get lost

FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH
John Pilger

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 Arundathi 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
legitimising 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 anguished."

"Temporarily anguished" 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 testimony was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the
internet, you will not know who Dhar Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad
blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. With the
exception of Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and several others, mostly
freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, cliché crunching camp followers
known as "embeds". A Lebanese with American 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 by western broadcasters, notably by the BBC. (See www.medialens.org alerts).

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

In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid
supporters and church leaders was addressed by Britain's treasurer, Gordon
Brown, the 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 protestor 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
intellectual-activist of Africa, 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 was 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 Geldoff
resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and
his jester. Elsewhere, there was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who
celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while
lauding "compassionate" George 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 neo-conservative 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 Live8 party".
The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldoff decreed,
in an environmental theme park in Cornwall, in front of an audience of less
than 50 people, 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", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "and
so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney and of course
Geldoff, whose Live Aid 21 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 their 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 Make Poverty History's Bruce Whitehead. "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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