The Quiet Death of Freedom?
John Pilger writes that 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 facade: "the cavalry on a new American frontier," guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010506L.shtml
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The death of freedom
FPF-fwd.: the excellent John Pilger The death of freedom + Gulag links
Fri Jan 6, 2006 03:42
FPF: After all those horrible years NOT ONE of the hundreds of people illegally held in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay has been charged, in court or convicted. There's no evidence of 'terrorism' by them: only terror and torture in the PNAC's Gulag*:
http://tinyurl.com/caut7
The criminals at present 'managing' and 'bleeding' The Netherlands - in the same way as the US - officially support this. The Dutch don't.
THE DEATH OF FREEDOM
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?
by John Pilger
6th Jan, 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 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. [FPF: Albright - The price is worth it - CBS - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/dneux ] - 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 BUSH REGIME'S "RIGHT" TO IMPRISON AN AMERICAN CITIZEN "INDEFINITELY" WITHOUT CHARGING HIM WITH A CRIME
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."
THE SYSTEMATIC BRUTALITY, THE WIDESPREAD ATROCITIES, THE RUTHLESS SUPPRESSION OF INDEPENDENT THOUGHT
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.
THE SENATE VOTE BANNING FREEDOM NEVER HAPPENED
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 - [FPF: like in Holland] - 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
Source: New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/200601090004
FPF: Related links for the whole week end:
* The Nuremberg principles: "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment." - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/byurp
* "People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back." - 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/9cyeq
* Who Are the War Criminals? Naming Names. - Behind every war criminal is a criminal idea - by Justin Raimondo - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/duab3
* 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - BBC: video & text-interview of the United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v
* PNAC.info - Exposing the Project for the New American Century - Url.:
http://www.pnac.info/
* Holland - an American 'Lapdog of War' - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/93c97
* Dutch 'Special Forces' Kill and Destroy for the US - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/6mpw2
* Afghanistan - Torturing and killing for 'Freedom'? - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/4nf2b
* AP - English - - Dutch F-16's at the Bagram base Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/47zvr
* Dutch Air Force web site confirming F-16 arrival in Kabul (in Dutch) - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/4wc52
* MSNBC Poll: Ninety-four percent believes that George Bush and the neocon media mislead the nation to go to war with Iraq - Url.:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8248969/
* TIME/Life poll: The Biggest Threat To Peace - Which country really poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? TIME asked for readers' views - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/4f34
* WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 /U.S. Newswire/ - According to the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll President Bush's national approval rating has declined to 39 (today 35) percent, the lowest level during his Presidency. And among African-Americans, Bush has only a 2 percent - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/b365o
* GULAG: Russian 1970 Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn described the Soviet prison camp system in his best-selling book 'The Gulag Archipelago'. He has since 2000 been globally declared 'dead' by the people involved, when he published about 'the last taboo on Russia' - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/bkoz8
* Reference guide to the Geneva Conventions - Url.:
http://www.genevaconventions.org
* The leaked 'Downing Street Memos' expose the criminal lies by war criminals like Bush, Blair, Berlusconi (It.) Balkenende (NL) - their collaborating media and other malignant ilk - Url.:
http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/
* The infamous US 'Lie Factory' - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/8ncal
* Who's financing? - The 'Federal Reserve' and it's usurers is the absolute biggest crime against all humanity ever. - Url.:
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm
* Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE WERE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm ] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.:
http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.:
http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html
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http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
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Source:
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495;article=97347;show_parent=1
