[R-G] Pilger: How Britain Wages War

[Anthony Fenton]

How Britain Wages War

Jul 13, 2008 By John Pilger

Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former  
Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in  
a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of  
medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery,  
which he won serving in the British army. He has been refused entry to  
Britain and treatment for a serious heart ailment by the National  
Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a public campaign. On 25  
June, he came to Down ing Street to hand his Victoria Cross back to  
the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to see him.

The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children.  
They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by Nato  
bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their  
roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, Nato planes  
struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village:  
children, women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22  
civilians died like this. All, including the roasted children, are  
described as "militants" or "suspected Taliban". The Defence  
Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghan istan is "the noble  
cause of the 21st century".

The third photograph is of a computer-generated aircraft carrier not  
yet built, one of two of the biggest ships ever ordered for the Royal  
Navy. The £4bn contract is shared by BAE Systems, whose sale of 72  
fighter jets to the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia has made Britain  
the biggest arms merchant on earth, selling mostly to oppressive  
regimes in poor countries. At a time of economic crisis, Browne  
describes the carriers as "an affordable expenditure".

The fourth photograph is of a young British soldier, Gavin Williams,  
who was "beasted" to death by three non-commissioned officers. This  
"informal summary punishment", which sent his body temperature to more  
than 41 degrees, was intended to "humiliate, push to the limit and  
hurt". The torture was described in court as a fact of army life.

The final photograph is of an Iraqi man, Baha Mousa, who was tortured  
to death by British soldiers. Taken during his post-mortem, it shows  
some of the 93 horrific injuries he suffered at the hands of men of  
the Queen's Lancashire Regiment who beat and abused him for 36 hours,  
including double-hooding him with hessian sacks in stifling heat. He  
was a hotel receptionist. Although his murder took place almost five  
years ago, it was only in May this year that the Ministry of Defence  
responded to the courts and agreed to an independent inquiry. A judge  
has described this as a "wall of silence".

A court martial convicted just one soldier of Mousa's "inhumane  
treatment", and he has since been quietly released. Phil Shiner of  
Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families of Iraqis who have  
died in British custody, says the evidence is clear - abuse and  
torture by the British army is systemic. Shiner and his colleagues  
have witness statements and corroborations of prima facie crimes of an  
especially atrocious kind usually associated with the Americans. "The  
more cases I am dealing with, the worse it gets," he says. These  
include an "incident" near the town of Majar al-Kabir in 2004, when  
British soldiers executed as many as 20 Iraqi prisoners after  
mutilating them. The latest is that of a 14-year-old boy who was  
forced to simulate anal and oral sex over a prolonged period.

"At the heart of the US and UK project," says Shiner, "is a desire to  
avoid accountability for what they want to do. Guantanamo Bay and  
extraordinary renditions are part of the same struggle to avoid  
accountability through jurisdiction." British soldiers, he says, use  
the same torture techniques as the Americans and deny that the  
European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act and the UN  
Convention on Torture apply to them. And British torture is  
"commonplace": so much so, that "the routine nature of this ill- 
treatment helps to explain why, despite the abuse of the soldiers and  
cries of the detainees being clearly audible, nobody, particularly in  
authority, took any notice".

Unbelievably, says Shiner, the Ministry of Defence under Tony Blair  
decided that the 1972 Heath government's ban on certain torture  
techniques applied only in the UK and Northern Ireland. Consequently,  
"many Iraqis were killed and tortured in UK detention facilities".  
Shiner is working on 46 horrific cases.

A wall of silence has always surrounded the British military, its  
arcane rituals, rites and practices and, above all, its contempt for  
the law and natural justice in its various imperial pursuits. For 80  
years, the Ministry of Defence and compliant ministers refused to  
countenance posthumous pardons for terrified boys shot at dawn during  
the slaughter of the First World War. British soldiers used as guinea  
pigs during the testing of nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean were  
abandoned, as were many others who suffered the toxic effects of the  
1991 Gulf War. The treatment of Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun is typical.  
Having been sent back to Nepal, many of these "soldiers of the Queen"  
have no pension, are deeply impoverished and are refused residence or  
medical help in the country for which they fought and for which 43,000  
of them have died or been injured. The Gurkhas have won no fewer than  
26 Victoria Crosses, yet Browne's "affordable expenditure" excludes  
them.

An even more imposing wall of silence ensures that the British public  
remains largely unaware of the industrial killing of civilians in  
Britain's modern colonial wars. In his landmark work Unpeople:  
Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses, the historian Mark Curtis uses  
three main categories: direct responsibility, indirect responsibility  
and active inaction.

"The overall figure [since 1945] is between 8.6 and 13.5 million,"  
Curtis writes. "Of these, Britain bears direct responsibility for  
between four million and six million deaths. This figure is, if  
anything, likely to be an underestimate. Not all British interventions  
have been included, because of lack of data." Since his study was  
published, the Iraq death toll has reached, by reliable measure, a  
million men, women and children.

The spiralling rise of militarism within Britain is rarely  
acknowledged, even by those alerting the public to legislation  
attacking basic civil liberties, such as the recently drafted Data Com  
muni cations Bill, which will give the government powers to keep  
records of all electronic communication. Like the plans for identity  
cards, this is in keeping what the Americans call "the national  
security state", which seeks the control of domestic dissent while  
pursuing military aggression abroad. The £4bn aircraft carriers are to  
have a "global role". For global read colonial. The Ministry of  
Defence and the Foreign Office follow Washington's line almost to the  
letter, as in Browne's preposterous description of Afghanistan as a  
noble cause. In reality, the US-inspired Nato invasion has had two  
effects: the killing and dispossession of large numbers of Afghans,  
and the return of the opium trade, which the Taliban had banned.  
According to Hamid Karzai, the west's puppet leader, Britain's role in  
Helmand Province has led directly to the return of the Taliban.

The militarising of how the British state perceives and treats other  
societies is vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out of 14 of  
the most impoverished and conflict-ridden countries are seduced into  
buying British arms and military equipment with "soft loans". Like the  
British royal family, the British Prime Minister simply follows the  
money. Having ritually condemned a despot in Zimbabwe for "human  
rights abuses" - in truth, for no longer serving as the west's  
business agent - and having obeyed the latest US dictum on Iran and  
Iraq, Brown set off recently for Saudi Arabia, exporter of Wahhabi  
fundamentalism and wheeler of fabulous arms deals.

To complement this, the Brown government is spending £11bn of  
taxpayers' money on a huge, pri vatised military academy in Wales,  
which will train foreign soldiers and mercenaries recruited to the  
bogus "war on terror". With arms companies such as Raytheon profiting,  
this will become Britain's "School of the Americas", a centre for  
counter-insurgency (terrorist) training and the design of future  
colonial adventures.It has had almost no publicity.

Of course, the image of militarist Britain clashes with a benign  
national regard formed, wrote Tolstoy, "from infancy, by every  
possible means - class books, church services, sermons, speeches,  
books, papers, songs, poetry, monuments [leading to] people stupefied  
in the one direction". Much has changed since he wrote that. Or has  
it? The shabby, destructive colonial war in Afghanistan is now  
reported almost entirely through the British army, with squaddies  
always doing their Kipling best, and with the Afghan resistance  
routinely dismissed as "outsiders" and "invaders". Pictures of nomadic  
boys with Nato-roasted skin almost never appear in the press or on  
television, nor the after-effects of British thermobaric weapons, or  
"vacuum bombs", designed to suck the air out of human lungs. Instead,  
whole pages mourn a British military intelligence agent in Afghanis  
tan, because she happens to have been a 26-year-old woman, the first  
to die in active service since the 2001 invasion.

Baha Mousa, tortured to death by British soldiers, was also 26 years  
old. But he was different. His father, Daoud, says that the way the  
Ministry of Defence has behaved over his son's death convinces him  
that the British government regards the lives of others as "cheap".  
And he is right.



From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3552