[Peace-discuss] It Can't Happen Here

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Earlier today Mort posted part of an interview with
Medialens, pointing out that, in the UK, "The only journalist
who has been consistently honest about the media is John
Pilger ... In our view he’s the country’s most powerful
dissident –- his writing is superb, and the depth and breadth
of his insight is beyond most of the other writers you
mention. But it seems there’s no place for him in any of the
quality papers..." The supposedly liberal Guardian refuses to
publish him.  "So our best living dissident -– obviously one
of the all-time greats –- is required to write a fortnightly
column in the New Statesman which reaches a few thousand
people ... Because he’s honest about the media -– he
criticises the Guardian, he draws attention to the vital role
of the entire liberal media establishment in crimes against
humanity. So he is persona non grata. The same is true of
Chomsky" (whom the Guardian recently trashed, and was forced
to apologize). Here's Pilger's latest, from the New Statesman:
you can see how good he is, and how bad things are.  --CGE]

  The Quiet Death Of Freedom
  By John Pilger

On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched,
pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For
four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square
with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and
suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The
effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when
the Blair government banned any expression of opposition
within a kilometre of Parliament. The High Court subsequently
ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was
an exception.

Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he
remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the
cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women
brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked
him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them
before. "That's typical of the public," he said. A man in a
pin-striped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a
small wreath. "I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read
out the names of the dead in Iraq," he said to Brian, who
cautioned him: "You'll spend the night in cells, mate." We
watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he
appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched
dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.

As night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya
Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the
new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at
the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq.
So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two
vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record
for the rest of her life.

Freedom is dying.

Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second
World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in
Brighton for wearing an "offensive" T-shirt, which suggested
that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested
under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held
behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the
"purpose" of searching him was "terrorism" and the "grounds
for intervention" were "carrying placard and T-shirt with
anti-Blair info" (sic).

He is awaiting trial.

Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond
any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at
Belmarsh prison, who have never been charged, let alone put on
trial. They are held "on suspicion". Some of the "evidence"
against them, whatever it is, the Blair government has now
admitted, could have been extracted under torture at
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all
but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the
country into the arms of a regime which may torture them to
death. Their isolated families, including children, are
quietly going mad.

And for what? From 11 September 2001 to 30 September 2005, a
total of 895 people were arrested in Britain under the
Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered
by the Act. As for real terrorists, the identity of two of the
7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, was known
to MI5, and nothing was done. And Blair wants to give them
more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing
freedom in his own country.

Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October,
an American surgeon, loved by his patients, was punished with
22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy,
which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and
humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In
raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr Rafil
Dhafir broke a siege which, according to Unicef, had caused
the deaths of half a million under the age of five. The then
Attorney-General of the United States, John Ashcroft, called
Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a "terrorist", a description mocked by
even the judge in his politically-motivated, travesty of a trial.

The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three
US Circuit Court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime's
"right" to imprison an American citizen "indefinitely" without
charging him with a crime. This was the case of Joseph
Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan
before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half
years ago. He was never charged and no evidence has ever been
presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case
puts George W Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of
Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate effectively
voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that
overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo
prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of
America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas
corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and
implement a dictatorship.

A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the
world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the
recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the
"Project for a New American Century". Written by his
ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it
foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind a
democratic façade: "the cavalry on a new American frontier"
guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700
American bases are now placed strategically in compliant
countries, notably at the gateways to the sources of fossil
fuels and encircling the Middle East and Central Asia.
"Pre-emptive" aggression is policy, including the use of
nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare industry has been
reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has
been militarised. Global warming has been embraced. The powers
of the president have never been greater. The judicial system
has been subverted, along with civil liberties. The former
senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared the White
House daily briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and
those now occupying positions of executive power used to be
known in Washington as "the crazies". He said, "We should now
be very worried about fascism".

In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7
December, Harold Pinter spoke of "a vast tapestry of lies,
upon which we feed". He asked why "the systematic brutality,
the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of
independent thought" of Stalinist Russia was well known in the
west while American state crimes were merely "superficially
recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged".

A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and
suffering of countless human beings can be attributed to
rampant American power, "but you wouldn't know it," said
Pinter. "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while
it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was
of no interest."

To its credit, the Guardian in London published every word of
Pinter's warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state
television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight
flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the
cameras at Booker prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not
make room for Britain's greatest living dramatist, so
honoured, to tell the truth.

For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of
half a million children by America's medieval siege of Iraq
during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and
Padilla trials and the Senate vote, banning freedom, never
happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist;
and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away
Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed
in the cause of nothing, except rotten power.

Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the BBC newsreader Fiona
Bruce introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about
Bush's dogs. That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the
following: "Here is delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005,
the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many
of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements
fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were
bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the
despair of millions more." (Thanks to William Blum's Rogue
State, Common Courage Press, 2005).

The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein's rule is a 1988 film of
petrified bodies in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a
chemical weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a
great deal by Bush and Blair and the film shown a great deal
by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience,
the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The
Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of
images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on
Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny
it until they were caught out recently by investigators using
the internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not
happen.

In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the
true scale of bombing in what the Americans and British then
called Iraq's "no fly zones". During the 18 months to 14
January, 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000 combat missions over
Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing. "We're
down to the last outhouse," a US official protested. "There
are still some things left [to bomb], but not many." That was
six years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has
multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For
the BBC it has not happened.

The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the
media and elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the
effects of cluster bombs and air-burst shells, yet continue to
invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the the nightmare in
Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out
his country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some
of them insist on describing themselves as "liberals" and
"left of centre", even "anti-fascists". They want some
respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that
the league table of carnage of Saddam Hussein was overtaken
long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will
next support an attack on Iran.

This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror
and confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied
in our name: its extremes and terrorism. The traditional
double-standard no longer works; there are now millions like
Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the
pin-striped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror means
understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being
imposed by those whose actions are little different from the
actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now
they are bringing it home.

John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published
in June by Bantam Press.