[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Our murderous comedy of errors

[Bill Totten]

Last month, "our" aircraft slaughtered nearly 100 Afghan civilians,
two-thirds of them children aged three months to sixteen years, while
they slept

by John Pilger

New Statesman (September 11 2008)


Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for
all the family to play.

First question: Why are "we" in Afghanistan? Answer: "To try to help in
the country's rebuilding programme". Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC's
principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are "we" in Iraq? Answer: To "plant a western-style
open democracy". Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC defence
correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. To prove
her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of quotations
from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has been
researching Bush's speeches for "evidence" of noble democratic reasons
for laying to waste an ancient civilisation. Says he: "The 'D' word is
not there, but the phrase 'united, stable and free' [is] clearly an
allusion to it". After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq "was launched
as 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'". Moreover, says the BBC man, "in Bush's 1
May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he talked repeatedly
about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi transition to democracy ...
These examples show that these were on Bush's mind before, during and
after the invasion".

Try to laugh, please.

Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians in
Afghanistan by "coalition" aircraft, including those directed by British
forces engaged in "the country's rebuilding programme". The bombing of
civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths of civilians, says
Human Rights Watch. Last month, "our" aircraft slaughtered nearly 100
civilians, two-thirds of them children between the ages of three months
and sixteen years, while they slept, according to eyewitnesses. BBC News
initially devoted nine seconds to the Human Rights Watch report, and
nothing to the fact that "less than peanuts"
(according to an aid worker) is being spent on rebuilding anything in
Afghanistan. Such wags, the Welsh.

As for the notion of a "united, stable and free" Iraq, consider the
no-bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies for ownership
of Iraq's oil. "Theft" is a more truthful word. Written by the companies
themselves and US officials, the contracts have been signed off by Bush
and Nouri al-Maliki, "prime minister" of Iraq's "democratic" government
that resides in an air-conditioned American fortress. This is not news.

Try to laugh, please, while you consider the devastation of Iraq's
health, once the best in the Middle East, by the ubiquitous dust from
British and US depleted uranium weapons. A World Health Organisation
study reporting a cancer epidemic has been suppressed, says its
principal author. This has been reported in Britain only in the Glasgow
Sunday Herald and the Morning Star. According to a study last year by
Basra University Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the
contaminated southern provinces were caused by cancer.

Try to laugh, please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from which
will come the next president of the United States. Those paid to keep
the record straight have strained to present a spectacle of choice.
Barack Obama, the man of "change", wants to "build a 21st-century
military ... to stay on the offensive everywhere". Here comes the new
Cold War, with promises of more bombs, more of the militarised society
with its 730 bases worldwide, on which Americans spend 42 cents of every
tax dollar.

At home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease America's
grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John McCain, his
Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon figure - the fake "war
hero" now joined with a Shakespeare-banning, gun-loving, religious
fanatic - yet his true significance is that he and Obama share
essentially the same dangerous prescriptions.

Thousands of decent Americans came to the two nominating conventions to
express the dissenting opinion of millions of their compatriots who
believe, with good cause, that their democracy is evaporating. They were
intimidated, arrested, beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were patronised
or ignored by those paid to keep the record straight.

Meanwhile, Justin Webb, the BBC's North America editor, has launched his
book about America, his "city on a hill". It is a sort of Mills & Boon
view of the rapacious system he admires with such obsequiousness. The
book is called Have a Nice Day.

Try to laugh, please.

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2008/09/pilger-iraq-bbc-try-obama

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