Apologizing
To Torturers
By John Pilger
19 April, 2005
Green Left Weekly
Can
you imagine the BBC and other major broadcasters apologizing to a rogue
regime which practices racism and ethnic cleansing; which has effectively
legalized the use of torture (according to Amnesty International);
which holds international law in contempt, having defied hundreds of
UN resolutions and built an apartheid wall in defiance of the International
Court of Justice; which has demolished thousands of people's homes and
given its soldiers the right to assassinate; and whose leader was judged
personally responsible for the massacre of more than 2000
people?
Can you imagine
the BBC saying sorry to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or other official demons,
for broadcasting an uncensored interview with a courageous dissident
of that country, a man who spent 19 years in prison, mostly in solitary
confinement? Of course not.
Yet, last month,
the BBC apologized confidentially to a regime with such
a record, so that its correspondent would be allowed back, having promised
to abide by a system of censorship that continues to gag the dissident.
The regime is President
Ariel Sharon's in Israel, whose war crimes, appalling human rights record
and enduring lawlessness continue to be granted a certificate of exemption
not only by the US-dominated West, but by respectable journalism.
The British Labour
government's collusion with the Sharon gang is reflected in the BBC's
balanced coverage of a repression described by Nelson Mandela
as the greatest moral issue of the age. Simon Wilson, the
correspondent made to apologies for a proper, important and long overdue
interview with nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, will know better
in future.
That is hardly new.
What is new is the extent to which insidious state propaganda has penetrated
sections of the media whose independence has been, until recently, accepted
by much of the public.
To appreciate this,
one applies the Law of Opposites and the Law of Silence. The Law of
Opposites can be applied to almost any news broadcast these days. The
long-awaited death of the Pope is a case in point. By reversing the
river of drivel about the Pope the people's Pope
(almost universal), the man who changed history (US President
George Bush) a towering figure revered across all faiths and none
(British PM Tony Blair) you have the truth.
This deeply reactionary
man held back history and destroyed lives all over the world with his
fanatical opposition to basic decencies, such as birth control. He called
this abominable, spitting the word out, and so condemned
millions, from starving infants to babies born with AIDS. In Latin America,
he publicly humiliated courageous priests whose preference for
the poor dared to cross the medieval hierarchy he upheld. The
claim that he brought down communism is also the opposite
of the truth. As I learned when I reported his papal return to his native
Poland in 1979, the church in that country, whose conservatism he embodied,
was a scheming bedfellow of the Stalinist regime until the wind changed.
The Law of Opposites
can be applied to the current Western government/media fashion for saving
Africa, known as the Year of Africa. The BBC has hosted a special conference
about this, just as Blair will host the G8 summit in July with eradicating
Africa's poverty as its theme.
Like the rest of
the impoverished world, African countries qualify for the vogue enlightenment
only if they agree to impose on their people the deadly strictures of
the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank such as the destruction of tariffs protecting sustainable
economies and the privatizing of natural resources such as water. At
the same time, they are encouraged to buy weapons from British
arms companies, especially if they have a civil war under way or there
is a tension with a neighbour.
The Law of Silence
is applied to crimes committed not by official demons Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein, Serb President Slobodan Milosevic et al but by
Western governments. An Australian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent,
Eric Campbell, in recently promoting a book of his adventures, described
the broadcast coverage of the war in Iraq. Live satellite
is a travesty, he said. Basically, if [the reporters] are
on satellite, they havent seen anything. The correspondent is
read the stories from the wire and told that is what they have to say
on air that's in the majority of cases.
That may help to
explain why the horror of the US attack on Fallujah has yet to be reported
by the other major broadcasters. By contrast, independent journalists
such as Dahr Jamail have reported doctors describing the slaughter of
civilians carrying white flags by US marines. This was videotaped, including
the killing of most of a family of 12. One witness described how his
mother was shot in the head and his father through the heart, and how
a six-year-old boy standing over his dead parents, crying, was shot
dead. None of this has appeared on British television. When asked, a
BBC spokesperson said, The conduct of coalition forces has been
examined at length by BBC programmes. That is demonstrably untrue.
Similarly, the Law
of Silence applies to the likely American attack on Iran. Scott Ritter,
the UN weapons inspector who in 1999 disclosed that Saddam Hussein had
no weapons of mass destruction and was thereafter virtually blackballed,
has recently revealed that, according to a Pentagon official, Iran will
be attacked in June. Again, he has been ignored by most of the media.
The Law of Silence
applies to the Bush regime's campaign to subvert and overthrow Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela, arguably the most democratically elected leader
in Latin America, if not the world (nine elections) whose own preference
for the poor has diverted the proceeds of the world's fourth biggest
oil supplies to the majority of Venezuelans.
Last year, I did
a long interview with Jeremy Bowen, a BBC reporter I admire, for a program
about war correspondents. Although I guessed that what was really wanted
was my tales of journalistic derring-do on the frontline, I set about
describing how journalists often produced veiled propaganda for Western
power by accepting our version or by omitting the
unpalatable, such as the atrocities of Western state terrorism: a major
taboo. I emphasized that this censorship was not conspiratorial, but
often unconscious, even subliminal: such was our training and grooming.
My contribution did not appear.