When the webmistress sleeps

Bent on violence, outwitted by peaceniks

For weeks they kept saying we were dangerous agitators, all because we wanted to expel the stench of death from our city. And to tell the truth about the APEC killers dining in the Sydney Opera House, the ones who claim that dropping bombs is a recipe for peace. We came not in hatred, but as witnesses to history. Tabloid morons said the marchers didn’t know what they were protesting about, and yet the ignorance was entirely theirs.  Neither rain nor threats kept us away.

The march was peaceful, but the atmosphere was edgy. The NSW police had promised violence, and thus were disconcerted by jocularity and placards of Gandhi. We made it to Hyde Park and then came orders from a secret source. Leaping from a convoy of white buses, Ninja shock troops surrounded the park and blocked the exits. The mood darkened. Helicopters whirred. Snipers squatted on rooftops. Rumours swept the crowd. The footpath became packed with puzzled protesters pouring from the park, unable to cross the road, any road. “This is a trap”, I thought, as the water cannon rolled up Elizabeth Street. We had exercised our freedom to assemble, but we were now denied our freedom to disassemble.
 
It felt scary. Grandmothers jabbed fingers at the faces in the thick blue line. Larrikins led cheer squads mocking the cops. I said to several officers, “this is false imprisonment”. Perhaps we should rush the line, I muttered, and a wiser voice replied, “That’s just what they want”. Of course. It’s what they had spent the last three weeks trying to incite. Why? To discredit the legitimacy of those who know what’s really going on, and who are loud and clear in their contempt for the killers in the Opera House.

This is a black moment in Sydney’s history, when the aphrodisiac of power curdles the brains of policemen and lets politicians think they are potentates. When our adventure in Iraq has descended to such a level of criminality, that all the perpetrators have left between self hate and facing a war crimes prosecution, is to keep lying until they are blue in the face. But Hyde Park was filled with people who know the truth, and that’s why the powers that be are so paranoid. Finally the police line broke, and we wended our way home.

SAD SEVENTH BIRTHDAY

In August 2001, I launched www.richardneville.com with the aim of bringing futures thinking to a wider audience, having just returned from a conference in Minneapolis, where I mingled with wacky inventors and cloned bulls. “Smart dreamers float through the gilded ballrooms, muttering about space-food, third dimensional pixels and micro credit”, I ranted, “visions were painted of enhanced humans with the eyesight of an eagle, the sonar prowess of a bat, the speed of a gazelle”. A few weeks later planes struck the World Trade Centre and the “free world” set its sights on revenge.
On 1 October 2001, I asked,  ‘Who would have thought that in a globalising world at the dawn of a new millennium, we would see such a resurgence of jingoism? Who would have thought that in the aftermath of the recent mass murders in Washington and New York, surely to be understood as a hideous crime against humanity; who would have thought we would hear from on high, such utterances as … evil barbarians, dead or alive, smoke ‘em out, you’re with us or against us, infinite justice and … that the sole cause of the cruel attack is because the US shines as the world’s beacon of freedom and opportunity?




They call it a war against terrorism, but it’s more like a war against history. It’s a war against education and illumination, a war against seeing the world as a whole, a war against seeing the world as a system.
How odd to be galloping through a new millennium, while saddled with the values of the Old Testament.
Why so quick to pursue the agenda of war?
Within 24 hours of the attacks, a CNN anchor is wearing a superbly tailored khaki jacket, complete with epaulettes. Tabloid fascists dismiss cautionary voices as “appeasers”. Their solution? Give Force a Chance.



Justice must come to the perpetrators, so long as it really is justice, and not just the worlds biggest lynch mob”.

But it was not to be. Our ongoing intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan is basically a process of mass murder, dressed up as “reconstruction”. Imperial forces were slaughtering “ragheads” at the dawn of the 20th century, and are still slaughtering them now, from the safe distance of cockpits and remote US bases, like Pine Gap. But history is expunged  from public consciousness. According to Condoleezza Rice a few days ago on Australia’s ABC TV, America was “sitting innocently on a day in September, a beautiful Tuesday morning…” when barbarians struck. That’s it. End of story. An act of motiveless malignity. This is what passes as analysis in today’s White House. No reference to Blowback, term first used in March 1954 in a CIA report on the unlawful 1953 operation to overthrow the President of Ian and control the oil. The CIA's fears that there could be blowback from its malicious interference in the affairs of Iran were justified, but that’s another story, but not one understood by Condoleezza Rice. As Chalmers Johnson puts it, “The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not "attack America," as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy”.

Perhaps the war against terrorism is working in the way its proponents intended. While it has multiplied the number of terrorists, it has also enhanced the power of the state. Politicians are authoritarian by nature and bullies at heart, so to them, helicopters, pomp, and heightened security are turn-ons. Armaments inflate their self importance. But who are these wretched outsiders who mock them? Scribblers, satirists, shady types. Quick as a flash, laws are enacted to curb tongues and civil liberties. “All for our own good”, say the lickspittles. But today I saw this sign at Sydney airport: “To make a joke during security procedures is a criminal offence”.  The war against humour has begun.

(Apart from the "grannie" and the image of US forces treating hospital patients in Falluja, the above photos  were provided by Jack Carnegie

CARTOONS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

The moving finger draws, and having drawn moves on,
nor all your piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line.

You have to feel sorry for the Danes, the least funny people on earth. Melancholia is their forte, angst their heritage. Over the years these former Vikings have tried to lighten their psychic load with an output of fairytales, sickly pastries and slick pornography, but to no avail. On the world’s stages, Hamlet and Ophelia keep playing out their tragic destiny in a castle near Copenhagen, reinforcing the national stereotype: gloomy, introverted, grief ridden.

To be or not to be, is not the question. It’s to speak or not to speak. To publish or prohibit. To think aloud or wrap your conscience in a flag or faith. The printing of the controversial cartoons in the Jyllands-Posten (Jutland Post), was not – thankfully - motivated by a desire to introduce the world to Danish humor.  The aim was less of audacious. It was seeking a response to the spread of self censorship in the wake of religious intolerance. A Danish academic had been brutally bashed for reading extracts from the Qur’an to non Muslim students. A Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, had been murdered for his critique Islam’s attitude to women. The Jutland Post asked the board of the Danish Editorial Cartoonist Union – probably a cabal of grim depressives on the brink of suicide – to invite its members to “draw Mohammed as they see him”. Twelve artists responded. The result was published last September, today Danish embassies are in flames, people are dying, the cartoonists are on the run.

Who started the fire? Free speech is under assault from fundamentalists of all persuasions. A high profile Christian minister much loved by the White House has again called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected President of Venezuela, on the grounds that his views are a threat to Americans. “Chavez calls Bush a war criminal”, gasps Pat Robertson on Fox News. The interviewers agree: “the world would be better off without him”. http://mediamatters.org/items/200602030003.  Such views are vile, but I will campaign for the right to hear them expressed. If their calls for assassination had been directed at George Bush, Tony Blair or John Howard, these bigots would be hauled behind bars as roughly as Cindy Sheehan was hauled from her seat at the State of the Union address, due of the words on her t-shirt: 2245 Dead. How many more? 

Despite its claim to be fighting for freedom, the US military is no believer in freedom of speech. In Iraq, Al Jazeera offices are bombed, numerous independent journalists are shot or “detained”. A cartoon in the pro war Washington Post commenting on the horrific injuries facing the “battle hardened” troops elicited a letter of outrage from six Joint Chiefs of Staff. The real outrage, of course, is that such men are still bombing the dwellings of Iraqis, Afghanis, even Pakistanis. The Rolling Stones lyrics are censored at Superbowl. Australian artist, Azlan McLennan, burnt holes in his country’s flag and hung it from a Melbourne art gallery billboard, captioned “Proudly unAustralian”. The police swooped. All this madness in the same few days.

Standing up for free speech is not always easy. How quickly the mighty Google succumbed to commercial imperatives by censoring its search engine to appease Beijing. Last November, historian David Irving was arrested in Austria for two speeches he made in 1989, during which he allegedly claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz. It is a crime in Austria to minimise the atrocities of the Third Reich and the historian faces up to 10 years imprisonment if found guilty, notes the BBC. Despite the good intentions of the lawmakers, this is a ridiculous affront to the right of citizens to believe what they like. Once Irving is locked up, who’s next?

Okay, so why are the rampaging Muslims so angry? The caricatures of Mohammed are mild – this is the most outrageous. One cartoon is even funny, a first for the Danish Editorial Cartoonist Union, with its depiction of the Prophet standing on a cloud, greeting ascended suicide bombers with the warning, "Stop, stop, we’re fresh out of virgins!” It reminds me of an Easter Monday cartoon I once printed in a student paper, which caused a storm. It depicted an anthropologist emerging from the burial cave of Jesus with skeletal remains, shouting “call off the holiday, I’ve found his bones”. How tame it seems now, how wild it seemed then.

Having been prosecuted on two continents for publishing satirical cartoons, I am well aware of the power of the pen to inflame. The embassy-burning Muslims are wrong to riot on several counts.

1) All religion is superstition, so by definition its core claims are open to doubt and a bit of a laugh.

2) If God/Allah really exists, then he/she personifies the best of humankind and can thus take a joke. A heaven without humor is hell.

3) Besides, there’s a rich lore of jocularity and anti authoritarian wisdom in the epigrams of Muslim mystics, the Sufis. (“You will not attain Truth until a thousand honest people have testified you’re a heretic” – the Junaid of Baghad). Young Muslims are making waves on the comedy circuit - http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/article305269.ece

4) If a mere caricature, and Danish at that, can send the faithful into a spasm, then the cartoon is only the catalyst, not the cordite. Could the psychic explosion be a way of distracting doubt; perhaps your faith is not as solid as it should be, or you sense it may not be the sole measure of human worth. You try to crush these qualms by running amok.

5) To be shocked by the views of others can be beneficial to mental health.

6) Medieval Muslim artists, renaissance Christians, modern scholars and commercial hacks have often created paintings, illuminated manuscripts, book covers and contemporary drawings depicting Mohammed in full face. Numerous examples are presented here. http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/

Perhaps the cartoon riots are more an expression of rage against the West, than a defence of the dignity of Mohammed. And who can blame this rage? Over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed and at least thrice that number maimed. Citizens are worse off now than under the tyranny of Saddam – less oil, less electricity, less clean water, less security – and they’re still under the thumbs of Marines, mercenaries and misfits. Just as fish cannot see the water in which they swim, the Bush administration is oblivious to the river of blood soaking its armpits. In the TV footage of rioting Muslims in Syria, one placard stood out: The West has entered a Dark Age. That much is true. Both sides are blinded by belief, so let’s use free speech to open each other’s eyes, or our tongues will turn to lead.

Ends. This piece first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 8/2006.

http//:www.richardneville.com

Iranian woman artist Oranous (who is a Muslim and lives in Tehran) created this iconic painting of a young Mohammed and is selling it online. This  painting is apparently not forbidden because it depicts a young Mohammed before he was visited by the Angel Gabriel and started receiving his visions. http://oranous.org

DIRTY WORK IN DAMADOLA

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on.

Imagine yourself drawn to a place of worship this January to celebrate an event that your community regards as holy. The cathedral is packed, all the bright children arrayed in festive dress, three days of feasting will follow. The occasion which melds you is the commemoration of a biblical story that long predates the birth of Christ, and his supposed resurrection. It is the Festival of Sacrifice (Eid ul-Adha). You are there to honour the willingness of Abraham to carry out what he regarded as a directive from God, as conveyed in a dream, that he must kill his beloved son.

As Abraham prepares to slit his son’s throat, despite the Devil urging him to resist, his devotion is rewarded by God, who lets the prophet sacrifice a sheep instead. Every year, millions of believers worldwide celebrate Abraham’s commitment by feasting on meat and distributing it among the poor. This year, let us imagine your place of worship – be it Westminster Cathedral or a boring brick chapel in Canberra - is struck by hellfire. Almost a score of the congregation are burnt to a crisp, many of them women and children. No warning is given, no negotiation is proffered. An untold number of celebrants are maimed, orphaned and scarred for life.

Later, after the wounded are tended, the bodies buried, you ask, who are  these evil doers? From whence came the fire? Was it Al-Qaeda? No! Imagine your rage on discovering the slaughter was instigated by an ally of your own Government, the champion of the “War on Terror”, the USA.  The children sacrificed at the behest of the CIA, on the grounds that a bad guy was in the building – to hell with the innocent!

ON NOT TREATING PEOPLE LIGHTLY

On Friday the 13th of January, such was the plight of the tribes people in Damadola,  a village in Pakistan, when the CIA flattened several dwellings with Hellfire missiles. The apparent target was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, who was not present at the time. Some Pakistani officials said the village been struck by as many as 10 missiles fired from the remote-controlled drones and that the death toll was 25. Locals denied any knowledge of al-Zawahiri. Instead of an apology, Condoleezza Rice reminded the Pakistanis that al-Qaeda and its supporters "are not people who can be dealt with lightly", meaning the lives of children – even those of its allies – are expendable. 
The bombing of Damadola is a war crime. In a just world, the people who the ordered the attack would be hauled before an international court. In Bushworld, such criminals are honoured.

Two weeks prior to this atrocity, eight people died in another U.S. drone attack on a cleric's house in Pakistan. Repeated air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11 have killed countless noncombatants, worshippers at mosques and wedding guests. On Jan 3, several members of the same family, including women and children, were killed in a US air strike that destroyed their home in northern Iraq.

Isn’t it time for the UN to  publicly name the CIA as the world’s most lethal terrorist network? The people who work for the agency, despite their firm handshakes and boyish charm, are handmaidens of terror and torture. They should be investigated by a legally constituted war crimes tribunal.

It may turn out that two or three of the victims at Damadola were connected with Al Qaeda, despite the repeated insistence by Pakistani Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz,  that such claims are “bizarre”. The village is now off limits, some identities remain unconfirmed. Newsday reports that the CIA’s missiles killed a gold merchant, Bakhtepur Khan, his wife and four of his five children, plus other relatives. Sisters Madia, 9, and Sadiqa, 10, were among those who died. Such deaths were expected, according to a former CIA specialist quoted by Newsday, but the chance to knock off some bad guys was too good to miss. While many regard this act as criminal, those who pushed the buttons will bathe themselves in glory.
Surely diehard conservatives realize the futility of bombing allies. Up to 10,000 men, women and children rallied in Karachi to denounce the atrocity at Damadola, chanting “Death to America”. For every “associate” of al Qaeda who is eliminated by such means, a thousand new terrorists are born.

THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH

One of the CIA’s golden boys is Henry "Hank" Crumpton, hailed by the Washington Post as a “revered master of CIA covert operations… on at least four continents … who recently came in from the cold … to take the job as State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, with the very public rank of ambassador”. It is likely Ambassador Crumpton ordered the murders at Damadola.

As though to divert scrutiny of this crime, he has been berating the mass media with dire warnings that the West will soon be hit with a major attack from a terrorists.  It could be anthrax, he says, or maybe WMD’s, even nuclear, bio-tech…. Did he mention bird flu? Not sure, but he reckons Osama bin Laden is still alive… and ticking. Up goes the fear meter.At this moment a tape from Osama turns up on Al Jazeerra.

The story has another chilling aspect. It is widely accepted that the Pakistanis have granted the CIA permission to mount such attacks, but they suppress this fact. (Some Westerners seem unaware that Pakistan is a military dictatorship). Last November in Waziristan, a suspected hide-out Osama bin Laden, two similar attacks took place. Pakistan's government claimed the explosions were caused by “clumsy al-Qaeda militants building bombs”.

However, a local journalist, Hayatullah Khan, obtained fragments from a US made missile and photos that proved an attack from the air. On Dec 5, he was abducted by armed gunmen and remains missing.

Khan’s eight-year-old daughter, Naila Hayat, and her brothers, Hamran, 5, and Fareshta, 6, have since headed a protest by family members and journalist colleagues, demanding his return. A placard read, “Give us our father back.” The day before he disappeared, Khan told his brother, “If anything happens to me, the government must be held responsible.”

But which Government?

“Freedom is a precious thing”, a friend said, who had escaped from East Germany as a child. “You people are losing it bit by bit, and you don’t even notice.” She had fled across barbed wire. The only country in the world to have dropped a nuclear bomb on a civilian population still claims collateral damage as its right. The US military likes big explosions at midnight, blood on the walls, the scattered bodies of decapitated children. And there’s plenty more bombs in the pipeline.


Note: This is a revised version of the piece I posted 21/Jan/06 on www.opednews.com

40 LESSONS FROM THE NEW MILLENIUM

Secret webs, scared bullies,
a global mind shift.

There is no God higher than Truth, said Socrates, but that was long ago. Today’s Truth lurks behind a thousand veils, while the new Gods pillage the future. Here’s some of what we think we now know:

1. Of whatever persuasion, religious fundamentalism is a global curse.

2. As is market fundamentalism.

3. The CIA is probably the mother of all terrorist organizations.

4. The world’s “most powerful democracy” is not a democracy. It is an oligarchy. The US is run by a surprisingly small number of power brokers who revolve through the doors of the White House, Big Oil, Defence, Security, Trade, Embassies, the World Bank and numerous blue chip boardrooms.

5. This elite, plus the CEO’s of major global corporations, are the true manipulators of the modern world. Yet few have faced elections.

6. Those who screw up, attract unwanted attention, or are caught with hands in the till, are often promoted out of the way.

7. A handful of boardroom tycoons own and control the mainstream media.

8. Anyone who aspires to high office in a Western democracy must cultivate the media and accept that boardroom power is today’s major driver of global affairs.

9. The high players embedded in these institutions – corporations, banks, media, government, IMF, WTO, etc – the “corporatocracy” – are united by a core credo: THERE IS NO GOD HIGHER THAN PROFIT.

10. This is the mindset that fuels endless growth, even as fossil fuels choke the planet.

11. Such a mindset imperils the future.

12. It is this mindset that says its okay to Wallmart the world, because the consumer gets more choice, even although the choice is largely illusory. What’s the point of offering 30 brands of toasters at the cost of “one-quarter of all plant and animal species” being doomed to extinction, because of global warming? (Nature magazine).

13. The greed-is-good philosophy is justified on the grounds that it spreads the wealth around. True, it spreads the wealth around the boardrooms. The income gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening. The richest 1% of Americans own more assets than the other 99% combined. Is this fair? Both within countries and between countries, such wealth gap keeps expanding, but few Western politicians will talk about it for fear that Rupert Murdoch’s media will call them Communists.

14. The top 5% of the world’s pop has an income 200 times greater than the bottom 5%. (In 1980, the ratio was only 6 to 1). Worldwide, downward mobility is more common than upward mobility.

15. A future of dramatic wealth redistribution is inevitable.

16. And is gathering momentum in Latin America.

17. Popular culture promotes global warming. It fans the flames of consumer desire and hastens obsolescence. Mainstream media, the movies, marketing, advertising, branding, celebrity endorsements, etc, put hyper consumption at the core of human existence. The Shopping Religion dwarfs traditional faiths.

18. By 2050, the world population, barring pandemics and/or climate shocks, is expected to reach 9.1 billion. At today’s consumption levels, this will increase the demand for oil tenfold. Yet the supply of oil is nearing its peak, or past its peak.

19. Which is why the wars to secure future supplies of oil (and water) have already begun.

20. Hollywood cultivates a taste for violence. Just as the Westerns of the 1950’s endorsed the slaughter of Native Americans, today’s blockbusters legitimise sadism. In this season’s highly acclaimed hymn to collateral damage and spouse bashing, Mr & Mrs Smith, it is taken for granted that the CIA has a right to liquidate anyone on the planet. Further, that the assassin’s role is noble, as well as lucrative, sexy and cool. All of life’s problems, including a grim marriage, can be solved with guns, explosions and a vicious beating. Followed by orgasm.                                     

21. In 2005, global military expenditure was expected to reach $1 trillion.

22. In the last 5 years, doublespeak has thrived. More than ever, the statements of political leaders are the reverse of the truth. When Condoleezza Rice tells the world that America is the land of laws, she is the mouthpiece of outlaws. While George Bush was saying he does not condone torture, he had already authorised torture and was denying its use, even as footage from Guantanamo Bay showed unconscious prisoners on stretchers returning from interrogation.

23. Hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay are being force fed with plastic tubes inserted into their stomach through the nose, a painful procedure, even at the hands of medical specialists. Some tubes used by guards are said to be “larger than normal”. The widespread incarceration of children by the US is not denied.  The International Red Cross reported registering 107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old. In May 2005, it was found that there were "800-900 Pakistani boys age 13-15 in custody." Accounts of mistreatment are numerous. A Pentagon spokesman told Seymour Hersh that "age is not a determining factor in detention."

24. Prior to the turn of the century, only a few intellectuals publicly argued that America was no longer a noble nation, as advertised. By now, it has become obvious to anyone with a passing acquaintance with foreign affairs, that George Bush’s America is the world’s deadliest Rogue State.

25. The plague of lying and law-breaking began to spread from the White House to its allies on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, itself regarded as illegal by the world’s most eminent lawyers.

26. Among the few invading nations who lined up to brown-nose Uncle Sam without being bribed, no tongue licked longer or more vigorously than that of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister. He disallowed a debate in Parliament. He dismissed the huge turnout of peaceful protesters as “a mob”. He was still pretending he hadn’t made up his mind about the war, long after authorising the Special Forces to blow-up Iraqi infrastructure.

27. Young Australians have been jailed for burning their country’s flag. The men who ordered the torching of Iraq have still not been arrested.   

28. Howard’s enthusiasm for war was not driven by revenge. He seemed to act from fear. Perhaps the fear of 242 million Indonesian Muslims on Australia’s doorstep. His long held terror of The Other may have bonded him to Bush and his seemingly invincible legions. Or was Howard’s fear even deeper, a fear of a values shift, a fear that the status quo was under threat, a fear that a new consciousness might arise and seek from him more than he could give, more than bread and circuses?  Meanwhile, there is no crime that America could ever commit in its terror wars, that will shake the loyalty of John Howard, who George Bush rightly calls his deputy sheriff.

29. Truer now than ever: Even if you are not interested in politics, politics is interested in you.

30. When the Australian military became aware of the porno-tortures at Abu Ghraib, it tried to hush them up. One of its officers, then attached to the Pentagon, wrote to the International Red Cross, trying to refute the rumours of abuse. When one of its own citizens detained by the US, Mamdouh Habib, was found to be the victim of torture, Australian officials were ordered to state “Habib was well treated”.

31. The deaths of well over a 100,000 Iraqis and the mutilation of many more, is still being justified by George Bush as the price of “spreading freedom”. What is this freedom? It is not freedom of the press. The US military has shot and jailed non-embedded journalists, it has closed down independent newspapers, it has bombed media offices, it has paid bribes to publish false stories.  Is it political freedom? Iraq is in the process of moving from a secular tyranny to a fundamentalist theocracy. No-one knows for sure what will happen, but it is unlikely to replicate the golden age of Athenian democracy.

32. The US has used more illegal weapons on Iraqis, including chemical weapons, than were ever used by Saddam Hussein, (either on his own people, or on anyone else).

33. At least 35 nations have weapons of mass destruction in their military stockpiles, the U.S. more than all others combined.

34. The ferocity of the November 04 assault on the citizens of Fallujah exceeded by far the 1937 Fascist bombardment of Guernica, but as yet no Picasso has emerged to immortalise the atrocity. While mainstream journos were a-bed with the perpetrators, it was left to freelancers and the bloggers to blow the gaff. The terror-war mindset has turned us into what we’re supposedly fighting against.

35. The heads of Halliburton, Boeing, Bechtel and other defense giants are seated on the boards of corporate media. The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with a stake in the arms industry, graces the board of the New York Times. The Washington Post hosts Lockheed Martin, whose latest warhead “successfully demonstrates lethality against urban structures”. Bombing the cities of Iraq does more for the corporate bottom line than publishing true accounts of the impact of the bombs.

36. Which is why to Western eyes, the nightly air strikes on Iraqi dwellings are invisible.

37. Among major defense contractors with shares that trade on Wall Street, the average pay for CEOs has tripled. And these are the wimps. DHB Industries makes bulletproof vests. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, its chief executive, David H. Brooks, took home an annual salary of $525,000. Three years later, Brooks collected $70 million, a pay increase 3,349 per cent. (He held a birthday party in Manhattan for 150 of his daughter’s friends reported to have cost $10 million).

38. Both NBC and the Washington Post have board members who sit on the board of  Coca Cola. The NY Times shares a board member with Pepsi, another board member with drug giant, Eli Lilly, another board member with Ford … and so on. So while the media has been dragged kicking and screaming to accept the likelihood of climate change, don’t expect a feverish promotion of a carbon neutral lifestyle any time soon. (On present trends, global greenhouse gas emissions will almost triple by 2050).

39. As Einstein pointed out, you can’t solve serious problems with the same mind set that created them. You can’t deal with climate change without experiencing a change of consciousness. We’re already half way through the first decade of a new millennium, and our leaders are still stuck with a medieval mindset. And we’re stuck with them. Meanwhile, many thousands of citizens have moved on from the Newtonian view of the world, with its focus on certainty, dualism, us-against-them, good-against-evil. A post-modern age requires a fluid sense of strategy, deep empathy, the acceptance of multiple stories. It seeks from leaders a way of coping with paradox, a flair for handling complex projects in surreal environments, an understanding that holistic thinking matters more than spin, trickery and photo ops.  While such a mind shift is gathering speed at the grass roots, the mentally decrepit  “survival of the fittest” war-horses at the top are trying to quell the new awakening with the age-old strategy of invoking FEAR.  It is a strategy that comes easy, as their own demons rise up to haunt them, and they desperately seek to unload their terror. But the global mind shift required for a sustainable future is underway, and grass-roots groups are cleaning up waterways, reforming third world aid, shining a light on injustice. Their rallying cry becomes ever more relevant: “Another World is Possible. Let us build it.”

40. Among these activists was Nkosi Johnson the heroic South African AIDS sufferer who was asked, not long before he died, aged 12, what motivated him at such a young age and with such a debilitating illness to campaign so tirelessly for his fellow sufferers.  His answer speaks for everyone: “Do what you can with what you have, in the time you have, and the place you are”. And do it now.

ENDS

RELATED LINKS:

www.richardneville.com/Satire/Satire030605.html

http://rebelpeasant.blogspot.com/2005/12/us-holding-children-in-prison-camps-as.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/12/17_right.html

BETWEEN A HARD PLACE AND STEVIE NIX

Roasting flesh and Fleetwood Mac - how we're bringing the fight to the
cowardly dogs and Taliban lady-boys!

(Martin Sharp, Oz, 1967)

We have entered the fourth year of killing Afghans, but we are the ones who are dying. Saddam Hussein is finally in the dock, but we too are guilty. Last night on Australia's feisty current affair show, Dateline (SBS, Oct 19/05), footage was screened of American soldiers near Kandahar burning the bodies of two of its “enemies”. Flames crackle, limbs jerk, a GI remarks on the gushing of blood from an enemy mouth. In a despondent daze I watch the scene from a suburban couch, toying with pasta. If this sparks a hue and cry, I realise, it won't make a speck of difference. Atrocities are a motif of today's terror wars, but no-one of note is ever held to account. When a mighty nation invades countries bereft of air force, navy, or high tech weaponry, it must get boring for the troops. How to let off steam? Bomb a few wedding parties, spray civilians at will, kick down the doors of hovels at midnight, ramp up the torture….

In the early weeks of the 2001 Afghan invasion, Operation Enduring Freedom, SBS showed footage of a CIA guy directing an air strike on a mud built compound holding numerous “Taliban” prisoners, but it didn't provoke a peep. Neither did a 2002 doco on the apparent role of American soldiers in the suffocation, shooting, torture & secret burial of  “up to 3000” prisoners held in steel containers. (Google Massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif by Jamie Doran). Anyway, so here we are today still strutting our stuff on foreign soil, while the locals continue to endure operation freedom. After the Taliban barbecue scene, psy-ops swings into action. Loudspeakers are aimed at the distant hills, where the “bad guys” lurk. In a local dialect, the message is blasted to an elusive prey: “You call yourself Taliban but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion, and you bring shame upon your family….You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady-boys we always believed you to be

Mesmerised on the couch, I am trying to imagine the Taliban huddled in caves, quaking in their frilly underwear. "You attack and run away like women”, continues the voice of freedom, “Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are..."

And so it continues, this unconscious revelation of frustration at the enemy's agility. What have our two country's become? Australian forces are also in the area, but far too wary to be caught on camera. While the diggers may not yet have shred the last vestiges of shame, it doesn't mean that they are not involved in shameful acts.

HEART MELTING HOSPITALITY

As far back as May 2002, Australian Defence Minister, Robert Hill, gloated on TV that our troops had “killed 300 Al Qaida”. However, the London Times Online, May 10/02, revealed how a “small number of armed men, probably Afghans, stumbled across a six-man team of Australian SAS, who were searching a cave complex for weapons. Surprised, the locals raised their weapons and were shot in the chest” … by the Australians. A subsequent search of a nearby village produced an ancient Lee Enfield which was taken as a trophy. The caves contained livestock. The men who our soldiers shot in the chest were shepherds, according to the report. (In 1966, when I overlanded through Afghanistan, the farmers still carried flintlocks and their hospitality was heart-melting). For more on Aussie troops in action see here.   

Remember, it was an Australian Major attatched to the Pentagon who helped try to hide the crimes at Abu Ghraib. Aussies have witnessed torture sessions at the “BIF”, that nasty jail near Baghdad airport. How futile to hope that the “Anzac spirit” or Government denial will shield us from the consequences of our complicity in the serial atrocities for which this era will be remembered and despised.

Psy-ops in Kandahar is not limited to abusive broadcasts and flesh fuelled bonfires. The opening scene of the Dateline doco is the most shocking of all, because of its depiction of everyday cultural sadism. Blasting from the military vehicles patrolling the towns and the countryside, is a barrage of ear shattering rock. Raggedy children look up amazed, even scared, as Humvees bristling with machine guns throb through the streets, forcing camels & buses off road, while Fleetwood Mac bursts across the Hindu Kush. What's going on here, apart from incredible bad manners?

A DRAMA TAKING PLACE IN TOTAL SILENCE

According to the Dateline narrator, it is all part of a psy-ops scheme to keep the Taliban on edge, but it is also a projection of the New American Century. Those who are bullied into rocking around the clock are Afghani citizens, whose own cultural traditions are exterminated, as they are groomed to join the shopping religion of their occupiers. Probably not a single citizen of Kandahar had a hand in flattening the World Trade Centre, but how many are still paying the price? 

A price so many of us are paying. In the most bellicose nations of the ever diminishing Coalition of the Willing, freedom, honour and truth have diminished. Mental illness, obesity and depression is soaring. Democracy has lapsed into shadow puppetry and lying by skillful means is taught on the news. On Constitution Day in Iraq, US helicopters and warplanes bombed two villages near Ramadi, the military claiming to have killed 70 “insurgents”. But an Iraqi doctor reported 20 people killed -- including six children -- and 25 wounded. All the dead were civilians, he said. Such dumb acts of cruelty have been common from the first day of the invasion.

Last week a UN Human rights investigator, Jean Ziegler, accused the US-led coalition of driving citizens out of settlements that were about to be attacked by cutting off supplies of water and food. 

Mr Ziegler, a Swiss-born sociologist, said "a drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces are using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population”. He told a press conference in Geneva, "This is a flagrant violation of international law”. But don't worry, a US military spokesman in Baghdad has denied the allegations. We are the good guys, remember. Big Mac, i-Mac, Fleetwood Mac - the world is within our grasp. Syrians and Iranians should stock up on ear plugs. Ends.

image from:www.lucyedkins.com/guan/kandahar_interrogation.htm

VISIT MAIN SITE: www.richardneville.com   

BOYS OWN ANTICS IN BAGHDAD

Since the London bombings, the elected leaders of nations that invaded Iraq are sinking deeper into the swamp, grinning wildly as they go, taking our freedoms with them. Long used to lying to their own citizens, George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, are also lying to themselves. How can it be claimed that the upsurge in terrorism is unrelated to our presence in Iraq? The argument rests on the assumption that the 9/11 strike on America stemmed solely from a blind hatred of western lifestyle, that it was unprovoked and that it lacked a geo-political context. It’s as if the CIA’s covert actions in Afghanistan, which led to the empowerment of the Taliban, had never happened. Or that no-one had noticed the 35,000 US troops propping up the House of Saud. Or…. but why go on? Politicians are loath to acknowledge ‘blowback’, as Chalmers Johnson points out, because it implicates them in the deaths of their own citizens. Perhaps Tony Blair’s addiction to cosmetics derives from an unconscious need to save face.

When a victim of the London bombers, Louise Barry, was visited in hospital by John Howard, she braved the TV crews and her alarming neck brace to suggest her assailants had been motivated by our invasion of Iraq. Taken aback, the PM looked shifty and disagreed. Yet the British newspaper, The Independent, now reveals new research into how the bloodbath in Iraq is “inspiring a worldwide insurgency”. The paper’s correspondent, Patrick Cockburn, a seasoned visitor to Iraq, quotes an Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters which found that almost all had been radicalised by Iraq alone. Another study of 300 Saudi fighters found that “very few had any previous contact with al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist organisation previous to 2003”. These insurgents are supported by a “homegrown network of sympathisers and supporters who provide safe houses, money, explosives, detonators, vehicles and intelligence”. In short, the worst way to hit back after 9/11 was to invade a Muslim country without links to Al Q’aeda or any plan to bomb the West.

It now turns out we started the war to export democracy, which is wonderful news for all the political prisoners in Burma, China and our comrade in arms, Uzbekistan. Hang in there.

Meanwhile, our own democracy continues to shrink, a process that started the moment the Iraq war plot was hatched. Tricking the public into backing an illegal invasion had little to do with democratic elections or representative assemblies, and much to do with faking the evidence and feeding the media. “Decisions were taken among small groups of people in private”, notes historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “not very different from the way they would have been taken in nondemocratic countries”. Yesterday we lost the right to joke at airports. Today the Murdoch media calls for a ban the pamphlets of Mullahs (as if its own editorials were any less inflammatory) and our students are questioned by secret police about their taste in text books. While the escalation of terror may require a reduction of freedoms, what will tomorrow bring? Web censorship, suspicious commuters to be shot on sight, martial law?

The war mongering nations have ceased to feel like democracies. Not one of them possesses an opposition party worthy of the name. Not one of them has accepted responsibility for the gruesome chain of murders triggered by our invasion - over 500 suicide attacks in Iraq over the last year. Not one “visionary leader” (Murdoch on Howard) has admitted that life for Iraqis is hell Those who concocted the intelligence that led to war have been congratulated, those who give the nod to torture have been promoted, those who bombed the hospitals, mosques, water plants and suburbs of Fallujah, are jangling with medals. Hollywood will convert their skyborne terrorism into Boys Own heroics. Our furtive use of depleted uranium raises the rates of leukemia, deformities and babies born without eyes. But politicians are more likely to bomb an Iraqi children’s ward than to visit one. John Howard took a “secret trip to Baghdad” to talk about cricket to soldiers as the cameras whirred, continuing an 80 year colonial tradition.

Back in the 20’s the British navy was converting to oil and Iraq was gushing with the stuff, but the natives were restless. Punitive bombings were prescribed. A typical raid took place in February 1923 on a village in southern Iraq, where Bedouins were celebrating 12 weddings. An eyewitness, Saleh 'Umar al Jabrim, reported bodies scattered everywhere, including those of women, children and four camels. In 1924, a distinguished Air Commodore, Lionel Charlton, resigned his post as a staff officer in Iraq after he paid a hospital visit to the armless and legless casualites of a British bombing of a Baghdad market. How quaint. These days Generals don’t even count the dead, much less visit the victims.

While all three Coalition of the Killing leaders were re-elected, despite the Iraqi cock-ups, it’s John Howard who goes from strength to strength, a beaming Machiavelli in a Vodaphone tracksuit, posing as a Churchill. This week, the LA Times reports on the growing number of unarmed,innocent civilians, “including people who are considered vital to building democracy”, who are being killed by U.S. troops.

Our country is under a spell, sleep walking towards disaster, while its decent, distracted citizens ponder interest rates, the footy and whether to put a plasma opposite the Jacuzzi. Our poets are lost for words, our comedians fiddle the stock market, our movie stars flock to the Imperial Court, our auction-star painters extrude sullen abstracts, while singing hymns at Howard’s table.

There’s a widespread switch off about crimes in Iraq. Mention Fallujah to the bright Westerners who “dedicate their waking hours to media-induced sensations, to their pursuit and their creation” and they’ll probably think it’s a Turkish pastry. Nothing seems to matter anymore, except what’s on a screen. If a tsunami had struck Asia in the age of radio, no-one would have noticed. And yet what’s on screen about Iraq is filtered through three thick flags, a legacy of the lost war in Vietnam. Our exporting of freedom requires limits on free speech, which is why the Marines tend to jail independent camera crews, or shoot them. ends.

See the main site:

www.richardneville.com

Iraq images not shown on TV:
www.richardneville.com.au/satire/satire030605.html

Shooting Civilians update:

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9564.ht

The mysterious quote about "media induced sensation comes from Thomas de Zengotita, who's worth Googling.

Thanks to Sydney artist Peter Kingston for this image of the fateful meeting:

KILLING US SOFTLY WITH YOUR LIES

It’s 4am, you’re walking across a bridge, a bridge to the future, your face is the mirror of Munch’s Scream. Licking your heels are the flames from Iraq. The lunatics who started the blaze are running ahead. Not that they are running away from justice, as you would expect, because justice is dying. These lunatics are on their way to rule the world.

You feel so alone on this bridge. And yet you know you are not alone. Millions of others are walking beside you, similarly baffled and distressed, gritting their teeth. Through the fog of war and the falsehoods of State, we cannot always see each other. But we can see what’s going on.

Posing as granny, Mr Wolf is sent to the World Bank to devour the poor. Another wolf, John Bolton, is sent to the UN to give war a chance. The new US ambassador to Baghdad, Mr Negroponte, is renowned in Nicaragua as a mini Saddam. (This former ambassador to Honduras is implicated in the slaughter of 10,000 citizens by “death squads”; a man well versed in the apparatus of torture, assassination and secret jails). Here comes the new Secretary of State, Condy the Oil Queen, a serial liar with a dazzling smile, who once boasted Iraq was never a threat to the West … until she was told to change her mind. The Devil in George W Bush is not without humour, as proved by his treatment of Mr Gonzales, the lawyer who mocks the Geneva Convention and says that torture is cool. Now he jangles the keys to courthouse and dungeon. On and on it goes, rippling through the entrails of the Coalition and beyond; a toxic brew of deceit, cruelty and denial.

On the bridge to the future, the icy winds blow also from the South.

In the nasty new Australia, immigration goons march into high schools and drag children off to detention centres, their classmates weeping. Among the letters-to-the-editors from holocaust survivors, who liken the scene to their own childhood kidnaps, one asks: “At what point do Australians intend to stop accepting this horror?” When they open their eyes. Years ago, some of our Liberal Party Ministers were half decent humans, until the Grey Medusa turned their hearts to stone.

Our Attorney General resists the evidence that Australians have been involved in torture - - both as accomplices and as victims - even as he flashes his Amnesty badge. Our Minister of Defence denies he knew of such crimes, until the “revelations” at Abu Ghraib, even though an Australian officer had been helping the Pentagon to deceive International Red Cross. But you know all this. To re-phrase the question of the holocaust victim, we must ask: At what point will citizens of the West accept that an addiction to oil and gold does not justify the pillage and bombing?

People chirp about an Arabian spring, but at four in the morning on the bridge of the future it looks like winter to me.

Here’s why:

The deep denial by pro war supporters of what’s being done in the name of “freedom,” is hard to shake. Not even a hundred Abu Ghraibs give them pause, or a thousand Fallujahs. "I don't need an investigation to tell me that there was no comprehensive or systematic use of inhumane tactics by the American military”, proclaims Senator Jim Talent, a Republican from Missouri, “because those guys and gals just wouldn't do it. Everything about the culture and the training in the military and at home works against that." How can you eradicate this kind of stupidity?

Last week two docos on SBS (by Danny Schechter & Robert Greenwald) nailed the deceptions of those who led us to war, as well as the lies and crimes of those who lead the troops. (Meanwhile, the bulk of the TV audience was glued to fictional depictions of vile murders in New York and Miami, happily solved by heroic forensics and a lust for justice). In one of the SBS docos a surgically masked reporter from Germany stands beside a tank in Iraq, brandishing a Geiger counter. Viewers had earlier been reminded of the use of depleted uranium (DU) by the US military in the first Gulf War and its link to the surge of children born with deformities. Despite this, DU is again being used by the freedom loving West in its missiles and armour, although the Pentagon tries to bury the issue. So here’s this masked German reporter with a crackling Geiger counter, warning a soldier: “Your tank is radioactive”. No it’s not, comes the reply. Crackle, crackle… The exchange is repeated in a surreal loop, like the dead parrot scene in Monty Python.

It’s so sad. The soldier could end up with leukaemia. Iraqi mothers will carry deformed foetuses. George Bush will be lauded as a hero. The DU denial is also symbolic. The Geiger counter is the truth revealed. The soldier is the public blocking its ears.

Sure there is a flicker of hope in the Middle East, which is due more to the death of Arafat than the genius of Bush. Let’s hope it works out better than the Afghan spring, with its harvest of heroin and, according to the Guardian, now the hub of a global network of detention centres: “one huge US jail”.

How quick are the warmongers to chant Bush is right, while his actions are wrong. We’re back to the jungle: back to the end justifies the means. How can this be acceptable? It is the ethic of the criminal. It is the ethic of the Nazi. It is the ethic of the Inquisition, of the damned, of the demented. It is the ethic of the Bush White House.

It is still chilly on the bridge to the future, though a little less lonely on this anniversary dawn of the invasion, the sunlight struggling against the fog, the people struggling for justice. No-one knows how many we are. When will it end?

www.richardneville.com

www.internetweekly.org was the source of discovery for the artwork of paranoia, from the files of Japanese ads for psychiatric drugs.

The Italian Job: High Noon in Baghdad

HUSH HUSH WHISPER WHO DARES, NEOCON KILLERS ARE SAYING THEIR PRAYERS

The only thing unusual about the hail of bullets that struck the car of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena in Baghdad, was that this time the US said sorry. Since the start of the invasion, occupation forces have wiped out numerous carloads of Iraqis. This little girl was splashed with the blood of her parents as they were shot while driving home. Where is she now? Who knows? The killers are immunised from prosecution. (In February, Australian soldiers added to the car passenger tally). These incidents happen so often, it might be the military's idea of target practice.

Whether or not Iraq ever achieves a genuine democracy - one capable of exiling the Pentagon and dismantling its bases - there will come a time when White House appeasers, the Murdoch propagandists, the neo colonialists ...  will stand fearful before their mirrors and their makers. By what moral code, they will ask themselves in aguish, did I sanction the bombing of cities in far away countries whose citizens offered no threat? One day, the images of dead & limbless Iraqi children suppressed by the mass media and revealed on blogs will fester in their unconscious.   

Restless at 4am they will shout in the dark: We even bombed wedding guests and claimed they were terrorists. One day the Generals and spin-artists will yearn for Alzheimers, in order to quell the ghosts of the slain. Why did we refuse to acknowledge the scale of the slaughter? So blinded were we by imperial hubris, so hungry for blood, we bombed mosques, hospitals and Al Jazeera; we razed cities, we installed puppets, we turned the population against us, then washed down our guilt with propaganda and oil. So many dead, we didn't keep count. So many warned us but we didn't listen. The war against terror gave birth to more terror. Yet nothing stood in our way - not the Geneva Conventions, not the laws against torture, not the innocence of children, not the loss of our name.  The streets ran with blood, our critics we hunted.

Why did it take us take so long to admit there were no WMD's in Iraq, apart from the ones we imported. (Depleted uranium, cluster bombs, napalm, gun ships, vacuum bombs. Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq's health ministry, has confirmed that US forces used mustard gas, nerve gas, and other incendiary chemicals on Fallujah).

Al Qaida never set foot in Iraq until we did. Then George Bush became its star recruiter. Over 100,000 Iraqis paid the price for 9/11, in which they played no part, not even Saddam Hussein. The President talked endlessly about spreading freedom, but what he spread was cliché and fear. Our troops so hated the people whose country they occupied, that prisoners were molested for digital amusement - and they were the lucky ones. In a secret string of gulags, inmates were disappeared off the face of the earth. Even if a case became public, the perpetrator was rewarded. The CIA man in Kabul, who chained an Afghan boy naked to a concrete floor until he froze to death, was promoted. Mostly secrets stayed safe because the media was embedded. Difficult witnesses were dealt with by snipers.

On top of all this was black ops, pillage and profits, including Halliburton's ongoing festival of embezzlement. And we wonder why the US is no longer seen as beacon of freedom. Why didn't I realise that by supporting the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, I was also trashing the 1648 treaty of Westphalia, which came into being for an excellent reason - to stop sovereign states attacking each other unless they were under imminent threat. Al Qaida was never a State. The reasons for the invasions have been revised retrospectively. It now seems we went to Afghanistan to help with the opium crop. We went to Iraq to impose democracy, which only leaves 45 more tyrannies left to invade. Except that some of these are our allies. Pakistan is a dictatorship. Uzbekistan is a Stalinist hellhole. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. Egypt is our offshore torture chamber. North Korea can claim the doctrine of pre-emption to bomb the West. Thanks a lot, George. You've watched High Noon so many times, you think you're Gary Cooper playing the sheriff. Trouble is, your methods put you at one with the crooks.

The masterpiece that didn't change the world

In April 1937, when General Franco was struggling to overthrow the elected Government of Spain, he sought help from Hitler. The enemies of fascism deserved a dose of shock and awe. The Luftwaffe obliged by flattening the pesky city of Guernica, raining its bombs on homes, farms and schools; machine gunning families at the crowded outdoor markets. The world was appalled. More than a million Parisians thronged the city in protest. An enraged Picasso created the mighty canvas that many consider to be the greatest artwork of the 20th Century - Guernica. It serves to commemorate the first massive, cold blooded attack against a non military target in modern warfare; an act of savagery since surpassed and repeated many times over. The bombing of Guernica lasted three and a half hours; the bombing of Falluja has been going on for six and a half weeks, still counting. Troops were reportedly ordered to shoot all males of fighting age seen on the streets, armed or unarmed, (though many women and children copped it as well).

The assault on Guernica aroused the conscience of the world and gave us an immortal icon. The assault on Falluja revealed the complicity of the mass media and its embedded cheerleaders, as well as the deadened souls of the celebrity-sodden shopaholic cowards who are its major consumers. Falluja also gave us George Bush as Time’s “Man of the Year” (for “sticking to his guns”). But he is so much more than that, don’t you think?

Not convinced? Go here: www. fallujapictures.blogspot.com

Congratulations to Feng Qian, 22, who made history at a Beijing opera house last weekend, when she won the title of Ms Artificial Beauty. Finalists had suffered procedures to nose, ears, breasts, eyelids, the upper and lower jaw, as well as much softening of skin and removal of body hair. Will this surface sculpturing change the inner human? Probably, by boosting confidence. Self improvement by any means necessary is 21st Century religion. Future beauty pageants are likely to feature Ms Genetically Enhanced, Ms Cyborg, Ms Nanotech.

While the human body rapidly evolves, the moral stature of Western leadership continues to shrink.

WHY?

The lust for power, the re-birth of belief in nutty Old Testament prophecies, the creeping shadow of fear, including the fear that our lifestyle requires adjustment.

WHAT ARE THE SIGNS OF THIS MORAL DECLINE?
The reversal of human rights, the rewarding of public figures who behave in bad faith, the culture of lying at the highest levels of leadership.

Look again at the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Almost half of its 30 famous Articles are now more honoured in their breach than in their implementation. Not just in Uzbekistan and Pakistan, but in Washington, Westminster and Canberra.

Article 5: No one shall be subject to torture or to cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Other Articles promote rights that are fast fading: judgement by “independent and impartial” tribunals, the presumption of innocence, the right of a public hearing, the right to seek asylum, to change nationality, to freely exchange information, regardless of frontiers, to enjoy privacy, the reasonable limitation of working hours, and the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well being ……

The three men who champion the trashing of freedoms say they are expanding freedoms with bombs, torture and lying. Tony Blair compares himself to Winston Churchill. John Winston Howard now poses in the style of Churchill and boasts he has enhanced Australia’s “confidence”. By which he means our COMPLIANCE with the world bully, our COMPLICITY in the murder of a 100,000 Iraqis, our CRUELTY to refugees. Still, Christmas is coming. A time of photo ops for politicians at Carols by Candlelight trying to look holy, a time to hit the Iraqi town of Hyt, west of Baghdad, with warplanes. According to www.english.aljazeera.net ,shops, homes and buses have been destroyed, as well as the civilians within.

Happy Chritmas.
www.richardneville.com

A Ticket to Ride

This flimsy adjunct to my long running dot com has unleashed a salvo of foam from the brownshirts. Thanks for caring, and pardon the failure to reply to each comment. At my age, every minute counts. Perhaps I’ll come to regret this blog, launched on an impulse to side-step the process of managing Go Live every time I want to shoot off my mouth at www.richardneville.com. It is also the lure of a 30 day free trial.

Wait a minute. Didn’t mean to sound rude. I WILL trawl the comments and reply to the ones that effectively challenge my viewpoint, okay?

A difference between today’s neo conservative climate and that of the Vietnam era, is that a number of poets, painters, writers, rockers and thinkers have sided with the party of war. For some, it is a career decision: stay with the strength. For others, it is based on an honestly held view of the world, moulded over many years. For a third group it is the shock of the view; observing the crash of the twin towers from the streets of Manhattan and/or its never ending replays, the power of which lies at the core of the collective brain like a primal trigger. Perhaps this is why Christopher Hitchens did a U-turn.

As a lifelong champion of human rights, Hitchens has every right to change his mind. At least he’s got as mind, unlike so many other ranting barrackers of Bush. But is it a mind that can be trusted? This is a question I ask of myself, as much as I ask it of those who support the war. It is so easy to become a victim of mindset, and so difficult to admit that we’re in its grasp.

About a year ago I heard Christopher Hitchens talking with Phillip Adams about events in Iraq, shortly after he had returned from touring the hotspots. Hitchens was certain it would soon calm down; that the few troublemakers would be exxtinguished, and that normality and democracy was imminent. It was a calm, lengthy discussion; Adams let him roll.
Because of Hitchens’ long experience in the Middle East, I was half inclined to accept this rosy view, until the source of the view was revealed. Hitchens had toured the warzone in the personal helicopter of Paul Wolfovitz.

The adage that power corrupts is assumed to apply to the powerful. In my experience, it is those on the edges of power who become the most corrupted.
The renegade painter taken up by the Australian Prime Minister, who lurches to the right. The brilliant scientist appointed to the coal board who suddenly sees a healthy future for fossil fuels. The sensitive journalist sent to Baghdad by Rupert Murdoch who finds “nobility” at the US high command. Choose carefully in whose helicopter you ride.

And now a message from Naomi Klein, addressed to Washington’s ambassador to Britain:
From the Guardian, Saturday December 4, 2004:

YOU ASKED FOR MY EVIDENCE, MR AMBASSADOR. HERE IT IS.

TO David T Johnson,
Acting ambassador,
US Embassy, London

Dear Mr Johnson, On November 26, your press counsellor sent a letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read: "In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies." Of particular concern was the word "eliminating".

The letter suggested that my charge was "baseless" and asked the Guardian either to withdraw it, or provide "evidence of this extremely grave accusation". It is quite rare for US embassy officials to openly involve themselves in the free press of a foreign country, so I took the letter extremely seriously. But while I agree that the accusation is grave, I have no intention of withdrawing it. Here, instead, is the evidence you requested.

In April, US forces laid siege to Falluja in retaliation for the gruesome killings of four Blackwater employees. The operation was a failure, with US troops eventually handing the city back to resistance forces. The reason for the withdrawal was that the siege had sparked uprisings across the country, triggered by reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed. This information came from three main sources: 1) Doctors. USA Today reported on April 11 that "Statistics and names of the dead were gathered from four main clinics around the city and from Falluja general hospital". 2) Arab TV journalists. While doctors reported the numbers of dead, it was al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya that put a human face on those statistics. With unembedded camera crews in Falluja, both networks beamed footage of mutilated women and children throughout Iraq and the Arab-speaking world. 3) Clerics. The reports of high civilian casualties coming from journalists and doctors were seized upon by prominent clerics in Iraq. Many delivered fiery sermons condemning the attack, turning their congregants against US forces and igniting the uprising that forced US troops to withdraw.

US authorities have denied that hundreds of civilians were killed during last April's siege, and have lashed out at the sources of these reports. For instance, an unnamed "senior American officer", speaking to the New York Times last month, labelled Falluja general hospital "a centre of propaganda". But the strongest words were reserved for Arab TV networks. When asked about al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya's reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed in Falluja, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, replied that "what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable ... " Last month, US troops once again laid siege to Falluja - but this time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian casualties last time around.

Eliminating doctors
The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control. The New York Times reported that "the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casual ties", noting that "this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons". The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers "stole the mobile phones" at the hospital - preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world.

But this was not the worst of the attacks on health workers. Two days earlier, a crucial emergency health clinic was bombed to rubble, as well as a medical supplies dispensary next door. Dr Sami al-Jumaili, who was working in the clinic, says the bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Falluja general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical centre" before it was hit.

Whether the clinic was targeted or destroyed accidentally, the effect was the same: to eliminate many of Falluja's doctors from the war zone. As Dr Jumaili told the Independent on November 14: "There is not a single surgeon in Falluja." When fighting moved to Mosul, a similar tactic was used: on entering the city, US and Iraqi forces immediately seized control of the al-Zaharawi hospital.

Eliminating journalists
The images from last month's siege on Falluja came almost exclusively from reporters embedded with US troops. This is because Arab journalists who had covered April's siege from the civilian perspective had effectively been eliminated. Al-Jazeera had no cameras on the ground because it has been banned from reporting in Iraq indefinitely. Al-Arabiya did have an unembedded reporter, Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, in Falluja, but on November 11 US forces arrested him and held him for the length of the siege. Al-Saadi's detention has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists. "We cannot ignore the possibility that he is being intimidated for just trying to do his job," the IFJ stated.

It's not the first time journalists in Iraq have faced this kind of intimidation. When US forces invaded Baghdad in April 2003, US Central Command urged all unembedded journalists to leave the city. Some insisted on staying and at least three paid with their lives. On April 8, a US aircraft bombed al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Al-Jazeera has documentation proving it gave the coordinates of its location to US forces.

On the same day, a US tank fired on the Palestine hotel, killing José Couso, of the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsiuk, of Reuters. Three US soldiers are facing a criminal lawsuit from Couso's family, which alleges that US forces were well aware that journalists were in the Palestine hotel and that they committed a war crime.

Eliminating clerics
Just as doctors and journalists have been targeted, so too have many of the clerics who have spoken out forcefully against the killings in Falluja. On November 11, Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, the head of the Supreme Association for Guidance and Daawa, was arrested. According to Associated Press, "Al-Sumaidaei has called on the country's Sunni minority to launch a civil disobedience campaign if the Iraqi government does not halt the attack on Falluja". On November 19, AP reported that US and Iraqi forces stormed a prominent Sunni mosque, the Abu Hanifa, in Aadhamiya, killing three people and arresting 40, including the chief cleric - another opponent of the Falluja siege. On the same day, Fox News reported that "US troops also raided a Sunni mosque in Qaim, near the Syrian border". The report described the arrests as "retaliation for opposing the Falluja offensive". Two Shia clerics associated with Moqtada al-Sadr have also been arrested in recent weeks; according to AP, "both had spoken out against the Falluja attack".

"We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks of US Central Command. The question is: what happens to the people who insist on counting the bodies - the doctors who must pronounce their patients dead, the journalists who document these losses, the clerics who denounce them? In Iraq, evidence is mounting that these voices are being systematically silenced through a variety of means, from mass arrests, to raids on hospitals, media bans, and overt and unexplained physical attacks.

Mr Ambassador, I believe that your government and its Iraqi surrogates are waging two wars in Iraq. One war is against the Iraqi people, and it has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. The other is a war on witnesses.
(Additional research by Aaron Maté).

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