On 17 October, President Bush signed a bill that legalised torture and
kidnapping and effectively repealed the Bill of Rights and habeas
corpus. The CIA can now legally abduct people and “render” them to
secret prisons in countries where they are likely to be tortured.
Evidence extracted under torture is now permissible in “military
commissions”; people can be sentenced to death based on testimony beaten
out of witnesses. You are now guilty until confirmed guilty. And you
are a “terrorist” if you commit what George Orwell, in Nineteen
Eighty-Four, called “thoughtcrimes”. Bush has revived the prerogatives
of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs: the power of unrestricted lawlessness.
“America can be proud,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill’s
promoters, who stood with other congressmen, clapping as Bush signed
away the American constitution and the essence of American democracy.
The
historic significance of this was barely acknowledged in Britain, the
source of these abandoned ancient rights, no doubt because the same
barbarians’ law is taking hold here. The great crime of Iraq is a moral
tsunami that has left New Labour’s vassals floundering and shouting
their hopeless inversions of the truth as they await rescue by
Washington. “At a deeper ideological level,” wrote the American
historian Alfred McCoy, “[what is happening] is a contest of power
versus justice . . . Viewed historically, it is a fight over fundamental
principles reaching back nearly 400 years.” Not long ago, I interviewed
Dianna Ortiz, an American nun tortured by a Guatemalan death squad
whose leader she identified as a fellow American. This was the time of
Ronald Reagan, who was as murderous in Central America as Bush is in the
Middle East. “You can’t claim to be a democracy if you practise or
condone torture,” she said. “It is the ultimate test.”
The United
States promised a democracy when the Civil Rights Act became law in
1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year finally ended slavery.
For the next decade, the civil rights movement joined the great popular
movement to end the slaughter in Vietnam, and Congress legislated to
restrain the CIA’s secretive parallel power. It was a fleeting
intermission. Under Reagan, the mythology of American democracy and
“pride” was restored, perversely, when his corrupt executive ignited a
lawless war in impoverished Central America, causing hundreds of
thousands of deaths, which the United Nations called genocide. The
United States became the only country ever to have been condemned by the
International Court of Justice for terrorism (against Nicaragua).
“Let’s drop the bullshit,” a former senior CIA officer told me recently.
“What matters is our national security interests, okay?”
“National
security” is the euphemism for the forbidden word, imperialism, whose
despotic power has accelerated under George W Bush. Secret presidential
“signing decrees” that can overturn the rare opposition of an otherwise
supine Congress are now normal practice, along with a gulag of secret
prisons, described approvingly by Bush as “the CIA programme”. The
United States today is an extension of the totalitarianism it has long
sought to impose abroad. That unpalatable truth is unspoken, of course;
in spite of his current “difficulties” over Iraq, corporate propaganda
remains on Bush’s side. The search for an “exit strategy” may make
“embarrassing” headlines, but the deliberate, systematic looting of
billions of dollars of Iraq’s resources has been quietly achieved, with
an estimated $20bn “missing”. The same silence applies to the class and
race war at home, as the Bush gang kicks away the ladder that once led
to the American middle class. Last January, 25,000 people applied for
325 jobs at a Wal-Mart in Chicago.
Constitutional rights are
formidable American myths. The American press is often put forward as
constitutionally having the freest speech on earth; and it does,
theoretically. Yet during every period of internal repression, the press
and broadcast journalism have played a compliant, “Pravda” role,
backing imperial wars, indulging the lies of the “red baiter” Joe
McCarthy, promoting phoney debates about phoney threats (Cuba,
Nicaragua, the nuclear arms race) and the supercult of “anti-communism”.
Bush’s lies on Iraq and Afghanistan were merely amplified and promoted.
Seymour Hersh and a handful of others stand out as honourable
exceptions.
In 1991, at the end of the one-sided slaughter known
as the Gulf war, the celebrated American TV anchorman Dan Rather told
his national audience, “There’s one thing we can all agree on. It’s the
heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that freedom could
live.” In fact, a quarter of them had been killed by other Americans.
Most of the British casualties were killed by the same “friendly fire”.
Moreover, official citations describing how Americans had died
heroically in hand-to-hand combat were fake. The hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis who died during and in the aftermath of that “war” remain
unmentionable – like hundreds of thousands who died as a result of the
decade-long embargo; like the 655,000 Iraqi “excess deaths” since the
invasion of 2003.
The war on democracy has been successfully
exported. In Britain, and in other western countries, such as Australia,
journalism and scholarship have been systematically appropriated as the
new order’s management class, and democratic ideas have been emptied
and refilled, beyond all recognition. Unlike the 1930s, there is a
silence of writers, with Harold Pinter almost the lone voice raised in
Britain. The promoters of an extreme form of capitalism known as
neo-liberalism, the supercult responsible for the greatest inequalities
in history, are described as “reformers” and “revolutionaries”. The
noble words “freedom” and “liberty” now refer to the divine right of
this extremism to “prevail”, the jargon for dominate and control. This
vocabulary, which contaminates the news and the pronouncements of the
state and its bureaucracy, is from the same lexicon as arbeit macht frei
– “work makes you free” – the words over the gates at Auschwitz.
For
the British under Blair, the influence of this fake democracy has been
catastrophic. Even if the convergence of the Labour party and the Tories
was historically inevitable, it was Tony Blair, the most extreme
British political figure in living memory, who returned Britain to a
full-time violent, imperial role, converting a fictional notion, “the
clash of civilisations”, into a possibility. Blair has destroyed the
power of parliament and politicised those sections of the civil service
and the security and intelligence services that saw themselves as
impartial. He is Britain’s president, lacking only the accompanying
strains of “Hail to the Chief”. Last installed by little more than a
fifth of the eligible population, he is the most undemocratically
elected leader in British history. Poll after poll tells us he is also
the most reviled.
Under President Blair, parliament has become
like Congress under Bush: an ineffectual, craven talking shop which has
debated Iraq only twice in two and a half years. With one important
exception,
regressive measure after measure has been waved through: from the
Criminal Justice Act 2003 to the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, with
their mandatory sentences and house arrests (“control orders”). A “bill
to abolish parliament”, as the innocuous-sounding Legislative and
Regulatory Reform Bill 2006 might be known, removed parliamentary
scrutiny of government legislation, giving ministers arbitrary powers
and Downing Street the absolute power of decree. There was no public
debate. How ironic that the bill stalled in the House of Lords which,
together with the judiciary, is now the loyal opposition.
In
2003, Blair worked the secretive royal prerogative – Orders in Council –
to order an unprovoked, illegal attack on a defenceless country, Iraq.
The following year, he used the same archaic powers to prevent the
Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland, from which they were
secretly expelled so that the Americans could build a huge military base
there. Last May, the high court described the treatment of these
British citizens as “repugnant, illegal and irrational”.
On 16
October 2005, Bush claimed that al-Qaeda was seeking to “establish a
radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia”. This deeply
cynical, calculated exaggeration – reminiscent of Washington’s warning
of “mushroom clouds” following September 11, 2001 – was repeated by
Blair fresh from the embrace of Rupert Murdoch, the likely source of his
future enrichment.
This is the message of liberal warmongers who have sought to be Tonier-than-thou and salvage their spent reputations by
using
big, specious words such as “Islamo-fascism”. They suppress the truth
that al-Qaeda is minuscule compared with the state terrorism that kills
and maims industrially and whose cost distorts all our lives. British
state terrorism in Iraq has cost more than £7bn. The real cost of
Trident is said to be £76bn.
The premises of the best of British
life that survived Margaret Thatcher have no place in this accounting.
The National Health Service and what was once the best postal service in
the world are denied subsidies uncorrupted by a rigged “free market”.
Whether it is the accretions of the free-loading Blairs or the sale of
72 Eurofighters to the medieval regime in Saudi Arabia, complete with
“commissions”, or the government’s refusal to ban highly profitable
cluster bombs, whose victims are mostly children, blood and money are
the essence of Blairism and its mutant liberalism. In their 1996 new
Labour manual, The Blair Revolution: can new Labour deliver? Peter
Mandelson and Roger Liddle highlighted Britain’s “strengths” under a
Blair regime. These were the multinational corporations and “aerospace”
(the arms industry) and the “pre-eminence of the City of London”. Blood
and money.
Of course, as in any colonial era, blood spilled is
invisible; one’s faraway victims are untermenschen – that is to say,
they are less than human and have no presence in our lives. On 11 June,
Fiona Bruce, the BBC newsreader, announced that prisoners in Guantanamo
Bay were committing suicide. She asked, “How damaging is it to the Bush
administration?” At the recent Labour party conference, a cringe-making
presidential occasion, Blair, wrote another leading television
journalist Jon Snow, demonstrated “oratorical mastery and matey
finesse”. Indeed, he was “a leader for his time, in a time when Britain
needed exactly such leadership”.
Those who have peeled back the
facades of the Blair and Bush gangs ought not to be despondent. The
inspiring demonstration on 15 February 2003 may not have stopped an
invasion,
but the same universal power of public morality has, I
believe, stalled attacks on Iran and North Korea, probably with
“tactical” nuclear weapons. This moral force is undoubtedly stirring
again all over the world, including the United States, and is feared by
those who would contrive an “endless war”. However, if I have learned
nothing else from witnessing numerous bloody contrivances, it is never
to underestimate the stamina of rampant, rapacious empire and the
dishonesty of its “humanitarian interventions”. Millions of us, who are
the majority, need to raise our voices again, more urgently now than
ever.
