I started off by putting samples of all of the construction material that I had been using in the attic. And I’ll tell you – the effect is frightening. The plasterboard took the longest to burn but eventually it did. Everything else was gone in minutes.

No wonder there are so many conflagrations in domestic property. There won’t be much left of my place if it sets alight.

But the tidying up is progressing, and it’s looking quite impressive downstairs. Another day or so and it’ll be done. The pallets that formed the old floor in the attic, they will have to be chucked out of the window but I can’t move the broken slates yet. They are destined to be used for the footpaths between the raised beds in the new vegetable garden once make a start on that later this winter.

And once the tidying up is completed it will immediately become untidy again as I demolish the wall between the bedroom and the stairway. All the rubble will be used for making the steps outside up into the house.

Claude came round today for a chat and bought me some news. Someone has had a really good stroke of luck – an exceptional one in fact. It’s bad news for me as it happens but I suppose that if I stopped being selfish and looked at it from other people’s points of view I should really be pleased at their exceptional fortune.

I can’t say any more about it right now as there needs to be something of a proper announcement at the right time by the right people in the right places.

In other news, the public enquiry into the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil has got under way. Many people wonder why I call it that, but don’t take my word for it – take that of Australia’s Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

But back to the plot. I was particularly impressed with the phrase “that Saddam had a “continuing intention” to acquire weapons of mass destruction, having used them in the past”. We all know by now that Saddam Hussein had Bacillus Anthracis, Clostridium Botulinum, Clostridium Perfringens, E coli, Histoplasma Capsulatum and Brucella Melitensis, and that he used them on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war. And how do we know this? Because the USA sold them to him and then gave him the satellite photos of Iranian troop movements so that he knew where to aim the chemical weapons.

The other bit that drew my specific attention was that “the sanctions policy in place against Iraq since 1991 …was steadily breaking down”. Here’s one reason why it was breaking down. And here’s another one. And there are plenty more where those came from. No wonder the wheels fell off the sanctions policy when Western companies put greed before ethics and legality.

Another Western company implicated in the breach of sanctions was Matrix-Churchill. They were one of the companies, by the way, that were named and shamed by Michael Moore as having supplied chemical weapons to Iraq. And would their “breach of sanctions” have anything to do with Saddam’s “continuing intention to acquire weapons of mass destruction”? During the company’s trial in a British court for its alleged breach of sanctions, the directors of the company claimed that their breaches of sanctions had been guided by the British Intelligence (there’s an oxymoron) Services and the British Ministry of Defence.

This startling revelation so clearly shocked the Court that the British Minister for Trade, Alan Clark was summoned to give evidence and under oath he was obliged to admit that he had been “economical with the truth” in an earlier statement denying all knowledge of the affair. Of course, the trial collapsed and the directors were awarded compensation.

This entire Iraq affair stinks to high heaven.

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