[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The politics of bollocks

[Bill Totten]

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger borrows from
Lord West of Spithead to deconstruct current mythology, such as the
'impartiality' of the BBC and the 'radical changes' implemented by
President Obama.

by John Pilger

www.johnpilger.com (February 05 2009)


Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of
expletives, I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in
England that I understood its majesterial power. All classes used it.
Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it as noun,
adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance of a double vowel saw off
its closest American contender. It had authority.

A high official with the Gilbertian title of Lord West of Spithead used
it to great effect on 27 January. The former admiral, who is security
adviser to Gordon Brown, was referring to Tony Blair's famous assertion
that invading countries and killing innocent people did not increase the
threat of terrorism at home.

"That was clearly bollocks", said his lordship, who warned of the
perceived "linkage between the US, Israel and the UK" in the horrors
inflicted on Gaza and the effect on the recruitment of terrorists in
Britain. In other words, he was stating the obvious: that state
terrorism begets individual or group terrorism at source. Just as Blair
was the prime mover of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, so Brown,
having pursued the same cynical crusades in Muslim countries and having
armed and disported himself before the criminal regime in Tel Aviv, will
share responsibility for related atrocities at home.

There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment.

The BBC's explanation for banning an appeal on behalf of the stricken
people of Gaza is a vivid example. Mark Thompson, the director general,
cited the BBC's legal requirement to be "impartial ... because Gaza is a
major ongoing news story in which humanitarian issues ... are both at
the heart of the story and contentious".

In a letter to Thompson, David Bracewell, illuminated the deceit behind
this. He pointed to previous BBC appeals for the Disasters Emergency
Committee that were not only made in the midst of "an ongoing news
story" in which humanitarian issues were "contentious", but demonstrated
how the BBC took sides. In 1999, at the height of the illegal Nato
bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the TV presenter Jill Dando made an appeal
on behalf of Kosovar refugees. The BBC web page for that appeal was
linked to numerous articles meant to support the gravity of the
humanitarian issue. These included quotations from Blair himself, such
as "This will be a daily pounding until [Slobodan Milosevic] comes into
line with the terms that Nato has laid down". There was no significant
balance of view from the Yugoslav side, and not a single mention that
the flight of Kosovar refugees began only after Nato had started
bombing. Similarly, in an appeal for the victims of the civil war in the
Congo, the BBC favoured the regime of Joseph Kabila without referring to
the Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other reports accusing his forces of
atrocities. In contrast, the rebel leader Nkunda was "accused of
committing atrocities" and was ordained the BBC's bad guy. Kabila, who
represented western interests, was clearly the good guy - just like Nato
in the Balkans and Israel in the Middle East.

While Mark Thompson and his satraps richly deserve the Lord West of
Spithead Bollocks Blue Ribbon, that honour goes to the cheer squad of
President Barack Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on.

On 23 January, the Guardian's front page declared, "Obama shuts network
of CIA 'ghost prisons' ". The "wholesale deconstruction [sic] of George
Bush's war on terror", said the report, had been ordered by the new
president who would be "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network,
banning torture and rendition ..."

The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press
release it was, citing "officials briefing reporters at the White House
yesterday".  Obama's orders, according to a group of sixteen retired
generals and admirals who attended a presidential signing ceremony,
"would restore America's moral standing in the world". What moral
standing? It never ceases to astonish that experienced reporters can
transmit PR stunts like this, bearing in mind the moving belt of lies
from the same source under only nominally different management.

Far from "deconstructing [sic] the war on terror", Obama is clearly
pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as
the previous administration. George W Bush's first war, in Afghanistan,
and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama's wars - with thousands more US
troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians.  On
22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the
central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism",
22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama's bombs in a hamlet populated
mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the
Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.

Far from "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network", Obama's
executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out
renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the
threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed,
"current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program
might be poised to play an expanded role". A semantic sleight of hand is
that "long term prisons" are changed to "short term prisons"; and while
Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners
working for the US are not. This means that America's numerous "covert
actions" will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy
regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet's in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.

Bush's open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary
personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in
America's "secret army" of subversive military and intelligence
operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama's nominee for
director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the
Army Field Manual may include new forms of "harsh interrogation", which
will be kept secret.

Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed
executive orders put an end to Bush's assault on constitutional and
international law. He has retained Bush's "right" to imprison anyone,
without trial or charges. No "ghost prisoners" are being released or are
due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for
attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush's
totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand
Americans' library and bookshop records. The man of "change", is
changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington.


The Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Prize (Runner-up) is shared. On 28
January, a national Greenpeace advertisement opposing a third runway at
London's Heathrow airport summed up the almost willful naivety that has
obstructed informed analysis of the Obama administration. "Fortunately",
declared Greenpeace beneath a God-like picture of Obama, "the White
House has a new occupant, and he has asked us all to roll back the
spectre of a warming planet". This was followed by Obama's rhetorical
flourish about "putting off unpleasant decisions". In fact, Obama has
made no commitment to curtail the America's infamous responsibility for
the causes of global warming. As with Bush and most modern era
presidents, it is oil, not stemming carbon emissions, that informs the
new administration. Obama's national security adviser, General Jim
Jones, a former Nato supreme commander, made his name planning US
military control over the exploitation of oil and gas reserves from the
Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Guinea in Africa.

Sharing the Bollocks Runner-up Prize is the Observer, which on 25
January published a major news report headlined, "How Obama set the tone
for a new US revolution". This was reminiscent of the Observer almost a
dozen years ago when liberalism's other great white hope, Tony Blair,
came to power. "Goodbye Xenophobia" was the Observer's post-election
front page in 1997 and "The Foreign Office says Hello World, remember
us".  The government, said the breathless text, would push for "new
worldwide rules on human rights and the environment" and implement
"tough new limits" on arms sales. The opposite happened. Last year,
Britain was the biggest arms dealer in the world; currently it is second
only to the United States.

In the Blair mould, the Obama White House "sprang into action" with its
"radical plans". The new president's first phone call was to that
Palestinian quisling, the unelected and deeply unpopular Mohammed Abbas.
There was a "hot pace" and a "new era", in which a notorious name from
an ancien regime, Richard Holbrooke, was dispatched to Pakistan. In
1978, Holbrooke betrayed a promise to normalise relations with the
Vietnamese on the eve of a vicious embargo that ruined the lives of
countless Vietnamese children. Under Obama, the "sense of a new era
abroad", declared the Observer, "was reinforced by the confirmation of
Hillary Clinton as secretary of state". Clinton has threatened to
"entirely obliterate Iran" on behalf of Israel.

What the childish fawning over Obama obscures is the dark power
assembled under cover of America's first "post-racial president". Apart
from the US, the world's most dangerous state is demonstrably Israel,
having recently killed and maimed some 4,000 people in Gaza with
impunity. On 10 February, a bellicose Israeli electorate is likely to
put Binyamin Netanyahu into power. Netanyahu is a fanatic's fanatic who
has made clear his intention of attacking Iran. In the Wall Street
Journal on 24 January, he described Iran as the "terrorist mother base"
and justified the murder of civilians in Gaza because "Israel cannot
accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities". On 31
January, unaware he was being filmed, Israel's ambassador in Australia
described the massacres in Gaza as a "pre-introduction" - dress
rehearsal - for an attack on Iran.

For Netanyahu, the reassuring news is that Obama's administration is the
most Zionist in living memory - a truth that has struggled to be told
from beneath the soggy layers of Obama-love. Not a single member of
Obama's team demurred from Obama's support for Israel's barbaric actions
in Gaza. Obama himself likened the safety of his two young daughters
with that of Israeli children while making not a single reference to the
thousands of Palestinian children killed with American weapons - a
violation of both international and US law. He did, however, demand that
the people of Gaza be denied "smuggled" small arms with which to defend
themselves against the world's fourth largest military power. And he
paid tribute to the Arab dictatorships, such as Egypt, which are bribed
by the US Treasury to help the US and  Israel enforce policies described
by the United Nations Rapporteur, Richard Falk, a Jew, as "genocidal".

It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the
record straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the
21st century, people power remains a huge and exciting and largely
untapped force for change, but it is nothing without truth. "In the time
of universal deceit", wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a
revolutionary act".

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=522


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