[A-List] Pilger: You are all suspects now

[bar at idirect.com]

What are you going to do about it?

by John Pilger

http://johnpilger.com (April 26 2012)

http://johnpilger.com/photo/470x357-Czm.jpg

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 ten years in
shackles and a
n 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
seventeen 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 twenty 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 ou
tside can be lied to, as is customary.

What are you going to do about it?

http://johnpilger.com/articles/you-are-all-suspects-now-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it