Describing the attack by an Apache helicopter crew who filmed civilians as they murdered and wounded them in Baghdad in 2007, Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have. They seemed not to value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety [who] is seriously wounded … For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.” He hoped “the public would be as alarmed as me” about a crime which, as his subsequent leaks revealed, was not an aberration.

Bradley Manning is a principled whistleblower and truth-teller who has been vilified and tortured – and Amnesty International needs to explain to the world why it has not adopted him as a prisoner of conscience; or is Amnesty, unlike Manning, intimidated by criminal power?

“It is a funeral here at Fort Meade,” Alexa O’Brien told me. “The US government wants to bury Manning alive. He is a genuinely earnest young man with not an ounce of mendacity. The mainstream media finally came on the day of the verdict. They showed up for a gladiator match – to watch the gauntlet go down, thumbs pointed down.”

The criminal nature of the American military is beyond dispute. The decades of lawless bombing, the use of poisonous weapons on civilian populations, the renditions and the torture at Abu Graib, Guantanamo and elsewhere, are all documented. As a young war reporter in Indochina, it dawned on me that America exported its homicidal neuroses and called it war, even a noble cause. Like the Apache attack, the infamous 1968 massacre at My Lai was not untypical. In the same province, Quang Ngai, I gathered evidence of widespread slaughter: thousands of men, women and children, murdered arbitrarily and anonymously in “free fire zones”.

In Iraq, I filmed a shepherd whose brother and his entire family had been cut down by an American plane, in the open. This was sport. In Afghanistan, I filmed to a woman whose dirt-walled home, and family, had been obliterated by a 500lb bomb. There was no “enemy”. My film cans burst with such evidence.

In 2010, Private Manning did his duty to the rest of humanity and supplied proof from within the murder machine. This is his triumph; and his show trial merely expresses corrupt power’s abiding fear of people learning the truth. It also illuminates the parasitic industry around truth-tellers. Manning’s character has been dissected and abused by those who never knew him yet claim to support him.

The hyped film, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, mutates a heroic young soldier into an “alienated …lonely …very needy” psychiatric case with an “identity crisis” because “he was in the wrong body and wanted to become a woman”. So spoke Alex Gibney, the director, whose prurient psycho-babble found willing ears across a media too compliant or lazy or stupid to challenge the hype and comprehend that the shadows falling across whistleblowers may reach even them. From its dishonest title, Gibney’s film performed a dutiful hatchet job on Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The message was familiar — serious dissenters are freaks. Alexa O’Brien’s meticulous record of Manning’s moral and political courage demolishes this smear.

In the Gibney film, US politicians and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are lined up to repeat, unchallenged, that, in publishing Manning’s leaks, WikiLeaks and Assange placed the lives informants at risk and had “blood on his hands”. On 1 August, the Guardian reported: “No record of deaths caused by WikiLeaks revelations, court told.” The Pentagon general who led a 10-month investigation into the worldwide impact of the leaks reported that not a single death could be attributed to the disclosures.

Yet, in the film, the journalist Nick Davies describes a heartless Assange who had no “harm minimization plan”. I asked the film-maker Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during much of the preparation of the leaked files for publication in the Guardian and the New York Times. His footage appears in the Gibney film. He told me, “Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs.”

While Manning faces life in prison, Gibney is said to be planning a Hollywood movie. A “biopic” of Assange is on the way, along with a Hollywood version of David Leigh’s and Luke Harding’s book of scuttlebutt on the “fall” of WikiLeaks. Profiting from the boldness, cleverness and suffering of those who refuse to be co-opted and tamed, they all will end up in history’s waste bin. For the inspiration of future truth-tellers belongs to Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and the remarkable young people of WikiLeaks, whose achievements are unparalleled. Snowden’s rescue is largely a WikiLeaks triumph: a thriller too good for Hollywood because its heroes are real.

Recently by John Pilger: Welcome to the Violent World of Mr.HopeyChangey

What is the world's most powerful and violent "ism"? The question will summon the usual demons such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged", because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.

In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians," he wrote, "provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." The "barbarians" were large sections of humanity of whom "implicit obedience" was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as "a triumph of Christianity and civilisation" that was "clearly preordained in the sight of Providence".

"It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, "but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its openended nature — its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] selfrighteous fanaticism." He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" according to his "moral values". At least a million dead later — in Iraq alone — this tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13m.

Blair's crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations — 69 countries — have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. This has been principally the project of the liberal flame carrier, the United States, whose celebrated "progressive" president John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962. "If we have to use force," said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future." How succinctly she defines modern, violent liberalism.

Syria is an enduring project. This is a leaked joint US-UK intelligence file:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, though it might have come from a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, A Collision Course for Intervention, whose author says, with witty understatement: "It is highly likely that some western special forces and intelligence sources have been in Syria for a considerable time." And so a world war beckons in Syria and Iran.

Israel, the violent creation of the west, already occupies part of Syria. This is not news: Israelis take picnics to the Golan Heights and watch a civil war directed by western intelligence from Turkey and bankrolled and armed by the medievalists in Saudi Arabia. Having stolen most of Palestine, attacked Lebanon, starved the people of Gaza and built an illegal nuclear arsenal, Israel is exempt from the current disinformation campaign aimed at installing western clients in Damascus and Tehran.

On 21 July, the Guardian commentator Jonathan Freedland warned that "the west will not stay aloof for long… Both the US and Israel are also anxiously eyeing Syria's supply of chemical and nuclear weapons, now said to be unlocked and on the move, fearing Assad may choose to go down in a lethal blaze of glory." Said by whom? The usual "experts" and spooks.

Like them, Freedland desires "a revolution without the full-blown intervention required in Libya". According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. Read the Unicef report on the children killed, "most [of them] under the age of ten". Like the destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, these crimes were not news, because news as disinformation is a fully integrated weapon of attack.

On 14 July, the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights, which opposed the Gaddafi regime, reported, "The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under Gaddafi." Ethnic cleansing is rife. According to Amnesty, the entire population of the town of Tawargha "are still barred from returning [while] their homes have been looted and burned down".

In Anglo-American scholarship, influential theorists known as "liberal realists" have long taught that liberal imperialists — a term they never use — are the world's peacebrokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified "failed states" (nations difficult to exploit) and "rogue states" (nations resistant to western dominance). Whether or not the regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. The same is true of those contracted to do the dirty work. In the Middle East, from Nasser's time to Syria today, western liberalism's collaborators have been Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while long-discredited notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest, "as required". Plus ça change.

John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John Pilger Archives

When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser "destroyed … murdered … I don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos in Egypt." Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven "into the gutter from which they should never have emerged."

The language of colonialism may have been modified; the spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in direct response to the Arab uprising that began in January and has shocked Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian tyrant Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable; an American-backed counterrevolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with new bribes and power shifting from the street to political groups that did not initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic democracy and reclaim control.

Libya is the immediate opportunity. The NATO attack on Libya, with the UN Security Council assigned to mandate a bogus "no fly zone" to "protect civilians," is strikingly similar to the final destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no UN cover for the bombing of Serbia and the "rescue" of Kosovo, yet the propaganda echoes today. Like Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi is a "new Hitler," plotting "genocide" against his people. There is no evidence of this, as there was no genocide in Kosovo. In Libya there is a tribal civil war; and the armed uprising against Gaddafi has long been appropriated by the Americans, French and British, their planes attacking residential Tripoli with uranium-tipped missiles and the submarine HMS Triumph firing Tomahawk missiles, a repeat of the "shock and awe" in Iraq that left thousands of civilians dead and maimed. As in Iraq, the victims, which include countless incinerated Libyan army conscripts, are media unpeople.

In the "rebel" east, the terrorizing and killing of black African immigrants is not news. On 22 May, a rare piece in the Washington Post described the repression, lawlessness and death squads in the "liberated zones" just as visiting EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, declared she had found only "great aspirations" and "leadership qualities." In demonstrating these qualities, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the "rebel leader" and Gaddafi's justice minister until February, pledged, "Our friends … will have the best opportunity in future contracts with Libya." The east holds most of Libya's oil, the greatest reserves in Africa. In March the rebels, with expert foreign guidance, "transferred" to Benghazi the Libyan Central Bank, a wholly owned state institution. This is unprecedented. Meanwhile, the US and the EU "froze" almost US$100 billion in Libyan funds, "the largest sum ever blocked," according to official statements. It is the biggest bank robbery in history.

The French elite are enthusiastic robbers and bombers. Nicholas Sarkozy's imperial design is for a French-dominated Mediterranean Union (UM), which would allow France to "return" to its former colonies in North Africa and profit from privileged investment and cheap labor. Gaddafi described the Sarkozy plan as "an insult" that was "taking us for fools." The Merkel government in Berlin agreed, fearing its old foe would diminish Germany in the EU, and abstained in the Security Council vote on Libya.

Like the attack on Yugoslavia and the charade of Milosevic's trial, the International Criminal Court is being used by the US, France and Britain to prosecute Gaddafi while his repeated offers of a ceasefire are ignored. Gaddafi is a Bad Arab. David Cameron's government and its verbose top general want to eliminate this Bad Arab, like the Obama administration killed a famously Bad Arab in Pakistan recently. The crown prince of Bahrain, on the other hand, is a Good Arab. On 19 May, he was warmly welcomed to Britain by Cameron with a photo-call on the steps of 10 Downing Street. In March, the same crown prince slaughtered unarmed protesters and allowed Saudi forces to crush his country's democracy movement. The Obama administration has rewarded Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive regimes on earth, with a $US60 billion arms deal, the biggest in US history. The Saudis have the most oil. They are the Best Arabs.

The assault on Libya, a crime under the Nuremberg standard, is Britain's 46th military "intervention" in the Middle East since 1945. Like its imperial partners, Britain's goal is to control Africa's oil. Cameron is not Anthony Eden, but almost. Same school. Same values. In the media-pack, the words colonialism and imperialism are no longer used, so that the cynical and the credulous can celebrate state violence in its more palatable form.

And as "Mr. Hopey Changey" (the name that Ted Rall, the great American cartoonist, gives Barack Obama), is fawned upon by the British elite and launches another insufferable presidential campaign, the Anglo-American reign of terror proceeds in Afghanistan and elsewhere, with the murder of people by unmanned drones — a US/Israel innovation, embraced by Obama. For the record, on a scorecard of imposed misery, from secret trials and prisons and the hounding of whistleblowers and the criminalizing of dissent to the incarceration and impoverishment of his own people, mostly black people, Obama is as bad as George W. Bush.

The Palestinians understand all this. As their young people courageously face the violence of Israel's blood-racism, carrying the keys of their grandparents' stolen homes, they are not even included in Mr. Hopey Changey's list of peoples in the Middle East whose liberation is long overdue. What the oppressed need, he said on 19 May, is a dose of "America's interests [that] are essential to them." He insults us all.

John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John Pilger Archives

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President's daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the "national security" monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the "drumbeat for war" was based not on intelligence, but lies.

"It was 95 per cent charade," McGovern told me.

"How did they get away with it?"

"The press allowed the crazies to get away with it."

"Who are the crazies?"

"The people running the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf … these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as u2018the crazies'."

I said, "Norman Mailer has written that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What's your view of that?"

"Well … I hope he's right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode."

On 22 January, Ray McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration's barbaric treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. "Way back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq," he wrote, "I said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly."

On 16 February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrested protesters and crushed free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the Internet while failing to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the Internet that encouraged dissent and truth-telling. It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon and beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks.

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America's official enemies and to promote the West's foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of "western civilization," found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became "US foreign policy."

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In "Operation Cyclone," the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bankrolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a "priority UK market," according to Britain's official arms "procurers," join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? "It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed," observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, "[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centered egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people — particularly young people — that this not only is what they should feel but that it's what they do feel."

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax-avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John Pilger Archives

In the US Army
manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General
David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a “war of perception
. . . conducted continuously using the news media”. What really
matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban
as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly
influence the attitude of key audiences”. Reading this, I was reminded
of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic
government in 2002. “We had a secret weapon,” he boasted. “We had
the media, especially TV. You got to have the media.”

Never has so
much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude
with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly
generals, are now “perpetual”. In echoing the west’s more verbose
warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick
Cheney, who predicated “50 years of war”, they plan a state
of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy
whose name they dare not speak: the public.

At Chicksands
in Bedfordshire, the
Ministry of Defence’s psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment,
media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon
world of “information dominance”, “asymmetric threats” and “cyberthreats”.
They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods
that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture
in Iraq.
Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.

Of course,
only the jargon is new. In the opening sequence of my film, The
War You Don’t See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks
private conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George,
Britain’s prime minister during much of the first world war, and
CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. “If people really knew
the truth,” the prime minister said, “the war would be stopped tomorrow.
But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”

In the wake
of this “war to end all wars”, Edward
Bernays, a confidante of President
Woodrow Wilson, coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism
for propaganda “which was given a bad name in the war”. In his book,
Propaganda
(1928), Bernays described PR as “an invisible government which is
the true ruling power in our country” thanks to “the intelligent
manipulation of the masses”. This was achieved by “false realities”
and their adoption by the media. (One of Bernays’s early successes
was persuading women to smoke in public. By associating smoking
with women’s liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded cigarettes
as “torches of freedom”.)

I began to
understand this as a young reporter during the American war in Vietnam.
During my first assignment, I saw the results of the bombing of
two villages and the use of Napalm
B, which continues to burn beneath the skin; many of the victims
were children; trees were festooned with body parts. The lament
that “these unavoidable tragedies happen in wars” did not explain
why virtually the entire population of South
Vietnam was at grave risk from the forces of their declared
“ally”, the United States. PR terms like “pacification” and “collateral
damage” became our currency. Almost no reporter used the word “invasion”.
“Involvement” and later “quagmire” became staples of a news vocabulary
that recognised the killing of civilians merely as tragic mistakes
and seldom questioned the good intentions of the invaders.

On the walls
of the Saigon bureaus of major American news organisations were
often displayed horrific photographs that were never published and
rarely sent because it was said they were would “sensationalise”
the war by upsetting readers and viewers and therefore were not
“objective”. The My
Lai massacre in 1968 was not reported from Vietnam, even though
a number of reporters knew about it (and other atrocities like it),
but by a freelance in the US, Seymour
Hersh. The cover of Newsweek magazine called it an “American
tragedy”, implying that the invaders were the victims: a purging
theme enthusiastically taken up by Hollywood in movies such as The
Deer Hunter and Platoon.
The war was flawed and tragic, but the cause was essentially noble.
Moreover, it was “lost” thanks to the irresponsibility of a hostile,
uncensored media.

Although the
opposite of the truth, such false realties became the “lessons”
learned by the makers of present-day wars and by much of the media.
Following Vietnam, “embedding” journalists became central to war
policy on both sides of the Atlantic. With honourable exceptions,
this succeeded, especially in the US. In March 2003, some 700 embedded
reporters and camera crews accompanied the invading American forces
in Iraq. Watch their excited reports, and it is the liberation of
Europe all over again. The Iraqi people are distant, fleeting bit
players; John Wayne had risen again.

The apogee
was the victorious entry into Baghdad, and the TV pictures of crowds
cheering the felling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. Behind this
faade, an American Psyops team successfully manipulated what an
ignored US army report describes as a “media circus [with] almost
as many reporters as Iraqis”. Rageh
Omaar, who was there for the BBC, reported on the main evening
news: “People have come out welcoming [the Americans], holding up
V-signs. This is an image taking place across the whole of the Iraqi
capital.” In fact, across most of Iraq, largely unreported, the
bloody conquest and destruction of a whole society was well under
way.

In The War
You Don’t See, Omaar speaks with admirable frankness. “I didn’t
really do my job properly,” he says. “I’d hold my hand up and say
that one didn’t press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough.”
He describes how British military propaganda successfully manipulated
coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC News 24 reported as having
fallen “17 times”. This coverage, he says, was “a giant echo chamber”.

The sheer magnitude
of Iraqi suffering in the onslaught had little place in the news.
Standing outside 10 Downing St, on the night of the invasion, Andrew
Marr, then the BBC’s political editor, declared, “[Tony Blair]
said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath
and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both
of those points he has been proved conclusively right . . .” I asked
Marr for an interview, but received no reply. In studies of the
television coverage by the University of Wales, Cardiff, and Media
Tenor, the BBC’s coverage was found to reflect overwhelmingly
the government line and that reports of civilian suffering were
relegated. Media Tenor places the BBC and America’s CBS at the bottom
of a league of western broadcasters in the time they allotted to
opposition to the invasion. “I am perfectly open to the accusation
that we were hoodwinked,” said Jeremy
Paxman, talking about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction
to a group of students last year. “Clearly we were.” As a highly
paid professional broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.

Dan Rather,
who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years, was less reticent. “There
was a fear in every newsroom in America,” he told me, “a fear of
losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic
or otherwise.” Rather says war has made “stenographers out of us”
and that had journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the
Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have
happened. This is a view now shared by a number of senior journalists
I interviewed in the US.

In Britain,
David Rose, whose Observer articles played a major part in
falsely linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida and 9/11, gave me a courageous
interview in which he said, “I can make no excuses . . . What happened
[in Iraq] was a crime, a crime on a very large scale . . .”

“Does that
make journalists accomplices?” I asked him.

“Yes . . .
unwitting perhaps, but yes.”

What is the
value of journalists speaking like this? The answer is provided
by the great reporter James
Cameron, whose brave and revealing filmed report, made with
Malcolm Aird, of the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam was banned
by the BBC. “If we who are meant to find out what the bastards are
up to, if we don’t report what we find, if we don’t speak up,” he
told me, “who’s going to stop the whole bloody business happening
again?”

Cameron could
not have imagined a modern phenomenon such as WikiLeaks
but he would have surely approved. In the current avalanche of official
documents, especially those that describe the secret machinations
that lead to war — such as the American mania over Iran — the failure
of journalism is rarely noted. And perhaps the reason Julian Assange
seems to excite such hostility among journalists serving a variety
of “lobbies”, those whom George Bush’s press spokesman once called
“complicit enablers”, is that WikiLeaks and its truth-telling shames
them. Why has the public had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how
great power really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of
Defence document reveals, the most effective journalists are those
who are regarded in places of power not as embedded or clubbable,
but as a “threat”. This is the threat of real democracy, whose “currency”,
said Thomas Jefferson, is “free flowing information”.

In my film,
I asked Assange how WikiLeaks dealt with the draconian secrecy laws
for which Britain is famous. “Well,” he said, “when we look at the
Official Secrets Act labelled documents, we see a statement that
it is an offence to retain the information and it is an offence
to destroy the information, so the only possible outcome is that
we have to publish the information.” These are extraordinary times.

Reprinted
from The Guardian with
permission from the author.

December
17, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

The problem
with this and other Murdoch scares is that, while one cannot doubt
their gravity, they deflect from an unrecognised and more insidious
threat to honest information. For all his power, Murdoch’s
media is not respectable. Take the current colonial wars. In the
United States, Murdoch’s Fox Television is almost cartoon-like
in its warmongering. It is the august, tombstone New York Times,
"the greatest newspaper in the world," and others such
as the once-celebrated Washington Post, that have given respectability
to the lies and moral contortions of the "war on terror,"
now recast as "perpetual war."

In Britain,
the liberal Observer performed this task in making respectable
Tony Blair’s deceptions on Iraq. More importantly, so did the
BBC, whose reputation is its power. In spite of one maverick reporter’s
attempt to expose the so-called dodgy dossier, the BBC took Blair’s
sophistry and lies on Iraq at face value.

This was made
clear in studies by Cardiff University and the German-based Media
Tenor. The BBC’s coverage, said the Cardiff study, was overwhelmingly
"sympathetic to the government’s case." According
to Media Tenor, a mere two per cent of BBC news in the build-up
to the invasion permitted antiwar voices to be heard. Compared with
the main American networks, only CBS was more pro-war.

So when the
BBC director-general Mark Thompson used the recent Edinburgh Television
Festival to attack Murdoch, his hypocrisy was like a presence. Thompson
is the embodiment of a taxpayer-funded managerial elite, for whom
political reaction has long replaced public service. He has even
laid into his own corporation, Murdoch-style, as "massively
left-wing." He was referring to the era of his 1960s predecessor
Hugh Greene, who allowed artistic and journalistic freedom to flower
at the BBC. Thompson is the opposite of Greene; and his aspersion
on the past is in keeping with the BBC’s modern corporate role,
reflected in the rewards demanded by those at the top. Thompson
was paid £834,000 last year out of public funds and his 50
senior executives earn more than the prime minister, along with
enriched journalists like Jeremy Paxman and Fiona Bruce.

Murdoch and
the BBC share this corporatism. Blair, for example, was their quintessential
politician. Prior to his election in 1997, Blair and his wife were
flown first-class by Murdoch to Hayman Island in Australia where
he stood at the Newscorp lectern and, in effect, pledged an obedient
Labour administration. His coded message on media cross-ownership
and deregulation was that a way would be found for Murdoch to achieve
the supremacy that now beckons.

Blair was embraced
by the new BBC corporate class, which regards itself as meritorious
and non-ideological: the natural leaders in a managerial Britain
in which class is unspoken. Few did more to enunciate Blair’s
"vision" than Andrew Marr, then a leading newspaper journalist
and today the BBC’s ubiquitous voice of middle-class Britain.
Just as Murdoch’s Sun declared in 1995 it shared the
rising Blair’s "high moral values" so Marr, writing
the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister’s
"substantial moral courage" and the "clear distinction
in his mind between prudently protecting his power base and rashly
using his power for high moral purpose." What impressed Marr
was Blair’s "utter lack of cynicism" along with his
bombing of Yugoslavia which would "save lives."

By March 2003,
Marr was the BBC’s political editor. Standing in Downing Street
on the night of the "shock and awe" assault on Iraq, he
rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised
"to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in end the Iraqis
would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved
conclusively right" and as a result "tonight he stands
as a larger man." In fact, the criminal conquest of Iraq smashed
a society, killing up to a million people, driving four million
from their homes, contaminating cities like Fallujah with cancer-causing
poisons and leaving a majority of young children malnourished in
a country once described by Unicef as a "model."

So it was entirely
appropriate that Blair, in hawking his self-serving book, should
select Marr for his "exclusive TV interview" on the BBC.
The headline across the Observer’s review of the interview
read, "Look who’s having the last laugh." Beneath
this was a picture of a beaming Blair sharing a laugh with Marr.

The interview
produced not a single challenge that stopped Blair in his precocious,
mendacious tracks. He was allowed to say that "absolutely clearly
and unequivocally, the reason for toppling [Saddam Hussein] was
his breach of resolutions over WMD, right?" No, wrong. A wealth
of evidence, not least the infamous Downing Street Memo, makes clear
that Blair secretly colluded with George W. Bush to attack Iraq.
This was not mentioned. At no point did Marr say to him, "You
failed to persuade the UN Security Council to go along with the
invasion. You and Bush went alone. Most of the world was outraged.
Weren’t you aware that you were about to commit a monumental
war crime?"

Instead, Blair
used the convivial encounter to deceive, yet again, even to promote
an attack on Iran, an outrage. Murdoch’s Fox would have differed
in style only. The British public deserves better.

October
8, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

The
American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should
smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation,
he made cigarettes "torches of freedom." In 1954, he conjured
a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the
democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening
the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called
it a "liberation."

Bernays
was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed
that "engineering public consent" was for the greater
good. This was achieved by the creation of "false realities"
which then became "news events." Here are examples of
how it is done these days:

False
reality The last US combat troops have left Iraq "as promised,
on schedule," according to President Barack Obama. TV screens
have filled with cinematic images of the "last US soldiers"
silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.

Fact
They are still there. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate
from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special
forces’ assassinations. The number of "military contractors"
is currently 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct
foreign control.

False
reality BBC presenters and reporters have described the departing
US troops as a "sort of victorious army" that has achieved
"a remarkable change in [Iraq's] fortunes." Their commander,
General David Petraeus, is a "celebrity," "charming,"
"savvy" and "remarkable."

Fact
There is no victory of any sort. There is a catastrophic disaster;
and attempts to present it as otherwise are a model of Bernays’
campaign to "re-brand" the slaughter of the first world
war as "necessary" and "noble." In 1980, Ronald
Reagan, running for president, re-branded the invasion of Vietnam,
in which up to three million people died, as a "noble cause,"
a theme taken up enthusiastically by Hollywood. Today’s Iraq war
movies have a similar purging theme: the invader as both idealist
and victim.

False
reality It is not known how many Iraqis have died. They are
"countless" or maybe "in the tens of thousands."

Fact
As a direct consequence of the Anglo-American led invasion,
a million Iraqis have died. This figure from Opinion Research Business
is based on peer-reviewed research led by Johns Hopkins University
in Washington DC, whose methods were secretly affirmed as "best
practice" and "robust" by the Blair government’s
chief scientific adviser, as revealed in a Freedom of Information
search. This figure is rarely reported or presented to "charming"
and "savvy" American generals. Neither is the dispossession
of four million Iraqis, the malnourishment of most Iraqi children,
the epidemic of mental illness and the poisoning of the environment.

False
reality The British economy has a deficit of billions which
must be reduced with cuts in public services and regressive taxation,
in a spirit of "we’re all in this together."

Fact
We are not in this together. What is remarkable about this public
relations triumph is that only 18 months ago the diametric opposite
filled TV screens and front pages. Then, in a state of shock, truth
was unavoidable, if briefly. The Wall Street and City of London
financiers’ trough was on full view for the first time, along with
the venality of once celebrated snouts. Billions in public money
went to inept and crooked organizations known as banks, which were
spared debt liability by their Labour government sponsors.

Within
a year, record profits and personal bonuses were posted, and state
and media propaganda had recovered its equilibrium. Suddenly, the
"black hole" was no longer the responsibility of the banks,
whose debt is to be paid by those not in any way responsible: the
public. The received media wisdom of this "necessity"
is now a chorus, from the BBC to the Sun. A masterstroke,
Bernays would surely say.

False
reality The former government minister Ed Miliband offers a
"genuine alternative" as leader of the British Labour
Party.

Fact
Miliband, like his brother David, the former foreign secretary,
and almost all those standing for the Labour leadership, is immersed
in the effluent of New Labour. As a New Labour MP and minister,
he did not refuse to serve under Blair or speak out against Labour’s
persistent warmongering. He now calls the invasion of Iraq a "profound
mistake." Calling it a mistake insults the memory and the dead.
It was a crime, of which the evidence is voluminous. He has nothing
new to say about the other colonial wars, none of them mistakes.
Neither has he demanded basic social justice: that those who caused
the recession clear up the mess and that Britain’s fabulously rich
corporate minority be seriously taxed, starting with Rupert Murdoch.

Of
course, the good news is that false realities often fail when the
public trusts its own critical intelligence, not the media. Two
classified documents recently released by WikiLeaks express the
CIA’s concern that the populations of European countries, which
oppose their governments’ war policies, are not succumbing to the
usual propaganda spun through the media. For the rulers of the world,
this is a conundrum, because their unaccountable power rests on
the false reality that no popular resistance works. And it does.

September
3, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

There
is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange is "hunted down" and "rendered."
In Washington, I interviewed a senior Defense Department official
and asked, "Can you give a guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks
and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected
to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?" He
replied, "It’s not my position to give guarantees on anything."
He referred me to the "ongoing criminal investigation"
of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower. In a
nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the
Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers
than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states
bluntly that US intelligence intends to "fatally marginalize"
Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists
ever ready to play their part.

On
31 July, the American celebrity reporter Christiane Amanapour interviewed
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the ABC network. She invited
Gates to describe to her viewers his "anger" at Wikileaks.
She echoed the Pentagon line that "this leak has blood on its
hands," thereby cueing Gates to find Wikileaks "guilty"
of "moral culpability." Such hypocrisy coming from a regime
drenched in the blood of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq — as
its own files make clear — is apparently not for journalistic inquiry.
This is hardly surprising now that a new and fearless form of public
accountability, which Wikileaks represents, threatens not only the
war-makers but their apologists.

Their
current propaganda is that Wikileaks is "irresponsible."
Earlier this year, before it released the cockpit video of an American
Apache gunship killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists
and children, Wikileaks sent people to Baghdad to find the families
of the victims in order to prepare them. Prior to the release of
last month’s Afghan War Logs, Wikileaks wrote to the White House
asking that it identify names that might draw reprisals. There was
no reply. More than 15,000 files were withheld and these, says Assange,
will not be released until they have been scrutinized "line
by line" so that names of those at risk can be deleted.

The
pressure on Assange himself seems unrelenting. In his homeland,
Australia, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has said that
if her right-wing coalition wins the general election on 21 August,
"appropriate action" will be taken "if an Australian
citizen has deliberately undertake an activity that could put at
risk the lives of Australian forces in Afghanistan or undermine
our operations in any way." The Australian role in Afghanistan,
effectively mercenary in the service of Washington, has produced
two striking results: the massacre of five children in a village
in Oruzgan province and the overwhelming disapproval of the majority
of Australians.

Last
May, following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his
Australian passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home.
The Labor government in Canberra denies it has received requests
from Washington to detain him and spy on the Wikileaks network.
The Cameron government also denies this. They would, wouldn’t they?
Assange, who came to London last month to work on exposing the war
logs, has had to leave Britain hastily for, as puts it, "safer
climes."

On
16 August, the Guardian, citing Daniel Ellsberg, described
the great Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu as "the preeminent
hero of the nuclear age." Vanunu, who alerted the world to
Israel’s secret nuclear weapons, was kidnapped by the Israelis and
incarcerated for 18 years after he was left unprotected by the London
Sunday Times, which had published the documents he supplied.
In 1983, another heroic whistleblower, Sarah Tisdall, a Foreign
Office clerical officer, sent documents to the Guardian that
disclosed how the Thatcher government planned to spin the arrival
of American cruise missiles in Britain. The Guardian complied
with a court order to hand over the documents, and Tisdall went
to prison.

In
one sense, the Wikileaks revelations shame the dominant section
of journalism devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign
power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look
on the Wikileaks site and read a Ministry of Defense document that
describes the "threat" of real journalism. And so it should
be a threat. Having published skillfully the Wikileaks expos of
a fraudulent war, the Guardian should now give its most powerful
and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Julian Assange
and his colleagues, whose truth-telling is as important as any in
my lifetime.

I
like Julian Assange’s dust-dry wit. When I asked him if it was more
difficult to publish secret information in Britain, he replied,
"When we look at Official Secrets Act labeled documents we
see that they state it is offense to retain the information and
an offense to destroy the information. So the only possible outcome
we have is to publish the information."

August
19, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

In
addition, four million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes
and a majority of children have descended into malnutrition and
trauma. Cancer rates near the cities of Fallujah, Najaf and Basra
(the latter "liberated" by the British) are now revealed
as higher than those at Hiroshima. "UK forces used about 1.9
metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,"
the Defense Secretary Liam Fox told parliament on 22 July. A range
of toxic "antipersonnel" weapons, such as cluster bombs,
was employed by British and American forces.

Such
carnage was justified with lies that have been repeatedly exposed.
On 29 January 2003, Blair told parliament, "We do know of links
between al-Qaida and Iraq …." Last month, the former head of
the intelligence service, MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the
Chilcot inquiry, "There is no credible intelligence to suggest
that connection … [it was the invasion] that gave Osama bin Laden
his Iraqi jihad." Asked to what extent the invasion exacerbated
the threat to Britain from terrorism, she replied, "Substantially."

The
bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were a direct consequence of Blair’s
actions.

Documents
released by the High Court show that Blair allowed British citizens
to be abducted and tortured. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw,
decided in January 2002 that Guantanamo was the "best way"
to ensure UK nationals were "securely held."

Instead
of remorse, Blair has demonstrated a voracious and secretive greed.
Since stepping down as prime minister in 2007, he has accumulated
an estimated 20 million, much of it as a result of his ties with
the Bush administration. The House of Commons Advisory Committee
on Business Appointments, which vets jobs taken by former ministers,
was pressured not to make public Blair’s "consultancy"
deals with the Kuwaiti royal family and the South Korean oil giant
UI Energy Corporation. He gets 2 million a year "advising"
the American investment bank J P Morgan and undisclosed sums from
financial services companies. He makes millions from speeches, including
reportedly 200,000 for one speech in China.

In
his unpaid but expenses-rich role as the West’s "peace envoy"
in the Middle East, Blair is, in effect, a voice of Israel, which
awarded him a $1 million "peace prize." In other words,
his wealth has grown rapidly since he launched, with George W. Bush,
the bloodbath in Iraq.

His
collaborators are numerous. The Cabinet in March 2003 knew a great
deal about the conspiracy to attack Iraq. Jack Straw, later appointed
"justice secretary," suppressed the relevant Cabinet minutes
in defiance of an order by the Information Commissioner to release
them. Most of those now running for the Labour Party leadership
supported Blair’s epic crime, rising as one to salute his final
appearance in the Commons. As foreign secretary, David Miliband,
sought to cover Britain’s complicity in torture, and promoted Iran
as the next "threat."

Journalists
who once fawned on Blair as "mystical" and amplified his
vainglorious bids now pretend they were his critics all along. As
for the media’s gulling of the public, only the Observer’s
David Rose, to his great credit, has apologized. The WikiLeaks’
exposs, released with a moral objective of truth with justice,
have been bracing for a public force-fed on complicit, lobby journalism.
Verbose celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson, who rejoiced in
Blair’s rejuvenation of "enlightened" imperialism, remain
silent on the "moral truancy," as Pankaj Mishra wrote,
"of [those] paid to intelligently interpret the contemporary
world."

Is
it wishful thinking that Blair will be collared? Just as the Cameron
government understands the "threat" of a law that makes
Britain a risky stopover for Israeli war criminals, a similar risk
awaits Blair in a number of countries and jurisdictions, at least
of being apprehended and questioned. He is now Britain’s Kissinger,
who has long planned his travel outside the United States with the
care of a fugitive.

Two
recent events add weight to this. On 15 June, the International
Criminal Court made the landmark decision of adding aggression to
its list of war crimes to be prosecuted. This is defined as a "crime
committed by a political or military leader which by its character,
gravity and scale constituted a manifest violation of the [United
Nations] Charter." International lawyers described this as
a "giant leap." Britain is a signatory to the Rome statute
that created the court and is bound by its decisions.

On
21 July, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, standing at the Commons
despatch box, declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. For all the
later "clarification" that he was speaking personally,
he had made "a statement that the international court would
be interested in," said Philippe Sands, professor of international
law at University College London.

Tony
Blair came from Britain’s upper middle classes who, having rejoiced
in his unctuous ascendancy, might now reflect on the principles
of right and wrong they require of their own children. The suffering
of the children of Iraq will remain a specter haunting Britain while
Blair remains free to profit.

August
6, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

The
next morning I arrived at the Pentagon for an interview with one
of President Obama’s senior war-making officials. There was a long
walk along shiny corridors hung with pictures of generals and admirals
festooned in ribbons. The interview room was purpose-built. It was
blue and arctic cold, and windowless and featureless except for
a flag and two chairs: props to create the illusion of a place of
authority. The last time I was in a room like this in the Pentagon
a colonel called Hum stopped my interview with another war-making
official when I asked why so many innocent civilians were being
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was in the thousands; now
it is more than a million. "Stop tape!" he ordered.

This
time there was no Colonel Hum, merely a polite dismissal of soldiers’
testimony that it was a "common occurrence" that troops
were ordered to "kill every mother-f**ker." The Pentagon,
says the Associated Press, spends $4.7 billion on public relations:
that is, winning the hearts and minds not of recalcitrant Afghan
tribesmen but of Americans. This is known as "information dominance"
and PR people are "information warriors."

American
imperial power flows through a media culture to which the word imperial
is anathema. To broach it is heresy. Colonial campaigns are really
"wars of perception," wrote the present commander, General
David Petraeus, in which the media popularizes the terms and conditions.
"Narrative" is the accredited word because it is postmodern
and bereft of context and truth. The narrative of Iraq is that the
war is won, and the narrative of Afghanistan is that it is a "good
war." That neither is true is beside the point. They promote
a "grand narrative" of a constant threat and the need
for permanent war. "We are living in a world of cascading and
intertwined threats," wrote the celebrated New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman, "that have the potential to turn
our country upside down at any moment."

Friedman
supports an attack on Iran, whose independence is intolerable. This
is the psychopathic vanity of great power which Martin Luther King
described as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world."
He was then shot dead.

The
psychopathic is applauded across popular, corporate culture, from
the TV death watch of a man choosing a firing squad over lethal
injection to the Oscar winning Hurt
Locker and a new acclaimed war documentary Restrepo.
Directors of both films deny and dignify the violence of invasion
as "apolitical." And yet behind the cartoon facade is
serious purpose. The US is engaged militarily in 75 countries. There
are some 900 US military bases across the world, many at the gateways
to the sources of fossil fuels.

But
there is a problem. Most Americans are opposed to these wars and
to the billions of dollars spent on them. That their brainwashing
so often fails is America’s greatest virtue. This is frequently
due to courageous mavericks, especially those who emerge from the
centrifuge of power. In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked
documents known as the Pentagon Papers which put the lie to almost
everything two presidents had claimed about Vietnam. Many of these
insiders are not even renegades. I have a section in my address
book filled with the names of former officers of the CIA, who have
spoken out. They have no equivalent in Britain.

In
1993, C. Philip Liechty, the CIA operations officer in Jakarta at
the time of Indonesia’s murderous invasion of East Timor, described
to me how President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
had given the dictator Suharto "a green light" and secretly
supplied the arms and logistics he needed. As the first reports
of massacres arrived at his desk, he began to turn. "It was
wrong," he said. "I felt badly."

Melvin
Goodman is now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.
He was in the CIA more than 40 years and rose to be a senior Soviet
analyst. When we met the other day, he described the conduct of
the cold war as a series of gross exaggerations of Soviet "aggressiveness"
that willfully ignored the intelligence that the Soviets were committed
to avoid nuclear war at all costs. Declassified official files on
both sides of the Atlantic support this view. "What mattered
to the hardliners in Washington," he said, "was how a
perceived threat could be exploited." The present secretary
of defense, Robert Gates, as deputy director of the CIA in the 1980s,
had constantly hyped the "Soviet menace" and is, says
Goodman, doing the same today "on Afghanistan, North Korea
and Iran."

Little
has changed. In America, in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote:

As
the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives [...]
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong

July
8, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

In Gaza, the
sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed
behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce
a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has
secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition
against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and
Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defense" Robert
Gates complains that "the general [European] public and the
political class" are so opposed to war they are an "impediment"
to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to
an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
is not so much a real war as a "war of perception." Thus,
the recent "liberation of the city of Marja" from the
Taliban’s "command and control structure" was pure Hollywood.
Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The
heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor.
Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide
fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure
seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The
Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins
through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda
exercise.

"War is
fun," the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony,
meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than
to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms
such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This
danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair
in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology
has surrendered entirely to values" (Hugo Young, the Guardian)
compared with today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Western war-states
such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or
any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the antiwar
instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences
handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel’s
assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in
which paramilitary police "kettled" (corralled) thousands,
first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for
minor offenses that would not normally carry custodial sentences.
On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal
war has become a serious crime.

Silence in
other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature,
journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from
the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference
to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively
the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With
Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists
and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the "market"
or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about
the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade
and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991,
the US Defense Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail
how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system
and lead to "increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease."
So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population:
one of the causes, noted UNICEF, of the deaths of half a million
Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently
has no name.

Norman Mailer
once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit
of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era."
Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even
he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for
it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography
of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism,
as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more
nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive
modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent."

This is Americanism,
the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The
rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their
own right and of a military that is now a state within the state,
set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington
lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and
stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results
are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck,
the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American
and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide.
They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented
wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its
genocide proceeded, human being by human being.

In the coming
election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this
war only to laud "our boys." The candidates are almost
identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars
and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British
elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb
the natives and call itself a "partner." We should interrupt
their fun.

April
13, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

Barack
Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at
the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that
peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends
well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions
and diffuse enemies." He called this "global security"
and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America
has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest
in occupying your country."

In
Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the
American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United
Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the
"the world" supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11
when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup
expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded
Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama]
bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand
over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and
were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification
for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers
were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told
by the Bush administration that an American military assault would
take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the
Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded
as "stable" enough to ensure America’s control over oil
and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s
most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven"
for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser,
General James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer
than 100" al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence,
90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a
tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the
US because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud. Only
the terminally gormless
remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."

Beneath
the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing
General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination
squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries
is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world
still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is known as COIN, or counterinsurgency
network, which draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists,
anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered
in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one
ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks
against Pashtuns.

The
Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multiethnic society.
They bribed and built walls between communities who had once intermarried,
ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country.
The embedded media reported this as "peace," and American
academics bought by Washington and "security experts"
briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news.
As in Nineteen Eighty-four, the opposite was true.

Something
similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into
"target areas" controlled by warlords bankrolled by the
Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous
for their barbarism is irrelevant. "We can live with that,"
a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a "stable"
Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favored western relief agencies, engineers
and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian
crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That
is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the
ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but
it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s "strategic hamlet program"
was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so
defeat the Viet Cong — the Americans’ catchall term for the resistance,
similar to "Taliban."

Behind
much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans
in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building,
checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance — these
are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing
most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their
suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and
they endure as a nation against all odds.

The
most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace
Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget,
are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the
19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century
attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were
seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are
their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic,
remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

"It
was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-four,
"to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia
or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also
very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant
of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies,
and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in
their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day
overturn the world."

January
1, 2010

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

Whole villages
were empty. Chairs and beds, pots and mats lay in the street, a
car on its side, a bent bicycle. Behind fallen power lines lay or
sat a single human shadow; it did not move. From the paddies, lines
of tall wild grass followed straight lines. Fertilized by the remains
of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children, these marked
common graves in a nation where as many as two million people, or
more than a quarter of the population, were "missing."

At the liberation
of the Nazi death camp in Belsen in 1945, The Times correspondent
wrote: "It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination
of mankind." That was how I felt in 1979 when I entered Cambodia,
a country sealed from the outside world for almost four years since
"Year Zero."

Year Zero had
begun shortly after sunrise on April 17, 1975 when Pol Pot’s Khmer
Rouge guerrillas entered the capital, Phnom Penh. They wore black
and marched in single file along the wide boulevards. At one o’clock,
they ordered the city abandoned. The sick and wounded were forced
at gunpoint from their hospital beds; families were separated; the
old and disabled fell beside the road. "Don’t take anything
with you," the men in black ordered. "You will be coming
back tomorrow."

Tomorrow never
came. An age of slavery began. Anybody who owned cars and such "luxuries,"
anybody who lived in a city or town or had a modern skill, anybody
who knew or worked with foreigners, was in grave danger; some were
already under sentence of death. Out of the Royal Cambodian Ballet
company of 500 dancers, perhaps 30 survived. Doctors, nurses, engineers,
teachers were starved, or worked to death, or murdered.

For me, entering
the silent, gray humidity of Phnom Penh was like walking into a
city the size of Manchester in the wake of a nuclear cataclysm which
had spared only the buildings. There was no power, no drinking water,
no shops, no services of any kind. At the railway station trains
stood empty at various stages of interrupted departure. Personal
belongings and pieces of clothing fluttered on the platforms, as
they fluttered on the mass graves beyond.

I walked along
Monivong Avenue to the National Library which had been converted
to pigsty, as a symbol, all its books burned. It was dreamlike.
There was wasteland where the Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral had
stood; it had been dismantled stone by stone. When the afternoon
monsoon rains broke, the deserted streets were suddenly awash with
money. With every downpour a worthless fortune of new and unused
banknotes sluiced out of the Bank of Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge
had blown up as they fled.

Inside, a checkbook
lay open on the counter. A pair of glasses rested on an open ledger.
I slipped and fell on a floor brittle with coins.

For the first
few hours I had no sense of even the remains of a population. The
few human shapes I glimpsed seemed incoherent, and on catching sight
of me, would flit into a doorway. A child ran into a wardrobe lying
on its side which was his or her refuge. In a crumbling Esso filling
station an old woman and three emaciated infants squatted around
a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over
a fire fueled with paper money: such grotesque irony: people in
need of everything had money to burn.

At a primary
school called Tuol Sleng, I walked through what had become the "interrogation
unit" and the "torture and massacre unit." Beneath
iron beds I found blood and tufts of hair still on the floor. "Speaking
is absolutely forbidden," said a sign. "Before doing something,
anything, the authorization of the warden must be obtained."

After a while,
one sound had a terrible syncopation: rising and falling day and
night. Without milk and medicines, children were stricken with preventable
disease like dysentery. It seemed that the very fabric of the society
had begun to unravel. The first surveys revealed that many women
had stopped menstruating.

What compounded
this was the isolation imposed on Cambodia by the West because its
liberators, the Vietnamese, had come from the wrong side of the
cold war, having driven America out of their country in 1975. Cambodia
had been the West’s dirty secret since President Richard Nixon and
his national security adviser Henry Kissinger ordered a "secret
bombing," extending the war in Vietnam into Cambodia in the
early 1970s, killing hundreds of thousands of peasants. "If
this doesn’t work," an aide heard Nixon say to Kissinger, "it’ll
be your ass, Henry." It worked in handing Pol Pot his chance
to seize power.

When I arrived
in the aftermath, no Western aid had reached Cambodia. Only Oxfam
defied the Foreign Office in London, which had lied that the Vietnamese
were obstructing aid. In September 1979, a DC-8 jet took off from
Luxembourg, filled with enough penicillin, vitamins and milk to
restore some 70,000 children — all of it paid for by Daily Mirror
readers who had responded to my reports and Eric Piper’s pictures
in two historic issues of the paper which sold every copy.

Following on
from the Mirror, on October 30, 1979, ITV broadcast Year
Zero: the silent death of Cambodia, the documentary I made
with the late David Munro. Forty sacks of post arrived at the ATV
studios in Birmingham, with 1 million in the first few days. "This
is for Cambodia," wrote an anonymous Bristol bus driver, enclosing
his week’s wage. An elderly woman sent her pension for two months.
A single parent sent her savings of 50. People expressed that unremitting
sense of decency and community which is at the core of British society.
Unsolicited, they gave more than 20 million. This helped rescue
normal life in faraway country. It restored a clean water supply
in Phnom Penh, stocked hospitals and schools, supported orphanages
and reopened a desperately needed clothing factory.

Such an extraordinary
public outpouring broke the US and British governments’ blockade
of Cambodia. Incredibly, the Thatcher government had continued to
support the defunct Pol Pot regime in the United Nations and even
sent the SAS to train his exiled troops in camps in Thailand and
Malaysia. Last March, the former SAS soldier Chris Ryan, now a best-selling
author, lamented in a newspaper interview "when John Pilger,
the foreign correspondent, discovered we were training the Khmer
Rouge in the Far east [we] were sent home and I had to return the
10,000 we’d been given for food and accommodation."

Today, Pol
Pot is dead and several of his elderly henchmen are on trial in
a UN/Cambodian court for crimes against humanity. Henry Kissinger,
whose bombing opened the door to the nightmare of Year Zero, is
still at large. Cambodians remain desperately poor, dependent on
an often seedy tourism and sweated labor.

For me, their
resilience remains almost magical. In the years that followed their
liberation, I never saw as many weddings or received as many wedding
invitations. They became symbols of life and hope. And yet, only
in Cambodia would a child ask an adult, as a twelve-year-old asked
me, with fear crossing his face: "Are you a friend? Please
say."

October
31, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

Within weeks
of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing
more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran
— which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared
to "obliterate" — Obama lied that the Iranians were covering
up a "secret nuclear facility," knowing that it had already
been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding
with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed
the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel
had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza — crimes
made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved
before his inauguration.

At home, the
man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any
year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over
a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting
in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarized police attacked peaceful
protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device,
not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small
tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were
fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of "crowd-control
munitions" supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon.
In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled "national security state,"
the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close,
remains open, and "rendition," secret assassinations and
torture continue.

The Nobel
Peace Prize—winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July,
Washington finalized a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven
giant military bases. "The idea," reported the Associated
Press, "is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations
. . . nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military
transport] without refueling," which "helps achieve the
regional engagement strategy."

Translated,
this means Obama is planning a "rollback" of the independence
and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and
Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional
cooperation that rejects the notion of a US "sphere of influence."
The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s
worst human rights record, has received US military support second
in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided
by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate
Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government
of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama’s war
on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated
since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel
Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted
subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced
poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture
cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement,
he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador
or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush
a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting
with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal
regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity
on behalf of the US.

Obama, the
smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore
what he calls "leadership" throughout the world. The Nobel
Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism
that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member
of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to
the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not
unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted
and boneheaded. "When Obama walks into a room," gushed
George Clooney, "you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere."

The great
voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The
Wretched of the Earth, he described the "intermediary
[whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation:
it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between
the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged." Because
political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture
— Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron — race, gender and class can
be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s
case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not
the intermediary’s "historic" elevation, but the class
he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most
multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice,
Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme
and dangerous power.

Britain has
seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected
in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create "new worldwide
rules on human rights" while the Guardian rejoiced at
the "breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open."
When Obama was elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee
of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: "I shut my eyes
when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the
same thing that we did in 1997."

October
16, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

Something similar
is happening over Iran: the same syncopation of government and media
"revelations," the same manufacture of a sense of crisis.
"Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant,"
declared the Guardian on 26 September. "Showdown"
is the theme. High noon. The clock ticking. Good versus evil. Add
a smooth new US president who has "put paid to the Bush years."
An immediate echo is the notorious Guardian front page of
22 May 2007: "Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive
to force US out of Iraq." Based on unsubstantiated claims by
the Pentagon, the writer Simon Tisdall presented as fact an Iranian
"plan" to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq by
September of that year — a demonstrable falsehood for which
there has been no retraction.

The official
jargon for this kind of propaganda is "psy-ops," the military
term for psychological operations. In the Pentagon and Whitehall,
it has become a critical component of a diplomatic and military
campaign to blockade, isolate and weaken Iran by hyping its "nuclear
threat": a phrase now used incessantly by Barack Obama and
Gordon Brown, and parroted by the BBC and other broadcasters as
objective news. And it is fake.

On 16 September,
Newsweek disclosed that the major US intelligence agencies
had reported to the White House that Iran’s "nuclear status"
had not changed since the National Intelligence Estimate of November
2007, which stated with "high confidence" that Iran had
halted in 2003 the program it was alleged to have developed. The
International Atomic Energy Agency has backed this, time and again.

The current
propaganda-as-news derives from Obama’s announcement that the
US is scrapping missiles stationed on Russia’s border. This
serves to cover the fact that the number of US missile sites is
actually expanding in Europe and the "redundant" missiles
are being redeployed on ships. The game is to mollify Russia into
joining, or not obstructing, the US campaign against Iran. "President
Bush was right," said Obama, "that Iran’s ballistic
missile program poses a significant threat [to Europe and the US]."
That Iran would contemplate a suicidal attack on the US is preposterous.
The threat, as ever, is one-way, with the world’s superpower
virtually ensconced on Iran’s borders.

Iran’s
crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favorite
tyrant, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iran remains the only resource-rich Muslim
state beyond US control. As only Israel has a "right to exist"
in the Middle East, the US goal is to cripple the Islamic Republic.
This will allow Israel to divide and dominate the region on Washington’s
behalf, undeterred by a confident neighbor. If any country in the
world has been handed urgent cause to develop a nuclear "deterrence,"
it is Iran.

As one of the
original signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran
has been a consistent advocate of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle
East. In contrast, Israel has never agreed to an IAEA inspection,
and its nuclear weapons plant at Dimona remains an open secret.
Armed with as many as 200 active nuclear warheads, Israel "deplores"
UN resolutions calling on it to sign the NPT, just as it deplored
the recent UN report charging it with crimes against humanity in
Gaza, just as it maintains a world record for violations of international
law. It gets away with this because great power grants it immunity.

Obama’s
"showdown" with Iran has another agenda. On both sides
of the Atlantic the media have been tasked with preparing the public
for endless war. The US/Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal
says 500,000 troops will be required in Afghanistan over five years,
according to America’s NBC. The goal is control of the "strategic
prize" of the gas and oilfields of the Caspian Sea, Central
Asia, the Gulf and Iran — in other words, Eurasia. But the
war is opposed by 69 per cent of the British public, 57 per cent
of the US public, and almost every other human being. Convincing
"us" that Iran is the new demon will not be easy. McChrystal’s
spurious claim that Iran "is reportedly training fighters for
certain Taliban groups" is as desperate as Brown’s pathetic
echo of "a line in the sand."

During the
Bush years, according to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg,
a military coup took place in the US, and the Pentagon is now ascendant
in every area of American foreign policy. A measure of its control
is the number of wars of aggression being waged simultaneously and
the adoption of a "first-strike" doctrine that has lowered
the threshold on nuclear weapons, together with the blurring of
the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons.

All this mocks
Obama’s media rhetoric about "a world without nuclear
weapons." In fact, he is the Pentagon’s most important
acquisition. His acquiescence with its demand that he keep on Bush’s
secretary of "defense" and arch war-maker, Robert Gates,
is unique in US history. He has proved his worth with escalated
wars from south Asia to the Horn of Africa. Like Bush’s America,
Obama’s America is run by some very dangerous people. We have
a right to be warned. When will those paid to keep the record straight
do their job?

October
3, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His latest book is Freedom
Next Time: Resisting the Empire.

John
Pilger Archives

The answer
lies in a deeper corruption which tales of tax evasion and phantom
mortgages touch upon but also conceal. Since Margaret Thatcher,
British parliamentary democracy has been progressively destroyed
as the two main parties have converged into a single-ideology business
state, each with almost identical social, economic and foreign policies.
This "project" was completed by Tony Blair and Gordon
Brown, inspired by the political monoculture of the United States.
That Labour and Tory politicians are now revealed as personally
crooked is no more than a metaphor for the antidemocratic system
they have forged together.

Their accomplices
have been Westminster "lobby" (parliamentary) journalists
and their editors who have "played the game," wilfully,
and deluded the public (and sometimes themselves) that vital, democratic
differences exist between the parties. Media-designed opinion polls
based on absurdly small samplings, along with a tsunami of comment
on political personalities and their specious crises, have reduced
the "national conversation" to a series of media events,
in which the withdrawal of popular consent — as the historically
low electoral turnouts under Blair demonstrated — has been abused
as apathy.

Having fixed
the boundaries of political debate and possibility and vocabulary,
self-important paladins, especially liberals, promoted the naked
emperor Blair as "mystical" and championed his "values"
that would allow "the mind [to] range in search of a better
Britain." And when the bloodstains showed, they ran for cover.
It has all been, as Larry David once described an erstwhile crony,
"a babbling brook of bullshit."

How contrite
their former heroes now seem. On 17 May, the leader of the House
of Commons, Harriet Harman, who is alleged to have spent 10,000
of taxpayers’ money on "media training," called on MPs
to "rebuild cross party trust." The unintended irony of
her words recalls one of her first acts as Blair’s Social Security
Secretary more than a decade ago — cutting the benefits of single
mothers. This was spun and reported as if there was a "revolt"
among Labour backbenchers, which was false. None of Blair’s new
female MPs, who had been elected "to end male-dominated, Conservatives
policies," spoke up against this attack on the poorest of poor
women. All voted for it.

The same was
true of the lawless attack on Iraq in 2003, behind which the cross-party
establishment and the political media rallied. The famous BBC man
Andrew Marr stood in Downing Street and excitedly told his viewers
that Blair "said they would be able to take Baghdad without
a bloodbath, and in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And
on both those points he has been proved conclusively right."
When Blair’s army finally retreated from Basra last month, they
left behind, according to scholarly estimate, more than a million
people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated
water supply, a crippled energy grid and four million refugees.
As for the "celebrating" Iraqis, the vast majority, say
Whitehall’s own surveys, want the invader out. And when Blair finally
departed the House of Commons, MPs gave him a standing ovation —
they who had refused to hold a vote on his criminal invasion or
even to set up an inquiry into its lies, which almost three-quarters
of the British population wanted.

Such corruption
goes beyond avarice.

Normalizing
the unthinkable, Edward Herman’s memorable phrase from his essay,
The Banality of Evil, about the division of labour in state
crime, is applicable here. On 18 May, the Guardian devoted
the top of one page to a report headlined, "Blair awarded $1
million prize for international relations work." Announced
in Israel soon after the Gaza massacre, the prize was for Blair’s
"cultural and social impact on the world." You looked
in vain for evidence of a spoof or some recognition of the
truth. Instead, there was his "optimism about the chance of
bringing peace …" and his work "designed to forge peace."

This was the
same Blair who committed the same crime — deliberately planning
and invading a country, "the supreme international crime"
— for which Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, was
hanged at Nuremberg, after proof of his guilt was located in German
cabinet documents. Last February, Britain’s "Justice"
Minister Jack Straw blocked publication of crucial cabinet minutes
in March 2003 about the planning of the invasion of Iraq, even though
the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has ordered their release.
For Blair, the unthinkable is both normalized and celebrated.

"How our
corrupt MPs are playing into the hands of extremists," said
the cover of last week’s New Statesman. But is not their
support for the epic crime in Iraq already extremism? And
for the murderous imperial adventure in Afghanistan? And for the
government’s collusion with torture?

It is as if
our public language is now Orwellian. Using totalitarian laws approved
by a majority of MPs, the police have set up secretive units to
combat democratic dissent they call "extremism." Their
effective partners are "security" journalists, a recent
breed of state or "lobby" propagandist. On 9 April, the
BBC’s Newsnight program promoted the guilt of twelve "terrorists"
arrested in a contrived media drama orchestrated by the prime minister
himself. All were subsequently released without charge.

Something is
changing in Britain. The British people have never been more political
aware and prepared to clear out decrepit myths and other rubbish
while angrily stepping over the babbling brook of bulls**t.

May
28, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, will
be published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

It is 100 days
since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The
"Obama brand" has since been named Advertising Age’s
"marketer
of the year for 2008," easily beating Apple. David Fenton
of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign "an
institutionalized, mass-level, automated technological community
organizing that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful
force." Deploying the Internet and a slogan plagiarized from
the Latino union organizer Caesar Chavez — Si se puede!
— "yes, we can," the "mass-level, automated
technological community" marketed its brand to victory in a
country desperate to be rid of George W. Bush.

No one knew
what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising
— a record $75 million was spent on TV commercials alone —
that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition
to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s
warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also
believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of
anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the
vacuous "change you can believe in," it was the renewal
of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. "We will be the
most powerful!" he declared.

Perhaps the
Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free
of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers in a rapacious
system, promote shining knights. They depoliticized him, spinning
his platitudinous speeches as "adroit
literary creations, rich, like those doric columns, with allusion"
(Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian). San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Mark Morford wrote
that "many spiritually advanced people I know … identify
Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who …
can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet."

In his first
100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus, and
demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact
and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On April
24, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo prisoners were
not "persons" and therefore had no right not to be tortured.
His national intelligence director, Adm. Dennis Blair, says he believes
torture works. One of his senior officials in Latin America is accused
of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala; another
is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, America
experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of "defense,"
Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, have been
retained by Obama.

All over the
world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly
or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in
Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, "the Obama team let it be known
that it would not object to the planned resupply of u2018smart bombs’
and other high-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel"
and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan,
the number of civilians killed by American missiles called drones
has more than doubled since Obama took office.

In Afghanistan,
the U.S. "strategy" of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the
"Taliban") has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon
time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated
country where, says Secretary Gates, the U.S. military will remain
indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold
War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He
is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on
Russia’s western border, lying that they are a counter to Iran,
which he accuses, absurdly, of posing "a real threat"
to Europe and the U.S. On April 5, in Prague, he made a speech reported
as "anti-nuclear." It was nothing of the kind. Under the
Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, the
U.S. is building new "tactical" nuclear weapons designed
to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.

Perhaps the
biggest lie — the equivalent of smoking is good for you —
is Obama’s announcement that the U.S. is leaving Iraq, the
country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed
U.S. Army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain "for
the next 15 to 20 years." On April 25, his secretary of state,
Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the
polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they
have been suckered — especially as the nation’s economy
has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence
Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3
trillion at the same banks that paid him more than $8 million last
year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe
in.

Much of the
American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and
threatening, the onward march of America’s "grand design,"
as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it.
In advertising terms, Bush was a "brand collapse," whereas
Obama, with his toothpaste-advertisement smile and righteous clichés,
is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent
to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall.
He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s
man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The madmen
did well.

May
1, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, will
be published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

Indeed, there
is so much more that the erosion of liberal freedoms is symptomatic
of an evolved criminal state. The haven for Russian oligarchs, together
with corruption of the tax and banking systems and of once-admired
public services such as the Post Office, is one side of the coin;
the other is the invisible carnage of failed colonial wars. Historically,
the pattern is familiar. As the colonial crimes in Algeria, Vietnam
and Afghanistan blew back to their perpetrators, France, the United
States and the Soviet Union, so the cancerous effects of Britain’s
cynicism in Iraq and Afghanistan have come home.

The most obvious
example is the bombing atrocities in London on 7 July 2005; no one
in the British intelligence mandarinate doubts these were a gift
of Blair. "Terrorism" describes only the few acts of individuals
and groups, not the constant, industrial violence of great powers.
Suppressing this truth is left to the credible media. On 27 February,
the Guardian’s Washington correspondent, Ewen MacAskill,
in reporting President Obama’s statement that America was finally
leaving Iraq, as if it were fact, wrote: "For Iraq, the death
toll is unknown, in the tens of thousands, victims of the war, a
nationalist uprising, sectarian infighting and jihadists attracted
by the US presence." Thus, the Anglo-American invaders are
merely a "presence" and not directly responsible for the
"unknown" number of Iraqi deaths. Such contortion of intellect
is impressive.

In January
last year, a report by the respected Opinion Research Business (ORB)
revised an earlier assessment of deaths in Iraq to 1,033,000. This
followed an exhaustive, peer-reviewed study in 2006 by the world-renowned
John Hopkins School of Public Health in the US, published in The
Lancet, which found that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result
of the invasion. US and British officials immediately dismissed
the report as "flawed" — a deliberate deception. Foreign
Office papers obtained under Freedom of Information disclose a memo
written by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Roy Anderson,
in which he praised The Lancet report, describing it as "robust
and employs methods that are regarded as close to u2018best practice’
given [the conditions] in Iraq." An adviser to the prime minister
commented: "The survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished,
it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict
zones." Speaking a few days later, a Foreign Office minister,
Lord Triesman, said, "The way in which data are extrapolated
from samples to a general outcome is a matter of deep concern."

The episode
exemplifies the scale and deception of this state crime. Les Roberts,
co-author of the Lancet study, has since argued that Britain
and America might have caused in Iraq "an episode more deadly
than the Rwandan genocide." This is not news. Neither is it
a critical reference in the freedoms campaign organized by the Observer
columnist Henry Porter. At a conference in London on 28 February,
Lord Goldsmith, Blair’s attorney-general, who notoriously changed
his mind and advised the government the invasion was legal, when
it wasn’t, was a speaker for freedom. So was Timothy Garton Ash,
a "liberal interventionist." On 9 April, 2003, shortly
after the slaughter had begun in Iraq, a euphoric Garton Ash wrote
in the Guardian: "America has never been the Great Satan.
It has sometimes been the Great Gatsby: u2018They were careless people,
Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things ….’" One of Britain’s
jobs "is to keep reminding Tom and Daisy that they now have
promises to keep." Less frivolously, he lauded Blair for his
"strong Gladstonian instincts for humanitarian intervention"
and repeated the government’s propaganda about Saddam Hussein. In
2006, he wrote: "Now we face the next big test of the
west after Iraq: Iran." (I have italicized we). This
also adheres precisely to the propaganda; David Milliband has declared
Iran a "threat" in preparation for possibly the next war.

Like
so many of New Labour’s Tonier-than-thou squad, Henry Porter celebrated
Blair as an almost mystical politician who "presents himself
as a harmonizer for all the opposing interests in British life,
a conciliator of class differences and tribal antipathies, synthesizer
of opposing beliefs." Porter dismissed as "demonic nonsense"
all analysis of the 9/11 attacks that suggested there were specific
causes: the consequences of violent actions taken by the powerful
in the Middle East. Such thinking, he wrote, "exactly matches
the views of Osama bin Laden … with America’s haters, that’s all
there is — hatred." This, of course, was Blair’s view.

Freedoms are
being lost in Britain because of the rapid growth of the "national
security state." This form of militarism was imported from
the United States by New Labour. Totalitarian in essence, it relies
upon fear mongering to entrench the executive with venal legal mechanisms
that progressively diminish democracy and justice. "Security"
is all, as is propaganda promoting rapacious colonial wars, even
as honest mistakes. Take away this propaganda, and the wars are
exposed for what they are, and fear evaporates. Take away the obeisance
of many in Britain’s liberal elite to American power and you demote
a profound colonial and crusader mentality that covers for epic
criminals like Blair. Prosecute these criminals and change the system
that breeds them and you have freedom.

March
5, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, will
be published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

By the late
1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of
Vietnam movie. The first was The
Deer Hunter which, according to Time, “articulates
the new patriotism.” The film celebrated immigrant America,
with Robert de Niro as a working class hero (“liberal by instinct”)
and the Vietnamese as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots,
or “gooks.” The dramatic peak was reached during recurring
orgiastic scenes in which GIs were forced to play Russian roulette
by their Vietnamese captors. This was made up by the director Michael
Cimino, who also made up a story that he had served in Vietnam.
“I have this insane feeling that I was there,” he said.
“Somehow… the line between reality and fiction has become
blurred.”

The
Deer Hunter was regarded virtually as documentary by ecstatic
critics. “The film that could purge a nation’s guilt!”
said the Daily Mail. President Jimmy Carter was reportedly
moved by its “genuine American message.” Catharsis was
at hand. The Vietnam movies became a revisionist popular history
of the great crime in Indo-China. That more than four million people
had died terribly and unnecessarily and their homeland poisoned
to a wasteland was not the concern of these films. Rather, Vietnam
was an “American tragedy,” in which the invader was to
be pitied in a blend of false bravado-and-angst: sometimes crude
(the Rambo films) and sometimes subtle (Oliver Stone’s
Platoon).
What mattered was the strength of the purgative.

Read
the rest of the article

February
21, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

As satire was
made redundant when Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch were honored
for their contributions to the betterment of humanity, Bush’s ceremony
was, at least, telling of a system of which he and his freshly-minted
successor are products. Although more spectacular in its choreographed
histrionics, Barack Obama’s inauguration carried the same Orwellian
message of inverted truth: of ruthlessness of criminal power, if
not unending war. The continuity between the two administrations
has been as seamless as the transfer of the odious Bono’s allegiance,
symbolized by President Obama’s oath-taking on the steps of Congress
— where, only days earlier, the House of Representatives, dominated
by the new president’s party, the Democrats, voted 390—5 to
back Israel’s massacres in Gaza. The supply of American weapons
used in the massacres was authorized previously by such a margin.
These included the Hellfire missile which sucks the air out of lungs,
ruptures livers and amputates arms and legs without the necessity
of shrapnel: a "major advance," according to the specialist
literature. As a senator, then president-elect, Obama raised no
objection to these state-of-the-art [sic] weapons being rushed to
Israel — worth $22 billion in 2008 — in time for the long-planned
assault on Gaza’s fenced and helpless population. This is understandable;
it is how the system works. On no other issue does Congress and
the president, Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals,
give such absolute support. By comparison, the German Reichstag
in the 1930s was a treasure of democratic and principled debate.

This is not
to say presidents and members of Congress fail to recognize the
Israel "lobbyists" in their midst as thugs and political
blackmailers, though they never say in public, and indeed disport
themselves at Zionist fund-raisers and on paid-for trips to the
object of their ardor. But they fear them. As eyes welled on 20
January for the first African-American president, who remembered
Cynthia McKinney, the courageous African-American Congresswoman,
the first to be elected from Georgia, who spoke out for the Palestinians
and was duly driven from office by a Zionist smear campaign? For
their part, the Israelis’ current, phony "unilateral ceasefire"
in Gaza is designed not to embarrass, not yet, its new man in the
White House, whose single acknowledgment of the "suffering"
of the Palestinians has been long eclipsed by his loyalty oaths
to Tel Aviv (even promising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which
not even Bush did) and his appointment of probably the most pro-Zionist
administration for a generation.

As deserving
as Blair, Howard and Uribe are of the Bush Freedom Medal, others
cry out for a place in their company. With the assault on Gaza a
defining moment of truth and lies, principle and cowardice, peace
and war, justice and injustice, I have two nominees. My first is
the government and society of Israel. (I checked; the Freedom Medal
can be awarded collectively). "Few of us," wrote Arthur
Miller, "can easily surrender our belief that society must
somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind
and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so
the evidence has to be internally denied."

The bleak irony
of this should be clear to all in Israel, yet its denial has emboldened
a militarist, racist cult that uses every epithet against the Palestinians
that was once directed at Jews, with the exception of extermination
— and even that is not entirely excluded, as the deputy defense
minister, Matan Vilinai, noted last year with his threat of a shoa
(holocaust).

In 1948, the
year Israel’s right to exist was granted and Palestine’s annulled,
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other leading Jews in the United
States warned the administration not to get involved with fascists
like Menachem Begin who described the Palestinians in the way the
Nazis used untermenschen — as "animals on two legs."
He became prime minister of Israel. This fascism, which was not
often flouted openly, was the harbinger of Likud and Kadima. These
are today "mainstream" political parties, whose influence,
in the treatment of the Palestinians, covers a national "consensus"
that is the source of the terror in Palestine: the brutal dispossessions
and perfidious controls, the humiliation and cruelty by statute.
The mirror of this is domestic violence at home. Conscripted soldiers
return from their "war" on Palestinian women and children
and make war on their own. Young whites drafted into South Africa’s
apartheid army did the same. Inhumanity on such a scale cannot be
buried indefinitely. When Desmond Tutu described his experience
in Palestine and Israel as "worse than apartheid," he
pointed out that not even in white supremacist South Africa were
there the equivalent of "Jews only" roads. Uri Avnery,
one of Israel’s bravest dissidents, says his country’s leaders suffer
from "moral insanity": a prerequisite, I should add, for
the award of a Bush Freedom Medal.

My other nominee
for a Bush Freedom Medal is that amorphous group known as western
journalism, which has always made much of its freedom and impartiality.
Listen to the way Israeli "spokespersons" and ambassadors
are interviewed. How respectfully their official lies are received;
how minimally they are challenged. They are one of us, you see:
calm and western-sounding, even blonde, female and attractive. The
frightened, jabbering voice on the line from Gaza is not one of
us. That is the subliminal message. Listen to newsreaders use only
the pejoratives for the Palestinians: words like "militants"
for resisters to invasion, many of them heroes, a word never used,
and "conflict" for massacre. Mark the timeless propaganda
that suggests there are two equal powers fighting a "war,"
not a stricken people, attacked and starved by the world’s fourth
largest military power which ensures they have no places of refuge.
And note the omissions — the BBC does not preface its reports with
the warning that a foreign power controls its reporters’ movements,
as it did in Serbia and Argentina, neither does it explain why it
shows but glimpses of the extraordinary coverage of al-Jazeera from
within Gaza.

There are the
ubiquitous myths, too: that Israel has suffered terribly from thousands
of missiles fired from Gaza. In truth, the first homemade Qassam
rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001, and
the first fatality occurred in June 2004. Some 24 Israelis had been
killed in this way, compared with 5000 Palestinians killed, more
than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. Now
imagine if the 1.5 million Gazans had been Jewish, or Kosovar refugees.
"The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use
military force to try to try to protect the people of Kosovo …,"
declared the Guardian on 23 March, 1999. Inexplicably, the
Guardian has yet to call for such "an honorable course"
to protect the people of Gaza.

Such
is the rule of acceptable victims and unacceptable victims. When
reporters break this rule they are accused of "anti-Israel
bias" and worse, and their life is made a misery by a hyperactive
cyber-army that drafts complaints, provides generic material and
coaches people all over the world on how to smear as "anti-Jewish"
work they have not seen. These vociferous campaigns are complemented
by anonymous death threats, which I and others have experienced.
Their latest tactic is malicious hacking into websites. But that
is desperate, since the times are changing.

Across the
world, people once indifferent to the arcane "conflict"
in the Middle East, now ask the question the BBC and CNN rarely
ask: Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine does not?
They ask, too, why do the lawless enjoy such immunity in the pristine
world of balance and objectivity? The perfectly-spoken Israeli "spokesman"
represents the most lawless regime on earth, exotic tyrannies included,
according to a tally of United Nations resolutions defied and Geneva
Conventions defiled. In France, 80 organizations are working to
bring war crimes indictments against Israel’s leaders. On 15 January,
the fine Israeli reporter, Gideon Levy, wrote in Ha’aretz
that Israeli generals "will not be the only ones to hide in
El Al planes lest they are arrested [overseas]."

One day, other
journalists and their editors and producers may be called upon to
not only explain why they did not tell the truth about these criminals
but even to stand in the dock with them. No Bush Freedom Medal is
worth that.

January
22, 2009

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

DIGG THIS

January:
Tony Blair is arrested at Heathrow Airport as he returns from yet
another foreign speaking engagement (receipts since leaving office:
£12m). He is flown to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes
for his part in the illegal, unprovoked attack on a defenseless
country, Iraq, justified by proven lies — and for the subsequent
physical, social and cultural destruction of that country, causing
the death of up to a million people. According to the Nuremberg
Tribunal, this is the "paramount war crime." The prosecution
tells Blair’s defense team it will not accept a plea of "sincerely
believing." Cherie Blair, a close collaborator who has compared
her husband with Winston Churchill, is cautioned.

February:
Following the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United
States, his predecessor, George W. Bush, is arrested leaving the
Church of the Holy Crusader in his home town of Crawford, Texas.
He is flown to The Hague in War Criminal One. (See above for prosecution
details.) Laura Bush, after a plea bargain, agrees to give evidence
against the former president, "for God’s sake."

March:
Former vice-president Dick Cheney shoots himself in the foot hunting
squirrels following a prayer breakfast in Hope, Florida.

April:
Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest and assumes her rightful
place as the democratic head of the government of Burma.

May:
All American and British troops leave Iraq, including the "300—400"
British troops who are to stay behind to "train Iraqis"
and do the kind of special forces dirty work almost never reported
by embedded journalists.

June:
All NATO troops leave Afghanistan.

July:
The British government calls a halt to selling arms and military
equipment to ten out of 14 conflict-hit countries in Africa. The
chairman of the arms company BAE Systems is arrested by the Serious
Fraud Office.

August:
The British Department for International Development ends its support
for privatization as a condition of aid to the poorest countries.

September:
Sir Bob Geldof and Bono visit Tony Blair in prison, suggesting a
worldwide Crime Aid gig to raise money for their hero’s defense.

October:
The Booker prizewinner Anne Enright apologizes to Gerry and Kate
McCann, parents of the missing child Madeleine McCann, for speculating
in the London Review of Books about the possible involvement
of the McCanns in the disappearance of their daughter.

November:
Gordon Brown is kidnapped, hooded and forced to listen repeatedly
to his 2007 speech to bankers at a Mansion House banquet: "What
you as the City of London have achieved for financial services,
we as a government now aspire to achieve for the whole economy."

December:
Tony Blair is sentenced to life imprisonment and beatified by the
Pope.

If you think
none of this will happen, you are probably right. But beware 2010
. . .

December
23, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

DIGG THIS

One of the
cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog
Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds
himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same
day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities.
Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realizes the
truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the
age of Obama?

Having campaigned
with “Change you can believe in,” President-elect Barack
Obama has named his A-team. They include Hillary Clinton, who voted
to attack Iraq without reading the intelligence assessment and has
since threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran on behalf
of a foreign power, Israel. During his primary campaign, Obama referred
repeatedly to Clinton’s lies about her political record. When
he appointed her secretary of state, he called her “my dear
friend.”

Obama’s
slogan is now “continuity.” His secretary of defense will
be Robert Gates, who serves the lawless, blood-soaked Bush regime
as secretary of defense, which means secretary of war (America last
had to defend itself when the British invaded in 1812). Gates wants
no date set for an Iraq withdrawal and “well north of 20,000”
troops to be sent to Afghanistan. He also wants America to build
a completely new nuclear arsenal, including “tactical”
nuclear weapons that blur the distinction with conventional weapons.

Another product
of “continuity” is Obama’s first choice for CIA chief,
John Brennan, who shares responsibility for the systematic kidnapping
and torturing of people, known as “extraordinary rendition.”
Obama has assigned Madeleine Albright to report on how to “strengthen
US leadership in responding to genocide.” Albright, as secretary
of state, was largely responsible for the siege of Iraq in the 1990s,
described by the UN’s Denis Halliday as genocide.

There is more
continuity in Obama’s appointment of officials who will deal
with the economic piracy that brought down Wall Street and impoverished
millions. As in Bill Murray’s nightmare, they are the same
officials who caused it. For example, Lawrence Summers will run
the National Economic Council. As treasury secretary, according
to the New York Times, he “championed the law that deregulated
derivatives, the… instruments — aka toxic assets — that
have spread financial losses [and] refused to heed critics who warned
of dangers to come.”

There is logic
here. Contrary to myth, Obama’s campaign was funded largely
by rapacious capital, such as Citigroup and others responsible for
the sub-prime mortgage scandal, whose victims were mostly African
Americans and other poor people.

Is this a grand
betrayal? Obama has never hidden his record as a man of a system
described by Martin Luther King as “the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today.” Obama’s dalliance as a soft
critic of the disaster in Iraq was in line with most Establishment
opinion that it was “dumb.” His fans include the war criminals
Tony Blair, who has “hailed” his appointments, and Henry
Kissinger, who describes the appointment of Hillary Clinton as “outstanding.”
One of John McCain’s principal advisers, Max Boot, who is on
the Republican Party’s far right, said: “I am “gobsmacked
by these appointments. [They] could just as easily have come from
a President McCain.”

Obama’s
victory is historic, not only because he will be the first black
president, but because he tapped in to a great popular movement
among America’s minorities and the young outside the Democratic
Party. In 2006 Latinos, the country’s largest minority, took
America by surprise when they poured into the cities to protest
against George W Bush’s draconian immigration laws. They chanted:
“Si, se puede!” (“Yes we can!”), a slogan Obama
later claimed as his own. His secretary for homeland security is
Janet Napolitano who, as governor of Arizona, made her name by stoking
hostility against Latino immigrants. She has militarized her state’s
border with Mexico and supported the building of a hideous wall,
similar to the one dividing occupied Palestine.

On
election eve, reported Gallup, most Obama supporters were “engaged”
but “deeply pessimistic about the country’s future direction.”
My guess is that many people knew what was coming, but hoped for
the best. In exploiting this hope, Obama has all but neutered the
antiwar movement that is historically allied to the Democrats. After
all, who can argue with the symbol of the first black president
in this country of slavery, regardless of whether he is a warmonger?
As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Obama is a “brand” like
none other, having won the highest advertising campaign accolade
and attracted unprecedented sums of money. The brand will sell for
a while. He will close Guantanamo Bay, whose inmates represent less
than one per cent of America’s 27,000 “ghost prisoners.”
He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the
tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the
latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral
power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded,
Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else
to go.”

Not yet. If
there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and
plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts
registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power.
Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of “continuity”?
In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been
politicized by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts
to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It’s
as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And
history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the
epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened.
As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers
are removed, anything is possible.

December
12, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

DIGG THIS

I went to
the Houses of Parliament on 22 October to join a disconsolate group
of shivering people who had arrived from a faraway tropical place
and were being prevented from entering the Public Gallery to hear
their fate. This was not headline news; the BBC reporter seemed
almost embarrassed. Crimes of such magnitude are not news when they
are ours, and neither is injustice or corruption at the apex of
British power.

Lizette Talatte
was there, her tiny frail self swallowed by the cavernous stone
gray of Westminster Hall. I first saw her in a Colonial Office film
from the 1950s which described her homeland, the island of Diego
Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as a paradise long settled by people
“born and brought up in conditions most tranquil and benign.”
Lizette was then 14 years old. She remembers the producer saying
to her and her friends, “Keep smiling, girls!” When we
met in Mauritius, four years ago, she said: “We didn’t
need to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots
were deep in Diego Garcia. My great-grandmother was born there,
and I made six children there. Maybe only the English can make a
film that showed we were an established community, then deny their
own evidence and invent the lie that we were transient workers.”

During the
1960s and 1970s British governments, Labour and Tory, tricked and
expelled the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago, more than
2,000 British citizens, so that Diego Garcia could be given to the
United States as the site for a military base. It was an act of
mass kidnapping carried out in high secrecy. As unclassified official
files now show, Foreign Office officials conspired to lie, coaching
each other to “maintain” and “argue” the “fiction”
that the Chagossians existed only as a “floating population.”
On 28 July 1965, a senior Foreign Office official, T.C.D. Jerrom,
wrote to the British representative at the United Nations, instructing
him to lie to the General Assembly that the Chagos Archipelago was
“uninhabited when the United Kingdom government first acquired
it.” Nine years later, the Ministry of Defense went further,
lying that “there is nothing in our files about inhabitants
[of the Chagos] or about an evacuation.”

“To get
us out of our homes,” Lizette told me, “they spread rumors
we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs. The American soldiers
who had arrived to build the base backed several of their big vehicles
against a brick shed, and hundreds of dogs were rounded up and imprisoned
there, and they gassed them through a tube from the trucks’
exhaust. You could hear them crying. Then they burned them on a
pyre, many still alive.”

Lizette and
her family were finally forced on to a rusting freighter and made
to lie on a cargo of bird fertilizer during a voyage, through stormy
seas, to the slums of Port Louis, Mauritius. Within months, she
had lost Jollice, aged eight, and Regis, aged ten months. “They
died of sadness,” she said. “The eight-year-old had seen
the horror of what had happened to the dogs. The doctor said he
could not treat sadness.”

Since 2000,
no fewer than nine high court judgments have described these British
government actions as “illegal,” “outrageous”
and “repugnant.” One ruling cited Magna Carta, which says
no free man can be sent into exile. In desperation, the Blair government
used the royal prerogative — the divine right of kings —
to circumvent the courts and parliament and to ban the islanders
from even visiting the Chagos. When this, too, was overturned by
the high court, the government was rescued by the law lords, of
whom a majority of one (three to two) found for the government in
a scandalously inept, political manner. In the weasel, almost flippant
words of Lord Hoffmann, “the right of abode is a creature of
the law. The law gives it and the law takes it away.” Forget
Magna Carta. Human rights are in the gift of three stooges doing
the dirty work of a government, itself lawless.

As the official
files show, the Chagos conspiracy and cover-up involved three prime
ministers and 13 cabinet ministers, including those who approved
“the plan.” But elite corruption is unspeakable in Britain.
I know of no work of serious scholarship on this crime against humanity.
The honorable exception is the work of the historian Mark Curtis,
who describes the Chagossians as “unpeople.”

The reason
for this silence is ideological. Courtier commentators and media
historians obstruct our view of the recent past, ensuring, as Harold
Pinter pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that while
the “systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless
suppression of independent thought” in Stalinist Russia were
well known in the west, the great state crimes of western governments
“have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented.”

Typically,
the pop historian Tristram Hunt writes in the Observer (23
November): “Nestling in the slipstream of American hegemony
served us well in the 20th century. The bonds of culture, religion,
language and ideology ensured Britain a postwar economic bailout,
a nuclear deterrent and the continuing ability to ‘punch above
our weight’ on the world stage. Thanks to US patronage, our
story of decolonization was for us a relatively painless affair…”

Not a word
of this drivel hints at the transatlantic elite’s Cold War
paranoia, which put us all in mortal danger, or the rapacious Anglo-American
wars that continue to claim untold lives. As part of the “bonds”
that allow us to “punch above our weight,” the US gave
Britain a derisory $14m discount off the price of Polaris nuclear
missiles in exchange for the Chagos Islands, whose “painless
decolonization” was etched on Lizette Talatte’s face the
other day. Never forget, Lord Hoffmann, that she, too, will die
of sadness.

November
29, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

DIGG THIS

In 1992, Mark
Higson, the Foreign Office official responsible for Iraq, appeared
before the Scott inquiry into the scandal of arms sold illegally
to Saddam Hussein. He described a “culture of lying” at
the heart of British foreign policymaking. I asked him how frequently
ministers and officials lied to parliament.

“It’s
systemic,” he said. “The draft letters I wrote for various
ministers were saying that nothing had changed, the embargo on the
sale of arms to Iraq was the same.”

“Was that
true?” I asked.

“No, it
wasn’t true.”

“And your
superiors knew it wasn’t true?”

“Yes.”

“So how
much truth did the public get?”

“The public
got as much truth as we could squeeze out, given that we told downright
lies.”

From British
involvement with the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to the supply
of warplanes to the Indonesian dictator Suharto, knowing he was
bombing civilians in East Timor, to the denial of vaccines and other
humanitarian aid to the children of Iraq, my experience with the
Foreign Office is that Higson was right and remains right.

As I write
this, the dispossessed people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian
Ocean await the decision of the Law Lords, hoping for a repetition
of four previous judgments that their brutal expulsion to make way
for a US military base was “outrageous,” “illegal”
and “repugnant.” That they must endure yet another appeal
is thanks to the Foreign Office — whose legal adviser in 1968,
one Anthony Ivall Aust (pronounced “oarst” and since knighted),
wrote a secret document headed “Maintaining the fiction.”
This advised the then Labour government to “argue” the
“fiction” that the Chagossians were “only a floating
population.” Today, the depopulated main island, Diego Garcia,
over which the Union Jack flies, serves the “war on terror”
as an American interrogation and torture center.

When you bear
this in mind, the US presidential race becomes surreal. The beatification
of President Barack Obama is already under way; for it is he who
“challenges America to rise up [and] summon ‘the better
angels of our nature’,” says Rolling Stone magazine, reminiscent
of the mating calls of Guardian writers to the “mystical”
Blair. As ever, the Orwell Inversion Test is necessary. Obama claims
that his vast campaign wealth comes from small individual donors,
yet he has also received funds from some of the most notorious looters
on Wall Street. Moreover, the “dove” and “candidate
of change” has voted repeatedly to fund George W Bush’s
rapacious wars, and now demands more war in Afghanistan while he
threatens to bomb Pakistan.

Dismissing
the popular democracies in Latin America as a “vacuum”
to be filled by the United States, he has endorsed Colombia’s
“right to strike terrorists who seek safe havens across its
borders.” Translated, this means the “right” of the
criminal regime in that country to invade its neighbors, notably
uppity Venezuela, on Washington’s behalf. The British human
rights group Justice for Colombia has just published a study concerning
Anglo-American backing for the Colombian regime of Álvaro
Uribe, which is responsible for more than 90 per cent of all cases
of torture. The principal torturers, the “security forces,”
are trained by the Americans and the British. The Foreign Office
replies that it is “improving the human rights record of the
military and combating drug trafficking.” The study finds not
a shred of evidence to support this. Colombian officers with barbaric
records, such as those implicated in the murder of a trade union
leader, are welcomed to Britain for “seminars.”

As in many
parts of the world, the British role is that of subcontractor to
Washington. The bloody “Plan Colombia” was the design
of Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president and inspiration for
Blair’s and Brown’s new Labour. Clinton’s administration
was at least as violent as Bush’s — see Unicef’s
report that 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of the Anglo-American
blockade in the 1990s.

The lesson
learned is that no presidential candidate, least of all a Democrat
awash with money from America’s “banksters,” as Franklin
Roosevelt called them, can or will challenge a militarized system
that controls and rewards him. Obama’s job is to present a
benign, even progressive face that will revive America’s democratic
pretensions, internationally and domestically, while ensuring nothing
of substance changes.

Among ordinary
Americans desperate for a secure life, his skin color may help him
regain this unjustified “trust,” even though it is of
a similar hue to that of Colin Powell, who lied to the United Nations
for Bush and now endorses Obama. As for the rest of us, is it not
time we opened our eyes and exercised our right not to be lied to,
yet again?

October
27, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

DIGG THIS

Britain’s
political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great
Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved
in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone.
There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the
political editor of Sky News, and billed as "the husband of
Blair aide Anji Hunter," has published a book of gossip derived
from his "unrivaled access to No 10." His revelation is
that Tony Blair’s mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself
has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his
own book of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself,
including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal
a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet
to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain’s part in the wanton human,
social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there
are happy debates such as, "Can hope win?" and, my favorite,
"Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?" As Harold Pinter
said of unmentionable crimes: "Nothing ever happened. Even
while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It
was of no interest."

The Guardian’s
economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister
"resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good
man brought down by one error of judgment." What is this one
error of judgment? The bankrolling of two murderous colonial adventures?
No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the
sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of
manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich?
No. The Prime Minister’s "folly" is "postponing the
election last year." This is the March Hare Factor.

Following
the US

Reality can
be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting
public pronouncements and headlines, such as "Aggressor Russia
facing pariah status, US warns," thereby identifying the correct
pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries
of political and media discussion. "When truth is replaced
by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
"the silence is a lie."

Understanding
this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise.
Silence covers the truth that Britain’s political parties have converged
and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This
is different from the political consensus of half a century ago
that produced what was known as social democracy. Today’s political
union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become
just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer,
is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given,
along with the theft of public services, known as privatization.
This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by
new Labour’s engineers. In The
Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson
and Roger Liddle declared Britain’s new "economic strengths"
to be its transnational corporations, the "aerospace"
industry (weapons) and "the preeminence of the City of London."
The rest was to be asset-stripped, including the peculiar British
pursuit of selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social
authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on "values."
Mandelson and Liddle demanded "a tough discipline" and
a "hardworking majority" and the "proper bringing-up
[sic] of children." And in formally launching his Murdochracy,
Blair used "moral" and "morality" 18 times in
a speech he gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who
had recently found God.

A "think
tank" called Demos exemplified this new order. A founder of
Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in one of Blair’s
"policy units," wrote a book called Connexity. "In
much of the world today," he offered, "the most pressing
problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material shortage
. . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles that result
from having too many freedoms that are abused rather than constructively
used." As if celebrating life in another solar system, he wrote:
"For the first time ever, most of the world’s most powerful
nations do not want to conquer territory."

That reads,
now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in a world where
more than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty
and at least a million people lie dead in just one territory conquered
by the most powerful nations. However, it serves to remind us of
the political "culture" that has so successfully fused
traditional liberalism with the lunar branch of western political
life and allowed our "too many freedoms" to be taken away
as ruthlessly and anonymously as wedding parties in Afghanistan
have been obliterated by our bombs.

The product
of these organized delusions is rarely acknowledged. The current
economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings and public
services, is the direct consequence of a rampant militarism comparable,
in large part, with that of the first half of the last century,
when Europe’s most advanced and cultured nation committed genocide.
Since the 1990s, America’s military budget has doubled. Like the
national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure
is not known, because up to 40 per cent is classified "black"
— it is hidden. Britain, with a weapons industry second only
to the US, has also been militarized. The Iraq invasion has cost
$5trn, at least. The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never
leave their base. They are there because the Americans demand it.
On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defense secretary, was
in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US
invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said
the British force would be increased. It was an order.

In the meantime,
an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly authorized
by President Bush. The "change" candidate for president,
Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft
and bombs. The ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school
attacked by American drone missiles, killing 23 people, was set
up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It was part of Operation Cyclone,
in which the US armed and funded mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda
and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the Soviet Union. This
was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.

War of the
world

On 20 September
the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the bombing
of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of
President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned
as a diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was
the rise to power of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban
guerrillas closing on Kabul and NATO refusing to conduct serious
negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan is also coming.

It is a war
of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is fomenting
incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay,
democracies whose governments have opposed Washington’s historic
rapacious intervention in its "backyard." Washington’s
"Plan Colombia" is the model for a mostly unreported assault
on Mexico. This is the Merida Initiative, which will allow the United
States to fund "the war on drugs and organized crime"
in Mexico — a cover, as in Colombia, for militarizing its closest
neighbor and ensuring its "business stability."

Britain is
tied to all these adventures — a British "School of the Americas"
is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers will train killers
from all corners of the American empire in the name of "global
security."

None of this
is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public
discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen,
professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark
essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.*
He warns of "the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared
Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist
Russia during the past 15 years." He describes a catastrophic
"relentless winner-take-all of Russia’s post-1991 weakness,"
with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy
barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being
encircled by US and NATO bases and missiles in violation of a pledge
by the United States not to expand NATO "one inch to the east."
The result, writes Cohen, "is a US-built reverse iron curtain
[and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests
outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics
such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption
that Russia does not have full sovereignty within its own borders,
as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow’s internal affairs
since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the
nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era."

This
danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian
relations as "a duel to the death — perhaps literally."
The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like
a bygone Pravda on the Potomac." The same is true in
Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly
responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a
"pariah." Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says
she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has
seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s,
writes Cohen, "when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold
War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer
a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to
retrieve that missed opportunity?" It is an urgent question
that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid
to break the lethal silence.

*Stephen Cohen’s
article, "The New American Cold War," is reprinted in
full in the current issue of the Spokesman,
published by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

September
26, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

DIGG THIS

Try to laugh,
please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the
family to play.

First question:
Why are "we" in Afghanistan? Answer: "To try to help
in the country’s rebuilding program." Who says so? Huw
Edwards, the BBC’s principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh
are.

Second question:
Why are "we" in Iraq? Answer: To "plant a western-style
open democracy." Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defense
correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News.
To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org
with 2,700 words of quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush.
Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew
Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been researching
Bush’s speeches for "evidence" of noble democratic
reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilization. Says he: "The
‘D’ word is not there, but the phrase ‘united, stable
and free’ [is] clearly an allusion to it." After all,
he says, the invasion of Iraq "was launched as ‘Operation
Iraqi Freedom’." Moreover, says the BBC man, "in
Bush’s 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier)
he talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi
transition to democracy . . . These examples show that these were
on Bush’s mind before, during and after the invasion."

Try to laugh,
please.

Laughing may
be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan
by "coalition" aircraft, including those directed by British
forces engaged in "the country’s rebuilding program."
The bombing of civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths
of civilians, says Human Rights Watch. Last month, "our"
aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 civilians, two-thirds of them children
between the ages of three months and 16 years, while they slept,
according to eyewitnesses. BBC television news initially devoted
nine seconds to the Human Rights Watch report, and nothing to the
fact that "less than peanuts" (according to an aid worker)
is being spent on rebuilding anything in Afghanistan.

As for the
notion of a "united, stable and free" Iraq, consider the
no-bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies for ownership
of Iraq’s oil. "Theft" is a more truthful word. Written
by the companies themselves and US officials, the contracts have
been signed off by Bush and Nouri al-Maliki, "prime minister"
of Iraq’s "democratic" government that resides in
an air-conditioned American fortress. This is not news.

Try to laugh,
please, while you consider the devastation of Iraq’s health,
once the best in the Middle East, by the ubiquitous dust from British
and US depleted uranium weapons. A World Health Organization study
reporting a cancer epidemic has been suppressed, says its principal
author. This has been reported in Britain only in the Glasgow Sunday
Herald and the Morning Star. According to a study last year by Basra
University Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the contaminated
southern provinces were caused by cancer.

Try to laugh,
please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from which will come
the next president of the United States. Those paid to keep the
record straight have strained to present a spectacle of choice.
Barack Obama, the man of "change," wants to "build
a 21st-century military . . . to stay on the offensive everywhere."
Here comes the new Cold War, with promises of more bombs, more of
the militarized society with its 730 bases worldwide, on which Americans
spend 42 cents of every tax dollar.

At
home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease America’s
grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John McCain, his
Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon figure — the
fake "war hero" now joined with a Shakespeare-banning,
gun-loving, religious fanatic — yet his true significance is
that he and Obama share essentially the same dangerous prescriptions.

Thousands of
decent Americans came to the two nominating conventions to express
the dissenting opinion of millions of their compatriots who believe,
with good cause, that their democracy is evaporating. They were
intimidated, arrested, beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were patronized
or ignored by those paid to keep the record straight.

In the meantime,
Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, has launched a
book about America, his "city on a hill." It is a sort
of Mills & Boon view of the rapacious system he admires with
such obsequiousness. The book is called Have a Nice Day.

Try to laugh,
please.

September
12, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

DIGG THIS

When I first
went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there.
It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs
splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for
a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August
6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I
stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the
river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with
the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was
dropped.

He and his
family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic
desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish
light, something like an electrical short," after which wind
blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the
ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything
was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked,
not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain
I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for
him, he was dead from leukemia.

In the immediate
aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned
all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had
been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first
big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the
front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation
and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred
Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write
this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily
Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the
first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled
with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what
he called "an atomic plague." For telling this truth,
his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared — and vindicated.

The atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic
scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of
intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought
refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war," whose
"ethical bath," as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed
the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote
60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring
lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific
and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks,"
concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air
supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring
about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported
by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it
is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even
if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not
entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

The National
Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart
Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable
sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted
by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to
sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were
hard." Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told
President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force
would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would
not be able "to show its strength." He later admitted
that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered,
to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb."
His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians
with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip." General
Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb,
testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia
was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis."
The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced
his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the
experiment."

Since 1945,
the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using
nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war
on terror," the present governments in Washington and London
have declared they are prepared to make "preemptive" nuclear
strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the
midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow
more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat." But Iran
has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning
a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored
Iranian opposition group, the MEK — just as the lies about Saddam
Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi
National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of
western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That
America’s Defense Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence"
that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has been consigned
to the memory hole. That Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never
threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest.
But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that
in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament,
Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.

This
progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous
nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost
unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in
the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle
East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn
the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was
building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions,
Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new
American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations
with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew
Iranian democracy in 1953.

In the New
York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once
considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country’s political
and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into
a nuclear wasteland." This would be mass murder. For a Jew,
the irony cries out.

The question
begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good
Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more
behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way,
legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and
innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted
violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan
Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair
do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.

August
7, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

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On 12 July,
The Times of London devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It
was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater,
described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed
with iced water. He also described the "high drama" and
"meticulously practiced routine" of evacuating another
overheated journalist. For his US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater,
"saving a life took precedence over [their] security."
Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only
mention that "47 civilians, most of them women and children,
were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern
Afghanistan on Sunday."

Slaughters
on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public.
I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family,
including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her
mud, stone and straw house. There was no "enemy" nearby.
I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball
caused by another "precision" bomb. Inside were nine people
— his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his
sister and her husband. Neither of these mass murders was news.
As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: "Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t
matter. It was of no interest."

A total of
64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was
discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties
are a "coalition" specialty. At least four of them have
been obliterated — at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar
provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims,
have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose
Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism
that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report
almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations
facilities of the British and American military.

The US and
its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan.
This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were
dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. "The
most frequently used bombs," the Air Force Times reports, "are
the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided…" Without this one-sided
onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not
have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America’s and Britain’s
puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners
have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords
once on the CIA’s payroll.

The scandal
of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W. Bush’s
former spokesman Scott McClellan has called "complicit enablers"
— journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers.
Having declared Afghanistan a "good war," the complicit
enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests
in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a
bomber.

In
the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear
as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan
and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops,
more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the
Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the
loss of electoral power — because their collaborators are,
as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, "bait-and-switch"
Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write
of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs, he will
be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same willful
navety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton — and
Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology
has surrendered entirely to ‘values’… there are no sacred
cows [and] no fossilized limits to the ground over which the mind
might range in search of a better Britain…"

Eleven years
and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack
Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a
black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose
drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences
of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

July
25, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

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The military
has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric
practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal
scrutiny.

Five photographs
together break a silence. The first is of a former Gurkha regimental
sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in a wheelchair
outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of medals, including
the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, which he won
serving in the British army.

He has been
refused entry to Britain and treatment for a serious heart ailment
by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a
public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Downing Street to hand his
Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused
to see him.

The second
photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children. They
are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by NATO bombs,
American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their roasted
skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, NATO planes struck
again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village: children,
women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22 civilians
died like this. All, including the roasted children, are described
as "militants" or "suspected Taliban." The Defense
Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghanistan is "the
noble cause of the 21st century."

The third photograph
is of a computer-generated aircraft carrier not yet built, one of
two of the biggest ships ever ordered for the Royal Navy. The £4bn
contract is shared by BAE Systems, whose sale of 72 fighter jets
to the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia has made Britain the biggest
arms merchant on earth, selling mostly to oppressive regimes in
poor countries. At a time of economic crisis, Browne describes the
carriers as "an affordable expenditure."

The fourth
photograph is of a young British soldier, Gavin Williams, who was
"beasted" to death by three noncommissioned officers.
This "informal summary punishment," which sent his body
temperature to more than 41 degrees, was intended to "humiliate,
push to the limit and hurt." The torture was described in court
as a fact of army life.

The final photograph
is of an Iraqi man, Baha Mousa, who was tortured to death by British
soldiers. Taken during his post-mortem, it shows some of the 93
horrific injuries he suffered at the hands of men of the Queen’s
Lancashire Regiment who beat and abused him for 36 hours, including
double-hooding him with hessian sacks in stifling heat. He was a
hotel receptionist. Although his murder took place almost five years
ago, it was only in May this year that the Ministry of Defense responded
to the courts and agreed to an independent inquiry. A judge has
described this as a "wall of silence."

A court martial
convicted just one soldier of Mousa’s "inhumane treatment,"
and he has since been quietly released. Phil Shiner of Public Interest
Lawyers, representing the families of Iraqis who have died in British
custody, says the evidence is clear — abuse and torture by the British
army is systemic.

Shiner and
his colleagues have witness statements and corroborations of prima
facie crimes of an especially atrocious kind usually associated
with the Americans. "The more cases I am dealing with, the
worse it gets," he says. These include an "incident"
near the town of Majar al-Kabir in 2004, when British soldiers executed
as many as 20 Iraqi prisoners after mutilating them. The latest
is that of a 14-year-old boy who was forced to simulate anal and
oral sex over a prolonged period.

"At the
heart of the US and UK project," says Shiner, "is a desire
to avoid accountability for what they want to do. Guantánamo
Bay and extraordinary renditions are part of the same struggle to
avoid accountability through jurisdiction." British soldiers,
he says, use the same torture techniques as the Americans and deny
that the European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act
and the UN Convention on Torture apply to them. And British torture
is "commonplace": so much so, that "the routine nature
of this ill-treatment helps to explain why, despite the abuse of
the soldiers and cries of the detainees being clearly audible, nobody,
particularly in authority, took any notice."

Unbelievably,
says Shiner, the Ministry of Defense under Tony Blair decided that
the 1972 Heath government’s ban on certain torture techniques applied
only in the UK and Northern Ireland. Consequently, "many Iraqis
were killed and tortured in UK detention facilities." Shiner
is working on 46 horrific cases.

A wall of silence
has always surrounded the British military, its arcane rituals,
rites and practices and, above all, its contempt for the law and
natural justice in its various imperial pursuits. For 80 years,
the Ministry of Defense and compliant ministers refused to countenance
posthumous pardons for terrified boys shot at dawn during the slaughter
of the First World War. British soldiers used as guinea pigs during
the testing of nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean were abandoned,
as were many others who suffered the toxic effects of the 1991 Gulf
War. The treatment of Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun is typical. Having
been sent back to Nepal, many of these "soldiers of the Queen"
have no pension, are deeply impoverished and are refused residence
or medical help in the country for which they fought and for which
43,000 of them have died or been injured. The Gurkhas have won no
fewer than 26 Victoria Crosses, yet Browne’s "affordable expenditure"
excludes them.

An even more
imposing wall of silence ensures that the British public remains
largely unaware of the industrial killing of civilians in Britain’s
modern colonial wars. In his landmark work Unpeople:
Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, the historian Mark
Curtis uses three main categories: direct responsibility, indirect
responsibility and active inaction.

"The overall
figure [since 1945] is between 8.6 and 13.5 million," Curtis
writes. "Of these, Britain bears direct responsibility for
between four million and six million deaths. This figure is, if
anything, likely to be an underestimate. Not all British interventions
have been included, because of lack of data." Since his study
was published, the Iraq death toll has reached, by reliable measure,
a million men, women and children.

The spiraling
rise of militarism within Britain is rarely acknowledged, even by
those alerting the public to legislation attacking basic civil liberties,
such as the recently drafted Data Communications Bill, which will
give the government powers to keep records of all electronic communication.
Like the plans for identity cards, this is in keeping what the Americans
call "the national security state," which seeks the control
of domestic dissent while pursuing military aggression abroad. The
£4bn aircraft carriers are to have a "global role."
For global read colonial. The Ministry of Defense and the Foreign
Office follow Washington’s line almost to the letter, as in Browne’s
preposterous description of Afghanistan as a noble cause. In reality,
the US-inspired NATO invasion has had two effects: the killing and
dispossession of large numbers of Afghans, and the return of the
opium trade, which the Taliban had banned. According to Hamid Karzai,
the west’s puppet leader, Britain’s role in Helmand Province has
led directly to the return of the Taliban.

The militarizing
of how the British state perceives and treats other societies is
vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out of 14 of the most
impoverished and conflict-ridden countries are seduced into buying
British arms and military equipment with "soft loans."
Like the British royal family, the British Prime Minister simply
follows the money. Having ritually condemned a despot in Zimbabwe
for "human rights abuses" — in truth, for no longer serving
as the west’s business agent — and having obeyed the latest US dictum
on Iran and Iraq, Brown set off recently for Saudi Arabia, exporter
of Wahhabi fundamentalism and wheeler of fabulous arms deals.

To complement
this, the Brown government is spending £11bn of taxpayers’
money on a huge, privatised military academy in Wales, which will
train foreign soldiers and mercenaries recruited to the bogus "war
on terror." With arms companies such as Raytheon profiting,
this will become Britain’s "School of the Americas," a
center for counterinsurgency (terrorist) training and the design
of future colonial adventures.

It
has had almost no publicity.

Of course,
the image of militarist Britain clashes with a benign national regard
formed, wrote Tolstoy, "from infancy, by every possible means — class books, church services, sermons, speeches, books, papers,
songs, poetry, monuments [leading to] people stupefied in the one
direction." Much has changed since he wrote that. Or has it?
The shabby, destructive colonial war in Afghanistan is now reported
almost entirely through the British army, with squaddies always
doing their Kipling best, and with the Afghan resistance routinely
dismissed as "outsiders" and "invaders." Pictures
of nomadic boys with NATO-roasted skin almost never appear in the
press or on television, nor the aftereffects of British thermobaric
weapons, or "vacuum bombs," designed to suck the air out
of human lungs. Instead, whole pages mourn a British military intelligence
agent in Afghanis tan, because she happens to have been a 26-year-old
woman, the first to die in active service since the 2001 invasion.

Baha Mousa,
tortured to death by British soldiers, was also 26 years old. But
he was different. His father, Daoud, says that the way the Ministry
of Defense has behaved over his son’s death convinces him that the
British government regards the lives of others as "cheap."
And he is right.

July
12, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives

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The British
lawyer Gareth Pierce, celebrated for her defense of miscarriage
of justice victims, wrote recently: "Over the years of the
conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state
provoked a similar reaction: internment, u2018shoot to kill’, the use
of torture, brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence.
This was registered by the community most affected, but the British
public, in whose name the actions were taken, remained ignorant."
Referring to the conflict in Northern Ireland, she was drawing a
comparison with "our new suspect community," people of
Muslim faith, against whom a vicious, sectarian and mostly unreported
war is well under way.

As Pierce points
out, "internment, discredited and abandoned in Northern Ireland"
now allows, not 42 days, but "indefinite detention without
trial of foreign nationals, the u2018evidence’ to be heard in secret
with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against
him." Those snatched from their homes in Britain following
11 September, 2001 have all but vanished into an Anglo-American
gulag, which in this country joins Belmarsh prison, where people
are consigned to oblivion, with Broadmoor psychiatric prison, where
they are sent as they go mad, and with Kafkaesque versions of "home"
where others are interred under "control orders." One
of these home prisoners, wrote Pierce, "a man without arms,
was left alone and terrified, unable to leave the flat or to contact
anyone without committing a criminal offense, subject to a curfew
and allowed no visits unless approved in advance by the Home Office."
Going into the garden, arranging a plumber, speaking to a child’s
teacher all require permission. The families go mad, too.

Preferring
"a quick death … to a slow death here," one man who took
a risk and returned to Algeria has been lost in the subcontracted
gulag, where his new torturers have given "assurances"
to the British government that they will do him no harm and while
they do him harm are themselves reassured by the presence of British
Petroleum, the ethical oil company, which has sunk 6 billion into
getting oil out of Algeria’s southern Sahara. Another subcontractor,
Jordan, is held economically afloat by the US so that George Bush’s
"renditions" and torture can proceed there. No British
court has found any of these people guilty of any crime. In Britain,
as Tony Blair, a genuine prima facie criminal, put it so well, "the
rules of the game have changed."

As in the Irish
conflict, it is again the ignorance of us, the public, upon which
the state relies. All propaganda is directed at honing this ignorance
and fabricating a fear. This is primarily the task of journalists.
The true fear is in Muslim communities. Visit them and find people
terrified by your knock on the door, and women who now never go
out and the children wrapped in nightmares. In effect, control orders
have been served on thousands of British citizens.

As Pierce reminds
us, the Irish had allies in the Catholic Church and the 40 million
Americans of Irish descent; Muslims are alone as they watch the
British state, with its "obstinate incomprehension" of
their faith, do to them as it would never do to those of other faiths.
Imagine Jews treated this way. You cannot imagine it; the profanity
is too great. The silence of British Jews, who have the history,
is also great.

As
the suppressed facts of "terrorism" show, Muslims are
by far the most numerous victims — up to a million Iraqis dead,
including 500,000 infants, during "sanctions" against
Iraq in the 1990s; perhaps another million dead when Blair and his
mentor ignited the current inferno; countless dead and maimed in
Afghanistan by weapons that include the British thermobaric bomb,
designed to suck the air out of human beings. And there is Palestine,
an entire nation under a permanent control order.

Reviewing this
monstrous record, it is no less than amazing that the world’s most
violent governments — Britain is now the world’s leading arms merchant
— have sustained only two retaliations on their home soil. With
every hypocritical act, they beckon another. Moreover, wrote Gareth
Pierce, "If our government continues on [this destructive]
path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal
fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice
and the responsibility are entirely ours."

June
26, 2008

John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.

John
Pilger Archives