[Peace-discuss] john pilger

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

I Know When Bush Is Lying: His Lips Move 

  by John Pilger ; New Statesman; November 21, 2003 


    Shortly before the disastrous Bush visit to Britain, Tony Blair was at 
the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. It was an unusual glimpse of a state killer 
whose effete respectability has gone. His perfunctory nod to "the glorious 
dead" came from a face bleak with guilt. As William Howard Russell of the Times 
wrote of another prime minister responsible for the carnage in the Crimea, "He 
carries himself like one with blood on his hands." Having shown his studied 
respect to the Queen, whose prerogative allowed him to commit his crime in Iraq, 
Blair hurried away. "Sneak home and pray you'll never know," wrote Siegfried 
Sassoon in 1917, "The hell where youth and laughter go." Blair must know his 
game is over. Bush's reception in Britain demonstrated that; and the CIA has 
now announced that the Iraqi resistance is "broad, strong and getting stronger", 
with numbers estimated at 50,000. "We could lose this situation," says a 
report to the White House. The goal now is to "plan the endgame". Their lying has 
finally become satire. Bush told David Frost that the world really had to 
change its attitude about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons because they were "very 
advanced". My personal favourite is Donald Rumsfeld's assessment. "The 
message," he said, "is that there are known knowns - there are things that we know 
that we know. There are known unknowns - that is to say, there are things that 
we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns . . . things we 
do not know we don't know. And each year we discover a few more of those 
unknown unknowns." An unprecedented gathering of senior American intelligence 
officers, diplomats and former Pentagon officials met in Washington the other day 
to say, in the words of Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and friend of 
Bush's father: "Now we know that no other president of the United States has ever 
lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably . . . The presumption now has 
to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything." And Blair and his 
foreign secretary dare to suggest that the millions who have rumbled the Bush 
gang are "fashionably anti-American". An instructive example of their own 
mendacity was demonstrated recently by Jack Straw. On BBC Radio 4, defending Bush 
and Washington's doctrine of "preventive war", Straw told the interviewer: 
"Article 51 [of the United Nations Charter], to which you referred earlier - you 
said it only allows for self-defence. It actually goes more widely than that 
because it talks about the right of states to take what is called 'preventive 
action'." Straw's every word was false, an invention. Article 51 does not refer 
to "the right of states to take preventive action" or anything similar. Nowhere 
in the UN Charter is there any such reference. Article 51 refers only to "the 
inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack 
occurs" (my emphasis) and goes on to constrain that right further. Moreover, the 
UN Charter was so framed as to outlaw any state's claimed right to preventive 
war. In other words, the Foreign Secretary fabricated a provision of the UN 
Charter which does not exist, then broadcast it as fact. When Straw does speak 
the truth, it causes panic. The other day, he admitted that Bush had shut him 
out of critical talks in Washington with Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. 
Straw said he was "not party to the talks, not a party to his [Bremer's] 
return visit". The Foreign Office transcript of this leaves out that Straw had 
complained that "the UK and US [are] literally the occupying powers, and we have 
to meet those responsibilities". The US disregard for its principal vassal has 
never been clearer. Both are now desperate. The Bush regime's panic is 
reflected in its adoption of Israeli revenge tactics, using F-16 aircraft to drop 
500lb bombs on residential areas called "suspect zones". They are also burning 
crops: another Israeli tactic. The parallels are now Palestine and Vietnam; more 
Americans have died in Iraq than in the first three years of the Vietnam war. 
For Bush and Blair, no recourse to the "bravery" of "our wonderful troops" 
will work its populist magic now. "My husband died in vain," read the headline 
in the Independent on Sunday. Lianne Seymour, widow of the commando Ian 
Seymour, said: "They misled the guys going out there. You can't just do something 
wrong and hope you find a good reason for it later." The moral logic of her words 
is shared by the majority of the British people, if not by Blair's 
diminishing court. How decrepit the Independent's warmongering rival the Observer now 
appears, with its pages of titillation and hand-wringing, having seen off a 
proud liberal tradition. "Out there", the Iraqi dead and suffering are still 
unpeople, their latest death toll not worthy of the front page. Neither is the 
Amnesty report that former Iraqi prisoners of war have accused American and 
British troops of torturing them in custody, blindfolding them and kicking and 
beating them with weapons for long periods. Investigators from Amnesty have taken 
statements from 20 former prisoners. "In one case we are talking about electric 
shocks being used against a man . . . If you keep beating somebody for the 
whole night and somebody is bleeding and you are breaking teeth, it is more than 
beating," said Amnesty's researcher, "I think that's torture." The Americans 
hold more than 4,000 prisoners - a higher figure, it is estimated, than those 
incarcerated at any time by Saddam Hussein. With Bush in London, Baroness 
Symons, a Foreign Office minister, postponed a long-planned meeting with families 
of British citizens held in the American concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, 
Cuba. She has made a habit of this. The families and their lawyers want to 
ask questions about the alleged use of torture, the deteriorating mental health 
of prisoners and the criminalising of the Muslim community in Britain. Held 
for two years without any due process, these British citizens have had their 
rights relegated to the convenience of the American warlord. Blair's troubles are 
only beginning. There are signs that the Shia storm is gathering in southern 
Iraq, an area for which the British are responsible. A Shia underground army 
is said to be forming, quietly and patiently, as it did under the shah of Iran. 
If or when they rise, there will be a great deal more British blood on the 
Prime Minister's hands. For 11 November, Remembrance Day, Hywel Williams wrote 
movingly in the Guardian about the exploitation of "the usable past - something 
that can be packaged into propaganda . . . [by those] with careers to build 
and their own causes to advance . . . We are now a country draped in the weeds 
of war . . . The remembrance we endure now is no longer a seasonal affair. It 
is a continuous festival of death as individual souls are press-ganged into 
the justification of all British-American wars. To this sorrow there seems no 
end." Yes, but only if we allow it. With thanks to Jim BrannJohn Pilger is a 
renowned journalist and documentary film-maker. A war correspondent and ZNet 
Commentator, his writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and newspapers such 
as the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Independent, New Statesman, the New 
York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation,and other newspapers and 
periodicals around the world. His books include Heroes (2001) Hidden Agendas (1998) and 
Distant Voices (1994).More articles by John Pilger