As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims. Robert Fisk, The Independent article 24th October 2010, The Shaming of America
But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America’s shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the 81 bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations? ibid.
There was a great deal of publicity and empathy last week for the four tourists, two of them Britons, murdered in Yemen. There has been nothing for the 68 Iraqi civilians murdered by the American and British governments shortly before Christmas.
The parallels between the two attacks are striking. Both were premeditated lawless acts for political ends, and they are connected. It is likely the Britons died as a direct consequence of their own government’s criminal actions in Iraq.
This, and the real danger of revenge attacks, was clearly not a consideration when the bellicose figure of Tony Blair rose in parliament to play Palmerston, and George Robertson pleaded the case for state murder, then disclaimed it in the letters columns of the Guardian. ‘We believe,’ he wrote, ‘that none of the munitions that missed [their targets] hit civilian targets’. Note that the word he chooses is believe, not know or can verify.
Consider this Defence Secretary. Shortly after the election, Robertson proposed a military experience for new Labour MPs who, he said, should spend at least 21 days ‘getting to know’ life with the troops. He described the head of Indonesia’s murderous special forces, a kind of Waffen-SS responsible for genocide in East Timor, as ‘an enlightened officer, keen [on] human rights’. He further distinguished himself by making clear his government was prepared to use ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons against Iraq.
As for Blair, his platitudes misled parliament and us all. Far from ‘punishing’ Saddam Hussein, the real Anglo-American objective is to secure an American oil protectorate to the Caspian Sea, along with isolating Iraq, so that its high-quality crude oil, 20 per cent of the world’s reserves, is not allowed to flow into the international market and force down the price of Saudi oil. Shoring up Saudi Arabia is critical for American and British capital; most of the British arms industry is dependent on the al-Yamamah deal with Saudi sheikhs.
To this end, Blair and Robertson approved the equivalent of hundreds of Omagh bombs hurled at a country where an estimated million children have died as a result of sanctions. This is a silent holocaust which Ethical Man Robin Cook disingenuously denies while another 5,000 children die every month. When you next hear Blair and Straw and Blunkett lecturing us on morality, on the importance of the family and doing your homework, think of their government's crime in the Gulf. John Pilger, article 8th January 1999 ‘The Press is Obsessed with Petty Vendettas While British Ministers Continue to Support a Silent Holocaust’
This is Diego Garcia, the main Island of the Chagos Group in the Indian Ocean. It was once a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. A paradise. Today, it is one of America’s biggest military bases in the world. There are more than 2,000 troops, two bomber runways, thirty warships and a satellite spy station. From here the United States has attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon calls it an indispensable platform for policing the world. Diego Garcia is a British colony. It lies midway between Africa and Asia. One of a group of coral islands ... 2,000 lived in the Chagos Islands ... A benign undisturbed way of life. John Pilger, Stealing a Nation, ITV 1984
A conspiracy was underway between the governments of Britain and the United States. The year is 1961. In this film never seen before the man on the right is Rear Admiral Grantham of the US Navy. His visit to Diego Garcia marked the beginning of a top-secret Anglo-American survey of the Island for a military base so vast it would cost over a billion dollars ... Hidden from the Parliament and the US Congress the deal was this: the Americans wanted the island in their words swept and sanitised. An entire population was declared expendable; all of them were to be deported. ibid.
By the end of 1975 the secret expulsion of the people of the Chagos Islands was complete. A survey of their conditions in exile told of twenty-six families who had died together in poverty, of nine suicides, of young girls forced into prostitution in order to survive. ibid.
What was done to these people is today defined in International Law as a crime against humanity. ibid.
In the 1990s the Islanders’ struggle took a dramatic turn with the discovery of these documents in the Public Record Office in London. Here was the evidence that they and their supporters were looking for. These long-forgotten secret official files reveal the full scale of the conspiracy and the cynicism that drove it. ibid.
The reason the government won’t allow the Islanders to go home is not money. It’s power. American power and its self-given role to dominate. ibid.
What was done to the people of the Chagos raises wider questions for those of us who live in powerful states like Britain and America. Why do we continue to allow our governments to treat people in small countries as either useful or expendable? Why do we except specious reasons for the unacceptable? Four years ago the High Court delivered one of the most damning indictments of a British government. It said the secret expulsion of the Chagos Islanders was wrong; that judgment must be upheld. And the people of a group of beautiful once-peaceful islands must be helped to go home and compensated fully and without delay for their suffering. Anything less diminishes the rest of us. ibid.
This year on May 11th two judges described the actions of the British government as outrageous, repugnant and illegal. So it’s unequivocal, it’s wrong, and under the statutes of the International Criminal Court it’s a major crime. You can’t do that. So what the Blair government has done to try to undercut the High Court is to invoke the Royal Prerogative. John Pilger, interview Guardian Hay Festival 2006
They finally made their way to the High Court in London after many years. The judges of the High Court were ... horrified by the story. They invoked the Magna Carta which is the basis for all our laws and says you cannot throw people out of their homeland. They described the decisions by governments as outrageous and said they could go back. The British government of Tony Blair decided this wasn’t what they wanted so they invoked a Royal Decree power ... The High Court threw out the government’s decree ... The struggle goes on. John Pilger, lecture Freedom Next Time
I don’t often use the word incredible but ... when a group of us found classified files in the public record office in London, it revealed how the American and British governments had conspired to expel the entire population of this British colony – all of them British citizens, and dumped them in the slums of Mauritius ... They started killing their pets, they shots their dogs ... The message was clear, you’re next unless you go! John Pilger, Democracy Now! interview
It’s become the unlikely target and obsession of some of the world’s greatest empires and superpowers. Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart I, BBC 2012
In 2001 an America-led Coalition invaded Afghanistan. ibid.
It had never encountered a non-Muslim power as alien as Britain. And yet in the 1830s Afghanistan was perceived as it is believed to be today to be an immediate threat to British national security. ibid.
The Russians called it the Tournament of Shadows. The British remember it ... as the Great Game. ibid.
Britain had taken a decisive step and placed an army of occupation in this distant and unlikely land. ibid.
By 1841 Britain’s choice of leader had been a disaster. ibid.
The British empire never had and never would experience a defeat like it. ibid.
In the late 1870s Russians again appeared in Kabul, and a new generation of British hawks decided the only response was again to invade. ibid.
It was about the fears of empire. ibid.
An un-winnable war. In the twenty-first century a US-led coalition attacked and is still mired there. In the nineteenth century it was the British empire who invaded and suffered an agonising defeat. Afghanistan: The Great Game - A Personal View by Rory Stewart II, BBC 2012
A war costing $130 billion a year. ibid.
Afghanistan has been for so many men a place of heroism, self-sacrifice, yet in the end all this energy, all this courage, is in pursuit of something that is simply wrong. ibid.
The New World Order is a more palatable name for the Anglo-American world empire. It’s the planetary domination of London, New York, Washington over the rest of the world ... The US/British world empire is what you are going to get. Professor Webster Tarpley, historian & author
For the first and last time the Americans made common cause with the Soviet Union at the United Nations and demanded an immediate end to the [British & French] invasion. Britain was isolated and cut off from its oil supplies ... Britain’s gamble was over. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, BBC 2007
In 1901 British troops were fighting a brutal war over the gold-rich territories of South Africa. The Boar War was fought between the largest empire in the history of the world, and a small force of untrained Dutch farmers – the Boars ... Nineteenth century cavalry warfare was about to meet twentieth-century guerrilla fighting. Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
The Boar War was known as Joe’s war. Chamberlain was confident of victory. But the Boars were out-manoeuvring the British, ambushing the army and then disappearing into the hills. The conflict was turning into Imperial Britain’s own Vietnam. ibid.