[Mb-civic] The Quiet Death of Freedom By John Pilger

[Michael Butler]

    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.