Battlepanda: Thank you, Ken Livingston

Battlepanda

Always trying to figure things out with the minimum of bullshit and the maximum of belligerence.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Thank you, Ken Livingston

(Hat Tip Nathan Newman)
It seems like they are having an "the emperor has no cloths" moment in England. Two third of Britons see a connection between the Iraq war and the bombings in London. Ken Livingston, Mayor of London, said what needed to be said.

"A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in (U.S. detention camp) Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," he said.

Police say they believe there is a clear link between bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the four British Muslims who blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus on July 7.

"You've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We've propped up unsavory governments, we've overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone said.

"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afgahnistan.

"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that, he might turn on his creators," he told BBC radio.