by John Pilger
New Statesman Cover story (January 09 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 pinstriped 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 the 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 the 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 fourteen 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 plackard
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 government has now admitted,
could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are
political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited
out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death.
Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.

And for what?

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, according 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 fifty governments, many of them
democracies, and to crush thirty 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 eighteen 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's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published in June
by Bantam Press

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2006

http://www.newstatesman.com/nscoverstory.htm

http://www.newstatesman.com/200601090004