Guest guest Posted July 8, 2005 Report Share Posted July 8, 2005 GMW: DISLOCATING REALITY " GM WATCH " <info Fri, 8 Jul 2005 16:53:00 +0100 GM WATCH daily http://www.gmwatch.org ------ 1.FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH 2.French expat recalls bombing COMMENT One night in July 20 years ago the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, was blown up while berthing in a New Zealand harbour. The ship's crew managed to escape with their lives but a freelance photographer on board was killed in the explosion (see item 2). Years later this incident was transfomed in a posting on CS Prakash's AgBioView into Greenpeace having been responsible for murder. Another posting, following 9/11 accused to GM critical scientists of having " blood on their hands " . GM proponents frequently appear to have no hesitation about presenting critics of the technologys as dangerous extremists and even terrorists. An Internet posting from a close ally of Prakash, and the then editor of the AgBioTech Reporter, once claimed I consorted with terrorists on the basis that the environmental group Earth First had a link to the website I edited. Ironically just five years after the bomb attack on Greenpeace, a bomb exploded in the car in which the Earth First activists and folksingers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving in Oakland California. Instead of launching an investigation into who had attacked Bari, who suffered a crushed pelvis, and Cherney who received cuts from the blast. The FBI launched an investigation into the pair that painted them as the prime suspects! It was more than a decade later before a jury finally vindicated the Earth First pair, ordering the FBI officers concerned to pay $4.4 million in compensation for their treatment. Tony Blair too presents critics of GM as part of the forces of violent intolerance. http://www.gmwatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=68 & page=1 But in a New Statesman article, John Pilger deals with another dislocation in reality involving Blair. Pilger contrasts two related 'global' events: the World Tribunal on Iraq - ignored by the world's media - and the G8 meeting in Scotland/Live8 etc. which has had almost saturation media coverage. Pilger points to the connection that is not being made. " No one in the " mainstream " - from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities - made the obvious connection of Bush's and Blair's enduring crime in Iraq. No one stood and said that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors " debt cancellation " at best amounted to less than the money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef). " Jonathan Matthews www.gmwatch.org / www.lobbywatch.org ------ FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH by John Pilger New Statesman, 6 July 2005 http://www.johnpilger.com Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related " global " events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain. The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. " We are here, " said the author Arundathi Roy in Istanbul, " to examine a vast spectrum of evidence (about the war) that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation, the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm, and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of torture . . . This tribunal is an attempt to correct the record: to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily anguished. " " Temporarily anguished " implies that, even faced with such rampant power, the Iraqi people will recover. You certainly need this sense of hope when reading the eyewitness testimonies which demonstrate, as Roy pointed out, " that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq. " The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the internet, you will not know who Dhar Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. With the exception of Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and several others, mostly freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, clich? crunching camp followers known as " embeds " . A Lebanese with American citizenship, Jamail has been almost everywhere the camp followers have not. He has reported from the besieged city of Fallujah, whose destruction and atrocities have been suppressed by western broadcasters, notably by the BBC. (See www.medialens. org/ alerts). In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter's witness to the thousands of Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib and other American prisons. His account of what happened to a civil servant in Baghdad was typical. This man, Ali Abbas, had gone to a US base to inquire about his missing neighbours. On his third visit, he was arrested without charge, stripped naked, hooded and forced to simulate sex with other prisoners . This was standard procedure. He was beaten on his genitals, electrocuted in the anus, denied water and forced to watch as his food was thrown away. A loaded gun was held to his head to prevent him from screaming in pain as his wrists were bound so tightly that the blood drained from his hands. He was doused in cold water while a fan was held to his body. " They put on a loud speaker, " he told Jamail, " put the speakers on my ears and said, 'Shut up, fuck, fuck, fuck!' He was refused sleep. Shit was wiped on him and dogs were used on him. " Sometimes at night when he read his Koran, " said Jamail, " (he) had to hold it in the hallway for light. Soldiers would buy and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it. " A female soldier told him, " Our aim is to put you in hell . . . These are the orders from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell. " Jamail described how Fallujah's hospitals have been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching the hospitals. Children were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood. The two men responsible for this, George Bush and Tony Blair, attended the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Unlike the Iraq Tribunal, there was saturation coverage, yet no one in the " mainstream " - from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities - made the obvious connection of Bush's and Blair's enduring crime in Iraq. No one stood and said that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors " debt cancellation " at best amounted to less than the money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef). In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid supporters and church leaders was addressed by Britain's treasurer, Gordon Brown, the paymaster of this carnage. Only one person asked him, " When will you stop the rape of the poor's resources? Why are there so many conditions on aid? " This lone protestor was not referring specifically to Iraq, but to most of the world. He was thrown out, to cheers from among the assembled Christians. That set the theme for the G8 week: the silencing and pacifying and co-option of real dissent and truth. It was Frantz Fanon, the great intellectual-activist of Africa, who exposed colonial greed and violence dressed up as polite do-goodery, and nothing has changed, in Africa, as in Iraq. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park beckoned a wilful, self-satisfied ignorance. There was none of the images that television refuses to show: of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's snipers. On the front page of the Guardian, the Age of Irony was celebrated as real life became more satirical than satire could ever be. There was Bob Geldoff resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his jester. Elsewhere, there was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding " compassionate " George Bush's " war on terror " as one of his generation's greatest achievements; and there again was Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, saying incredibly that " unfair rules of trade shackle poor people " ; and Paul Wolfowitz, beaming next to the Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bush's so-called neo-conservative putsch, the mendacious justification for the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of " endless war " . And if you missed all that, there is a downloadable PDF kit from a " one Campaign " e-mail to " help you organise your very own ongoing Live8 party " . The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldoff decreed, in an environmental theme park in Cornwall, in front of an audience of less than 50 people, was described correctly by Andy Kershaw as " musical apartheid " . Has there ever been a censorship as complete and insidious and ingenious as this? Even when Stalin airbrushed his purged comrades from the annual photograph on top of Lenin's mausoleum, the Russian people could fill in the gaps. Media and cultural hype provide infinitely more powerful propaganda weapons in the age of Blair. With Diana, there was grief by media. With Iraq, there was war by media. Now there is mass distraction by media, a normalising of the unmentionable that " the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people " , wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, " and so the evidence has to be internally denied. " Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney and of course Geldoff, whose Live Aid 21 years ago achieved nothing for the people of Africa, the contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers of that continent have pulled off an unprecedented scam: the antithesis of 15 February 2003 when two million people brought both their hearts and brains to the streets of London. " (Ours) is not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a walk, " said Make Poverty History's Bruce Whitehead. " The emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and increased aid to developing countries. " Really? In Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter to show her the way out of wonderland. They did, over and again, this way, that way, until she lost her temper and brought down her dream world, waking her up. The people killed and maimed in Iraq and the people wilfully impoverished in Africa by our governments and our institutions in our name, demand that we wake up. ------ 2.French expat recalls NZ bombing By Henri Astier BBC News [shortned] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4637897.stm [image caption of bombed boat: France wanted to stop Greenpeace's campaign against nuclear testing] On a cold winter morning in July 1985, I walked into the French embassy in New Zealand to catch up with the news from home. I got there early, hoping to beat fellow French expats to the week-old newspaper that had just arrived. But no-one cared about Le Monde on that Thursday. For once, the Wellington embassy was abuzz with local news. Someone had blown up a Greenpeace ship in Auckland overnight, killing a photographer. " The radio ran interviews this morning, and they're all blaming the French! " said a young diplomat. Opposition to nuclear tests in the Pacific was running high in New Zealand. As a French teacher doing my national service, I knew many students and had more than once observed their sometimes paranoid ideas. " There they go again! " I said. " As if France would ever do such a terrible thing. " But one member of our group was not sure. " It would not surprise me all that much, " the military attache said, shaking his head. Communication breakdown The attache, of course, had no inside knowledge - spies rarely involve diplomats in bomb plots. He just knew more about our masters' mindset than we youngsters did. It turned out that the New Zealanders had something to be paranoid about. By mid-September, after weeks of denial by Paris, a man and a woman arrested in connection with the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior were exposed as French spies. Commander Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur were on an official mission to stop Greenpeace snooping around nuclear test sites. Over the next few months, French papers brought us - with their usual lateness - distant echoes of the political storm raging back home. The communication problems, it seemed, ran the other way as well. The French media seemed to understand little about what was happening in New Zealand. We were reading reports of anti-French hysteria, as if the tricolour was being torched from Invercargill to Auckland and expats were in fear of their lives. Reduced to silence When I heard that a prominent reporter was in town, I tracked her down to introduce her to my students to start a dialogue and dispel misunderstandings. I was desperate to show her that Kiwis were such nice people. Strongly as they felt about government policies, they would never vent their anger on individuals. I caught up with the reporter and hauled her into my classroom. But the exercise did little good. She inveighed about the continued detention of Mafart and Prieur and the rampant Francophobia she had witnessed. My mild-mannered students were not able to get a word in. Not all French reporters, however, wore nationalist blinkers. The involvement of French external security services in the Rainbow Warrior bombing was exposed by journalistic sleuths in Paris. I had a chance to meet France's answer to Bob Woodward - Jean-Marie Pontaut of L'Express, who did more than any other to break the story. Pontaut was among the many journalists who descended on Auckland for the trial of Prieur and Mafart in June 1986. He spoke no English. As an aspiring journalist, I attached myself to him to serve as his guide, neglecting my beloved students for a week. Lessons Driving around Auckland with Pontaut was an eerie experience. He had never set foot in New Zealand, and yet the harbour had no secret for him. " There is a bridge on the left after this curve, " he said. " That's where Mafart and Prieur picked up the bomb. It was delivered by boat by another team. 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