[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:17135] FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH

[Alfred Kagan]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Dana Lubow" <danalubow at hotmail.com>
> Date: July 7, 2005 1:31:30 PM CDT
> To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
> Subject: [SRRTAC-L:17135] FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF 
> DISSENT AND TRUTH
> Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>
> FYI
>
> FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH
> John Pilger
>
> Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related "global" 
> events has
> been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in 
> Istanbul; the
> second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History 
> campaign. Reading
> the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing 
> about the
> Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of 
> the
> greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a 
> defenceless Iraq by
> America and Britain.
>
> The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the 
> invasion and
> occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. "We are here," said 
> the author
> Arundathi Roy in Istanbul, "to examine a vast spectrum of evidence 
> (about the
> war) that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its 
> legality, the
> role of international institutions and major corporations in the 
> occupation, the
> role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium 
> munitions,
> napalm, and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of torture . . . 
> This
> tribunal is an attempt to correct the record: to document the history 
> of the war
> not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily 
> anguished."
>
> "Temporarily anguished" implies that, even faced with such rampant 
> power, the
> Iraqi people will recover. You certainly need this sense of hope when 
> reading
> the eyewitness testimonies which demonstrate, as Roy pointed out,  
> "that even
> those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of 
> a fraction
> of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq."
>
> The most shocking testimony was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read 
> the
> internet, you will not know who Dhar Jamail is. He is not an amusing 
> Baghdad
> blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. With the 
> exception
> of Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and several others, mostly 
> freelancers, he
> shames the flak-jacketed, cliché crunching camp followers known as 
> "embeds". A
> Lebanese with American citizenship, Jamail has been almost everywhere 
> the camp
> followers have not. He has reported from  the besieged city of 
> Fallujah, whose
> destruction and atrocities have been suppressed by western 
> broadcasters, notably
> by the BBC. (See www.medialens. org/ alerts).
>
> In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter's witness to the 
> thousands of
> Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib and other American prisons. His account 
> of what
> happened to a civil servant in Baghdad was typical. This man, Ali 
> Abbas, had
> gone to a US base to inquire about his missing neighbours. On his 
> third visit,
> he was arrested without charge, stripped naked, hooded and forced to 
> simulate
> sex with other prisoners . This was standard procedure. He was beaten 
> on his
> genitals, electrocuted in the anus, denied water and forced to watch 
> as his food
> was thrown away. A loaded gun was held to his head to prevent him from 
> screaming
> in pain as his wrists were bound so tightly that the blood drained 
> from his
> hands. He was doused in cold water while a fan was held to his body.
>
> "They put on a loud speaker," he told Jamail, "put the speakers on my 
> ears and
> said, 'Shut up, fuck, fuck, fuck!' He was refused sleep. Shit was 
> wiped on him
> and dogs were used on him. "Sometimes at night when he read his 
> Koran," said
> Jamail, "(he) had to hold it in the hallway for light. Soldiers would 
> come by
> and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or 
> wipe shit
> on it." A female soldier told him, "Our aim is to put you in hell . . 
> . These
> are the orders from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell."
>
> Jamail described how Fallujah's hospitals have been subjected to an 
> American
> tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and 
> stopping
> the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and 
> windows, and
> medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching the hospitals. 
> Children
> were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
>
> The two men responsible for this, George Bush and Tony Blair, attended 
> the G8
> meeting at Gleneagles. Unlike the Iraq Tribunal, there was saturation 
> coverage,
> yet no one in the "mainstream" - from the embedded media to the Make 
> Poverty
> History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities  - made 
> the
> obvious connection of Bush's and Blair's enduring crime in Iraq. No 
> one stood
> and said that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" at best 
> amounted to
> less than the money the government spent in a week  brutalising Iraq, 
> where
> British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child 
> poverty and
> malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef).
>
> In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid 
> supporters
> and church leaders was addressed by Britain's treasurer, Gordon  
> Brown, the
> paymaster of this carnage. Only one person asked him, "When will you 
> stop the
> rape of the poor's resources? Why are there so many conditions on 
> aid?" This
> lone protestor was not referring specifically to Iraq, but to most of 
> the world.
> He was thrown out, to cheers from among the assembled Christians.
>
> That set the theme for the G8 week: the silencing and pacifying and 
> co-option of
> real dissent and truth. It was Frantz Fanon, the great 
> intellectual-activist of
> Africa, who exposed colonial greed and violence dressed up as polite 
> do-goodery,
> and nothing has changed, in Africa, as in Iraq. The mawkish images on 
> giant
> screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park beckoned a wilful, 
> self-satisfied
> ignorance. There was none of the images that television refuses to 
> show: of
> murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut 
> down by
> Bush's snipers.
>
> On the front page of the Guardian, the Age of Irony was celebrated as 
> real life
> became more satirical than satire could ever be. There was Bob Geldoff 
> resting
> his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his 
> jester.
> Elsewhere, there was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates 
> men like
> Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding 
> "compassionate"
> George Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest 
> achievements;
> and there again was Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, 
> saying
> incredibly that "unfair rules of trade shackle poor people"; and Paul 
> Wolfowitz,
> beaming next to the Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, 
> before he was
> handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bush's so-called
> neo-conservative putsch, the mendacious justification for the 
> bloodfest in Iraq
> and the notion of "endless war".
>
> And if you missed all that, there is a downloadable PDF kit from a "one
> Campaign" e-mail to "help you organise your very own ongoing Live8 
> party". The
> suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldoff 
> decreed, in an
> environmental theme park in Cornwall, in front of an audience of less 
> than 50
> people, was described correctly by Andy Kershaw as "musical apartheid".
>
> Has there ever been a censorship as complete and insidious and 
> ingenious as
> this? Even when Stalin airbrushed his purged comrades from the annual 
> photograph
> on top of Lenin's mausoleum, the Russian people could fill in the 
> gaps. Media
> and cultural hype provide infinitely more powerful propaganda weapons 
> in the age
> of Blair. With Diana, there was grief by media. With Iraq, there was 
> war by
> media. Now there is mass distraction by media, a normalising of the
> unmentionable that "the  state has lost its mind and is punishing so 
> many
> innocent people", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "and so the 
> evidence has
> to be internally denied."
>
> Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney and of course 
> Geldoff,
> whose Live Aid 21 years ago achieved nothing for the people of Africa, 
> the
> contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers of  that continent have pulled 
> off an
> unprecedented scam: the antithesis of 15 February 2003 when two 
> million people
> brought both their hearts and brains to the streets of London.
>
> "(Ours) is not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a 
> walk, "
> said Make Poverty History's Bruce Whitehead. "The emphasis is on fun 
> in the sun.
> The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and ask them to 
> deliver
> trade justice, debt cancellation and increased aid to developing 
> countries."
>
> Really?
>
> In Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat and the Mad 
> Hatter to
> show her the way out of wonderland. They did, over and again, this 
> way, that
> way, until she lost her temper and brought down her dream world, 
> waking her up.
> The people killed and maimed in Iraq and the people wilfully 
> impoverished in
> Africa by our governments and our institutions in our name, demand 
> that we wake
> up.
>
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>
> *********
> The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations 
> establishes that all people have the right to self-determination and 
> national sovereignty.
>
> La Declaración de los Derechos Humanos, de las Naciones Unidas, 
> establece los principios de autodeterminación y soberanía nacional.
>
> Dana Lubow
> L.A. Valley College Library
> Valley Glen, California 91401
> (818) 947-2766
>
>
>


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801

tel. 217-333-6519
fax 217-333-2214
akagan at uiuc.edu
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