Re: NBC: The Quiet Death of Freedom

Wow... next time I'm in London, I'll look him up.

The Left Rev. New Guy wrote:

    The Quiet Death of Freedom
    By John Pilger
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Thursday 05 January 2006

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

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

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

    Freedom is dying.

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

    He is awaiting trial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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