Labour rewards US war criminals and profiteers with 'honours'

independent: Britain has secretly honoured a raft of senior US military and business figures in the past three years, it emerged last night. The recipients include General Tommy Franks, the man responsible for the "Shock and Awe " Iraq war attack plan, and Riley Bechtel, head of the Bechtel Corporation.

Mr Bechtel, the billionaire head of the US-based engineering giant, was handed a CBE for "services to UK-American commercial relations" in 2003, according to information obtained by The Observer. He is a likely bidder for future nuclear plants in the UK and has made hundreds of millions of dollars in reconstruction projects in Iraq. Others honoured include several senior US military figures, among them Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the man in charge of maritime forces during the Iraq invasion, and Rear Admiral Barry Costello, commander of the Third Fleet and Task Force 55.

Releasing the information in a parliamentary answer, the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, said: "Awards to citizens where Her Majesty the Queen is not head of state are not formally announced." The Government last night denied claims that it had made a secret of the honours, but a Foreign Office spokeswoman accepted they might not have been "pro-actively" publicised at the request of the recipients. Read more

db: Message to the Labour Party: How many of you sat back and allowed it to come to this? Your strategy of 'power at any cost' - which led to the rise of Blair and his secretly funded 'party wintin a party' - is a disgrace. This story is your shame. Blair, like Thatcher, 'is what he is' - it's not as if he makes a secret of it. You Neo-Labour MPs on the other hand - the real chameleons of British politics - are worse. And Gordon Brown? He's a socialist is he? Patiently waiting for his moment to save us all - cleverly working from the inside and serving as a Brake on Blair's worst excesses. That's much like similar nonsense we've heard about Blair's relationship to Bush.