December 2009
Vol 9, No.12
CHARTER FOR COMPASSION On 12 November 2009, the Charter for Compassion was launched in a number of cities around the world, including Malaysia. The Charter is the brainchild of the eminent British religious scholar Ms Karen Armstrong. In September 2008, she invited the world to contribute towards the writing of the Charter for Compassion. The views submitted by the planet’s citizens were presented to a Council of Conscience which Ms Armstrong had established. The council comprising 18 individuals from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, provided input on the proposed Charter which was drafted by Ms Armstrong. JUST President, Dr Chandra Muzaffar was a member of the Council. We publish below the Charter for Compassion with the hope that it will be disseminated more widely --- editor
CHARTER FOR COMPASSION The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others - even our enemies - is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women
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~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings, even those regarded as enemies. We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.
ARTICLES SUSSEX STUDENTS VOTE TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL
CLIMATE CHANGE COPENHAGEN
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................. The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) joins civil society groups around the world to express the fear that the Copenhagen Climate Summit will fail to achieve agreement on fundamental issues pertaining to global warming. Many analysts are doubtful that “a deal will be sealed” .............................................................P.2
By Iyad Burnat ............................................................. page 2
PRISONER ABUSE
AT BAGRAM By M. Gebauer, J. Goetz and B. Sandberg ................... page 3
SRI LANKA - MAKING PEACE
AND WAGING WAR By Larry Marshall ......................................................... page 5
FEAR RULES By Paul Craig Roberts .................................................. page 7
BREAKING THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN SILENCE PART 1 By John Pilger ............................................................... page 8
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STATEMENT The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) joins civil society groups around the world to express the fear that the Copenhagen Climate Summit will fail to achieve agreement on fundamental issues pertaining to global warming. Many analysts are doubtful that “a deal will be sealed” — which is what optimists like Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, are hoping for. There is nothing to suggest that the three principal challenges confronting Copenhagen will be overcome in the next few days before the Summit begins on 7 December 2009. One, will the United States go beyond the offer to reduce greenhouse gases by 17 percent measured against 2005 over the next decade? It is a paltry offer aimed at accommodating the vested interests that dominate the US legislative process. Two, will emerging economies such as China (which together with the US is the world’s biggest polluter) curb their carbon
emissions, when they see the drive for rapid, massive growth as vital for eradicating poverty and uplifting the masses? China has of course pledged to reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent per unit of production, harness sources of energy other than fossil fuels, and reforest parts of the country. But whether the pledge will be translated into reality is anybody’s guess. Three, will the rich, industrialized nations mainly from the Global North provide much needed finance and technology to poor, vulnerable states in the Global South to enable them to adopt measures that will mitigate against the devastating consequences of global warming? If Copenhagen does not provide concrete solutions to these challenges and merely generates vague promises, we, the citizens of an imperiled planet may not be able to avert the monumental catastrophe that awaits us all. It is a widely held view that if Copenhagen does not succeed to produce a climate
treaty that is more comprehensive and more effective than the 1997 Kyoto Accord, the first phase of which expires in 2012, annual greenhouse emissions will perhaps increase by as much as 40 percent over the next twenty years. This will not only cause low-lying island states such as the Maldives to disappear, but also wreak havoc upon countries in the Global North such as Holland. What this means is that neither the North nor the South, neither the rich nor the poor, will be able to escape the tragic impact of the current global climate crisis. This is why Copenhagen will have to show tangible results — for our sake, for the sake of our children, and our children’s children. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President, International Movement for a Just World. (JUST). 28 November 2009.
SUSSEX STUDENTS VOTE TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL SUSSEX STUDENTS’ UNION FIRST IN UK TO BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS FOLLOWING a landmark referendum, students at Sussex University have voted to boycott Israeli goods. The decision will become part of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which calls upon Israel to respect international law and end the occupation of Palestine. The referendum received messages of support and thanks from Jewish and Israeli academics and nongovernmental organizations that oppose Israel’s policy of occupation in Palestine. Author and scholar Norman G. Finkelstein described the referendum result as ‘a victory, not for Palestinians but for truth and justice’. Iyad Burnat- Head of Popular Commitee and-co-founder of Friends of Freedom and Justice Bil'in -Palestine --- The committee really appreciates Sussex Students' Union remarkable idea of starting a boycott on Israeli goods. We hope even more people all around the world will follow by our example so that we can put an end to the israeli occupation and dismantle the apartheid wall. http://www.bilin-ffj.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=208&Itemid=1 Any questions or requests please contact Martha Baker on 07595 700717 or Bushra Khalidi on 07964 923753----or bel3in@yahoo.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Thank you for you continued support, Iyad Burnat- Head of Popular Commitee in Bilin, co-founder of Friends of Freedom and Justice - Bilin 31 October 2009 Email- bel3in@yahoo.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Mobile- (00972) (0) 547847942, Office- (00972) (2) 2489129, Mobile- (00972) (0) 598403676, www.bilin-ffj.org
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By Matthias Gebauer, John Goetz and Britta Sandberg US President Barack Obama has spoken out against CIA prisoner abuse and wants to close Guantanamo. But he tolerates the existence of Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, where more than 600 people are being held without charge. The facility makes Guantanamo look like a "nice hotel," in the words of one military prosecutor. The day that Raymond Azar was taken by force to Bagram was a quiet day in Kabul. There were no attacks and the sun was shining. Azar, who is originally from Lebanon, is the manager of a construction company. He was on his way to Camp Eggers, the American military base near the presidential palace, when 10 armed FBI agents suddenly surrounded him. The men, all wearing bulletproof vests, put him in handcuffs, tied him up and pushed him into an SUV. Two hours later, they unloaded Azar at the Bagram military prison 50 kilometers (31 miles) northeast of Kabul. As Azar later testified, he was forced to sit for seven hours, his hands and feet tied to a chair. He spent the night in a cold metal container, and he received no food for 30 hours. He claimed that US military officers showed him photos of his wife and four children, telling him that unless he cooperated he would never see his family again. He also said that he was photographed while naked and then given a jumpsuit to wear.
kidnapping operations of terrorism suspects, no renditions. At least, that was what Obama had promised. He did not mention Bagram in his speeches. Azar was in Kabul on business. His company had signed contracts with the Pentagon worth $50 million (•34 million) for reconstruction work in Afghanistan. On April 8, Azar was placed onto a Gulfstream and flown to the US state of Virginia to face charges. He was accused of having bribed his US Army contact to secure military contracts for his company, and he was later found guilty of bribery. It was a classic case of corruption, which is not the sort of crime for which a suspect is normally sent to a military prison. No one can explain to Azar why he was taken to Bagram, where the US military treated him like a terrorism suspect and, in doing so, inadvertently provided him with an insight into a world it normally prefers to keep under wraps. Bagram is "the forgotten second Guantanamo," says American military law expert Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale Law School. "But apparently there is a continuing need for this sort of place even under the Obama administration." From the beginning, "Bagram was worse than Guantanamo," says New York-based attorney Tina Foster, who has argued several cases on behalf of detainee rights in US courts. "Bagram has always been a torture chamber."
'A Need for This Sort of Place' On that day, April 7, 2009, President Barack Obama had been in office for exactly 77 days. Shortly after his inauguration, Obama had ordered the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center and ordered the CIA to give up its secret "black site" prisons. He wanted to shed the dark legacy of the Bush years -- there should be no torture any more, no more secret
And what does Obama say? Nothing. He never so much as mentions Bagram in any of his speeches. When discussing America's mistreatment of detainees, he only refers to Guantanamo. Classified Location The Bagram detention facility, by now the largest American military prison outside the United States, is not marked
on any maps. In fact, its precise location, somewhere on the periphery of the giant air base northeast of the Afghan capital, is classified. It comprises two sand-colored buildings that resemble airplane hangars, surrounded by tall concrete walls and green camouflage tarps. The facility was set up in 2002 as a temporary prison on the grounds of a former Soviet air base. Today, the two buildings contain large cages, each with the capacity to hold 25 to 30 prisoners. Up to 1,000 detainees can be held at Bagram at any one time. The detainees sleep on mats, and there is one toilet behind a white curtain for each cage. A $60 million extension is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Unlike Guantanamo, Bagram is located in the middle of the Afghan war zone. But not all the inmates were captured in combat areas. Many terrorism suspects are from other countries and were transported to Bagram for interrogation after being captured. Since the military prison first came into operation, all the detainees there have been classified as "enemy combatants" rather than prisoners of war, which would make them subject to the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Bagram's most prominent temporary detainee to date was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. After his arrest in Pakistan, Mohammed was initially taken to continued next page
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Bagram for three days and was then held at a secret prison in Poland before being flown to Guantanamo. He told representatives of the Red Cross that he was beaten in Afghanistan, suspended from shackles attached to his hands and sexually humiliated. "I was made to lie on the floor," he said. "A tube was inserted into my anus and water poured inside." "In my view, having visited Guantanamo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantanamo look like a nice hotel," says military prosecutor Stuart Couch, who was given access to the interior of both facilities. "The men did not appear to be allowed to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the "monkey house" at the zoo."
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basically been "pulpified." As it happens, his interrogators had already known -and later testified -- that there was no evidence against Dilawar. According to an internal military investigation of the prisoner abuse cases at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which triggered worldwide outrage when it became public in 2004, the practices there were inspired by the treatment of inmates at Bagram. Hundreds of Innocent Inmates To this day, there are hardly any photos from inside Bagram, and journalists have never been given access to the detention center. Although exact numbers are unknown, there are believed to be about 600 detainees at Bagram, or close to three times as many as there currently are at Guantanamo. According to
Sleep Deprivation and Sexual Humiliation From the beginning, Bagram was notorious for the brutal forms of torture employed there. Former inmates report incidents of sleep deprivation, beatings and various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex. Omar Khadr, a Canadian inmate who was 15 at the time, says military personal used him as a living mop. "Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me. And then, with me lying on my stomach with my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil on the floor." At least two men died during imprisonment. One of them, a 22-yearold taxi driver named Dilawar, was suspended by his hands from the ceiling for four days, during which US military personnel repeatedly beat his legs. Dilawar died on Dec. 10, 2002. In the autopsy report, a military doctor wrote that the tissue on his legs had
A R T I C L E S the new initiative is just a cosmetic measure. "There is absolutely no difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration's position with respect to Bagram detainees' rights," she says during an interview with SPIEGEL in her office in the New York borough of Queens. Foster, a petite 34-year-old with dark brown eyes and black hair, took on the cases of Guantanamo detainees as an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. That was before she discovered that the worst prisoner abuse happened long before the detainees arrived in Guantanamo -- at Bagram. Since 2005, Foster has worked exclusively with Bagram cases. She has appeared in court to file habeas corpus petitions for three Bagram inmates. Normally, every prisoner is entitled to habeas corpus rights, which would give him the opportunity to petition a US court to investigate the reasons for his arrest. 'This Ugly Chapter of American History'
an as-yet-unpublished 2009 Pentagon report, 400 of the Bagram inmates are innocent and could be released immediately. The detainees at Bagram still have no right to an attorney, which means that they have no legal recourse against their imprisonment and no opportunity to testify in their cases. Some have been there for years, without knowing why. Obama has announced new guidelines for the treatment of the Bagram detainees, which would require that a US military official provide assistance to each detainee -- not as an attorney but as a personal adviser of sorts. This representative could then review evidence and witness testimony for the first time, and could request that a review board examine the case. Worst Abuse However attorney Tina Foster feels that
In early April of this year, a judge ruled in favor of Foster's petition, arguing that because her three clients, two Yemenis and a Tunisian, had not been "captured in a battlefield situation" in Afghanistan but instead had been taken to Bagram from a third country, they too had rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. "That was a huge success," says Foster. Last Monday, the US Justice Department submitted a 64-page brief to the appeals court, challenging the decision. The Justice Department lawyers argued that, as a military prison in a combat zone, Bagram constitutes a special case. Foster, who supported Obama during the campaign and then voted for him, is disappointed by her former idol. "When I heard his announcement to close Guantanamo, I breathed a sigh of relief that perhaps this extremely ugly chapter of American history was continued next page
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Left in the Snow Foster plans to continue fighting for that cause, even though one of her clients, whose witness testimony figured prominently in her case, is now dead. Jawed Ahmad, who was also known as Jojo Yazemi, was a journalist working in Afghanistan for a Canadian television station. He was 22 when he
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was arrested in October 2007. The Americans accused him of being in contact with the Taliban. They incarcerated Yazemi at Bagram, where he became just another "enemy combatant" -- detainee number 3,370. They left him standing in the snow for six hours, beat him, threatened him and submitted him to sleep deprivation for weeks. It was only after fellow journalists in New York launched a major media campaign in support of Yazemi that he was released -- after 11 months and without any explanation as to why he had been detained in the first place.
A R T I C L E S Just six months after his release, gunmen driving a white Toyota pickup truck, the kind favored by many Taliban, shot and killed Yazemi in Kandahar. "It was one of the most terrible moments of my life," says Tina Foster. "He was a great person and a friend." And he was also Foster's star witness in her case against Bagram. 21 September 2009 Written in German by Matthias Gebauer, John Goetz and Britta Sandberg and translated by Christopher Sultan. Source: Spiegel Online, http:// www.spiegel.de/international/world/
SRI LANKA-MAKING PEACE AND WAGING WAR By Larry Marshall The recent emotional appeals by 253 Tamils seeking refuge in Australia from their boat in Merak, Indonesia, highlight the urgent need for a political solution to power sharing in Sri Lanka, writes Larry Marshall. In Sri Lanka the brutal civil war, which took nearly 100,000 lives and seemed so intractable, has suddenly ended. In May 2009 the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) crushed the decades-old separatist campaign waged by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and killed their elusive and ruthless leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. It is important to note that China underwrote the war against the LTTE. When the United States stopped direct aid to Sri Lanka because of its human rights record in 2007, Beijing came to Colombo’s rescue. China’s armaments (and their ally Pakistan’s) gave the GOSL the firepower to smash the Tiger’s highly trained war machine. China is building a $1 billion port in Hambantota in the south. The Times of India reports this as part of China’s ‘string of pearls’ strategy to control crucial international passageways for trade and oil between the Indian and Pacific oceans. China is now the biggest foreign donor to Sri Lanka*1. The military victory was absolute.
However, local and international human rights groups have called for inquiries into the deaths of thousands of Tamil civilians in the final months of the war when a ferocious GOSL bombing campaign was conducted away from the eyes of the world’s media*2. The GOSL claimed the casualties occurred because the LTTE leaders were making hostages of their own people, using a ‘human shield’ as the army advanced on their final stronghold. However, a furor erupted in August when Channel 4 in Britain aired video footage from Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka allegedly showing government troops summarily executing Tamils*3. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse has been dubbed Hela Raja, the ‘king of the island’ for winning the ‘unwinnable war’. The Sinhalese, who make up 74 per cent of the population, are triumphant. The Tamils who are a minority (13 per cent) are vulnerable and apprehensive. The question now is: can this president win the peace? Can he reassure the Tamil people, who trace their ancestry back over 2000 years on this idyllic island, that, although they are a minority, they are equal and valued citizens of the new Sri Lanka? Since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948 Tamils have claimed that political,
economic and racial discrimination has been commonplace at the hands of the central governments controlled by the Sinhalese majority. This lack of inclusion in the nation-building project, they argue, drove the Tamils to support the armed struggle for a separate Tamil state. The most contentious issue is the fate of almost 250,000 internally displaced people (IDPs). These Tamil families are non-combatants who once lived under the tutelage of the LTTE in a de-facto state it had carved out of the north and the east of Sri Lanka, the area claimed as ‘Eelam,’ an ancient Tamil homeland. They have been the innocents caught in the crossfire, and they have been displaced many times before as the war raged around them. They are now incarcerated in government detention camps as the monsoon rains descend, bringing fears of disease and death. Claims of disappearances and maltreatment abound. continued next page
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The GOSL argues that they cannot return to their villages for two reasons. Firstly, time is required to ‘de-mine’ the areas that were recently the site of a ferocious war. And second, there may be LTTE cadres hiding amongst the civilians who must be weeded out as a matter of ‘national security’.
Afghanistan or Iraq, have a right to arrive here and make their claims under the international refugee convention which Australia and over 140 other countries have signed and ratified. It is important to note that Indonesia is not a signatory to this convention. 9 October 2009
The UN Human Rights Representative Walter Kaelin has insisted that the IDPs should be processed quickly and allowed to return to their homes or to host families in the community*4. The International Crisis Group told the European Parliament in early October that ’such restrictions on freedom in the absence of due process are a violation of both national and international law’*5.
Larry Marshall is the Project Officer for the Centre for Dialogue at La Trobe University. He was born in Sri Lanka.
The incarceration of Tamil civilians by the GOSL is highly sensitive and symbolic. The huge Tamil diaspora scattered in Canada, Britain, Europe and Australia watches with trepidation. Boatloads of fearful Tamils from the north are now risking their lives to seek refuge elsewhere. The fate of the IDPs is viewed as a litmus test of how Tamils will fare under majority Sinhalese rule unhindered by a countervailing force. In essence, the diaspora supported the fight for Tamil rights, even if a majority may have abhorred the methods used by the LTTE to prosecute their case. Therefore a failure by the GOSL to free the IDPs and treat them as respected citizens today might only fuel support for a new (armed?) struggle tomorrow. Unfortunately, the lessons of history are not always learned. A corollary is that President Rajapakse may have trouble turning off his huge war machine. The army is now more powerful than ever and the fragile institutions of democracy that suffered while the all-out war was being prosecuted are still weak and ineffective. Civil Society is largely silent and fearful in the face of arrests and killings of those who have dared to question the way the victory was won. Dissenting
opinion against state policy is portrayed as unpatriotic and subversive. Yet the popularity of the government is stronger than ever. A string of recent provincial election victories by the governing party has indicated a possibility of early national polls. Rajapakse may also call forward the presidential poll (due in 2011) to cash in on his own popularity as a strong man. Some commentators even suggest that the hubris of the president may lead to constitutional changes aimed at extending his hold on power beyond his impending second term. Unfortunately, international calls for an end to triumphalism may fall on deaf political ears. But whatever the president decides, he may find that making peace is harder than waging war. In a statement on Sri Lanka to the Australian Parliament on 14 September, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, spoke of the urgent need to resettle the IDPs and to move towards political reconciliation. He said: Australia has consistently stated that the solution to the conflict was never going to be by military means alone. The time is here for the Sri Lankan Government to win the peace and to forge an enduring political settlement for all Sri Lankans. This will require political reform and rapprochement between all parties and communities*6. These are wise words from a friend of the Sri Lankan people. But if Australia is to remain a friend of the Sri Lankan people then it must accept that IDPS, and others like them from
Source: Asian Currents, The Asian Studies Association of Australia's ebulletin. http://asaa.asn.au/publications/ ac/asian-currents-09-10.html#2a
References: 1.http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/world/asia/article6207487.ece Even India, Sri Lanka’s long-time ally and the traditionally dominant power in South Asia, has found itself sidelined in the past two years—to its obvious irritation. ‘China is fishing in troubled waters,’ Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s Home Minister, warned last week. 2 . h t t p : / / www.warwithoutwitness.com ‘We’ve seen rape used as a tactic of war before in Bosnia, Burma, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. In too many countries and in too many cases, the perpetrators of this violence are not punished, and so this impunity encourages further attacks.’—Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State in UN. 3 . h t t p : / / w w w. y o u t u b e . c o m / watch?v=Mb9QX4AYGys ‘The man is young, naked, bound and blindfolded; a corpse lying across his legs. A soldier approaches…..’ 4 . h t t p : / / w w w. i r i n n e w s . o r g / Report.aspx?ReportId=86371 ‘There is a growing concern from the international community that the pace of progress is simply too slow,’ Walter Kaelin, Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, told IRIN. 5.http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/ index.cfm?id=6335&l=1 ‘The government of Sri Lanka has been imprisoning without charge over a quarter of a million ethnic Tamils displaced by the conflict. The state has locked them in internment camps in the north of the country. The camps are surrounded by barbed wire, and as an incident just this past weekend in Vavuniya demonstrates, the Sri Lankan army will shoot at anyone who tries to escape.' 6.http://www.foreignminister.gov.au/ speeches/2009/090914_statement.html
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FEAR RULES By Paul Craig Roberts The power of irrational fear in the US is extraordinary. It ranks up there with the Israel Lobby, the military/security complex, and the financial gangsters. Indeed, fear might be the most powerful force in America.
innocent person for career or bureaucratic reasons or out of pure meanness.
Americans are at ease with their country’s aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, which has resulted in a million dead Muslim civilians and several million refugees, because the US government has filled Americans with fear of terrorists. “We have to kill them over there before they come over here.”
Frame-ups are so routine that 96% of the criminally accused will not risk a “jury of their peers,” preferring to negotiate a plea bargain agreement with the prosecutor. The jury of their peers are a brainwashed lot, fearful of crime, which they have never experienced but hear about all the time. Criminals are everywhere, doing their evil deeds.
Fearful of American citizens, the US government is building concentration camps apparently all over the country. According to news reports, a $385 million US government contract was given by the Bush/Cheney Regime to Cheney’s company, Halliburton, to build “detention centers” in the US. The corporate media never explained for whom the detention centers are intended. Most Americans dismiss such reports. “It can’t happen here.” However, In northeastern Florida not far from Tallahassee, I have seen what might be one of these camps. There is a building inside a huge open area fenced with razor wire. There is no one there and no signs. The facility appears new and unused and does not look like an abandoned prisoner work camp. What is it for? Who spent all that money for what? There are Americans who are so terrified of their lives being taken by terrorists that they are hoping the US government will use nuclear weapons to destroy “the Muslim enemy.” The justifications concocted for the use of nuclear bombs against Japanese
Yet, it happens all the time. Indeed, it is routine.
civilian populations have had their effect. There are millions of Americans who wish “their” government would kill everyone that “their” government has demonized. When I tell these people that they will die of old age without ever seeing a terrorist, they think I am insane. Don’t I know that terrorists are everywhere in America? That’s why we have airport security and homeland security. That’s why the government is justified in breaking the law to spy on citizens without warrants. That’s why the government is justified to torture people in violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions. If we don’t torture them, American cities will go up in mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney tells us this every week. Terrorists are everywhere. “They hate us for our freedom and democracy.” When I tell America’s alarmed citizens that the US has as many stolen elections as any country and that our civil liberties have been eroded by “the war on terror” they lump me into the terrorist category. They automatically conflate factual truth with anti-Americanism. The same mentality prevails with regard to domestic crime. Most Americans, including, unfortunately, juries, assume that if the police make a case against a person and a prosecutor prosecutes it, the defendant is guilty. Most Americans are incapable of believing that police or a prosecutor would frame an
The US has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than “authoritarian” countries, such as China, a one-party state. An intelligent population might wonder how a “freedom and democracy” country could have incarceration rates far higher than a dictatorship, but Americans fail this test. The more people that are put in prison, the safer Americans feel. Lawrence Stratton and I describe frame-up techniques in The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Police and prosecutors even frame the guilty, as it is easier than convicting them on the evidence. One case that has been before us for years, but is resolutely neglected by the corporate media, whose function is to scare the people, is that of Troy Davis. Troy Davis was convicted of killing a police officer. The only evidence connecting him to the crime is the testimony of “witnesses,” the vast majority of whom have withdrawn their testimony. The witnesses say they testified falsely against Troy Davis because of police intimidation and coercion. continued next page
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One would think that this would lead to a new hearing and trial. But not in America. The Republican judicial nazis have created the concept of “finality.” Even if the evidence shows that a wrongfully convicted person is innocent, finality requires that we execute him. If the convicted person is executed, we can assume he was guilty, because America has a pure justice system and never punishes the innocent. Everyone in prison and everyone executed is guilty. Otherwise, they they wouldn’t be in prison or executed. It is all very simple if you are an American. America is pure, but other countries, except for our allies, are barbaric.
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The same goes for our wars. Everyone we kill, whether they are passengers on Serbian commuter trains or attending weddings, funerals, or children playing soccer in Iraq, is a terrorist, or we would not have killed them. So was the little girl who was raped by our terrorist-fighting troops and then murdered, brutally, along with her family. America only kills terrorists. If we kill you, you are a terrorist. Americans are the salt of the earth. They never do any wrong. Only those other people do. Not the Israelis, of course. And police, prosecutors, and juries
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never make mistakes. Everyone accused is guilty. Fear has made every American a suspect, eroded our rights, and compromised our humanity. 10 June 2009 Paul Craig Roberts is a former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service Source: Information Clearing House In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
GREAT AUSTRALIAN SILENCE By John Pilger
PART 1 In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".
Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from. I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four
pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” - a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823. Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable
that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”. One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again. The Australian silence has unique features. Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high continued next page
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school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.
My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in. The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence. Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country. Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.” There is no truth in this statement. It
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is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name. The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name. During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.” What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated. One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and
A R T I C L E S regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda -- “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.” Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion. The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work? Silence. “I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.” We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one? When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our continued next page
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assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.” Two versions. One for us, one for them. Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies. During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.”
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In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it. A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The
How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?
Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.
stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war. These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news. Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news. According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.
How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?
“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...”.
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innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom. The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere -- from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed
It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf. In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global continued next page
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celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs. This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves. In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: "The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum." Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.”
demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”. Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign? After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.
Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.
This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no selfcensorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”.
The people in those leaking boats
In no other democratic country is
public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone. Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders. In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy. Are we? Or are we a murdochracy. 5 Nov 2009 End of Part 1 Part 2 of John Pilger’s speech will be published in the January 2010 issue of the Commentary John Pilger is a world renowned journalist and documentary film maker. Source: http://www.johnpilger.com/ page.asp?partid=555
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