Culture of lying
JOHN Pilger
When the state and its vested interests are
guilty of killing, those responsible are covered in a protective fog
It is difficult to forget the courage of Helen Jef-fries speaking on
television about her 14-year-old daughter Zoe, who lay stricken beside
her with vCJD and died a few days later. She accurately described Zoe's
imminent death as murder. A proper justice system might prefer criminal
manslaughter; but the weasel conclusions of the BSE inquiry, led by the
establishment trustee Lord Phillips, ensured there was no justice for
Helen Jeffries, and no truth that profit and greed had killed those like
Zoe.
When the state and its vested interests are guilty of killing, those
responsible are covered in a pro-tective fog and their culpability is
minimised. The American essayist Edward Herman described this as
"normalising the unthinkable". The chief exec-utive of Railtrack, Gerald
Corbett, should be await-ing trial on a charge of corporate
manslaughter, and John Prescott, at the very least, ought to have been
publicly disgraced and sacked. The lives lost at Hatfield and Ladbroke
Grove, also victims of profit and greed, require nothing less.
Consider the protective fog over British state killing in Iraq. On 23
October, Peter Ham, a For-eign Office minister, called a press
conference at which he handed journalists "evidence" of Saddam Hussein's
"obscene decadence". According to Ham, the dictator has built a theme
park for his cronies and has been importing large amounts of alcohol and
cigarettes, funded by smuggling. What Ham left out, as the Foreign
Office admitted on 5 October, was that revenues from smuggling amount to
less than 3 per cent of the total value of the oil-for-food programme.
In the circumstances, that is negligible. Ham also failed to say that 25
per cent of Iraq's oil-for-food revenues (recently reducedfrom30percent)
are diverted from the des-perate needs of the Iraqi people to western
oil com-panies and the super-rich Kuwaiti sheikhs as "repa-rations".
Hans von Sponeck, the chief UN relief official in Baghdad last year,
told me: "The Secu-rity Council allows me to spend just $180 per per-son
over six months. This must pay for all human needs, from hospitals to
education, road repairs to electric light. It is a pitiful picture." Von
Sponeck resigned in disgust at the economic embargo imposed by the UN
and driven by the US and British governments. His predecessor, Denis
Hal-liday, had gone before him, charging Washington and London with
genocide. Their revolt is unprece-dented in the history of the UN.
"I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible,"
wrote Tony Blair in his famously leaked memo of "touchstone issues",
which included new Labour's foreign adventures. Halli-day agrees. He
makes the case that Blair and Bill Clinton are personally responsible
for the deaths of the Iraqi children. They had all the intelligence;
they knew what they were doing and who would die. For example, a
recently declassified US Defence Intel-ligence Agency report was a
blueprint for the destruction of Iraq's clean water treatment
facilities, predicting "full degradation of the water treatment system
within six months" which would cause epi-demic illnesses. That has
happened. Water-borne diseases have decimated under-fives; the Unicef
figure is half a million children dead in eight years. This is the same
figure as the Rwanda genocide.
Having been in office since 1997, Blair can be "personally associated"
with a quarter of these deaths: 125,000 children. The motives are the
same as those that allowed profit and greed to take over farming and the
railways, and now dominate every section of the British state.
Anglo-American con-trol of the Middle East guarantees huge profits for
the oil companies and the British arms industry, the second biggest in
the world, whose deals are con-centrated on the medieval regime in Saudi
Arabia. Ham' s colourful descriptions of "decadence" in Iraq reflect
Foreign Office panic that other govern-ments are tired of sanctions and
public opinion is revolted by them. The latest Foreign Office tale is
the beheading of Iraqi prostitutes as "revealed" in "restricted Foreign
Office documents obtained by the Guardian" and run in the Guardian under
the byline of the diplomatic correspondent. If nothing else, this
presents a vivid case for the abolition of the position of diplomatic
correspondent, a conduit for what Mark Higson, the Foreign Office
official commended by the Scott inquiry, described as a "culture of
lying". Famous examples include Robin Cook's invention about an
imprisoned Iraqi boy, and the lie about Kuwaiti babies thrown out of
their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. What is curious is that they bother;
Saddam' s terrible human rights record needs no embellishment. My guess
is that Ham, an enthusiastic convert to the modern colo-nialism he once
denounced, is worried about his role as Foreign Office fall guy. He has
even refused to supply parliament with a list of British compa-nies that
supplied weapons technology to Iraq and have since been back to Iraq.
In his play Ashes to Ashes, Harold Pinter uses the images of Nazism and
the Holocaust, while inter-preting them as a warning against
totalitarian actions taken by polite politicians in western democracies
and which are, in principle and effect, little different from those
taken by fascists. The crucial difference is distance from the crime.
Thus, half a million peasants were despatched by Amer-ican bombers sent
secretly and illegally to skies above Cambodia by Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger, igniting an Asian holocaust. Clinton and Blair, Cook
and Han and their Tory predecessors have done much the same in Iraq. The
method of killing may be different, but the fact of a holocaust is
beyond doubt, and, like Cambodia, the memory of their crime will not be
suppressed.