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IRAQ :
the unthinkable becomes normal
Monday 15th November 2004
by John Pilger
Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign "insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our name.
Edward
S Herman's landmark essay, "The
Banality of Evil", has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things
in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation'," wrote Herman.
"There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable,
with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . .
others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning
and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace
patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise
the unthinkable for the general public."
On Radio 4's Today (6 November), a BBC reporter in Baghdad referred to
the coming attack on the city of Fallujah as "dangerous" and "very dangerous"
for the Americans. When asked about civilians, he said, reassuringly, that the
US marines were "going about with a Tannoy" telling people to get out. He omitted
to say that tens of thousands of people would be left in the city. He mentioned
in passing the "most intense bombing" of the city with no suggestion of what
that meant for people beneath the bombs.
As for the defenders, those Iraqis who resist in a city that heroically defied
Saddam Hussein; they were merely "insurgents holed up in the city", as if they
were an alien body, a lesser form of life to be "flushed out" (the Guardian):
a suitable quarry for "rat-catchers", which is the term another BBC reporter
told us the Black Watch use. According to a senior British officer, the Americans
view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf
to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans. This is how the Nazi army
laid siege to Russian cities, slaughtering combatants and non-combatants alike.
Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism,
linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that
the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that behead people:
for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to be al-Qaeda's "top operative"
in Iraq. This is what the Americans say; it is also Blair's latest lie to parliament.
Count the times it is parroted at a camera, at us. No irony is noted that the
foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed.
These indications come from apparently credible polling organisations, one of
which estimates that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can
be credited to the infamous al-Zarqawi.
In a letter sent on 14 October to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura Council, which
administers the city, said: "In Fallujah, [the Americans] have created a new
vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this
new pretext and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill
children and women, they said: 'We have launched a successful operation against
al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists,
is not in Fallujah . . . and we have no links to any groups supporting such
inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre
which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in
Fallujah, as well as many parts of the country."
Not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and America.
"What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?" asked the playwright
Ronan Bennett in April after the US marines, in an act of collective vengeance
for the killing of four American mercenaries, killed more than 600 people in
Fallujah, a figure that was never denied. Then, as now, they used the ferocious
firepower of AC-130 gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers and 500lb bombs against
slums. They incinerate children; their snipers boast of killing anyone, as snipers
did in Sarajevo.
Bennett was referring to the legion of silent Labour backbenchers, with honourable
exceptions, and lobotomised junior ministers (remember Chris Mullin?). He might
have added those journalists who strain every sinew to protect "our" side, who
normalise the unthinkable by not even gesturing at the demonstrable immorality
and criminality. Of course, to be shocked by what "we" do is dangerous, because
this can lead to a wider understanding of why "we" are there in the first place
and of the grief "we" bring not only to Iraq, but to so many parts of the world:
that the terrorism of al-Qaeda is puny by comparison with ours.
There is nothing illicit about this cover-up; it happens in daylight. The most
striking recent example followed the announcement, on 29 October, by the prestigious
scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis
had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. Eighty-four per cent of
the deaths were caused by the actions of the Americans and the British, and
95 per cent of these were killed by air attacks and artillery fire, most of
whom were women and children.
The editors of the excellent MediaLens observed the rush - no, stampede - to
smother this shocking news with "scepticism" and silence. They reported that,
by 2 November, the Lancet report had been ignored by the Observer,
the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times,
the Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the report in
terms of the government's "doubts" and Channel 4 News delivered a hatchet
job, based on a Downing Street briefing. With one exception, none of the scientists
who compiled this rigorously peer-reviewed report was asked to substantiate
their work until ten days later when the pro-war Observer published an
interview with the editor of the Lancet, slanted so that it appeared
he was "answering his critics". David Edwards, a MediaLens editor, asked the
researchers to respond to the media criticism; their meticulous demolition can
be viewed on the [http://www.medialens.org/] alert for 2 November.
None of this was published in the mainstream. Thus, the unthinkable that "we"
had engaged in such a slaughter was suppressed - normalised. It is reminiscent
of the suppression of the death of more than a million Iraqis, including half
a million infants under five, as a result of the Anglo-American-driven embargo.
In contrast, there is no media questioning of the methodology of the Iraqi Special
Tribune, which has announced that mass graves contain 300,000 victims of Saddam
Hussein. The Special Tribune, a product of the quisling regime in Baghdad, is
run by the Americans; respected scientists want nothing to do with it. There
is no questioning of what the BBC calls "Iraq's first democratic elections".
There is no reporting of how the Americans have assumed control over the electoral
process with two decrees passed in June that allow an "electoral commission"
in effect to eliminate parties Washington does not like. Time magazine
reports that the CIA is buying its preferred candidates, which is how the agency
has fixed elections over the world. When or if the elections take place, we
will be doused in cliches about the nobility of voting, as America's puppets
are "democratically" chosen.
The model for this was the "coverage" of the American presidential election,
a blizzard of platitudes normalising the unthinkable: that what happened on
2 November was not democracy in action. With one exception, no one in the flock
of pundits flown from London described the circus of Bush and Kerry as the contrivance
of fewer than 1 per cent of the population, the ultra-rich and powerful who
control and manage a permanent war economy. That the losers were not only the
Democrats, but the vast majority of Americans, regardless of whom they voted
for, was unmentionable.
No one reported that John Kerry, by contrasting the "war on terror" with Bush's
disastrous attack on Iraq, merely exploited public distrust of the invasion
to build support for American dominance throughout the world. "I'm not talking
about leaving [Iraq]," said Kerry. "I'm talking about winning!" In this way,
both he and Bush shifted the agenda even further to the right, so that millions
of anti-war Democrats might be persuaded that the US has "the responsibility
to finish the job" lest there be "chaos". The issue in the presidential campaign
was neither Bush nor Kerry, but a war economy aimed at conquest abroad and economic
division at home. The silence on this was comprehensive, both in America and
here.
Bush won by invoking, more skilfully than Kerry, the fear of an ill-defined
threat. How was he able to normalise this paranoia? Let's look at the recent
past. Following the end of the cold war, the American elite - Republican and
Democrat - were having great difficulty convincing the public that the billions
of dollars spent on the war economy should not be diverted to a "peace dividend".
A majority of Americans refused to believe that there was still a "threat" as
potent as the red menace. This did not prevent Bill Clinton sending to Congress
the biggest "defence" bill in history in support of a Pentagon strategy called
"full-spectrum dominance". On 11 September 2001, the threat was given a name:
Islam.
Flying into Philadelphia recently, I spotted the Kean congressional report on
11 September from the 9/11 Commission on sale at the bookstalls. "How many do
you sell?" I asked. "One or two," was the reply. "It'll disappear soon." Yet,
this modest, blue-covered book is a revelation. Like the Butler report in the
UK, which detailed all the incriminating evidence of Blair's massaging of intelligence
before the invasion of Iraq, then pulled its punches and concluded nobody was
responsible, so the Kean report makes excruciatingly clear what really happened,
then fails to draw the conclusions that stare it in the face. It is a supreme
act of normalising the unthinkable. This is not surprising, as the conclusions
are volcanic.
The most important evidence to the 9/11 Commission came from General Ralph Eberhart,
commander of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad). "Air force
jet fighters could have intercepted hijacked airliners roaring towards the World
Trade Center and Pentagon," he said, "if only air traffic controllers had asked
for help 13 minutes sooner . . . We would have been able to shoot down all three
. . . all four of them."
Why did this not happen?
The Kean report makes clear that "the defence of US aerospace on 9/11 was not
conducted in accord with pre-existing training and protocols . . . If a hijack
was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack coordinator on duty to contact
the Pentagon's National Military Command Center (NMCC) . . . The NMCC would
then seek approval from the office of the Secretary of Defence to provide military
assistance . . . "
Uniquely, this did not happen. The commission was told by the deputy administrator
of the Federal Aviation Authority that there was no reason the procedure was
not operating that morning. "For my 30 years of experience . . ." said Monte
Belger, "the NMCC was on the net and hearing everything real-time . . . I can
tell you I've lived through dozens of hijackings . . . and they were always
listening in with everybody else."
But on this occasion, they were not. The Kean report says the NMCC was never
informed. Why? Again, uniquely, all lines of communication failed, the commission
was told, to America's top military brass. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence,
could not be found; and when he finally spoke to Bush an hour and a half later,
it was, says the Kean report, "a brief call in which the subject of shoot-down
authority was not discussed". As a result, Norad's commanders were "left in
the dark about what their mission was".
The report reveals that the only part of a previously fail-safe command system
that worked was in the White House where Vice-President Cheney was in effective
control that day, and in close touch with the NMCC. Why did he do nothing about
the first two hijacked planes? Why was the NMCC, the vital link, silent for
the first time in its existence? Kean ostentatiously refuses to address this.
Of course, it could be due to the most extraordinary combination of coincidences.
Or it could not.
In July 2001, a top secret briefing paper prepared for Bush read: "We [the CIA
and FBI] believe that OBL [Osama Bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist
attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will
be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities
or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little
or no warning."
On the afternoon of 11 September, Donald Rumsfeld, having failed to act against
those who had just attacked the United States, told his aides to set in motion
an attack on Iraq - when the evidence was non-existent. Eighteen months later,
the invasion of Iraq, unprovoked and based on lies now documented, took place.
This epic crime is the greatest political scandal of our time, the latest chapter
in the long 20th-century history of the west's conquests of other lands and
their resources. If we allow it to be normalised, if we refuse to question and
probe the hidden agendas and unaccountable secret power structures at the heart
of "democratic" governments and if we allow the people of Fallujah to be crushed
in our name, we surrender both democracy and humanity.
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John Pilger is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University, New
York. His latest book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and its
triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape
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