I Know When
Bush Is Lying:
His Lips Move
By John Pilger
New Statesman
23 November , 2003
Shortly
before the disastrous Bush visit to Britain, Tony Blair was at the Cenotaph
on Remembrance Sunday. It was an unusual glimpse of a state killer whose
effete respectability has gone. His perfunctory nod to "the glorious
dead" came from a face bleak with guilt. As William Howard Russell
of the Times wrote of another prime minister responsible for the carnage
in the Crimea, "He carries himself like one with blood on his hands."
Having shown his studied respect to the Queen, whose prerogative allowed
him to commit his crime in Iraq, Blair hurried away. "Sneak home
and pray you'll never know," wrote Siegfried Sassoon in 1917, "The
hell where youth and laughter go."
Blair must know
his game is over. Bush's reception in Britain demonstrated that; and
the CIA has now announced that the Iraqi resistance is "broad,
strong and getting stronger", with numbers estimated at 50,000.
"We could lose this situation," says a report to the White
House. The goal now is to "plan the endgame".
Their lying has
finally become satire. Bush told David Frost that the world really had
to change its attitude about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons because
they were "very advanced". My personal favourite is Donald
Rumsfeld's assessment. "The message," he said, "is that
there are known knowns - there are things that we know that we know.
There are known unknowns - that is to say, there are things that we
now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns . . . things
we do not know we don't know. And each year we discover a few more of
those unknown unknowns."
An unprecedented
gathering of senior American intelligence officers, diplomats and former
Pentagon officials met in Washington the other day to say, in the words
of Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and friend of Bush's father: "Now
we know that no other president of the United States has ever lied so
baldly and so often and so demonstrably . . . The presumption now has
to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."
And Blair and his
foreign secretary dare to suggest that the millions who have rumbled
the Bush gang are "fashionably anti-American". An instructive
example of their own mendacity was demonstrated recently by Jack Straw.
On BBC Radio 4, defending Bush and Washington's doctrine of "preventive
war", Straw told the interviewer: "Article 51 [of the United
Nations Charter], to which you referred earlier - you said it only allows
for self-defence. It actually goes more widely than that because it
talks about the right of states to take what is called 'preventive action'."
Straw's every word
was false, an invention. Article 51 does not refer to "the right
of states to take preventive action" or anything similar. Nowhere
in the UN Charter is there any such reference. Article 51 refers only
to "the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence
if an armed attack occurs" (my emphasis) and goes on to constrain
that right further. Moreover, the UN Charter was so framed as to outlaw
any state's claimed right to preventive war.
In other words,
the Foreign Secretary fabricated a provision of the UN Charter which
does not exist, then broadcast it as fact. When Straw does speak the
truth, it causes panic. The other day, he admitted that Bush had shut
him out of critical talks in Washington with Paul Bremer, the US viceroy
in Iraq. Straw said he was "not party to the talks, not a party
to his [Bremer's] return visit". The Foreign Office transcript
of this leaves out that Straw had complained that "the UK and US
[are] literally the occupying powers, and we have to meet those responsibilities".
The US disregard for its principal vassal has never been clearer.
Both are now desperate.
The Bush regime's panic is reflected in its adoption of Israeli revenge
tactics, using F-16 aircraft to drop 500lb bombs on residential areas
called "suspect zones". They are also burning crops: another
Israeli tactic. The parallels are now Palestine and Vietnam; more Americans
have died in Iraq than in the first three years of the Vietnam war.
For Bush and Blair,
no recourse to the "bravery" of "our wonderful troops"
will work its populist magic now. "My husband died in vain,"
read the headline in the Independent on Sunday. Lianne Seymour, widow
of the commando Ian Seymour, said: "They misled the guys going
out there. You can't just do something wrong and hope you find a good
reason for it later." The moral logic of her words is shared by
the majority of the British people, if not by Blair's diminishing court.
How decrepit the Independent's warmongering rival the Observer now appears,
with its pages of titillation and hand-wringing, having seen off a proud
liberal tradition.
"Out there",
the Iraqi dead and suffering are still unpeople, their latest death
toll not worthy of the front page. Neither is the Amnesty report that
former Iraqi prisoners of war have accused American and British troops
of torturing them in custody, blindfolding them and kicking and beating
them with weapons for long periods. Investigators from Amnesty have
taken statements from 20 former prisoners. "In one case we are
talking about electric shocks being used against a man . . . If you
keep beating somebody for the whole night and somebody is bleeding and
you are breaking teeth, it is more than beating," said Amnesty's
researcher, "I think that's torture." The Americans hold more
than 4,000 prisoners - a higher figure, it is estimated, than those
incarcerated at any time by Saddam Hussein.
With Bush in London,
Baroness Symons, a Foreign Office minister, postponed a long-planned
meeting with families of British citizens held in the American concentration
camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She has made a habit of this. The families
and their lawyers want to ask questions about the alleged use of torture,
the deteriorating mental health of prisoners and the criminalising of
the Muslim community in Britain. Held for two years without any due
process, these British citizens have had their rights relegated to the
convenience of the American warlord.
Blair's troubles
are only beginning. There are signs that the Shia storm is gathering
in southern Iraq, an area for which the British are responsible. A Shia
underground army is said to be forming, quietly and patiently, as it
did under the shah of Iran. If or when they rise, there will be a great
deal more British blood on the Prime Minister's hands.
For 11 November,
Remembrance Day, Hywel Williams wrote movingly in the Guardian about
the exploitation of "the usable past - something that can be packaged
into propaganda . . . [by those] with careers to build and their own
causes to advance . . . We are now a country draped in the weeds of
war . . . The remembrance we endure now is no longer a seasonal affair.
It is a continuous festival of death as individual souls are press-ganged
into the justification of all British-American wars. To this sorrow
there seems no end."
Yes, but only if
we allow it.
With thanks to Jim
Brann
Copyright: New Statesman.