe, particularly the euro-zone. Lyndon LaRouche's response to the report was to add that the same factions may be moving also to dump Tony Blair, and move into power a Tory faction aligned with the new Labour Party chairman, Michael Howard.

This British group, LaRouche said, would be preparing for the general financial crash by isolating Britain from both the United States and the continent.

Scotland Yard Diana Probe Challenges French Findings

Scotland Yard investigators, tasked by Royal Coroner Michael Burgess to probe the circumstances of the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed in the Paris car crash on Aug. 31, 1997, have already raised some of the thorny paradoxes in the "official" French findings, Press Association News (UK) and the London Times reported over the Jan. 10-11 weekend.

"Scotland Yard today refused to comment on a report that senior British police officers have doubts over the authenticity of chauffeur Henri Paul's blood sample, used in a French inquiry which concluded that Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed by a drunk driver," the PA wire began.

The Times said it has learned there are what it called "high-level concerns" over the specimen, and that French police have not carried out a DNA test which would prove it came from Mr. Paul."

EIR reported over the past years, that the same blood sample that offered the only evidence of Henri Paul having high levels of alcohol in his system at the time of the crash, also showed that he had near-fatal levels of carbon monoxide. Anyone with such high levels of carbon monoxide would have been unable to drive a car. Therefore, there is something fishy about the blood samples, and, therefore, the whole coverup line that the crash was a case of simple drunk driving.

A well-informed London source expressed some optimism that the Scotland Yard team assigned to investigate the case—headed by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Alan Brown—will not bow to royal pressure to cover up the findings. It is expected that the probe, which the source said should have started six years ago under British law, will take 12-15 months.

New 'European Left' Countergang Established

Upon the invitation by the German post-communists of the PDS (the Democratic Socialist Party, which uses the name of the official party of former East Germany), 19 parties of the left-wing spectrum from numerous European countries met in Berlin Jan. 11, to discuss the formation of a party alliance for the June 13 European Parliament elections. The alliance, which will run under the name "European Left" (EL), has the profile of a notorious countergang, with the task of distracting voters from the LaRouche movement and discrediting it, with populist slogans against the Maastricht Pact, against neo-liberal labor market and welfare reforms, and the like, as well as against capitalism as such.

The other prime target of the EL, though not identified by name, is the Franco-German alliance, which it opposes under the banner of "preventing the militarization of Europe," or the "dictate of the great powers over the smaller ones in Europe." This will also be the target of several protest mobilizations of the EL during February and March—in Berlin and other capitals of Europe.

Founding members of the EL are the following 11 parties: Estonian Social Democratic Workers Party; French Communist Party; Party of Communist Re-Foundation (PRC, Italy); The Left (Luxembourg); Communist Party of Austria; Communist Party of Slovakia; Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (Czechia); Party of Democratic Socialism (Czechia); Party of Democratic Socialism (Germany); United Left (IU, Spain); Coalition of the Left, the Movements and of the Ecology (Synapsismos, Greece).

The Berlin Declaration of the EL otherwise states the following priorities of mobilization, besides anti-militarist objectives: anti-fascism, anti-racism, feminism, ecologism.

Death of Synarchist Norberto Bobbio

The same day that the new "United European Left" was launched, international press widely reported the death of 94-year-old Norberto Bobbio, the leading ideologue of the left, who died in Turin on Jan. 9. This Synarchist philosopher and jurist had been a youthful, fervent admirer of Mussolini, and later became a leftist.

Corriere della Sera published Bobbio's photo Jan. 12, alongside pictures of bestial philosopher Thomas Hobbes and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, noting that in 1932 and 1937, when Bobbio travelled to Berlin, he made Schmitt's acquaintance, forming a deep friendship, "based on the reciprocal interest which both men had for the theory of Thomas Hobbes."

After 1948, relations between the two became even closer. Bobbio, who also studied the ideas of Kelsen, Benedetto Croce, Antonio Gramsci, and Pareto, was instrumental in shaping the Left in Europe, and was key in introducing into Italy the ideas of Sir Karl Popper and his key work, The Open Society and its Enemies. Bobbio was a co-founder of the Venetian-oriented "Société Européenne de Culture." He became famous for his book Right and Left.

Paris UNESCO Forum: 'There Is No Clash of Civilizations'

A press conference was held in Paris Jan. 10 by Etienne Mougeotte, vice president of the French National TV TF1; Albert Mallet, adviser to former Interior Minister Jean Pierre Chevenement; and Maurice Szafran, president of the scientific committee of the association Euro Mediterranée Science, Development and Peace, to outline the aims of the Forum of Paris Conference, which will take place Jan. 17-19 on the theme "there is no clash of civilization."

The closing session of that conference will be given to Yossi Beilin and Yasser Rabbo, the key initiators of the Geneva Peace plan for the Mideast; they will also address the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Conference in Berlin on Jan. 15.

The forum will be held under the patronage of French President Jacques Chirac, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, and Koichiro Matsura, Director General of UNESCO. Panels will include such subjects as: Islam and the West; The USA: Common Enemy or Shared Partner?; Islam, Democracy and Laity; The Arab World—Is It Living Through a Second Colonization?; Diseases of the Poor, Medicine of the Rich; and European Construction: Will It Be Done to the Detriment of the Mediterrenean?

Speakers include former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali, Michel Barnier of the European Commission, and senior French political figures Jacques Attali, Philippe Seguin, and Charles Pasqua.

The conference will be taking place as LaRouche's Youth Movement launches a week-long campaign of action in Paris.

Solana Pledges Closer European Cooperation with Iran

In a joint press conference in Tehran on Jan. 12, European Union policy representative Javier Solana and Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi laid out a perspective for closer relations between the EU and Iran. Solana said the EU viewed Iran as a "partner," with whom the EU seeks deeper relations. He cited the European talks with Iran, which led to the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) protocol, as an example of cooperation. Solana announced that a group of Iranians would be invited to the EU headquarters in Brussels, to discuss long-term cooperation.

Kharrazi, when asked by press about the perspectives for improving relations with the U.S., said that it would be impossible at the moment, since the U.S. government is continuing to repeat its old views and accusations. The U.S. considers us the enemy, he said, and supports our enemies. Kharrazi singled out the nuclear issue as a case in point: "They have wrongly accused us of having nuclear weapons. We have signed the additional protocol, and if the Americans have good will, now they should take back their words and also accept our legal right to have peaceful nuclear technology, under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency."

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