Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the act. As for real terrorists, the identities of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were known to MI5, yet nothing was done. And Blair wants to give the security services 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 doctor, 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, accor-ding to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John Ashcroft, the then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a ‘terrorist’, a description mocked by even the judge in a 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 Jose 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 in effect voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America’s most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the Project for the 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 facade: ‘the cavalry on the 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 gateways to 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 daily White House 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 were well known in the west while US 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 published every word of Pinter’s warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for Britain’s greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million children by America’s medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote banning freedom never happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the 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, published by Common Courage Press.)
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein’s rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies of people 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 seven 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 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 by Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now 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 usual double standard no longer works; there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pinstriped 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, article January 2006, ‘The Death of Freedom’
In the west of London a group of people occupied a piece of derelict land in an effort to highlight the pressing global issues of landrights and a lack of sustainability in our modern societies. Grasp the Nettle, 2014
‘It’s a bit ironic really having an eco-village and getting our water from the Jet garage.’ ibid.
‘We have built the delux shower – bucket on a string.’ ibid.
‘There’s thirty of us who live here but two hundred who like this place.’ ibid.
100,565. ‘Vietnam was, and still is, the only question that can mobilise the masses. Grin Without a Cat aka The Base of the Air is Red, Paul Verges, 1977
Saint-Nazaire May 1st 1967: End of the longest strike of the post-war in Sud-Aviation. ibid.
1967: ‘We feel we had a real movement.’ ibid. striker
‘On April 11th 1968 Rudi was gravely wounded by gunfire while he cycled in a Berlin street. He’d written, We Must Revolutionise Revolutionaries. ibid.
Paris 1962 Metro Charonne: ‘A new attitude in the demonstrations, more aggressive, born from a real need of striking back.’ ibid.
‘This is where the New Left was born.’ ibid.
‘It’s a struggle between rich and poor.’ ibid. Douglas Bravo
May ’68 and all that: ‘For me, May ’68 happened in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. ibid.
‘But never have this authentic courage, this everyday courage, which consists of sacrificing your personality completely to become effective.’ ibid.
‘Indeed, we have occupied the Sorbonne.’ ibid.
Paris Latin Quarter May 6th: ‘At once the State reveals its oppressive side; the one that stays more or less hidden in everyday life.’ ibid.
‘The occupation of the Latin Quarter went fine until 8 p.m. It was the police that set off the incidents attacking us with chlorine grenade-launchers.’ ibid.
‘Birth of a legend. Birth of an image.’ ibid.
‘It’s always the same scene: a few blows and then they arrest them.’ ibid.
‘That time showed us that street violence does not lead automatically to political change.’ ibid.
‘In Latin America a whole generation of political fighters would end up under fascist regimes.’ ibid.
‘They want a change: political and economic.’ ibid.
‘In Saint-Etienne, however, the CGT strikers shunned by their comrades from the other two unions take to counter-attack and attack the CRS with stones, screws and iron bars.’ ibid. Newsreel October 1948
‘Anyway, history wasn’t being written in Avignon that summer; it was being written in Prague.’ ibid. striker