Behind the Arab revolt - a word we dare not speak

24 February 2011

by John Pilger

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President’s daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the “national security” monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the “drumbeat for war” was based not on intelligence, but lies. “It was 95 per cent charade,” McGovern told me. “How did they get away with it?” “The press allowed the crazies to get away with it.” “Who are the crazies?” “The people running the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf... these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as ‘the crazies’.” I said, “Norman Mailer has written that that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What’s your view of that?” “Well... I hope he’s right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode.” On 22 January, Ray McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration’s barbaric treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. “Way back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq,” he wrote, “I said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly.” On 16 February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrested protestors and crushed free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the internet while failing to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the internet that encouraged dissent and truth-telling. It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon and beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks. Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of “western civilisation”, found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became “US foreign policy”. As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone”, the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market”, according to Britain’s official arms “procurers”, join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft. The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism. How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.” Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name. http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/behind-the-arab-revolt-is-a-word-we-dare-not-speak

America's Nation-Destroying Mission

With President Obama’s recently announced military buildup, America’s leaders are on the verge of doing the virtually impossible — making the situation in Afghanistan even worse. The worst aspect of events post-2001 is that the U.S. and the world are less safe, since the world now sees the U.S. as the leading military power attacking possibly the poorest nation on earth. Since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008, not counting those who died after the impact of an explosive. To understand the enormity of America’s invasion, it is vital to know something of Afghanistan’s recent history, for which we must thank James Lucas:

America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan

by James Lucas, March 06, 2010

Interference by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Afghanistan has been a tragic chapter in our nation’s history.

Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons, and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare.

In fact, the gains that had already been made were actually reversed. By 2010 the economic and social status of Afghans has been set back generations; women’s status has deteriorated to such an extent that the prevalence of self-immolation has increased among discouraged women, and there is no democracy now, with the U.S. making major decisions as an occupying power.

Read this in its entirety at:

http://original.antiwar.com/james-lucas/2010/03/05/americas-nation-destroying-mission-in-afghanistan/

When the enemy vanishes - kill civilians!

Afghan refugees - BBC News

Nato's current offensive in the town of Marjah is being portrayed as a low casualty mission in the "good war" to get rid of the Taliban.
If you were to believe the news broadcasts, it's already a success.

Since the assault was always intended to be as much a publicity stunt as serving any military objective, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown will certainly be pleased at how the media have snapped into line and acted as stenographers for Nato press releases.
The truth is, most of the few hundred Taliban fighters in Marjah vanished well before the much touted offensive began, not being stupid enough to face up to 15,000 of the most heavily armed troops on the planet.

Much of what we've seen on the TV screens looks like random firing into empty space to give the cameras footage for the evening news bulletins.
But with very few enemy to engage it wasn't long -- two days in fact-- before tragedy struck when a missile attack looking for Taliban to kill managed to slaughter 12 civilians, five of them children -- the very people this war was supposedly tailored to keep out of harm's way.

The attack on Marjah is no different from the numerous other Nato "clear, hold and build" missions -- except in the amount of media ballyhoo.
And there's no reason why this should be different in the outcome, with the Taliban withdrawing tactically and biding its time, before infiltrating back into the town, once the overblown Operation Moshtarak, and its accompanying media circus, has moved on to some other flashpoint of resistance to foreign occupation.

The only reason the invading armies continue fighting a war that cannot be won is in the hope that some escape route can be found, from Obama and Brown's "war of necessity", which
will leave intact the credibility of the Western powers' ability to invade other countries with impunity.

The deaths of the 12 civilians this weekend is a brutal reminder of the heavy price many Afghans will pay in the months and years to come to save the face of those responsible
for prosecuting a futile and unjustifiable war.


[The current fuss about twelve civilians being killed is obviously a PR stunt, weighed against, for instance, the previous wiping-out of an entire wedding party and a delegation of churchmen and politicians en route to a peace conference.]

First published by Stop The War Coalition, 15 February 2010

Chomsky on Obama

Following the award to the Boy-King Twotank Obama, the barely-installed US President, of a Nobel Peace Prize, I present Noam Chomsky's views on Israel and its self-appointed 'True Friend'. As Mr Chomsky points out, the Zionist regime is at pains to paint itself as being a democracy. The benefits of that democracy, of course, only extend to the members of its chosen tribe. And the regularly invoked 'right of defence' hardly covers the extermination of all extended relatives of any resistance fighters who may or may not be in the country. Back in the Seventies, when Anwar Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a peace treaty, proposing the Zionist withdrawal from occupied Sinai but leaving out the Palestinians, he was turned down. The Zionists' response to the more recent offer by Hamas was the same: continued occupation and expansion with unlimited support from the US, over the offered security. Again, as Noam Chomsky says, the Nazis could have protected themselves against the Poles by withdrawing; so could the Zionists protect themselves by returning to their mothership, the US. An unavoidable irony here is that, despite that previous winner of a politically-motivated Peace Prize being the All-American Henry Kissinger, I feel that in many ways America is my spiritual home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bAUJF5uUuw

Is Obama weaseling out of his commitment on Guantanamo?

As we hear yet more news items suggesting that Barack Obama's declared intention to close that obscenity, the Guantanamo Prison, by 2010, may be delayed, and with still no mention of reparations for the innocent victims who were banged up there or tortured in other countries as part of the same systematic terrorist scheme, less still of any prosecution of those grunts who carried out the tortures, and their superiors (up to G W Bush and his wee pal Tony) who told them to do it, this short film made by the BBC is worth a look.
[unspeak alert:] Note that even here, the 'impartial' BBC voice-over refers to "dangerous detainees" as being a greater problem when it comes to deciding how to set them free. As if untried, uncharged citizens abducted at random may be in any way described as dangerous. If ever there were a prime example of begging the question, this is it.

A former prosecutor, a true believer, wised up fast when he saw Guantanamo for himself:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7762430.stm

Smile on the Face of the Tiger

John Pilger
June 11, 2009 "Information Clearing House"

At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip. His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and he was suffering from a lung infection which was treatable.
Denied basic equipment, the doctors in Gaza could do nothing. For weeks, the child’s parents had sought a permit from the Israelis to allow them to take him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he would have been saved. Like many desperately sick people who apply for these permits, the parents were told they had never applied. Even if they had arrived at the Erez Crossing with an Israeli document in their hands, the odds are that they would have been turned back for refusing the demands of officials to spy or collaborate in some way. “Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University, who is Jewish, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
Falk was describing Israel’s massacre in December and January of hundreds of helpless civilians in Gaza, many of them children. Reporters called this a “war”. Since then, normality has returned to Gaza. Most children are malnourished and sick, and almost all exhibit the symptoms of psychiatric disturbance, such as horrific nightmares, depression and incontinence. There is a long list of items that Israel bans from Gaza. This includes equipment to clean up the toxic detritus of Israel’s US munitions, which is the suspected cause of rising cancer rates. Toys and playground equipment, such as slides and swings, are also banned. I saw the ruins of a fun fair, riddled with bullet holes, which Israeli “settlers” had used as a sniping target.
The day after Baby Zu’rob died in Gaza, President Barack Obama made his “historic” speech in Cairo, “reaching out to the Muslim world”, reported the BBC. “Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Obama, “does not serve Israel’s security.” That was all. The killing of 1,300 people in what is now a concentration camp merited 17 words, cast as concern for the “security” of the killers. This was understandable. During the January massacre, Seymour Hersh reported that “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” for use in Gaza.
Obama’s one criticism of Israel was that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements . . . It is time for these settlements to stop.” These fortresses on Palestinian land, manned by religious fanatics from America and elsewhere, have been outlawed by the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice. Pointedly, Obama made no mention of the settlements that already honeycomb the occupied territories and make an independent Palestinian state impossible, which is their purpose.
Obama demanded that the “cycle of suspicion and discord must end”. Every year, for more than a generation, the UN has called on Israel to end its illegal and violent occupation of post-1967 Palestine and has voted for “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. Every year, those voting against these resolutions have been the governments of Israel and the United States and one or two of America’s Pacific dependencies; last year Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe joined them.
Such is the true “cycle” in the Middle East, which is rarely reported as the relentless rejection of the rule of law by Israel and the United States: a law in whose name the wrath of Washington came down on Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait, [an invasion which might not have occurred without the encouragement of the perfidious US/UK] a law which, if upheld and honoured, would bring peace and security to both Palestine and Israel.
Instead, Obama spoke in Cairo as if his and previous White House administrations were neutral, almost divine brokers of peace, instead of rapacious backers and suppliers of the invader (along with Britain). This Orwellian illogic remains the standard for what western journalists call the “Israel-Palestine conflict”, which is almost never reported in terms of the law, of right and wrong, of justice and injustice – Darfur, yes, Zimbabwe, yes, but never Palestine. Orwell’s ghost again stirred when Obama denounced “violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan [who are] determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can”. America’s invasion and slaughter in these countries went unmentioned. It, too, is divine.
Naturally, unlike George W Bush, Obama did not say that “you’re either with us or against us”. He smiled the smile and uttered “many eloquent mood-music paragraphs and a smattering of quotations from the Holy Quran”, noted the American international lawyer John Whitbeck. Beyond this, Obama offered no change, no plan, only a “tired, morally bankrupt American mantra [which] essentially argues that only the rich, the strong, the oppressors and the enforcers of injustice (notably the Americans and Israelis) have the right to use violence, while the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the victims of oppression must . . . submit to their fate and accept whatever crumbs their betters may magnanimously deign suitable to let fall from their table”. And he offered not the slightest recognition that the world’s most numerous victims of terrorism are people of Muslim faith – a terrorism of western origin that dares not speak its name.
In his “reaching out” in Cairo, as in his “anti-nuclear” speech in Berlin, as in the “hope” he spun at his inauguration, this clever young politician is playing the part for which he was drafted and promoted. This is to present a benign, seductive, even celebrity face to American power, which can then proceed towards its strategic goal of dominance, regardless of the wishes of the rest of humanity and the rights and lives of our children.

http://www.johnpilger.com/

Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Alexander Cockburn
Originally posted: May 4th 2009.

The notion of putting the Bush years on trial has never held allure for President Obama; even less so that of putting Wall Street in the dock. From his lips has always dropped the catechism of uplift and forgiveness, of "moving forward". He and his advisors had supposed that closing down Guantanamo and issuing a stern denunciation of torture would be sufficient advertisement of the new era; that a few terse reprimands for excessive bonuses for executives would slake the public appetite for retribution on the bankers and tycoons.

On torture, as he approaches the 100-day benchmark, Obama has been forced to change step, in response to public outrage at the chilling stream of memoranda documenting the savageries, and legal justifications for same, ordered and subsequently monitored in minute detail by the Bush high command. Obama's continuing aversion to any serious calling to account of the sponsors of torture has been evident in his almost daily shifts in position. At the start of this last week he indicated that yes, those okaying the tortures might be legally answerable, that a "Truth Commission" might be the way forward. By Thursday he was backing into that, saying that a commission would "open the door to a protracted, backward-looking discussion" and in the language of his press secretary, "the president determined the concept didn't seem altogether workable in this case" because of the intense partisan atmosphere built around the issue.
So it's still not clear whether Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their subordinates will have to endure the soft option of a bipartisan commission of enquiry, or face a special prosecutor, or sit back and watch political momentum flag as the issue devolves into lengthy and possibly closed hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Republicans have not been slow in pointing out, senior Democrats in Congress were certainly complicit in sanctioning torture as early as 2002. They say House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed waterboarding. She says she did not.
As always, former vice predident Cheney has usefully raised the stakes. Did the various tortures, the hundreds of waterboarding sessions, the exposure of naked captives to weeks of intense cold in small concrete boxes, actually make America safer? Cheney snarls on television that they did, thus inviting documented ripostes that this is far from clear, and indeed they contributed nothing of advantage to the national interest.
http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn04242009.html