Conghaileach
13th April 2003, 15:41
Crime against humanity
John Pilger
They have blown off the limbs of women andthe scalps of children. Their
victims overwhelm the morgues and flood into hospitals that lack even
aspirin. John Pilger on a piratical war that brought terrorism and
death to Iraq
A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by an American
fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly fire", spoke to
his mother on a satellite phone.Holding the phone over his head so that
she could hear the sound of the American planes overhead, he said:
"Listen, that's the sound of freedom."
Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being
ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever designed
the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind when he
wrote the weasel headline: "The moment young Omar discovered the price
of war". These cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American
marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just
participated in the mass murder of his father, mother, two sisters and
brother during the unprovoked invasion of their homeland, in breach of
the most basic law of civilised peoples.
No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper; no
honest headline, such as: "This American marine murdered this boy's
family". No photograph of Omar's father, mother, sisters and brother
dismembered and blood-soaked by automatic fire. Versions of the
Observer's propaganda picture have been appearing in the Anglo-American
press since the invasion began: tender cameos of American troops
reaching out, kneeling, ministering to their "liberated" victims.
And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80 men,
women and children were rocketed to death? Apart from the Mirror, where
were the pictures, and footage,of small children holding up their hands
in terror while Bush's thugs forced their families to kneel in the
street? Imagine that in a British high street. It is a glimpse of
fascism, and we have a right to see it.
"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the Nuremberg
trial of the Nazi leadership, "is not only an international crime;it is
the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." In
stating this guiding principle of international law, the judges
specifically rejected German arguments of the "necessity" for
pre-emptive attacks against other countries.
Nothing Bush and Blair,their cluster-bombing boys and their media court
do now will change the truth of their great crime in Iraq. It is a
matter of record, understood by the majority of humanity, if not by
those who claim to speak for "us". As Denis Halliday said of the
Anglo-American embargo against Iraq, it will "slaughter them in the
history books". It was Halliday who, as assistant secretary general of
the United Nations, set up the "oil for food" programme in Iraq in 1996
and quickly realised that the UN had become an instrument of "a
genocidal attack on a whole society". He resigned in protest,as did his
successor, Hans von Sponeck, who described "the wanton and shaming
punishment of a nation".
I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly because
their names and their witness have been airbrushed from most of the
media. I well remember Jeremy Paxman bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight
shortly after his resignation: "So are you an apologist for Saddam
Hussein?" That helped set the tone for the travesty of journalism that
now daily, almost gleefully, treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked
e-mail Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television News,described the BBC's
war coverage as "extraordinary -it almost feels like World Cup football
when you go from Um Qasr to another theatre of war somewhere else and
you're switching between battles".
He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and no one
will say so, even when they are murdering journalists. They bring to
this one-sided attack on a weak and mostly defenceless people the same
racist, homicidal intent I witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole
programme of murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs through all
their foreign wars, as it does through their own divided society. Take
your pick of the current onslaught. Last weekend, a column of their
tanks swept heroically into Baghdad and out again. They murdered people
along the way. They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of
children. Hear their voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape:
"We shot the shit out of it." Their victims overwhelm the morgues and
hospitals - hospitals already denuded of drugs and painkillers by
America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn in humanitarian goods,
approved by the Security Council and paid for by Iraq. The screams of
children undergoing amputation with minimal anaesthetic qualify as the
BBC man's "sound of freedom".
Heller would appreciate the sideshows.Take the British helicopter pilot
who came to blows with an American who had almost shot him down. "Don't
you know the Iraqis don't have a fucking air force?" he shouted. Did
this pilot reflect on the truth he had uttered, on the whole craven
enterprise against a stricken third world country and his own part in
this crime? I doubt it. The British have been the most skilled at
delusion and lying. By any standard, the Iraqi resistance to the
high-tech Anglo-American machine was heroic. With ancient tanks and
mortars, small arms and desperate ambushes, they panicked the Americans
and reduced the British military class to one of its specialities -
mendacious condescension.
The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums", "pockets of Ba'ath
Party loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They are not real
people: cultured and cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary
of dishonour has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying it all from
the broadcasting box. "What do you make of Basra?" asked the Today
programme's presenter of a former general embedded in the studio. "It's
hugely encouraging,isn't it?" he replied. Their mutual excitement, like
their plummy voices, are their bond.
On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC
Middle East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this "hugely
encouraging" truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of British soldiers
smashing their way into a family home in Basra,pointing their guns at a
woman and manhandling, hooding and manacling young men, one of whom was
shown quivering with terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking
political prisoners and, if so, based on what sort of intelligence,
given Britain's long unfamiliarity with this territory and its
inhabitants . . . The least this ugly display will do is remind Arabs
and Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double standards -we can show
your prisoners in . . .degrading positions, but don't you dare show
ours.".
Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World Cup football".
There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate refugees are streaming in
and the hospitals are overflowing. All this misery is due entirely to
the "coalition" invasion and the British siege, which forced the United
Nations to withdraw its humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic
relief agency, which has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard
humanitarian quota for water in emergency situations is 20 litres per
person per day. Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and
people drinking from contaminated wells. According to the World Health
Organisation,1.5 million people across southern Iraq are without water,
and epidemics are inevitable.And what are "our boys" doing to alleviate
this, apart from staging childish, theatrical occupations of
presidential palaces, having fired shoulder-held missiles into a
civilian city and dropped cluster bombs?
A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it is difficult
to deliver aid in an area that is still an active battle zone". The
logic of his own words mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle zone, if the
British and the Americans were not defying international law, there
would be no difficulty in delivering aid.
There is something especially disgusting about the lurid propaganda
coming from these PR-trained British officers,who have not a clue about
Iraq and its people.They describe the liberation they are bringing from
"the world's worst tyranny", as if anything, including death by cluster
bomb or dysentery, is better than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient
truth is that, according to Unicef,the Ba'athists built the most modern
health service in the Middle East. No one disputes the grim,
totalitarian nature of the regime;but Saddam Hussein was careful to use
the oil wealth to create a modern secular society and a large and
prosperous middle class. Iraq was the only Arab country with a 90 per
cent clean water supply and with free education.All this was smashed by
the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed in 1990, the
Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution system that the UN's
Food and Agriculture Organisation described as "a model of efficiency .
. . undoubtedly saving Iraq from famine". That, too, was smashed when
the invasion was launched.
Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to put on
protective suits torecover dead and wounded in vehicles hit by American
"friendly fire"? The reason is that the Americans are using solid
uranium coated on missiles and tank shells.When I was in southern Iraq,
doctors estimated a sevenfold increase in cancers in areas where
depleted uranium was used by the Americans and British in the 1991 war.
Under the subsequent embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied
equipment with which to clean up its contaminated battlefields. The
hospitals in Basra have wards overflowing with children with cancers of
a variety not seen before 1991. They have no painkillers; they are
fortunate if they have aspirin.
With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera),little of this has
been reported. Instead, the media have performed their preordained role
as imperial America's "soft power": rarely identifying "our" crime, or
misrepresenting it as a struggle between good intentions and evil
incarnate. This abject professional and moral failure now beckons the
unseen dangers of such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition
in Iran, Korea, Syria, Cuba, China.
George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I was just
following orders.'"He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no doubt
the right of ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in an illegal
war of aggression. Two British soldiers have had the courage to seek
status as conscientious objectors. They face court martial and
imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have been asked about them in
the media. George Galloway has been pilloried for asking the same
question as Bush, and he and Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of
Commons, are being threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip.
Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the Prime Minister
is a war criminal who should be sent to The Hague. This is not
gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair is a war criminal, and
all those who have been, in one form or another, accessories should be
reported to the International Criminal Court. Not only did they promote
a charade of pretexts few now take seriously,they brought terrorism and
death to Iraq. A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees
that the new court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University
wrote, to investigate "not only the regime, but also the UN bombing and
sanctions which violated the human rights of Iraqis on a vast scale".
Add the present piratical war, whose spectre is the uniting of Arab
nationalism with militant Islam.The whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is
just beginning. Such is the magnitude of their crime.
This message has been brought to you by ZNet (http://www.zmag.org).
John Pilger
They have blown off the limbs of women andthe scalps of children. Their
victims overwhelm the morgues and flood into hospitals that lack even
aspirin. John Pilger on a piratical war that brought terrorism and
death to Iraq
A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by an American
fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly fire", spoke to
his mother on a satellite phone.Holding the phone over his head so that
she could hear the sound of the American planes overhead, he said:
"Listen, that's the sound of freedom."
Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being
ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever designed
the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind when he
wrote the weasel headline: "The moment young Omar discovered the price
of war". These cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American
marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just
participated in the mass murder of his father, mother, two sisters and
brother during the unprovoked invasion of their homeland, in breach of
the most basic law of civilised peoples.
No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper; no
honest headline, such as: "This American marine murdered this boy's
family". No photograph of Omar's father, mother, sisters and brother
dismembered and blood-soaked by automatic fire. Versions of the
Observer's propaganda picture have been appearing in the Anglo-American
press since the invasion began: tender cameos of American troops
reaching out, kneeling, ministering to their "liberated" victims.
And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80 men,
women and children were rocketed to death? Apart from the Mirror, where
were the pictures, and footage,of small children holding up their hands
in terror while Bush's thugs forced their families to kneel in the
street? Imagine that in a British high street. It is a glimpse of
fascism, and we have a right to see it.
"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the Nuremberg
trial of the Nazi leadership, "is not only an international crime;it is
the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in
that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." In
stating this guiding principle of international law, the judges
specifically rejected German arguments of the "necessity" for
pre-emptive attacks against other countries.
Nothing Bush and Blair,their cluster-bombing boys and their media court
do now will change the truth of their great crime in Iraq. It is a
matter of record, understood by the majority of humanity, if not by
those who claim to speak for "us". As Denis Halliday said of the
Anglo-American embargo against Iraq, it will "slaughter them in the
history books". It was Halliday who, as assistant secretary general of
the United Nations, set up the "oil for food" programme in Iraq in 1996
and quickly realised that the UN had become an instrument of "a
genocidal attack on a whole society". He resigned in protest,as did his
successor, Hans von Sponeck, who described "the wanton and shaming
punishment of a nation".
I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly because
their names and their witness have been airbrushed from most of the
media. I well remember Jeremy Paxman bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight
shortly after his resignation: "So are you an apologist for Saddam
Hussein?" That helped set the tone for the travesty of journalism that
now daily, almost gleefully, treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked
e-mail Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television News,described the BBC's
war coverage as "extraordinary -it almost feels like World Cup football
when you go from Um Qasr to another theatre of war somewhere else and
you're switching between battles".
He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and no one
will say so, even when they are murdering journalists. They bring to
this one-sided attack on a weak and mostly defenceless people the same
racist, homicidal intent I witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole
programme of murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs through all
their foreign wars, as it does through their own divided society. Take
your pick of the current onslaught. Last weekend, a column of their
tanks swept heroically into Baghdad and out again. They murdered people
along the way. They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of
children. Hear their voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape:
"We shot the shit out of it." Their victims overwhelm the morgues and
hospitals - hospitals already denuded of drugs and painkillers by
America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn in humanitarian goods,
approved by the Security Council and paid for by Iraq. The screams of
children undergoing amputation with minimal anaesthetic qualify as the
BBC man's "sound of freedom".
Heller would appreciate the sideshows.Take the British helicopter pilot
who came to blows with an American who had almost shot him down. "Don't
you know the Iraqis don't have a fucking air force?" he shouted. Did
this pilot reflect on the truth he had uttered, on the whole craven
enterprise against a stricken third world country and his own part in
this crime? I doubt it. The British have been the most skilled at
delusion and lying. By any standard, the Iraqi resistance to the
high-tech Anglo-American machine was heroic. With ancient tanks and
mortars, small arms and desperate ambushes, they panicked the Americans
and reduced the British military class to one of its specialities -
mendacious condescension.
The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums", "pockets of Ba'ath
Party loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They are not real
people: cultured and cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary
of dishonour has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying it all from
the broadcasting box. "What do you make of Basra?" asked the Today
programme's presenter of a former general embedded in the studio. "It's
hugely encouraging,isn't it?" he replied. Their mutual excitement, like
their plummy voices, are their bond.
On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC
Middle East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this "hugely
encouraging" truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of British soldiers
smashing their way into a family home in Basra,pointing their guns at a
woman and manhandling, hooding and manacling young men, one of whom was
shown quivering with terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking
political prisoners and, if so, based on what sort of intelligence,
given Britain's long unfamiliarity with this territory and its
inhabitants . . . The least this ugly display will do is remind Arabs
and Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double standards -we can show
your prisoners in . . .degrading positions, but don't you dare show
ours.".
Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World Cup football".
There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate refugees are streaming in
and the hospitals are overflowing. All this misery is due entirely to
the "coalition" invasion and the British siege, which forced the United
Nations to withdraw its humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic
relief agency, which has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard
humanitarian quota for water in emergency situations is 20 litres per
person per day. Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and
people drinking from contaminated wells. According to the World Health
Organisation,1.5 million people across southern Iraq are without water,
and epidemics are inevitable.And what are "our boys" doing to alleviate
this, apart from staging childish, theatrical occupations of
presidential palaces, having fired shoulder-held missiles into a
civilian city and dropped cluster bombs?
A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it is difficult
to deliver aid in an area that is still an active battle zone". The
logic of his own words mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle zone, if the
British and the Americans were not defying international law, there
would be no difficulty in delivering aid.
There is something especially disgusting about the lurid propaganda
coming from these PR-trained British officers,who have not a clue about
Iraq and its people.They describe the liberation they are bringing from
"the world's worst tyranny", as if anything, including death by cluster
bomb or dysentery, is better than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient
truth is that, according to Unicef,the Ba'athists built the most modern
health service in the Middle East. No one disputes the grim,
totalitarian nature of the regime;but Saddam Hussein was careful to use
the oil wealth to create a modern secular society and a large and
prosperous middle class. Iraq was the only Arab country with a 90 per
cent clean water supply and with free education.All this was smashed by
the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed in 1990, the
Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution system that the UN's
Food and Agriculture Organisation described as "a model of efficiency .
. . undoubtedly saving Iraq from famine". That, too, was smashed when
the invasion was launched.
Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to put on
protective suits torecover dead and wounded in vehicles hit by American
"friendly fire"? The reason is that the Americans are using solid
uranium coated on missiles and tank shells.When I was in southern Iraq,
doctors estimated a sevenfold increase in cancers in areas where
depleted uranium was used by the Americans and British in the 1991 war.
Under the subsequent embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied
equipment with which to clean up its contaminated battlefields. The
hospitals in Basra have wards overflowing with children with cancers of
a variety not seen before 1991. They have no painkillers; they are
fortunate if they have aspirin.
With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera),little of this has
been reported. Instead, the media have performed their preordained role
as imperial America's "soft power": rarely identifying "our" crime, or
misrepresenting it as a struggle between good intentions and evil
incarnate. This abject professional and moral failure now beckons the
unseen dangers of such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition
in Iran, Korea, Syria, Cuba, China.
George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I was just
following orders.'"He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no doubt
the right of ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in an illegal
war of aggression. Two British soldiers have had the courage to seek
status as conscientious objectors. They face court martial and
imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have been asked about them in
the media. George Galloway has been pilloried for asking the same
question as Bush, and he and Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of
Commons, are being threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip.
Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the Prime Minister
is a war criminal who should be sent to The Hague. This is not
gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair is a war criminal, and
all those who have been, in one form or another, accessories should be
reported to the International Criminal Court. Not only did they promote
a charade of pretexts few now take seriously,they brought terrorism and
death to Iraq. A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees
that the new court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University
wrote, to investigate "not only the regime, but also the UN bombing and
sanctions which violated the human rights of Iraqis on a vast scale".
Add the present piratical war, whose spectre is the uniting of Arab
nationalism with militant Islam.The whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is
just beginning. Such is the magnitude of their crime.
This message has been brought to you by ZNet (http://www.zmag.org).