John Pilger:From Iraq to G8: The Polite Crushing of Dissent and Truth

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John Pilger:From Iraq to G8: The Polite Crushing of Dissent

and Truth

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:22:06 +0100

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 12:47 AM

FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH

 

THIS is a Must Read...

 

http://pilger.carlton.com/print/133471

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Writing in the New Statesman, John Pilger contrasts two related

'global' events: the World Tribunal on Iraq and the G8 meeting in

Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. : Pilger :06 Jul 2005

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articles

 

FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH

 

by John Pilger

 

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.

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Read this and WEEP!!!!!

 

Global Eye

 

Love Me Tender

 

By Chris Floyd

Published: July 15, 2005

 

They were still scraping body parts out of the blasted carriages in

the London Underground last week when the terrorists brazenly

announced a harvest of blood fruits from their murderous campaign. The

declaration -- bone-chilling in its moral nullity, its brutal cynicism

-- was made in the fearsome name of Jihad.

 

That would be Asim Jihad, of course, spokesman for the Iraqi Oil

Ministry. Yes, just one day after London's agony, the state terrorists

who perpetrated the ongoing mass atrocity of aggressive war in Iraq

celebrated an important victory in their campaign of violence and

fear: 11 juicy oil fields are being put up for tender to international

investors, AdnKronos International reports.

 

The corporate cornucopia of these fertile fields in oil-laden southern

Iraq -- 3 million barrels per day, said Jihad -- will surpass the

nation's entire current output of 2.2 million bpd: rich pickings for

the oil barons whose branch office in the White House has done such

outstanding advance work for them. With oil prices soaring past $60

per barrel -- on their way to the $100 mark in the near future, some

experts say -- the $25 billion ante that the Iraqis are seeking will

be a small price to pay for a seat at this game.

 

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But goodness gracious me -- as Pentagon pump-jockey Don Rumsfeld would

say, in that prim spinster patois he likes to affect when wiping blood

off his hands -- nobody in their right mind believes all that money

will actually go to the Oil Ministry, which will maintain ostensible

control of the sold-off fields for the alleged benefit of the Iraqi

people. Heavens to Betsy, no!

 

Some of the loot will be skimmed by Bushist-favored bagmen in the new

Baghdad regime. Some will be siphoned off to fund the death-dealing,

torture-happy goon squads now operating on behalf of various factions

in the government. Some will be kicked back to the oil barons. And

some will be smuggled into slush funds for covert ops, mercenaries,

campaign hijinks in the Homeland and " retirement packages " for good

and faithful servants of the Bush war machine.

 

How do we know this will happen? Because it has already happened to

Iraqi oil money that fell into the hands of the profiteer-in-chief,

President George W. Bush. According to detailed audits and

investigations by Congress, the Pentagon, the General Accountability

Office, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, and the

Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, more than $8.8

billion in Iraqi money under Bush's control simply went walking

between October 2003 and July 2004, the London Review of Books

reports. These were revenues supposedly earmarked for the Iraqi

government -- but no one knows where they actually went, except for a

few dollops that investigators found were bankrolling many of the

worthy endeavors outlined above.

 

And this epic rapine -- looting on a scale not seen since the days of

the Mongol Horde -- is just a single rivulet in the vast delta of

corruption draining the conquered land. Christian Aid estimates that

an additional $4 billion in unmetered oil export revenue was sold off

under the counter, Saddam-style, to coalition cronies. Then there were

the planeloads of cold cash spread around by Bush's " Provisional

Authority " -- off the books, natch -- to " couriers, " brokers, Western

contractors, tribal leaders, " intelligence assets " and anyone else who

had the moxie to put their hands out at the right time.

 

All of this money was stolen from the Iraqi people. In fact, every bit

of Iraq's oil money was seized by Bush and transferred to New York's

Federal Reserve Bank in May 2003. Perhaps this was the operation Bush

was referring to in his ballyhooed " Mission Accomplished " declaration

that same month. (He certainly couldn't have been talking about the

military mission -- not with " major combat operations " still being

launched even as we speak.) And oil revenues kept flowing to Bush's

bank account after the conquest. All told, by the time Bush's personal

viceroy, Jerry Bremer, did his " last days of Saigon " bug-out from

Baghdad last year, the Crawford Caligula had run through $20 billion

of Iraq's oil money.

 

To Our Readers

 

Has something you've read here startled you? Are you angry, excited,

puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas to improve our coverage?

Then please write to us.

All we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the city

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We look forward to hearing from you.

 

Email the Opinion Page Editor

No one has been brought to justice for this monstrous -- indeed

murderous -- thievery. And the oil barons preparing to feast on the

new tenders needn't worry about such " quaint " notions as legality

either. That's because Bush -- hugger-mugger as usual -- recently

renewed his infamous Executive Order 13303, the blanket immunity for

all U.S. corporate interests involved in any way with Iraq's oil, the

Deep Blade web log reports. The original edict was issued in that

fateful, fruitful month of May 2003.

 

Bush's ukase applies to all traffickers in Iraqi oil -- as long as

their loot finds its way, by hook or crook, into the coffers of

" United States persons or entities. " Bush declares flatly that any

" judicial process " launched against these protected entities -- not

excluding criminal proceedings for, say, fraud, corruption, extortion,

even murder -- " shall be deemed null and void. " But what if some rogue

nation still clinging to the outmoded principle of law and order tries

to take Bush's cronies to court? Not to worry: one of the many

agencies authorized to " employ all powers " to " carry out the purposes

of this order " is none other than Spinster Rumsfeld's own little

parlor -- the Pentagon.

 

Money and power, grabbed through violence and deceit: that's the real

point -- the only point -- of Bush's " war on terror. " It is in fact a

war of terror, where both sides use senseless murder and mass

slaughter to advance their degraded ambitions. No doubt the innocent

victims of the London bombing are happy to have died in the service of

such a noble cause.

 

 

Annotations

 

11 Southern Iraqi Oil Fields Go Up for Tender

AdnKronos International, July 8, 2005

 

Where Has All the Money Gone?

London Review of Books, July 7, 2005

 

US Extends Legal Immunity in Iraq

Deep Blade Journal, May 22, 2005

 

Dubya Indemnity: Bush Renews Protection for War Pork Cronies

Empiire Burlesque, May 27, 2005

 

Executive Order 13303

The Federal Register, May 28, 2003

 

Continuation of Executive Order 13303

Federal Register, May 19, 2005

 

Rules and Cash Flew Out the Window

Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2005

 

Assessment of Executive Order 13303

Government Accountability Project, July 18, 2003

 

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MISSION ACCOMPLISHED---iRAQ IS BROKEN

 

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