Bringing down the new Berlin Walls by John Pilger

John Pilger

In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the Palestinian breakout of Gaza offers inspiration for people struggling to bring down the new Berlin Walls all over the world.

The recent breakout of the people of Gaza provided a heroic spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the smashing down of the Berlin Wall. Whereas on the occupied West Bank, Ariel Sharon’s master plan of walling in the population and stealing their land and resources has all but succeeded, requiring only a Palestinian Vichy to sign it off, the people of Gaza have defied their tormentors, however briefly, and it is a guarantee they will do so again. There is profound symbolism in their achievement, touching lives and hopes all over the world.

“[Sharon’s] fate for us,” wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian, “was a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted [by] collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today – that is what he had in store for us and he nearly achieved it.

”Israel’s and America’s experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it.

There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer Rains, which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then extrajudicial executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade: the denial of electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines and the denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere, incessant voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one merging with the other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of the “international community” whose response is not to help, but to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as “disputed” and damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as “Hamas militants” who “refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist” when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the Palestinians’ right to exist.

“What is being hidden from the [Israeli] public,” wrote Uri Avnery, a founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, on 26 January, “is that the launching of the Qassams [rockets from Gaza] could be stopped tomorrow. Several months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire. It repeated the offer this week . . . Why doesn’t our government jump at this proposal? Simple: to make such a deal, we must speak to Hamas . . . It is more important to boycott Hamas than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media co-operate with this pretence.” Hamas long ago offered Israel a ten-year ceasefire and has since recognised the “reality” of the Jewish state. This is almost never reported in the west.

The inspiration of the Palestinian breakout from Gaza was dramatically demonstrated by the star Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Aboutreika. Helping his national side to a 3-0 victory over Sudan in the African Nations Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the words “Sympathise with Gaza” in English and Arabic. The crowd stood and cheered, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world expressed their support for him and for Gaza. An Egyptian journalist who joined a delegation of sports writers to Fifa to protest against Aboutreika’s yellow card said: “It is actions like his that bring many walls down, walls of silence, walls in our minds.

”In the murdochracies, where most of the world is viewed as useful or expendable, we have little sense of this. The news selection is unremittingly distracting and disabling. The cynicism of an identical group of opportunists laying claim to the White House is given respectability as each of them competes to support the Bush regime’s despotic war-making. John McCain, almost certainly the Republican nominee for president, wants a “hundred-year war”. That the leading Democratic candidates are a woman and a black man is of supreme irrelevance; the fanatical Condoleezza Rice is both female and black. Look into the murky world behind Hillary Clinton and you find the likes of Monsanto, a company that produced Agent Orange, the war chemical that continues to destroy Vietnam. One of Barack Obama’s chief whisperers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, which spawned jihadism, al-Qaeda and 9/11.

This malign circus has been silent on Palestine and Gaza and almost anything that matters, including the following announcement, perhaps the most important of the century: “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” Inviting incredulity, these words may require more than one reading. They come from a statement written by five of the west’s top military leaders, an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman and a Dutchman, who help run the club known as Nato. They are saying the west should nuke countries that have weapons of mass destruction – with the exclusion, that is, of the west’s nuclear arsenal. Nuking will be necessary because “the west’s values and way of life are under threat”.

Where is this threat coming from?

“Over there,” say the generals.Where?

In “the brutal world”.On 21 January, on the eve of the Nato announcement, Gordon Brown also out-Orwelled Orwell. He said that “the race for more and bigger stockpiles of nuclear destruction [sic]” is over. The reason he gave was that “the international community” (basically, the west) was facing “serious challenges”. One of these challenges is Iran, which has no nuclear weapons and no programme to build them, according to America’s National Intelligence Estimates. This is in striking contrast to Brown’s Britain, which, in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has commissioned an entirely new Trident nuclear arsenal at a cost believed to be as much as £25bn. What Brown was doing was threatening Iran on behalf of the Bush regime, which wants to attack Iran before the end of the presidential year.

Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal Fate of the Earth, provides compelling evidence in his recently published The Seventh Decade: the New Shape of Nuclear Danger that nuclear war has now moved to the centre of western foreign policy even though the enemy is invented. In response, Russia has begun to restore its vast nuclear arsenal. Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during the Cuban crisis, describes this as “Apocalypse Soon”. Thus, the wall dismantled by young Germans in 1989 and sold to tourists is being built in the minds of a new generation.

For the Bush and Blair regimes, the invasion of Iraq and the campaigns against Hamas, Iran and Syria are vital in fabricating this new “nuclear threat”. The effect of the Iraq invasion, says a study cited by Noam Chomsky, is a “sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks”.

Behold Nato’s instant “brutal world”.

Of course, the highest and oldest wall is that which separates “us” from “them”. This is described today as a great divide of religions or “a clash of civilisations”, which are false concepts, propagated in western scholarship and journalism to provide what Edward Said called “the other” – an identifiable target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and economic plunder. In fact, the foundations for this wall were laid more than 500 years ago when the privileges of “discovery and conquest” were granted to Christopher Columbus in a world that the then all-powerful pope considered his property, to be disposed of according to his will.

Nothing has changed. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and now Nato are invested with the same privileges of conquest on behalf of the new papacy in Washington. The goal is what Bill Clinton called the “integration of countries into the global free-market community”, the terms of which, noted the New York Times, “require the United States to get involved in the plumbing and wiring of other nations’ internal affairs more deeply than ever before”.

This modern system of dominance requires sophisticated propaganda that presents its aims as benign, even “promoting democracy in Iraq”, according to BBC executives responsible for responding to sceptical members of the public. That “we” in the west have the unfettered right to exploit the economies and resources of the poor world while maintaining tariff walls and state subsidies is taught as serious scholarship in the economics departments of leading universities. This is neoliberalism – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. “Rather than acknowledging,” wrote Chalmers Johnson, “that free trade, privatisation and the rest of their policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense, apologists for neoliberalism have also revived an old 19th-century and neo-Nazi explanation for developmental failure – namely, culture.

”What is rarely discussed is that liberalism as an open-ended, violent ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Hatred of Muslims is widely advertised by those claiming the respectability of what they call “the left”. At the same time, opponents of the new papacy are routinely smeared, as seen in the recent fake charges of narcoterrorism against Hugo Chávez. Having insinuated their way into public debate, the smears deflect authentic critiques of Chávez’s Venezuela and prepare the ground for an assault on it.

This is the role that journalism has played in the invasion of Iraq and the great injustice in Palestine. It also represents a wall, on which Aldous Huxley, describing his totalitarian utopia in Brave New World, might have written: “Opposition is apostasy. Fatalism is ideal. Silence is preferred.” If the people of Gaza can disobey all three, why can’t we?

The Kings of England-The unaccountable people who launched the Iraq war have learnt nothing from it by George Monbiot.

If you doubt that Britain needs a written constitution, listen to the strangely unbalanced discussion broadcast by the BBC on Friday. The Today programme asked Lord Guthrie, formerly chief of the defence staff, and Sir Kevin Tebbit, until recently the senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, if parliament should decide whether or not this country goes to war. The discussion was a terrifying exposure of the privileges of unaccountable power. It explained as well as anything I have heard how Britain became party to a crime that might have killed a million people.

Lord Guthrie argued that parliamentary approval would mean that intelligence had to be shared with MPs; that the other side could not be taken by surprise (”do you want to warn the enemy you are going to do it?”), and that commanders should have “a choice about when to attack and when not to attack”. Sir Kevin maintained that “no prime minister would be able to deploy forces without being able to command a parliamentary majority. In that sense the executive is already accountable to parliament.” Once the prime minister has his majority, in other words, MPs become redundant.

Let me dwell for a moment on what Lord Guthrie said, for he appears to be advocating that we retain the right to commit war crimes. States in dispute with each other, the UN Charter says, must first seek to solve their differences by “peaceful means”(article 33)(1). If these fail, they should refer the matter to the Security Council (#37), which decides what measures should be taken (#39). Taking the enemy by surprise is a useful tactic in battle, and encounters can be won only if commanders are able to make decisions quickly. But either Lord Guthrie does not understand the difference between a battle and a war - which is unlikely in view of his 44 years of service(2) - or he does not understand the most basic point in international law. Launching a surprise war is forbidden by the charter.

It has become fashionable to scoff at these rules and to dismiss those who support them as pedants and prigs, but they are all that stand between us and the greatest crimes in history. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ruled that “to initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime”(3). the tribunal’s charter placed “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”(4) at the top of the list of war crimes.

If Britain’s most prominent retired general does not understand this, it can only be because he has never been forced to understand it. In September 2002, he argued in the House of Lords that “the time is approaching when we may have to join the United States in operations against Iraq. …Strike soon, and the threat will be less and easier to handle. If the United Nations route fails, I support the second option.”(5) No one in the chamber warned him that he was proposing the supreme international crime. In another debate in the Lords, Guthrie argued that it was “unthinkable for British service men and women to be sent to the International Criminal Court”, regardless of what they might have done(6). He demanded a guarantee from the government that this would not be allowed to happen, and proposed that the British armed forces should be allowed to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights. The grey heads murmured their agreement.

Perhaps it is unfair to single out the noble and gallant lord. The exceptionalism of the British establishment is almost universal. According to the government, both the Commons public administration committee and the Lords constitution committee recognise that decision-making should “provide sufficient flexibility for deployments which need to be made without prior parliamentary approval for reasons of urgency or necessary operational secrecy.”(7) You cannot keep an operation secret from parliament unless you are also keeping it secret from the UN.

Sir Kevin appears to have a general aversion to disclosure. In 2003 the Guardian obtained letters showing that he had prevented the fraud squad at the ministry of defence from investigating allegations of corruption against the arms manufacturer BAE, that he tipped off the chairman of BAE about the contents of a confidential letter the Serious Fraud Office had sent him and that he failed to tell his minister about the fraud office’s warnings(8). In October 2003, under intense cross-examination during the Hutton inquiry into the death of the government scientist David Kelly, he revealed that the decision to name Dr Kelly was made in a “meeting chaired by the Prime Minister.”(9) That could have been the end of Blair, but a week later Sir Kevin quietly sent Lord Hutton a written retraction of his evidence(10). No one bothered to tell parliament or the press; the retraction was made public only when the Hutton report was published, three months later(11). Blair knew all along, and the secret gave him a crushing advantage(12).

The discussion also reveals that Guthrie and Tebbit appear to have learnt nothing from the disaster in Iraq. They are not alone. Soon before he stepped down last year, Tony Blair wrote an article for the Economist called What I’ve Learned(13). He had discovered, he claimed, that his critics were both wrong and dangerous and that his decisions, based on “freedom, democracy, responsibility to others, but also justice and fairness” were difficult but invariably right. He called his article “a very short synopsis of what I have learned”. I could think of an even shorter one.

We have yet to hear one word of regret or remorse from any of the major architects - Blair, Brown, Straw, Hoon, Campbell and their principal advisers - of Britain’s participation in the supreme international crime. The press and parliament appear to have heeded Blair’s plea that we all “move on” from Iraq. The British establishment has a unique capacity to move on, and then to repeat its mistakes. What other former empire knows so little of its own atrocities?

When people call our unwritten constitution a “gentleman’s agreement”, they reveal more than they intend. It allows the unelected gentlemen who advise the prime minister to act without reference to the proles. Britain went to war in Iraq because the public and parliament were not allowed to know when the decision was made, what the intelligence reports really said, and what the attorney-general wrote about the legality of an invasion. Had the truth not been suppressed, our armed forces could never have attacked Iraq.

Real constitutional reform requires much more than the timid proposals in the green paper on the governance of Britain, which are likely to appear in a new bill in a few weeks’ time. Yes, parliament should be allowed to vote on whether to go to war, yes the Royal Prerogative should be rolled back. But the prime minister, his diplomats, civil servants and generals would still decide which wars parliament needs to know about, which crimes could be secretly committed in our name. Real constitutional reform means not only handing power to parliament; it also means confronting the power of the cold, unaccountable people who act as if it is their birthright.

www.monbiot.com

Published in the Guardian 1st January 2008.

References:

1. http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/

2. Lord Guthrie, 24th March 2004. House of Lords debates, Column 731.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldhansrd/vo040324/text/40324-05.htm

3. Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, 9th November 2004. Aggressive War: Supreme International Crime. http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110904A.shtml

4. The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings. Vol. 1:
Charter of the International Military Tribunal.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/imtconst.htm#art6

5. Lord Guthrie, 24th September 2002. House of Lords debate, Column 896.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200102/ldhansrd/vo020924/text/20924-03.htm#20924-03_spnew9

6. Lord Guthrie, 14th July 2005. House of Lords debate, Column 1234. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldhansrd/vo050714/text/50714-08.htm#50714-08_spnew0

7. Home Office, July 2007. The Governance of Britain. Green paper. Para 28, p19. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm71/7170/7170.pdf

8. David Leigh and Rob Evans, 13th October 2003. MoD chief in fraud cover-up row. The Guardian.

9. Sir Kevin Tebbit, 13th October 2003. Hearing Transcript, The Hutton Enquiry,
para 57. http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/transcripts/hearing-trans47.htm

10. Richard Norton-Taylor and Owen Bowcott, 2nd February 2004. Tebbit’s late change put Blair in clear. The Guardian.

11. ibid.

12. John Kampfner, 2004. Blair’s Wars. pp350 and 364. Free Press, London.

13. Tony Blair, 31st May 2007. What I’ve learned. The Economist. http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9257593

But No Justice for Iraq Atrocities-There Will Be Blood By CHRIS FLOYD

The headline in last Friday's Washington Post says it all: "No Murder Charges Filed in Haditha Case."

Two years ago, a group of Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians -- including women and children cowering in their own homes -- in a revenge rampage in Haditha. Once the story emerged from the usual layers of lies and cover-up, the atrocity flared briefly on the public stage, and eight of the Marines and their officers were charged "with murder or failing to investigate an apparent war crime," as the Post reports. But public attention moved swiftly on, and over the past few months, the Pentagon's "military justice" system has quietly reduced or dropped charges against most of the men. Yesterday's announcement signaled the final climb-down in the case, leaving only a single Marine, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, facing a charge of voluntary manslaughter, and lesser charges against one other enlisted man and two officers.

Two dozen civilians slaughtered, as confirmed by the Pentagon itself -- and yet there was no murder. Indeed, Brian Rooney, the lawyer for one of the officer charged with failing to investigate the killings, now says "it's clear now that no massacre occurred, yet this legal fiction is moving forward." Twenty-four actual, physical dead bodies in the ground -- yet the incident was a "legal fiction" -- "no massacre occurred."

The Pentagon has decided that the beserkers who killed two dozen innocent civilians were essentially following the accepted rules of engagement for U.S. forces in Iraq -- a revealing fact in itself. As the Post notes:

Investigating officers in the cases have recommended lesser charges because they have found that the Marines determined the houses were hostile and believed they could kill everyone inside, more likely a case of recklessness than intent to commit a crime.

Even the indictment of Wuterich contains mitigating circumstances in the charge itself, which, the Post notes, alleges "that he had an intent to kill and that his actions inside a residential home and on a residential street in November 2005 amounted to unlawful killing 'in the heat of sudden passion caused by adequate provocation.'"

"Adequate provocation" to kill twenty-four unarmed civilians in cold blood -- or rather, as the indictment terms it, in hot blood, "the heat of sudden passion."

There is little I can say about this case beyond what I first wrote about it in 2006 in a piece called "The Line of Atrocity: From the White House to Haditha."

"Many observers have compared the methodical murder of 24 innocent civilians by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha ­ now confirmed by Pentagon and Congressional sources ­ to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when American troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a bloody rampage. But this is a false equation, one that gravely distorts the overall reality of the Coalition effort in Iraq.

"For it is not the small-scale Haditha atrocity that should be compared to My Lai: it is the entire Iraq War itself. The whole operation ­ from its inception in high-level mendacity to its execution in blood-soaked arrogance, folly, greed and incompetence ­ is a war crime of almost unfathomable proportions: a My Lai writ large, a My Lai every single day, year after year after year.

"....Photos taken afterwards by U.S. military intelligence document the carnage [at Haditha]. 'One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer,' the Sunday Times reports. 'They have been shot dead at close range. The pictures show other victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes.' The victims 'included a 76-year-old amputee and a four-year-old boy,' the Observer reports. "In one house an entire family, including seven children, were attacked with guns and grenades. Only a 13-year-old girl survived.' A U.S. government official told the Sunday Times that the attackers had 'suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership.'

"Take special note of that last statement: it may be the first time that a Bush Administration spokesman has ever told the truth about the war. There has indeed been a "total breakdown in morality and leadership" in Iraq; but it's not confined to the Haditha killers. They are just the inevitable end product of the culture of lawlessness, brutality, and aggression deliberately manufactured by the White House to serve its predatory geopolitical ambitions and its dirty war-profiteering schemes.

"This fish has rotted from the head, and the corruption has eaten through the entire body politic. It was bound to find its most extreme manifestations in those whom Bush has armed with lies ­ a majority of U.S. soldiers believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, polls show ­ and sent off to kill and be killed in an illegal war of aggression based on knowingly false and tricked-up evidence. If atrocity is the foundation of your enterprise, if atrocity is the atmosphere you breathe, why then, you are bound to produce atrocities, over and over, despite the many individual soldiers and honorable officers who struggle against the infected tide.

"These massacres aren't just momentary outbursts of revenging anger; they're learned behavior. The Marines who killed at Haditha were veterans of the much larger atrocity at Fallujah the year before. There they took part in one of the most savage demolitions of a city since World War II. Eight weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a cut-off of the city's water, electricity and food supplies. a clear war crime under the Geneva Conventions. More than two-thirds of the city's residents, some 200,000 people, fled the coming inferno, refugees in their own land. Those who remained were considered fair game in the house-by-house ravaging that followed. Among the Americans' first targets were the city's hospitals and clinics, as U.S. officers freely admitted to the New York Times: another blatant war crime. They were destroyed or shut down, with medical staff killed or imprisoned, to prevent bad publicity about civilian casualties from reaching the outside world, the officers said. Later, an investigation by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government found credible evidence of the use of chemical weapons against the city; yet another war crime. Up to 6,000 people were killed in the attack, most of them civilians.

"The few hundred Fallujah-based insurgents who had been the ostensible target of the assault had escaped long before the onslaught began. Thus there was no real military purpose to the city's destruction, which had been ordered by the White House; it was instead an act of reprisal, a collective punishment against the Iraqi people as a whole, non-combatants included, for the armed resistance to the Coalition conquest. The Marines of Kilo Company simply took what they were taught by their eminently respectable superiors in Fallujah and applied it in Haditha.

"...Like Abu Ghraib, Haditha is not an aberration by a few 'bad apples' but the emblem of a wider, systemic crime, the natural fruit of an outlaw regime that has made aggressive war, torture, indefinite detention, 'extrajudicial killing,' rendition and concentration camps official national policy. This moral rot is Bush's true historical legacy."

It is also the historical legacy of every single public figure and presidential candidate who fails to stand up -- right now, today, and every single day-- and demand that this abomination come to an immediate end, and that its perpetrators face the full measure of justice for what they have done. Who gives a damn about Obama's "elevating rhetoric" or Hillary's "tough fight-back" in New Hampshire -- or any of the other soul-rotting bullshit of the presidential campaign -- when this innocent blood drenches us all, day after day after day? Moral insanity has gripped this nation -- and we are all of us, every single one, tainted and corrupted by it...and are passing it on to our children. Who will break this chain of madness? And where will we find mercy for these crimes?

Chris Floyd is an American journalist and frequent contributor to CounterPunch. He is the author of the book Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium. He can be reached through his webistie: www.chris-floyd.com.

from CounterPunch