Home > The death of freedom

The death of freedom

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 5 January 2006
18 comments

Wars and conflicts International Attack-Terrorism Governments UK

The rights of ordinary people to speak out against an unjust war and atrocities unleashed in their name are being crushed. Fascism is at the door. Who else will fight it?

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 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 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, accor-ding 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 inde- pendent 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 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, 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 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 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

– http://www.globalecho.org/view_arti...

Forum posts

  • Why should I "fight for the freedom" of Iraq, when I’m losing my own freedom at home? I think the war is misplaced. It’s time to take this war to the steps of parliament, to the white house...we will use impeachment as our guns, accusations of treason as bombs, and criminal prosecution of traitors as "mini-nukes".

    It’s time to out these bastards for who they really are....it’s time for these meddling kids to unmask the president and reveal the hideous monster face under his failing fascade.

    And then we can all get our scooby-snacks back.

  • The problem with Brian Haw’s crusade is that it comes about 30 years too late. Where was Brian when the bodies of Iraqi’s were being bulldozed into mass graves by Saddam Hussein, women brutally raped and disfigured, Islamic clerics slaughtered on Iraqi national TV? That’s right ladies and gentleman, Brian Haw was sitting on his rear end just like the rest of the thousands of "peaceniks’ around the world that couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger to help the people of Iraq. I challenge anyone on this website to name the date, time, and place of ONE SINGLE protest against the brutal policies of Saddam Hussein that left over half a million bodies buried in mass graves — and those are just the ones we’ve found so far. One can make a very clear and valid argument that the invastion of Iraq is going to save the lives of about another 1/2 million Iraqi’s in the next 10 years that would otherwise have been butchered by Saddam. How about that for a moral argument?

    I’m not buying for a second that Mr. Haw has any compassion for the people of Iraq. His pseudo-compassion is really an exploitation of the suffering of the people of that country for his own political purposes. Actually, not admirable at all in my humble opinion.

    But I’m going to give fidelisa and Mr. Haw a 2nd chance. There is another Holocaust country in the world, where the masses are being brutally mistreated: North Korea. As I write this, there are over 250,000 political prisoners locked up in a gulag the conditions of which are too disgusting to describe. I am issuing a PUBLIC CHALLENGE to Mr. Haw and Fidelista to organize a PUBLIC mass rally against the brutality of the North Korean regime. When I see this happen, and all these left-wing peaceniks showing that they really do care for the oppressed peoples of the world, then I might start to take Mr. Haw more seriously. Okay Fidelista, you’ve got your marching orders. You name the time and place, and I will join you and Haw at the rally. Given my suspicions of your real character though, I’m not packing my bags just yet.

    Brook D.

    • How about the mass grave of 3,000 that king george the butcher did on 9-11 asshole and who put Saddam in power and who supplied Saddam with weapons your government did asshole. get your facts straight jerk off.

    • Those are certainly horrific numbers found in the mass graves ---- if they were true . Lots of articles have appeared that contest those numbers ( more like around 5000 ) and the circumstances for their occurence ( some of it Saddam , some of it fundementalist uprisings ) . Does this make it any better ? Of course not . But it was easier to believe the Holocaust happened because we saw films of all the piles of corpses . To say we should believe half a million massacred because Bush , Blair and their syncophants say so , well , can you say WMD ? And would you care to join in a protest of the REAL supression of rights under the Constitution being performed by this administration , or do you support the same type of mentality that created the Holocaust in the first place ?

    • Actually, if you’re looking for straight facts, it was the French and Russians that supplied Saddam with ALL of his military hardware. The U.S. mostly just supplied Saddam with intelligence. These facts are available to anyone who wants to do a Google Search and look for them. As for Bush creating 9/11, you’ll have to provide the specific evidence for that other than just rhetoric.

      I’m still waiting for you to name the date and time of a protest of the brutal North Korean menace to world peace and humanity Fidelista. You want to demonstrate your concern for the real menaces to human rights and world peace — prove it. Why is it that 250,000 people can be so horribly mistreated for decades now and you, Fidelista, haven’t devoted even ONE ARTICLE to protest what’s going on in that country. But if America decided to invade North Korea, you’d be howling with protest, wouldn’t you, Fidelista? I think you need to ask yourself why this situation exists. What is it about you that can ignore the suffering for so long, and then turn on the compassion spigot in an instance? Waiting for answers, Fidelista.

      BTW, according to your website rules, you violated them by calling me a name, but i will forgive. I am a compassionate person.

      Brook D.

    • Brook how do you respond to the 3 million killed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam when your country was sent on a goose chase.( I won’t go into those thousands of agent orange birth defects or the weekly toll of lost limbs suffered by farmers as they try 35 years later to work amongst thousand and thousands of unexploded ordinance. I know that 50, 000 US mostly conscripts paid with their lives for this folly. Robert McNamara the then # 1 advocate for this nonsense is now coming clean. Read his 11 Lessons about Vietnam and then get back to me. My site id will get you to google then follow to article then scroll to the bottom to get a simplified version of these 11 Lessons. You might want to compare them to Iraq...

      http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/02/05_fogofwar.shtml

      cheers, jt

    • > The death of freedom

      Brook how do you respond to the 3 million killed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam when your country was sent on a goose chase.( I won’t go into those thousands of agent orange birth defects or the weekly toll of lost limbs suffered by farmers as they try 35 years later to work amongst thousand and thousands of unexploded ordinance. I know that 50, 000 US mostly conscripts paid with their lives for this folly. Robert McNamara the then # 1 advocate for this nonsense is now coming clean. Read his 11 Lessons about Vietnam and then get back to me. My site id will get you to google then follow to article then scroll to the bottom to get a simplified version of these 11 Lessons. You might want to compare them to Iraq...

      http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/02/05_fogofwar.shtml

      cheers, jt

    • > The death of freedom

      Brook D. how do you respond to the 3 million killed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam when your country embarked on a wild goose chase. (I won’t go into those thousands of agent orange birth defects or the weekly toll of lost limbs suffered by farmers as they try 35 years later to work amongst thousands and thousands of unexploded ordinance. I know that 58, 000 US mostly conscripts paid with their lives for this folly.
      Robert McNamara the then # 1 advocate and head honcho for this nonsense is now coming clean. Read his 11 Lessons about Vietnam and then get back to me. My site id will get you to google then follow to article then scroll to the bottom to get a simplified version of these 11 Lessons. You might want to compare them to Iraq...

      http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/02/05_fogofwar.shtml

      cheers, jt

    • Actually, it was the French and Russians that supplied ALL of Saddam’s hardware. The U.S. only supplied intelligence. Bush was behind 9/11? Ugh, hello, Al Qaeda has already confessed to that one numerous times on video.

      Also, site rules — no name-calling. You’re not above the law now are you, Fidelesta?

    • Brook D. How do you respond to the 3 million killed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam when your country was sent on a goose chase.( I won’t go into those thousands of agent orange birth defects or the weekly toll of lost limbs suffered by farmers as they try 35 years later to work amongst thousands and thousands of unexploded ordinance. I know that 58, 000 US mostly conscripts paid with their lives for this folly. Robert McNamara the then # 1 advocate for this nonsense is now coming clean.
      Read his 11 Lessons about Vietnam and then get back to me. My site id will get you to google then follow to article then scroll to the bottom to get a simplified version of these 11 Lessons. You might want to compare them to Iraq...

      http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/02/05_fogofwar.shtml

      cheers, jt

    • JT, I find it interesting that you readily throw out the sum of 3 million dead you obviously believe is true, but you absolutely question the total of 400,000 bodies dug up so far in Iraq. Neither can be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt, can they, yet you believe one and discount the other to a small 5,000.

      This board is about getting to the truth, is it not? Okay, so I’m saying what is the truth here. Are people protesting America’s invasion of Iraq because they care about suffering Iraqi’s or is there another agenda in play? The fact that these same individuals sat silently by for 30 years, said and did nothing about the brutality going on inside Iraq makes me extremely suspicous of their sudden concern. Either they had a "road to Damascus" experience and are suddenly motivated to care or they never cared then and they don’t really care now, but if the suffering of innocent people can be used to exploit their anti-American agenda — that’s a good thing.

      Tell me the truth, JT! What is your true motivation here?

    • That wasn’t JT who threw out the 5000 number , it was me . So let’s get to the truth . Are you implying that the American invasion was purely the act of the white knight riding to the rescue of an oppressed people ? Are you implying the left has a secret agenda and the right doesn’t ? Are you implying that there is NOTHING suspicious about 9/11 and that it all happened exactly as we were told ? And are you implying that you are only one person when your URL changes every time you make a post , or do you own five computers and three laptops ? Just looking for the truth . --------------- JC

    • I wasn’t aware my URL changes but that isn’t in violation of the posting rules, is it?

      Okay we’ve heard from Bin Laden himself and his Lt. Zawaheri that Al Qaeda is responsible for 9/11. This, of course, being the 2nd time they attacked the facility — the first being in 1993 and the MUSLIM perpetrators of that have confessed and are in jail now. So, you tell me, JC. Would Al Qaeda take credit for an attack it didn’t make?

      As for the 5,000 bodies, it’s a lot easier to actually count bodies dug up in a mass grave because you have to meticulously do the work and then autopsies on each one. Forensic teams have been working overtime and the numbers are well into the 6 figures. This is not beyond the question of anyone who reads the facts for themselves. It’s Iraqi’s doing the work here — NOT Americans.

      Bush made the best of two very bad choices. Invading was a bad choice — not invading was a worse choice. It’s as simple as that, and he’s got the same decision to make vis-a-vis Iran right now.

      My central question remains. Why is the left so concerned about suffering Iraqi’s now and demonstrated 0 concern during 30 years of persecution? I’m still waiting for an answer.

    • To respond to your central question I would ask , why did the U.S. show zero concern for the plight of the Iraqi people until AFTER the WMD excuse for invasion fell through . For the left to not protest previously is indeed hypocritical . For the right to play the "free the Iraqi people" card at this late date is indeed criminal . Now in case you’ve conveniently forgotten , Bin Laden denied involvement in 9/11 in his first post -attack broadcast but praised whoever did it. But let’s pretend that there’s nothing fishy about 9/11 and it was entirely Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda inspired . Bush’s FIRST and ONLY choice at that time was to not rest until Bin Laden was caught and Al-Qaeda wiped out. Instead he makes what you yourself call a bad choice and invades Iraq , a country that didn’t even have Al-Qaeda in it until AFTER the U.S. invaded .
      You ask me if Al-Qaeda would take credit for an attack it didn’t make . I ask you if Iran is stupid enough to use a nuke knowing full well they would be vaporized immediately after . I think I know your answer and I think you know mine .

    • 70/158
      Had a chance to compare Robert McNamara’s 11 lessons from Vietnam with the Iraq scene ?

      Today is a day to honour a true hero:

      Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.

      cheers, jt.

    • Would Iran be stupid enough to use a nuclear weapon, knowing they would be wiped out. Actually, you can’t tell what these fanatics in Tehran will or will not do. These men have absouetly no regard for the lives of their own people, so one can only assume they have even less for non-Iranians. Mutually assured destruction doesn’t work against Iran — the main reason being most Iranians want friendly relations with the West and considerably more freedom. Are we going to bomb these people who are basically held hostage by a brutal regime?

      Heres is the nightmare scenario. A counter-revolution is instigated (and it’s only a matter of time before Iranians rise up and revolt). Now, you’ve got an apocalyptic theocracy armed with nuclear weapons and faced with extinction. What will they do? I don’t know and neither do you. It’s possible that, like Hitler, they could decide a non-Islamic Iran doesn’t deserve to exist and use them on their own people. It’s very likely that they will use their last dying breath to destroy Israel — not caring whether Israel responds or not.

      Then there’s always the possibilty that they could make nuclear weapons small enough to transport around the world and blackmail Western nations etc... Iran is not a responsible government. They are the worst fascist regime on the planet behind North Korea, and that means you cannot allow them to get their hands on nuclear weapons.

      These people do not think like us. They think only about exporting their revolution night and day. Everything else is subordinate to that. Iran’s President has claimed that the "most beautiful form of art is martyrdom". I don’t want to find out years from now whether he takes that literally or not.

    • Now let’s deal with the real world , not the " we have to kill these crazy bastards before they kill us " bullshit that mesmerizes the masses into serving power crazy tribal leaders since the dawn of time . Name ONE mullah , ayatollah or muslim bigshot who has ever said to his subjects " The Great Satan must die , and I will lead the way !" , then strapped T.N.T. to HIMSELF and set it off in a crowd . Name ONE senator or congressman who , after voting to send his country to war , has enlisted to fight it . The moral ? People in power DON’T WANT TO DIE ! They are freaking COWARDS who will avoid getting hurt at all costs but need every able bodied person they can find to do their dirty work for them . So would Iran fire the first nuke ? Not a chance unless all their leaders leave the country before the order is given .