[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] How Britain wages war

[Bill Totten]

The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to
barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid
legal scrutiny

by John Pilger

New Statesman (July 10 2008)


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ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a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 Downing Street to hand his
Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to
see him.

The second photograph is of a twelve-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 thirty 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 Afghanistan 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 GBP 4 billion 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 twenty Iraqi
prisoners after mutilating them. The latest is that of a
fourteen-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".

Arcane rituals

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 eighty 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 (2004), 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 Communications 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 GBP 4 billion 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.

Loans for arms

The militarising of how the British state perceives and treats other
societies is vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out of fourteen
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 GBP 11 billion of
taxpayers' money on a huge, privatised 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 Afghanistan, 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.

www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2008/07/british-pilger-britain-torture


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/