The Quiet Death of Freedom By John Pilger

[Guest guest]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010506L.shtml

 

 

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 snigger, 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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