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You are all potential terrorists. It
matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia
or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on
your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security's
National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not
merely "al-Qaeda", but "exercise", "drill", "wave", "initiative"
and "organisation": all proscribed words. The British government's
announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call
is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been
doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of
permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police
state is consuming western democracy.
What are you going to do about it?
In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to
deal with "terror suspects". Habeas Corpus is dying. The European
Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three
British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none
except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned
for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed
one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court
had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to "cruel and unusual
punishment". One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000
pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the
custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of
fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who
has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure
hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free, they
go - along with young Richard O'Dwyer, who faces 10 years in
shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US
copyright on the internet.
As the law is politicised and Americanised, these travesties are
not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university
student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating "terrorism" on the
internet, Appeal Court judges in London ruled that "acts...
against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which
sought to influence a government and were made for political
purposes" were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San
Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.
What are you going to do about it?
The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer
called "pre fascist" has metastasized. The US attorney-general,
Eric Holder, defends the "right" of his government to assassinate
American citizens. Israel, the protege, is allowed to aim its
nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking glass world, the lying is
panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on 11 March,
including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to
a "rogue" American soldier. The "authenticity" of this is vouched
by President Obama himself, who had "seen a video" and regards it
as "conclusive proof". An independent Afghan parliamentary
investigation produces eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of
as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their
villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more
murderous US special forces "night raid".
Take away the videogame technology of killing - America's
contribution to modernity - and the behaviour is traditional.
Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained,
frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer class,
American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places
whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. A nation
founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks
the habit. Vietnam was "Indian country" and its "slits" and
"gooks" were to be "blown away".
The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the
Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a "rogue" incident
and, profanely, an "American tragedy" (the cover headline of
Newsweek). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted and he was
let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai
province where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000
people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called
"free fire zones". This was the model of modern warfare:
industrial murder.
Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the
beneficiaries of America's new permanent war: Nato, the armaments
and hi-tech companies, the media and a "security" industry whose
lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life. The
conquest or "pacification" of territory is unimportant. What
matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your
indifference.
What are you going to do about it?
The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the
Supreme Court in London will decide whether the WikiLeaks editor,
Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final
appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale,
who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and
interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations. Thanks to a secret
deal between the US and Sweden, he can be "rendered" to the
American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, prime
minister Julia Gillard has conspired with those in Washington she
calls her "true mates" to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is
fitted for his orange jump suit just in case he should make it
home. In February, her government wrote a "WikiLeaks Amendment" to
the extradition treaty between Australia and the US that makes it
easier for her "mates" to get their hands on him. She has even
given them the power of approval over Freedom of Information
searches - so that the world outside can be lied to, as is
customary.
What are you going to do about it?
John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker,
based in London. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year
Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in
Britain and the US.
http://johnpilger.com
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