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bravecaptain



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 06:04    Post subject: Paymasters Of Carnage Reply with quote

The ghost at Gleneagles

By John Pilger

07/09/05 "New Statesman" - - In the orgy of summit coverage something has been overlooked: the two men at the heart of it, telling us how the world should be run, are the men responsible for Fallujah and Abu Ghraib.

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 Arundhati 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 legitimation 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 vanquished."

"Temporarily vanquished" 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 Dahr Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. Together with Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and a few others, mostly freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, cliche-crunching camp followers known as "embeds". A Lebanese with US 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, notably by the BBC. (See [http://www.medialens.org/alerts]).

In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter's witness to the thousands of Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons. His account of what had 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 fourth 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 loudspeaker," he told Jamail, "put the speakers on my ears and said, 'Shut up, fuck, fuck, fuck!'" He was refused sleep. Excrement was wiped on him and dogs were used on him. "Sometimes at night when he would read his Koran," said Jamail, "[he] had to hold it in the hallway for light. 'Soldiers would walk by and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it,' [Abbas] said." A female soldier told him, "Our aim is to put you in hell . . . These are the orders we have 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 ultimately responsible for this, George W Bush and Tony Blair, attended the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Unlike for 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 with 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 on brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid supporters and church leaders was addressed by Gordon Brown, a 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 protester 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 pan-Africanist intellectual/activist, 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 were 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 Geldof, resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his jester. Elsewhere, there was a heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" 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 neoconservative 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 Live 8 party". The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldof decreed, in an environmental theme park in Cornwall far from the vaunted global audience, 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", as Arthur Miller wrote, "and so the evidence has to be internally denied". Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney, a pop-up Andrew Marr and of course Geldof, whose Live Aid 20 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 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 Bruce Whitehead of Make Poverty History. "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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mixedcasesspaces



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 10:34    Post subject: Reply with quote

While I agree with a lot of the opinions in here and it certainly is good to have more literature giving this side of the story and bringing these things to people's attention, is all of what is said here actually true?

I'm not saying it isn't - I really hope that it isn't - but there are some very serious crimes mentioned in here, in particular to do with Ali Abbas... for example: "...forced to simulate sex with other prisoners. This was standard procedure ." ...was it really? Although I am aware that I really have no idea what goes on outside of what the media (i.e. mostly the BBC) have told me, I find this hard to believe, or if there is some truth in it (for example that this has happened at certain times to certain people) then Pilger is very deliberately and dishonestly exaggerating the truth - which is a shame as most of his opinions in the article seem sound to me.

He also states that the horrific account of the electrocution and genital beating of Ali Abbas "was typical". While I am not saying that these things did not happen to Ali Abbas, I hope that it was actually a relatively isolated incident?

I am not looking for a debate here, as I really do know little about these subjects, these are more just questions... I am hoping that you'll tell me that Pilger is indeed guilty of twisting and exagerating some facts to give his opinion more impact. Otherwise, if all that he says is totally true then I am even more ashamed of my country's behaviour in Iraq than I was already.

Mark
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bravecaptain



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:16    Post subject: Reply with quote

relying on the bbc for yr news is like relying on the nme for yr music.

although i notice that this had quietly disappeared...

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/090705bombingexercises.htm

mx


http://www.markdanner.com/nyreview/061004_Torture_Truth.htm

http://www.shoutmonthly.com/current/abug.html

http://news.findlaw.com/prnewswire/20050428/28apr2005134727.html
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stegger



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:31    Post subject: Reply with quote

bravecaptain wrote:
relying on the bbc for yr news is like relying on the nme for yr music.


That's quite a statement. Where would advise people to get their news from instead?
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bravecaptain



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:40    Post subject: Reply with quote

i'm not saying that there is no news on the bbc, i listen to radio5, but you cannot rely on one source for your news. all news agencies have a bias, news has to be collected and collated from a variety of sources for a clearer picture to emerge. innit?

mx
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PrincessPunkRock



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:42    Post subject: Reply with quote

i reckon you could always pay a little visit to America's Finest News Source

x
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Dubya - T



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 14:23    Post subject: Reply with quote

That seems about as sensible as the prisonplanet website!
I suppose Elvis was the mastermind aided and abetted by Lord Lucan.Rolling Eyes

Interesting story about the exercise,however. I think it might suggest the "authorities" knew something but were too late, same as I think may have been the case with 9/11.

They seem to be saying that Governments have been behind most major terrorist attacks. I suppose they would really like to think that "ordinary" people aren't capable of such things, therefore it has to be the big bad organisation behind it. Sadly not the case. Even Al Queda isn't so much an organisation as a set of ideals.

To suggest that last Thursday was set up to make the public say "Hey, ID cards are a good idea!" is just a little extreme. Whilst I think such a scheme wouldn't be out of the question, it would be far better to just "foil" a few attempts, even find a load of semtex and plans or detonate a small car bomb that doesn't do much damage (see the BBC bomb). All that stuff that happened yesterday without the bombs first would have been the sort of thing. I can believe we wouldn't be told the truth by the Government on certain things either, for example if they did have wind of an imminent attack and got it wrong, they wouldn't say so.

The bombings were real enough. There are enough misguided idiots around so full of religous dogma and hatred that they would do a thing like that. Our Government will not have helped matters by going in with Dubya's shoot 'em up.

On the point of the conditions in the prisons, I don't think that sounds unreasonable at all. The army is a large group of trained killers. People will be hyped up beyond belief in a war situation so the very worst traits of human nature will come out. I'm sure such things have been going on during every war ever, not just Iraq. Some believe that people are basically good and that most aren't capable of such behaviour. This may be true when everything is going well, but if the chips are down they will turn downright evil and behave not unlike Chimpanzees. I suppose that ties in with the point about the conspiracy theorists.

Sadly, Human nature can be extremely unpleasant.
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stegger



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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 16:58    Post subject: Reply with quote

bravecaptain wrote:
innit?


it is. but I reckon that the BBC is fairly impartial, as far as it goes. i'd certainly trust them more than the N*E. I'd trust a recipie book more than I'd trust the them.
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 19:20    Post subject: Reply with quote

while lauding "compassionate" Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest achievements

Did bono really do that or is that Pilgers Prefuse style quoting. I agree with the sentiment but you know Pilger isn't above manipulating context to highlight points.


www.znet.org is good too

www.reliefweb.int is a good objective site

www.opendemocracy.net is really good I think its quite critical

www.theglobalsite.ac.uk is good as well, check out Martin Shaws section he's got some interesting ideas
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bravecaptain



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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 05:37    Post subject: Reply with quote

<<That seems about as sensible as the prisonplanet website! >>

I wasn't advocating this site but it was the only place I could find that reported this story.
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Dubya - T



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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 16:48    Post subject: Reply with quote

I realised that! (At least I hoped you weren't advocating it!)

It is an interesting angle on the events, but his talk of conspiracy just doesn't add up. If "the authorities" were going to do such a thing, wouldn't they just do it? No lowering of the alerts or staging exercises that might arouse suspicion?

I do wonder if they knew more than they let on, not that it would have helped as it probably couldn't be prevented.
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