Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held ‘on suspicion’. Some of the ‘evidence’ against them, whatever it is, the government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.
And for what?
Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the act. As for real terrorists, the identities of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were known to MI5, yet nothing was done. And Blair wants to give the security services more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American doctor, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, according to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John Ashcroft, the then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a ‘terrorist’, a description mocked by even the judge in a politically motivated travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US circuit court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime’s ‘right’ to imprison an American citizen ‘indefinitely’ without charging him with a crime. This was the case of Jose Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago. He was never charged and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case puts George W Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate in effect voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America’s most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the Project for the New American Century. Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind a democratic facade: ‘the cavalry on the new American frontier’, guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases are now placed strategically in compliant countries, notably at gateways to sources of fossil fuels and encircling the Middle East and central Asia. ‘Pre-emptive’ aggression is policy, including the use of nuclear weapons.
The chemical warfare industry has been reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has been militarised. Global warming has been embraced. The powers of the president have never been greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with civil liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared the daily White House briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and those now occupying positions of executive power used to be known in Washington as ‘the crazies’. He said: ‘We should now be very worried about fascism.’
In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December, Harold Pinter spoke of ‘a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed’. He asked why ‘the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought’ of Stalinist Russia were well known in the west while state crimes were merely ‘superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged’.
A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power, ‘But you wouldn’t know it,’ said Pinter. ‘It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.’
To its credit, the Guardian published every word of Pinter’s warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for Britain's greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million children by America’s medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote banning freedom never happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the newsreader Fiona Bruce introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush’s dogs. That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the following: ‘Here is delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more.’ (Thanks to William Blum’s Rogue State, published by Common Courage Press.)
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein’s rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies of people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush and Blair and the film shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience, the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny it until they were caught out recently by investigators using the internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.
In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale of bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq’s ‘no-fly zones’. During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000 combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing. ‘We’re down to the last outhouse,’ a US official protested. ‘There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many.’ That was seven years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC, it has not happened.
The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs and air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out his country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some of them insist on describing themselves as ‘liberals’ and ‘left of centre’, even ‘anti-fascists’. They want some respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that the league table of carnage by Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now support an attack on Iran.
This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror and confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name, its extremes and terrorism. The usual double standard no longer works; there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pinstriped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror means understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being imposed by those whose actions are little different from the actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are bringing it home. John Pilger, article January 2006, ‘The Death of Freedom’
We were aiming for an expansion of the zone of freedom in the world. And in part that had to do with fighting communism and in part it had to do with fighting other kinds of tyrannies. But that’s what we were about. Michael Ledeen
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let’s work together. Aboriginal Activists Group, Queensland 1970s
Freely ye have received, freely give. Matthew 10:8
5As political and economic freedom diminishes, says Huxley, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonise empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate. Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians
There are things that we Americans must be willing to fight for. Do you know, this Republic was spawned by armed conflict. Alexander Haig, Secretary of State, address to Senate
We have been ruled by men who live by illusion. The illusion that you can have freedom by government decree. Margaret Thatcher
But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,
A universal licence to be good. Hartley Coleridge, Liberty
Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind. Thomas Paine, Common Sense
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it. ibid.