In an article for the Melbourne Age, John Pilger says that with the
the establishment of an International Criminal Court, the promise of
universal justice is no longer far-fetched.
The invasion of Iraq, now in its second year, was “organised with
lies”, says the new Spanish prime minister. Does anyone doubt this any
more? And yet these proven lies are still dominant in Australia. Day
after day, their perpetrators seek to obfuscate and justify an
unprovoked, illegal attack that killed up to 55,000 people, including at
least 10,000 civilians: that every month causes the death and injury of
1,000 children from exploding cluster bombs: that has so saturated
Iraqi towns and cities with uranium that American and British soldiers
are warned not to go where Iraqi children play, for fear of
contamination.
Set that carnage against the Madrid atrocity. Terrible though that
act of terrorism was, it was small compared with the terrorism of the
American-led “coalition”. Yes, terrorism. How strange it reads when it
describes the actions of “our” governments. So saturated are we in the
west in the devilry of third world tyrants (most of them the products of
Western imperialism) that we have lost all sense of the enormous crime
committed in our name.
This is not rhetoric. In 1946, the judges who tried the German
leadership at Nuremberg called the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign
country “the supreme international war crime”. That principle guided
more than half a century of international law, until Bush and Blair and
Howard tore it up, covering their actions with a litany of lies. On
February 4 last year, in a speech lasting less than an hour, John Howard
referred more than 30 times to the “threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. He
offered authoritative detail: that Iraq’s “arsenal of chemical and
biological weapons [was] intact” and was a “massive program”. All of
this was false.
Ray McGovern, one of the CIA’s most senior analysts and a personal
friend of George Bush Senior, told me: “It was 95 per cent charade. And
they all knew it: Bush, Blair, Howard”. Set that truth against the
present carnage in Iraq, and set it against the wilful destruction that
preceded it, which was barely reported in Australia. The UN’s two senior
officials in Iraq in the 1990s, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck,
both assistant secretaries general of the United Nations, have described
a “genocidal embargo” imposed by America under a UN flag of
convenience, aided and abetted by Australia. “Almost a million Iraqis
died as a direct result,” Halliday told me, “including at least half a
million children. The UNICEF studies are on the record. It was US policy
to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, such as the water supply, which
killed thousands of infants. By the time Bush invaded, a once prosperous
country was a stricken nation.”
In fact, UN records show that up to July 2002, more than $US5 billion
worth of humanitarian aid, approved by the UN Security Council and paid
for by Iraq, was blocked by the United States.
How many Australians are aware of this and their government’s
complicity? Howard sent RAN ships to police what in reality was a
medieval-style siege. Who dared listen to Halliday, Von Sponeck and
other distinguished witnesses that it was this terrible siege that
actually reinforced Saddam’s rule and prevented the Iraqi people from
getting rid of him? Who, among those who point almost gleefully to the
mass graves of Saddam’s tyranny, ever tell their readers that the
greatest mass graves are those of Iraqi forces in the south whose
uprising in 1991 was encouraged by the Americans, who then denied them
minimum support, even access to their own arsenals, and watched from
aircraft as they were slaughtered? President Bush senior decided he
wanted to keep Saddam Hussein in power at his pleasure, and the bravest
Iraqis paid with their lives.
All this has been suppressed in Australia while the latest lies are
channelled and amplified by journalists. I am not referring to the usual
far-right windbags in the press, but those broadcasters who believe
sincerely they are being objective. When a dissenting voice such as mine
(representing the views of a great many Australians) was allowed a
fleeting appearance on ABC television on March 10, absurd protests the
next day by both the foreign minister and the deputy prime minister and
their tut-tutting media court underlined the sheer rarity of genuine
debate in the Australian media. Yesterday’s Insiders on the ABC excelled
itself with interviews with Alexander Downer (Tweedledum) and Gerard
Henderson (Tweedledee). How frightened of informed opinion they are. By
constantly framing the national debate in the terms and cliches of
mendacious power, journalists collude with it, censoring by omission.
Do they ever consider that the very notion of a “war on terror” is
absurd when the power in Washington claiming to combat terror has run an
empire of terror: Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, El
Salvador, Nicaragua and now Haiti, again: to name but a few. By
comparison Al-Qaeda is a lethal flea. The true danger for the world is
where a rampant superpower will strike next: look out Korea, Syria,
Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, even China.
As the prisoners begin to struggle home from the American
concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay (except for two Australians,
deserted by their government), the scale of the crime is emerging. We
now know that the British military command virtually refused to send
troops to Iraq until Blair gave them a guarantee they would not be
prosecuted by the newly constituted International Criminal Court.
Blair’s guarantee was worthless. And that frightens the British
establishment, and the Australian establishment, too. Unlike the United
States, Britain and Australia are signatories to the ICC.
The times are changing; Washington-manipulated show trials of third
world dictators are giving way to the promise of universal justice,
however tenuous that may seem. The dock may well await those westerners
who bring mass terrorism to faraway countries, then watch it blow back
in our faces. Like Al-Qaeda, they should not be allowed to get away with
it.
