Through a glass, sharply...

Silence amid the circus

2009-10-23T01:57:00.001-07:00

Nick Griffin's appearance on the BBC's worn-out political forum Question Time was a predictably haphazard show-trial that generally worked wonders for its racist guest of honour.

Griffin, as expected, was amiable, skilful and evasive – unlike his tiresome fellow panellists.

But the most telling moment of last night's curious circus was not to be found in any of the BNP chief's guarded pronouncements. It was in the silence of his detractors.

At a stroke, blundering motormouth Jack "Listen, I am a minister of justice" Straw and impassioned Lib Dem warbler Chris Huhne fell silent when accused of murdering 800,000 Iraqis and tacitly supporting an invasion of the sovereign Islamic Republic of Iran.

It was the one and only statement from the serpentine Griffin that was not immediately ridiculed or quashed.

Not a peep.

Presumably the honourable ministers were too busy recharging their batteries in order to continue nobly rebutting the wearisome rhetoric of a chubby racist on live television.

After all, shooting fish in a barrel is certainly preferable to excusing state-sanctioned war crimes and wholesale terrorism.

Which brings us to last night's protests outside the BBC's television studios.

Despite their commendable intentions, the irony of 800 justice-seeking humans expressing outrage at a fascist party entering the headquarters of an organisation which implicitly supports aggressive, illegal wars and horrendous repression around the world was acute.

Though not nearly as acute as the horror and suffering of those currently quaking beneath the merciless shadow of western bombs in the Middle East. Those clinging on to shattered lives amid the rubble. Amid unseen, unheard, untold devastation.

Tony Blair: the true value of "his conviction"

2009-10-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

...being the fact that Tony Blair is now the highest-paid public speaker in the world – a multi-millionaire garlanded and protected by the powerful global elite he served, strengthened and lied for while in office as the elected political leader of this country.

But let us be very clear. Blair's artful profiteering is no revelation in itself. It is merely the repugnant small-print of a truly shocking affront to humanity – namely, the impunity with which western war criminals who have wreaked unprecedented violence on millions of innocents now sail breezily on into the sunset, embraced warmly by the free market and all its muscular guardians.

Jim Holstun's outstanding new piece Tony Blair and the business of covering up war crimes, an extract of which is printed below, should be read by all.

On 27 June 2007, Blair left his job as UK prime minister under the cloud of the war on Iraq that he had concocted with former US President George W. Bush. Just hours later, he assumed his new position as the Special Envoy to the Mideast Quartet (EU, Russia, UN, US). He had long been a Zionist and a member of Labor Friends of Israel, and he received heartfelt farewells-and-hellos from Ehud Olmert ("A true friend of the State of Israel") and Tzipi Livni ("a very-well appreciated figure in Israel"). Palestinians living under Israeli occupation did not find this a very promising development.

Though Blair spends only a week a month in the Middle East, he has managed to keep busy. He maintains a gruelling, globe-trotting schedule of lectures, for which he receives up to $500,000. On top of this, he has been at work on his memoirs, for which he received a $7.3 million advance. Consulting work brought him $3.2 million (including a bonus) from J. P. Morgan Chase and $800,000 from Zurich Financial Services. By October 2008, he had amassed at least $19 million, far outdistancing even the enterprising Bill Clinton. He is thought to be the highest paid public speaker in the world.

Please visit the Blair War Crimes Foundation website to sign the appeal to indict Tony Blair. Sign up, and encourage all you know to do so as well.

If you are in any doubt as to why such campaigns are important, consider the testimony of a young Iraqi girl, who dubbed herself Riverbend, who sent regular reports from Iraq up until 2007.

On February 20, 2007, she wrote about the gang rape of an Iraqi woman, Sabine, by Iraqi "security forces". Riverbend concluded her piece with these words:

"As the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation - are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse? Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost.

"You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets.

"You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile."

You couldn't make it up...

2009-10-05T09:16:00.001-07:00

Well, of course, you could. And they have. And they will. Again and again.

Amid all the furore over Iran, this little-known fact has been glossed over.

In 1967, under the "Atoms for Peace" program launched by President Eisenhower, the US sold the Shah of Iran's government a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor. This small dome-shaped structure, located in the Tehran suburbs, was the foundation of Iran's nuclear program.

It remains at the center of the controversy over Iranian intentions, even today.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1002/p04s01-usfp.html

Get informed.

Exile on main street: Newspeak in the 21st Century

2009-09-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

Now here's a queer thing.

A remarkable new book which...

a) contains explosive personal exchanges involving some of the most glittering names in the UK press pantheon (Jon Snow, George Monbiot and Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger to name but three);

b) reveals startling evidence concerning major war crimes and impending climate catastrophe; and

c) of which John Pilger writes: "Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth."

...has to date not been reviewed or mentioned in any mainstream UK newspaper.

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

In fact, David Cromwell and David Edwards' Newspeak in the 21st Century has received an even lower profile reception than Guardians of Power: the Myth of the Liberal Media, the duo's previous work, published in 2005.

And the reason?

Quite simply, the book, like its predecessor, is a brick-by-brick dismantling of the sham that is our "free press", eloquently exposing the BBC and other media behemoths as willing collaborators in western aggression, imperialist genocide and the destruction of our planet.

Sound good?

If you are a rational, truth-seeking human, it should do.

Click here for David McQueen's comprehensive review of the book, posted on the excellent Spinwatch.org.

As he says, "this may be the only review you will read..."

What we say goes: Gaddafi and the herd mentality

2009-09-24T01:45:00.000-07:00

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's 100-minute maiden address to the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday drew predictable ridicule from our hallowed media guardians.

Soon after the event, this piece by the Guardian's Ed Pilkington took pride of place on the front page of the paper's website. It is a cast-iron example of the uniform manner in which outspoken critics of western power are caricatured and summarily dismissed by our "free press".

Gaddafi, we are told, "fully lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, bloody-mindedness and extreme verbiage" – a crackpot simply "grabb[ing] his fifteen minutes of fame" in front of "startled delegates".

Pilkington was given free rein to make such cavalier – and patently editorialised – judgements in a supposedly serious news report not because Gaddafi over-shot his allotted speaking time, but because the Libyan leader dared to raise major issues concerning high-level western corruption and systemic crimes against humanity.

Gaddafi, it was reported, "accused the security council of being an al-Qaida-like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war, demanded $7.7tn in compensation for the ravages of colonialism on Africa, and... demanded to know who was behind the killing of JFK."

In line with the standard, highly rigid narrative that proclaims western global benevolence as the only acceptable political reality – a narrative dutifully repeated by our media at every turn – anyone making public proclamations of the above nature will be subject to immediate censure and derision.

As David Edwards of the website Media Lens told me:

"'We', the West, know (because we just do) that Gadaffi is a cartoon figure, like Chavez, to be mocked. This cartoon label is applied to anyone who speaks out – Galloway, Pinter, Pilger, Chomsky, Chavez, le Carre, even Greg Dyke. It's a sort of knowing, superior sneer – it works beautifully.

"The more passionate and sincere the person speaking out, the more potent the sneer becomes. I'm not saying Gadaffi should be compared to the great dissidents, but it's just the presumption that 'we' all know he's an idiot that strikes me. It's a type of thought control."

Edwards is entirely right to consider the Guardian piece "thought control". Such casual subversion is so common as to almost pass unnoticed. Yet Pilkington's report stands as a chillingly breezy example of propaganda flak, swiftly and effectively silencing such "outlandish" claims.

The irony is that to truly tackle the issues Gaddafi raised – several of which are not only valid but of critical importance – the Libyan leader would have needed more than 1000 minutes, let alone 100.

Regardless, it is simply taken as given that not only are his accusations unworthy of further comment, they are to be wholly ridiculed.

And this is because, the Guardian tells "us", Wednesday "was meant to be a day of global reconciliation, when the new leader of the free world put all the rancour of the past eight years behind him and heralded an era of unity."

Gaddafi, evidently, was unaware of his obligation to maintain an obedient silence regarding some of the more glaring details of that "rancour".

"And so it might have been," Pilkington laments, "were it not for a short man, swathed in saffron robes and a black felt hat waving his arms around and shouting: 'Terrorism!'"

The mocking tone, dismissing Gaddafi as the epitome of pantomime, speaks volumes about what truly passes for debate in our liberal newspapers:

"[T]he self-proclaimed king of kings, figurehead of a thousand African kingdoms, must have been chuffed by how his morning had turned out. Now, where to pitch that tent?"

Of course, as Edwards points out, when Gaddafi was "behaving himself", he was treated with considerable respect by the press: "He was a 'reformed' character, they told us."

But not, it seems, on Wednesday.

"They switch the 'respect' and 'contempt' modes on and off, and no-one notices."

Lockerbie: a furious sham

2009-09-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Not that you'd know it from the headline, or the egregiously selective summary written below the video, but Dr Jim Swire has tirelessly maintained that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced 27 years in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, was and is wholly innocent.

Dr Swire – whose daughter Flora died in the bombing – has also long campaigned for a genuine inquiry into the tragedy, in direct and urgent opposition to the appalling lies, deliberate misdirection and reprehensible silence of the UK government over the true nature of the event.

Unsurprisingly, Swire's views are rarely aired in full.

His unerring and heartbreaking fury at the UK and US governments' despicable actions (a cover-up which goes "all the way to Number 10") is a rare thing to see published by any mainstream media outlet.

Watch the whole video.

Then do some digging.

You might begin here, or, say, with the unspoken mass crime of Iranian flight 655.

As the excellent Nick Turse has written, our capacity for gross hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Turse’s account of the differing treatments of al-Megrahi and William Calley – the US soldier sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 – is a remarkable exposition of the US regime’s near-psychopathic disregard for the lives and suffering of its victims.

So too its dutiful corporate press. Consider the gulf between reporting of Turse’s calibre and the mass media’s response.

The medium kills the message: Obama and exercises in non-debate

2009-08-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

A crude and highly dangerous poster which entirely misrepresents Barack Obama and uses a crass, fallacious slogan to describe his political vision has been circulating across America – and now, digitally, across the globe.

You can find it in this link.

Thankfully, the Obama-Joker-Socialism poster pictured above, which began appearing across Los Angeles and other parts of the US in July, is infinitely less disingenuous, less evacuated of all meaning and less entirely risible than Shepard Fairey's "iconic" propaganda sop.

Moreover, it is genuinely inspiring.

And what the image inspires, regardless of its true origin (the sole focus of all mainstream comment until 20-year-old student Firas Alkhateeb came forward last week), is a rare frame of criticism through which to reflect on the policies of the US regime’s latest frontman – and those of his cheerleaders.

Public satirisation, however rudimentary, of Obama's political creed has been almost entirely absent since his "historic" accession: that astonishingly a-critical fanfare most notable for its “intensification of feeling and degradation of significance”, to use Walter Lippman’s classic phrase.

And with good reason. Accepted unquestioningly as the benevolent face of an America renewed in moral purpose and direction, Obama’s messianic status has long been naturalised within mainstream commentary.

Accordingly, the initial media reaction to the Palestinian-American student’s admirable and entirely democratic subversion stands as a remarkable illustration of how restricted the parameters of mainstream debate remain over all things Barack.

The immediate response of the liberal press – a most accommodating vehicle for the US leader’s blandishments – was defensive, terse and one-dimensional.

“Obama as the Joker: just what is it supposed to mean?” asked the Guardian in a pithy news stub:

“A bizarre poster depicting the US president as Batman's arch-nemisis [sic] has everyone scratching their heads. There are many levels on which it doesn't quite work…”

A more sustained piece of “analysis” was subsequently provided by the Guardian’s Ben Walters, under the title “Why the Obama as Joker poster leaves a bad taste in the mouth”.

In this painfully narrow assessment of the poster’s possible implications, Walters griped that “this attempt to paint the US president as a supervillain” is “just wrongheaded. Plus, it's not even funny”.

The poster was dismissed as “the American right's first successful use of street art”.

This analysis largely represented the standard rebuttal of the poster across the liberal media spectrum, which was to scorn the “cohesion” of what was evidently an amateurishly misguided barb by the US right: pairing Obama with the “horror” of socialism, and lampooning him as evil incarnate.

In fact, this reading was a quite shocking "straw man" – in which the very idea that the poster might have originated from the left (mocking the risible myth of Obama’s global beneficence, for example) was wholly absent.

As commentator Kurt Nimmo wrote with devastating clarity:

“The basic problem with the Obama as Joker poster is that its message is lost on those who believe the government is basically good and all it takes to turn things around (things accomplished by that monster Bush) is that we elect the right man to the office of president. It is intellectual laziness that prevents most people from reading the true message.”

In this circumscribed scenario, the idea that Obama could be reproached for his reprehensible failings as a liberal – or, more simply, denounced as the fraudulent mask of a murderous rogue state – is an impossibility. It simply does not exist.

Neither does critical discernment. The addition of the word "Socialism" (allegedly appended to Alkhateeb's image by an anonymous other) actually dilutes the message, observed Nimmo, who went on explain the primary reason for the “laziness” described above:

“It is of course incomprehensible for most liberals to believe Obama represents the most violent and sadistic force in the world – the United States government long ago taken over by [a] bankster cartel or mafia. Three million dead Vietnamese, one million plus dead Iraqis, an undetermined number of Afghans and assorted others either directly slaughtered by the US war machine or its numerous proxies should be evidence enough.

“So should the penchant for torture and economic warfare, the latter waged against literally billions of people… Obama is the current and transitional face of this high-tech murder and economic violence machine.”

This reading of our perilous geopolitical moment is simply unacceptable within the confines of mainstream debate.

As Harold Pinter noted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 2005:

"Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

"But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now."

Pinter's summation is as biting now as then:

"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

The media – and especially in the US – also entertained the notion that the Obama as Joker poster contained racist connotations. This was, as ever, another lamentable abstraction designed to obfuscate any meaningful criticism of Obama’s contemptible record.

Nimmo wrote:

“Liberals far and wide are like Chatty Cathy dolls when it comes to either criticising or parodying Obama – they uniformly assert racism is at work. Of course, one of the reasons our rulers selected Obama is because they want to disarm all criticism by playing the race card. In our politically correct and brainwashed society, any allusion to racism immediately destroys an argument – no matter how reasoned or logical.

“The white face – and clowns usually hide their faces under white makeup (it is called “clown white”) – has nothing to do with an attempt to portray Obama as a white person. It’s about Obama as the Joker, and not necessarily the Joker played by the late Heath Ledger.

“Bob Kane’s original comic book Joker is a master criminal and a bizarre psychopath. Obama is not necessarily a psychopath – that is to say a ruthless hands-on serial killer – but by the standard of his office he is a master criminal, or rather a front man for a cartel of master criminals.

“In 2009, the office of the president is nothing if not a wholly owned subsidiary of the international bankers. In fact the whole of Congress is owned by the banksters and their corporate minions, a fact the liberals consistently miss or are incapable of understanding mostly because many of them are beholden to foundations established by the same bankster elite.”

So too a corporate media in thrall to pro-business governments – left, right, any-which-way.

All too quickly, of course, arrived the “revelation” that the author of this “wrongheaded” right-wing smear was in fact no angry conservative, but a student from Obama’s hometown who actually favoured “an even more liberal presidential candidate”.

A humble and bemused Alkhateeb explained his simple reasoning:

“After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him.”

So wrote the Guardian after this turnaround:

“Firas Alkhateeb, 20, is far from one of the red-faced protesters who have shouted down Democratic politicians at constituent meetings, nor is he a smug young conservative standing against his Obama-enthralled peers.”

Yet these were the only positions plausible according to the paper’s initial non-analysis.

Beyond the cloying hagiographies and unwavering pro-Obama support of the liberal media, Alkhateeb’s depiction of the president as lacking in “substance” is easy enough to understand.

The exemplary Paul Street has written:

“Obama has remained amazingly silent on his campaign promise to advance the critical and overdue labor law reform - the Employee Free Choice Act (the EFCA) - that is required to re-legalize unions and restore strength to the labor movement (aptly described by John Edwards during the primary campaign as ‘the single greatest anti-poverty program in American history’). The EFCA is loathed by key segments of the business class and is therefore not currently on the table of recovery policy."

Of Obama's foreign policy pronouncements, Street adds:

"Obama is continuing core Bush policies on Israel and Iran. He refuses to pay honest attention to the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people about whose fate he stayed revealingly mute during the savage U.S.-Israel assault on the people of Gaza last December and January. He made no effort to resist the U.S. Israel lobby's torpedoing of Charles Freeman's nomination as chair of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman, a veteran national security operative, was brusquely dismissed because he dared to suggest that the Israeli apartheid and occupation state might bear some responsibility for violence and hatred in the Middle East.

"Meanwhile, Obama dangerously and revealingly resists pressure to investigate and prosecute the monumental war and human rights crimes of the Bush administration. He quietly commits to the officially concealed trillion dollar annual Pentagon budget, a giant subsidy to high-tech industry that pays for more than 760 bases across more than 130 nations and accounts for nearly half the military spending on earth – all in the name of 'defense.' The leading Wall Street investment firm and bailout recipient Morgan Stanley reported the day after Obama's election victory that Obama 'has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.'"

Elsewhere, the rigorous and uncompromising Street (author of what John Pilger has called "perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States", Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics) skewers the myth of Obama's domestic "Change" epoch:

“Obama refuses to advance the obvious cost-cutting and social democratic health-care solution: single-payer national health insurance (improved Medicare for all). Consistent with his recent description of himself as a New Democrat, Obama's Treasury Department and the secretive, unaccountable Federal Reserve Bank (to whom the new Administration increasingly wishes to pass the buck of the current financial crisis) will dispense untold trillions of dollars in further taxpayer handouts to the giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the U.S. and world economy over a cliff.

“According to leading liberal economist James K. Galbraith in the Washington Monthly, Obama's plan to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries' toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place amounts to a massive effort to ‘keep perpetrators afloat.’

“By left-liberal writer William Greider's account, ‘Obama's approach so far is devoted to restoring Wall Street's famous names and his [supposedly non-ideological] advisors tell him this is the 'responsible' imperative, no matter that it might offend the unwashed public. Obama evidently agrees’ (Washington Post, March 22, 2009). The liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is ‘filled with a sense of despair’ by Obama's ‘bank rescue plan,’ which ‘recycles Bush administration policy – specifically the 'cash for trash' plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury secretary Henry Paulson’ (March 23, 2009).

“The Obama plan rewards reckless and selfish investor class behavior by funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to bankrupt banks. Under the scheme unveiled on March 23, 2009, the public is put on the hook to the tune of $1 trillion. The program amounts to what Krugman calls a coin flip in which investors win if it's heads and taxpayers lose if it's tails. As the Times quickly noted, ‘the Treasury and the Federal Reserve will be offering at least a tablespoon of financial sugar for every teaspoon of risk that investors agree to swallow,’ buying up the toxic mortgage assets that the investor class created in the first place. The government (identical to the people in a functioning democracy) will take more than 90 percent of the risk, but private investors reap at least half the reward.

“Meanwhile, the underlying insolvency of the banks continues, a problem the Obama administration hopes we will forget about as we get dazzled by their fancy and obscure plan. Beneath claims of allegiance to ‘free market’ ideals and ‘private enterprise,’ the Administration's ‘bank rescue’ design – described by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich as a continuation of ‘the most expensive tax-supported fiasco in history’ (Salon, March 20, 2009) – boils down to a traditional exercise in Wall Street welfare: socialism for the rich, market discipline and capitalism for the rest of us. It is at heart what Greider calls an effort ‘to restore the old order that failed,’ the dark reality beneath newspaper headlines proclaiming a new age of progressive-style government regulation (‘Bill Moyers' Journal,’ PBS, March 27, 2009)."

Street’s last sentence is most instructive. A critical chasm separates the quality of this analysis from the robotic chorus played out by our daily newspapers.

The simple fact is that a mountain of evidence exists to illustrate how deplorably Obama’s actions – both domestically and abroad – belie the noxious façade so painstakingly sculpted by his administration.

The patently ephemeral nature of this façade was plain as day to a 20-year-old student of Palestinian origin, who was moved to satirise what he and many others rightly see as an epic exercise in truth-reversal.

Not so for our flagship media channels.

For them, the US president is "America’s hope, and, in no small way, ours too" – a saviour to be buttressed, airbrushed and resolutely defended.

Such are the permitted limits of dissent.

Holiday reading...

2009-08-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of John Pilger. Get stuck in...

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/08/extraordinary-times-pilger

These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC's Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain's and America's colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.

The difference today is that a majority of the British people are not fooled. The cheerleading newsreaders can say "Britain's resolve is being put to the test" as if the Luftwaffe is back on the horizon, but their own polls (BBC/ITN) show that popular disgust with the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq is strongest in the very communities where adolescents are recruited to fight them. The problem with the British public, says a retired army major on Channel 4 News, is that they need "to be trained and educated". Indeed they do, wrote Bertolt Brecht in The Solution, explaining that the people . . .

Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

In their modern classic Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky describe how war propaganda in free societies is "filtered" by media organisations, not as conscious "crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalisation of [elite] priorities and definitions of newsworthiness". In the wake of the US invasion of Vietnam, in which at least three million people were killed and their once-bountiful land ruined and poisoned, planners of future bloodfests invented the "Vietnam syndrome", which they identified perversely as a "crisis of democracy". The "crisis" was that the "general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power". Afghanistan and Iraq now have their syndromes.

With this in mind, I respectfully urge readers to put aside the holiday reading lists in the newspaper review pages, with their clubbable hauteur, and read, or read again, books as fine as Manufacturing Consent, which help make sense of extraordinary times. As Herman and Chomsky decode principally the American media, an ideal companion is Newspeak in the 21st Century, by David Edwards and David Cromwell (published next month by Pluto). The founders and editors of the outstanding website www.medialens.org present a fluent dissection of Britain's liberal media, employing the kind of rigour that shames those who proclaim their impartiality and independence from vested power. Read also A Century of Spin by David Miller and William Dinan, who describe the rise of an "invisible government" invented by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. "Propaganda," said Bernays, "got to be a bad word because of the Germans, so what I did was to try and find some other words." The other words were "public relations", which now consumes much of journalism.

The latest achievement of PR is the "Obama phenomenon". In Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (published in the US by Paradigm), Paul Street peels away the mask in perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States.
Not enough laughs? Pack Joseph Heller's Catch-22, still unmatched in its demolition of the idiocies and lies of the killers who promote wars. Try this:

"Anyone," says Dr "Doc" Daneeka, "who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so I can't ground him."
Yossarian: "OK, let me get this straight.
In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying."
Dr "Doc" Daneeka: "You got it . . ."

Kurt Vonnegut's equally black and brave and hilarious Slaughterhouse Five is my other favourite war book.

"How's the patient?" [the colonel] asked.
“Dead to the world."
“But not actually dead."
“No."
“How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

Faber recently published Harold Pinter's Various Voices: 60 Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics (1948-2008). It is a gem from Pinter on everything from Shakespeare, night cricket and Arthur Miller's socks to murderous great power:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless . . . while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

If you have not already read it, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers is a rare treat: a view of humanity so precisely, beautifully, honourably, yet almost incidentally expressed. In the "bantering inconsequence" (F Scott Fitzgerald) of effete modern fiction, no one touches McCullers or, for that matter, Pete Dexter, whose Paris Trout is the great unsung book of the American South, or Richard Ford, whose Rock Springs is a masterly collection, among his others, on the mysteries between men and women. And don't forget Albert Camus's The Outsider, about a man who will not pretend: a parable for today. Happy holidays.

Let them...

2009-08-07T12:21:00.000-07:00

As with Harrowdown Hill, Thom Yorke once again bears vicarious witness to the spectral corridors of imperialism...

Haunting. Terrible. The Unspoken.

Lest We Forget...

Harry Patch (in memory of)
I am the only one that got through
The others died where ever they fell
It was an ambush
They came up from all sides
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
I've seen devils coming up from the ground
I've seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical but they will never learn

'A brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.'

2009-07-30T05:04:00.000-07:00

That being the frank assessment of the US-led "war" in Afghanistan by Malalai Joya, the remarkable Afghan MP who spoke at a Stop the War Coalition rally in London last week.

Buried deep beneath the establishment clamour of "liberation of women", "bringing security and democracy to the Afghan people" and - most risibly - "defending the streets of Britain", this type of unerring appraisal has remained almost entirely absent from mainstream news articles or broadcasts.

Why?

Here is her urgent testimony in full:

"In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie.

On behalf of the long-suffering people of my country, I offer my heartfelt condolences to all in the UK who have lost their loved ones on the soil of Afghanistan. We share the grief of the mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters of the fallen. It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops.

In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election. Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, "the same donkey with a new saddle".

So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation.

This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.

I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

What's more, I don't believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.

The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination. We want a helping hand through international solidarity, but we know that values like human rights must be fought for and won by Afghans themselves.

I know there are millions of British people who want to see an end to this conflict as soon as possible. Together we can raise our voice for peace and justice."

*****

Having read the above, it is worth reflecting again that this version of events is all but outlawed in acceptable public discussion of what is known as "The war against the Taliban in Afghanistan".

If we can crudely summarise Joya's statement for a moment, these are the bare facts:

The "war" in Afghanistan is in fact a strategic US-led occupation
Karzai's "democratic government" is a corrupt sham with no legitimacy
The Afghan people reject foreign domination - they do not desire it
Afghans, and notably Afghan women, are as badly off as ever - this after eight years of Western "state building"

This, then, makes a mockery of every single report spewing forth from - to cite just one example - BBC Radio and BBC Online sources. Listen and look, and you will find almost no mention of any of the above points. Most certainly, the first two points will never be entertained in any fashion.

Marvellously, in Joya the establishment has been lumbered with a voice that is impossible to ignore, such is the embedded validity (her searing clarity and acute honesty are secondary here) of her testimony.

Why have we only now, eight years on, seen such argument given the weight it so evidently deserves?

The simple reason is that Joya's version of events falls outside parliamentary consensus (in other words, it challenges state interests) and thus will never be meaningfully promoted by a media whose primary concern is to maintain the "balanced" running of a monstrously skewed status quo.

This is a fine example. And this the benchmark, default BBC position on the Afghanistan atrocities. Investigate them.

Such are the permitted limits of "balanced" reporting.

Paul Street on Obama's violin

2009-05-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

Scorching, in-depth analysis that should be read by all...

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/21334
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20702

After which, ask yourself: why do I unconsciously read mainstream newspapers to find out about the world I live in?

The tacit trillion-dollar "defence" subsidy is key. What does this tell us about the permitted limits of rational discussion?

Perhaps this: that Obama, a marginally less acquiescent Bush, is much like a stall-dresser at a village market taking place in front of a gargantuan castle.

A bit of fluffing and rearranging of the bric-a-brac on display is his remit - while the monstrous gates behind remain silent, impassive, and firmly locked.

Shine a light: Ray Kennedy remembered

2009-04-25T02:45:00.000-07:00

Amid the chaos at Anfield on Tuesday night, a truly remarkable grassroots fans' campaign for Arsenal and Liverpool great Ray Kennedy reached its moving culmination.

Thanks to the Guardian, who published this piece I wrote on the Ray of Hope Appeal - a charity I've helped to publicise over the past year.

And to all who've supported - you've done Ray, and football, proud.

Paypal donations can be made to rayofhopeappeal@hotmail.co.uk; direct contributions can be sent to the Ray of Hope Appeal c/o HSBC account 21817299, sort code 40-03-27

Plumbing the depths

2009-01-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

Much like its eager satirisation of Bush's gaffes, reporting the facile ramblings of figures such as Joe the Plumber is an ideal exercise for our liberal media outlets, providing a form of contextualised light relief - which is always welcome in times of Western-sponsored atrocity and wholesale murder.

But back to the issue at hand. To read the unspeakable Joe trotting out the de rigeur Israeli refrain - "What would you do if unprovoked rockets were coming through your innocent window?" - jarred an opaque, unresolved corner of my memory.

When I worked in Israel in 2001 - surrounded by friends and colleagues I consider to be the most upright, generous people I have ever met - a deathly, labyrinthine incongruence would, on rare occasions, rear its head:

"The only good Arab is a dead Arab."

The quip, and permutations thereof, appeared infrequently, but its impact will stay with me. Somehow, educated, moral and welcoming Israeli adults were able to blithely dismiss an entire people.

At a visceral level, my response was to realise that I simply could not know nor judge the cumulative effects of living in fear of a rocket/bomb attack. (For my part, I experienced at least some of this fear on various trips to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: flinching at the sight of charred buses; hearing radio reports of bombs going off in nearby malls.)

Nor could I hope to understand the cultural impact of the events of 1967, or indeed the entire breathtaking journey of these stoic, resourceful, beautiful people.

One night-time outing to Tel Aviv, aborted at the last minute by our happy young party simply for lack of car space, is printed indelibly on my mind because of what occurred there that night.

There are less than seven million people in Israel. It can feel awfully close.

And so, I wasn't about to tell my hosts otherwise. Theirs was an ingrained, unfathomable impulse. Some of my immediate Israeli peers were, like me, bookish 18-year-olds. The difference was that while I was soon trotting off home to study DH Lawrence, they were reeling at the thought of 3-5 years' national service.

My conclusion in the ensuing years, however, was that many of the people with whom I discussed the issues of the day, teens and seniors alike, had a simple absence of either knowledge or care about the obviously skewed playing-field just down the road.

Israel has been turning the screw for decades. What we are witnessing is nothing less than an administrative attempt at ethnic cleansing; an abhorrent siege; a structured evisceration.

Let us be clear: you can wage war on a people without firing a shot. The current rockets issuing from Gaza are but a beleaguered, near-spent fox bearing its teeth at a thousand riders and hounds who surround its hole dawn to dusk.

Talk of ceasefires, then, in this egregiously imbalanced scenario, is almost tautological.

These facts were - as they are now - the malignant elephant in the room.

Today, incredibly, just as the Israeli news reports I viewed throughout my stay in 2001 comprehensively ignored this overwhelming disproportion, our own domestic media vehicles in the UK remain just as monocular. Why?

"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."

- Chomsky, 1992

Please...

2009-01-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

1. Get informed:

John Pilger on Gaza
http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2009/01/pilger-israel-gaza-palestine

Independent TFF analyses of the broader Middle East since 2006
http://www.transnational.org/Area_Index_MiddleEast.htm

TNN - TFF News Navigator
Read the Middle East media directly
http://www.transnational.org/Resources_Media/TNN.html

Richard Falk's pathbreaking prediction from 2007
Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust
http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html

Richard Falk - UN Special Rapporteur
Situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
http://www.transnational.org/Resources_Treasures/2008/FALK_SR_Report_GA_Palestine.pdf

Vicky Samantha Rossi interview
Eyewitness report from Gaza
http://www.transnational.org/Columns_Rossi/Rossi_GazaInterview.html

Richard Falk
Statement on Gaza situation as of December 27, 2008
http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view01/F1EC67EF7A498A30C125752D005D17F7?opendocument

Richard Falk in Current Concerns
TFF Associate and UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and Other Occupied Territories speaks to one of the leading European journals.
http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=615

Richard Falk
Gaza - Silence is not an option
Press release by the UN Special Rapporteur and TFF Associate
http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2008/Falk_GazaSilence_NotAnOption.html

Omar Barghouti in CounterPunch
A Rubber Stamp for U.S. Dictats
http://www.counterpunch.com/barghouti01022009.html

Jan Hjärpe
The power of a Jewish-Muslim narrative
What can be done to address disparate perceptions of history?
http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=23728&lan=en&sid=1&sp=0&isNew=1

Attack on Gaza...
If Americans (and the rest) knew
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

Richard Falk interviewed by AMW - Arab Media Watch - December 24, 2008
http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Articles/Analysis/tabid/75/newsid395/5497/AMW-adviser-interviews-Richard-Falk-/Default.aspx

Haaretz.com
Israel expels UN Human Rights Rapporteur and TFF Associate Richard Falk
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046838.html

Coverage by the International Herald Tribune, exclusively questioning Falk's
credentials, not Israel's.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/15/mideast/mideast.php?WT.mc_id=newsalert

Jan Oberg
The Richard Falk case, Israeli authoritarianism and Western media
http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/profiles/blogs/the-richard-falk-case-israeli

TFF's Board
Towards Peace In and With Iraq - A 10-Point Plan
http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/TFF_IraqPeacePlan2008.pdf

Hans von Sponeck
Justice for Whom? The fate of Tariq Aziz in Iraq
http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2008/Sponeck_TAzizJustice.html

2. Think: for yourself.

3. Act: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

Afghanistan: excellent overview; ghostly solutions...

2008-12-14T11:06:00.002-08:00

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/kaldor/secure-afghanistan

A great overview, empirically, of the dire situation in Afghanistan, and very much worth reading.

If TV/broadsheets paraded even a fraction of the obvious torrent of civilian suffering detailed above, we'd split our tongues. Can you recall seeing even more than a flicker? Why do we know so painfully little about this humanitarian catastrophe?

By no means, however, does Kaldor offer a rigorous analysis of the drivers behind this appallingly calculated and brutal tragedy. In fact, only a suspiciously limited one.

"Human security" is a dangerous notion because, inevitably, in practice it means little more than a rebranding exercise for a most detestable occupation – fresh balm laid on a crushed corpse. This is not to say, however, that we might not yet see it sold to the public as another excuse to continue the West's open-ended drive into the Middle East.

That Kaldor accepts "protection of Americans" as a genuine stratagem is less bemusing than frightening, just as unironically referring to Iraq as a "mistake" in one's opening paragraph is a surefire alarm-sounder. The euphemistic deployment of "tension" is another haunted, ghostly phrase...

Read, as ever, with caution.

Obalming: all aboard the optimism wagon

2008-11-25T14:34:00.000-08:00

We live in, in all senses, eye-watering times.

Keep count, dear friends, if you are able, of the current slew of newspapers, politicians, organisations, businesses and who-the-hell-ever "Obama-ising" their various communiqués, either directly or indirectly.

Fully three weeks on, and the Change/Hope/Optimism wagon rumbling remorselessly around our mainstream media channels remains a most accommodating vehicle.

Riding up front this week? The British Transport Police, no less. A press release aimed at none other than "travelling football fans" reads (in all seriousness) as follows:

"The election of Barack Obama to the White House has turned a page in world history – now is the time for football fans to do the same...His election has brought with it a new sense of optimism, and we are also optimistic that the trend of increasing problems associated with some travelling fans can be reversed."

All aboard, ladies and gents. There's space aplenty on this Trojan horse…

We can be confident, however, that those least mollified by the present deluge of Western propaganda are the people and nations currently eking out an existence at the sharp end of US and British "cooperation". People and nations to whom the Democrats' proselytising carnival of "Change" will not extend quite far enough.

No, while the eulogised epicentre himself makes noises about Afghanistan that are in fact less promising than John McCain's, we can be sure that news of a "sense of optimism" swirling about the ears of US/UK citizens will fail to offer much comfort to those shattered, grieving families still living in illegally-occupied and missile-obliterated territories.

The chasm separating the continuing reality for these forgotten souls from the egregious fallacies packaged and sold to the West's citizens is more than merely grotesque. At a time when the violated millions of our scorched playgrounds remain displaced, starving, traumatised and dying, there are surely few things more insidious than a self-certified rhetorical fug, trumpeted soothingly at every turn – as if anything at all is set to Change, under the current parameters, for these Unpeople.

But for the hawks and their complicit media machine – so desperate to re-brand, re-justify and re-energise the appalling policies of the Blair/Bush era that have been ceaselessly clothed as righteous truth for a pacified public – nothing less will do.

Let us call it Obalming, shall we? Like embalming, its ultimate effect is the preservation of death. The sanitising of decay, disrepair, disaster.

Fever, fever, everywhere...

2008-11-05T17:09:00.000-08:00

The frenzied pointlessness, utter hypocrisy and unrelenting sophistry of the media’s treatment of the Andrew Sachs affair was amply illustrated by the sight of four photographers and a camera crew chasing Sachs down his own driveway in search of “reaction” to his “horrendous treatment”.

Not forgetting the camera crew that provided the above shot, of course: the BBC’s.

Enough said.

And so to the only news item to receive more airtime and column inches this week. The US election.

“America’s moment of truth” headlined the Guardian. If only such a thing were possible. (Thanks, Richey.)

Once again, and almost without exception, the ultimate opportunity to pick seriously and deeply at the murderous fibres of the world’s supreme rogue state was politely declined by our flagship media channels – at every gushing, delusional turn.

The torrent of surface-deep, "Change!"-shrieking rhetoric was as unceasing as Obama's campaign itself. And so, as yet another gossamer-thin election broadcast piped shrilly from Radio 5 on Sunday morning, peppy presenter promising to “cut through the hype and internet hyperbole” (presumably via the insights of his guest panellists, introduced during the pre-faff as “a DJ” and “a Premier League goalkeeper”), this writer turned the corporate deluge firmly off.

One might have thought election time to be a most apposite stage on which to debate America’s grotesque foreign policy record under Bush, responsible as it is for a decade of quite unimaginable slaughter and wilful geopolitical destabilisation – via the illegal, immoral and genocidal occupation of at least two sovereign states (at the last count). Or, perhaps, to examine the deplorable procession of hawkish, expansionist Democratic presidents elected since World War II that the new incumbent is all set to join.

No danger.

Revolving tirelessly around the same microeconomic themes – the US “healing itself”, Obama’s “historic” succession – the most febrile of all election fevers sweated itself out through our radios, broadsheets and screens in yet another obscene exercise in collective myopia. A gross, perverse parade comprehensively enshrining America and its values as an upright, just, ordered, democratic state, the overwhelming majority of election “coverage” provided merely the ultimate distraction from America’s (and the UK’s) bloodthirsty role in the real world.

The establishment-consecrating bias of the mainstream reportage is ably illustrated by the broad absence of any mention of the serious fraud concerns raised during the US elections of both eight and four years ago. We might compare this remarkable omission with media coverage of, for example, a typical African state election in which fraud allegations had once been substantially reported.

As genuine engines for Change outside of the cloying indoctrination of the corporate media machine teach us eloquently, there is a heavy price to pay for allowing but a few monocular elites to decide what is "newsworthy".

Dig deeper.

Cul-de-sac...

2008-10-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

Ouch.

Just seeing a huge billboard in Hoxton advertising the new album made me feel a little embarrassed for our Mike. The poor guy.

That same clipper lighter logo. Blimey. A million memories and connotations in its sturdy, button-down honesty. Spot on at the time, but so dated now.

And the title, 'Everything Is Borrowed'... Meaning, we can presumably deduce, that Skinner has nothing original left to say. Defeatist from the off - not a good look.

Mike even admitted in an interview in The Word this month that the next album he does will definitely be the last one. "I signed a five-album deal," he intoned joylessly. So this is number four, then. You could feel the wretchedness seeping through his words...

For the man who brought my starry-eyed youth "the world stands still as my mind sloshes round/the washing up bowl in my crown", I'll always have gratitude.

But I feel for him now, more than ever. And he'd be the first person to understand how...

Gangs: the Gov gets gully

2008-09-06T02:42:00.000-07:00

As the government's Gangs: You and Your Child booklet prepares to hit the mean streets of the UK, an alternative guide is proving to be the viral sensation of the month. The author - who has been variously described as "flippant beyond all countenance", "irresponsible to the point of blasphemy", and "Ewen Cook" - kindly permits us to reprint it below.

How tell if your child is in a gang:

- Do they have an air of purpose about them that floundering at the arse-end of a socially-immobile society should have crushed beyond all repair?

- Are they displaying a bullish sense of pride and unity that a rigged economy and postcode-segregated public services should have rendered impossible?

- Are they laughing at government self-help guides even more derisively than you?

If you can answer 'YES' to any or all or even half of one of the above questions, while keeping a straight face, ACT NOW. Before the problem becomes obscured in a smokescreen of throwaway gestures which mask the fundamental structural inequalities responsible for a fatally disenfranchised British underclass.

Call Gordon. Tell him everything.

Iraqi oil on the block

2008-08-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

Worth reprinting in its entirety, Greg Muttitt's revealing analysis of last month's Oil Ministry announcement in Iraq confirms the brazen foundations of the slaughter that has taken place since 2003...

Last week saw the biggest step so far towards transferring Iraqi oil into the hands of foreign multinational companies, sparking renewed accusations that the US-UK war on Iraq was really motivated by an oil grab.

The Oil Ministry announced on 30 June that foreign oil companies would be invited to bid for contracts to develop six of Iraq’s largest oilfields, which together contain around half of the country’s known oil reserves.

Yet most commentators missed the significance of the move – that it would give away more to foreign companies than had been planned at any point since the Constitution was written in 2005, and possibly more than any major oil producer has given since the colonial era.

The contracts were (with one exception) for the second stage of development of the oilfields, to come after the one- or two-year no-bid contracts that the Ministry has been privately negotiating with Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total and four smaller companies. The Ministry had also intended to sign those last week, but has delayed signing to some time this month.

To understand what’s at stake, we need to take a short diversion into some oil industry contract terminology. Last week’s announcement was of longer-term “risk service contracts” (RSCs), a kind of half-way house in the range of contract types.

The shorter (no-bid) contracts that would come first are known as “technical service contracts” (TSCs), where companies simply act as contractors to a government client who calls the shots, for a fixed fee – albeit with some strange features that I described in my last article for niqash.

These are contrasted with what the companies really want in Iraq – the dreaded “production sharing agreements” (PSAs), which would give them control over the fields, a large share of the oil extracted, and the potential for huge profits.

Last week’s RSCs are somewhere between TSCs and PSAs. It’s a model that has been used in Latin America, and is very similar to the “buyback contracts” used in Iran. The foreign company invests the capital (like in a PSA), but rather than getting a share of the oil, it gets a specified rate of return on its investment (say, 15%). And after a number of years, the oilfield reverts to national control. The government has not released the details of the contracts; but it appears they would be for either 7 or 9 years (in contrast to 22 years for a PSA or 1-2 years for a TSC).

The Oil Minister made much of the fact that he was not offering PSAs – to reassure Iraqis that they need not fear a great giveaway.

But that the contracts were not PSAs misses the point. All six of the fields – Rumaila, Kirkuk, West Qurna, Zubair, Maysan and Bai Hasan – are already producing oil, and actually together account for more than 90% of Iraq’s current production. As such, their investment and technology needs are relatively minor, and could easily be provided within the public sector, as they have been for more than 30 years.

Ever since the Constitution was written in 2005, Iraqi oil policy has been that fields already producing oil would stay in Iraqi hands – and that only for new, undeveloped fields would development contracts be offered to foreign companies. Even the draft Oil Law – which has been so controversial for giving away too much – required that fields already producing oil would be “managed and operated” by the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC).

That policy was reversed last week – giving the “backbone of Iraq’s oil production” (in the Minister’s own words) also to foreign companies – fields that were never going to be on offer in any form. It remains to be seen what happens to new fields.

The positive portrayal of a negative step was repeated when the Minister also emphasised that companies would have to “give” at least a 25% stake in each project to INOC. But this was never the companies’ to give – in fact, the true implication of the announcement is that they may take 75% away from INOC.

Even for new fields, a 25% INOC stake would have been derisory. Libya, for instance, requires a public stake of around 80% for new exploration contracts (and for much smaller fields than Iraq’s). Nigeria, which is seen as one of the OPEC members most friendly to western companies, requires that the Nigeria National Petroleum Company take a 55% stake in onshore projects.

It was in the 1950s, as the colonial era was coming to a close, that a minimum of 51% became the norm in major oil producers. Now Iraq appears to be stepping back to the age of subjugation to the interests of foreign powers. Hardly the progressive move the Minister claimed.

For the most part, the international media were willing to accept the spin about how Iraq would get a great deal – some reports even celebrated how the companies were charitably “helping” Iraq rebuild its oil sector. The coverage clearly signified how far the Iraqi oil debate has been twisted over the last five years.

Iraqi oil policy, and mainstream discussion of it, have rested on two assumptions: that Iraq’s oil can only be effectively developed by the western oil majors, and that the contracts offered have to provide for the companies’ needs (or sometimes the oil market’s needs) first and foremost. Consistently absent has been any conception of what is in the best interests of the Iraqi people.

The big question is why the Oil Ministry would want to bring in the multinationals for these fields. The Ministry is not short of cash: in fact, it has been consistently unable to spend the funds provided to it, so is now sitting on billions of dollars that could be invested in the fields. And technology can easily be purchased, whilst Iraqis maintained the management of the fields.

The true explanation seems almost too obvious for most commentators to spot. One radio interviewer asked me “Why shouldn’t the Iraqi government sign these contracts if it wants to? – it’s not as if someone’s holding a gun to their head”.

In fact, that is exactly what is being held to Iraqis’ heads. Or more precisely, over 150,000 guns.

The Iraqi government owes its very existence to the foreign troops that remain in the country. And with the occupiers playing a greater role than the Iraqi electorate in whether the government stands or falls, it is inevitable that the government will respond more to the views of the former.

Last week, the New York Times revealed that US advisers had helped shape the new contracts. The State Department responded that its advice was purely technical, and gave the example of helping draft arbitration clauses. Those clauses, which determine how the contracts will be adjudicated outside the country by secretive investment courts, would probably be seen by most Iraqis as rather more than a technical issue. But for the USA, for multinational companies to run the industry is simply a natural way of doing things.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey added that the US role is similar to that of a lawyer helping a client draw up a will. It was an apt analogy. The USA sees Iraq’s economy as in its dying throes, and is helping the Iraqi government decide how much of its estate to bequeath to BP, Shell or Exxon.

But all is not yet lost for advocates of Iraqi sovereignty over its oil. Companies are not to bid for the contracts until next March, and signing is not expected until summer 2009 – giving plenty of time for the policy to change. During this time, the political landscape will alter significantly following the departure of the Bush/Cheney administration.

And the so-far successful Iraqi campaign against oil privatisation continues to make progress. According to press reports, the Oil Minister has finally agreed to open the technical service contracts to parliamentary scrutiny before they are signed. This is a welcome move, although it needs to be extended: all Iraqis should have a right to know what is being done to their natural resources.

For the US administration, it might seem like a dangerously radical idea to let Iraqis decide the future of their oil. But with Cheney and Bush on their way out, there may even be a prospect that the idea will take hold.

Greg Muttitt is an expert on Iraqi oil policy, which he has been studying since the start of the occupation in 2003. Working for the independent British charity PLATFORM, he has argued throughout that decisions about the future of Iraq’s oil should be made by the Iraqi people, free from external pressure.

War Crimes: remedial class

2008-08-02T02:28:00.000-07:00

The ever balanced, objective and impartial BBC really is pulling out all the stops with its coverage of the Radovan Karadzic trial. As part of a dedicated Karadzic sub-section on the corporation's website entitled ‘Search For Justice’, readers of all ages are even treated to a handy guide to what constitutes war crimes.
"Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: 'Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including... wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.'

This, international lawyers say, is the basic definition of war crimes."

Useful revision, in anyone’s book. Nice one, the Beeb.

But why is it that such studious, publically-funded research is only appropriate when the West’s official enemies are in the dock?

Mystifyingly, when US tanks and missiles bulldoze Iraqi enclaves to dust, when civilians are tortured in nameless desert prisons, or innocents frogmarched without trial to Guantanamo, thumbing through the annals of international justice is apparently not required.

Rather, when “coalition” business is on the agenda, the BBC prefers to talk of “mistakes”.

"As is so often the case in this conflict it's the Iraqi civilian population which suffers the greatest loss of life - either as a result of mistakes by the Americans, or, far more frequently, of course, as a result of the bombs and the bullets of the insurgents." (Nicholas Witchell, BBC News, September 2004)

But of course.

To glance at other versions of the above events, however, as a Media Lens report of 2004 shows us, is to discover an altogether different picture.

'"Our troops continue to die but we can't even identify the enemy, which is why so many innocent Iraqi civilians - including women and children - are being blown away. The civilians are being killed by the thousands." (Bob Herbert, 'A War Without Reason,' The New York Times, October 18, 2004)

Ex-Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey was honourably discharged last year after 12 years as a Marine. Massey was in the main invasion force all the way to Baghdad, before his battalion was moved to Karbala.

In an interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman entitled, 'Ex-US Marine: I killed civilians in Iraq', Massey said: "It sickened me so that I had actually brought it up to my lieutenant, and I told him, I said, you know, sir, we're not going to have to worry about the Iraq - you know, we're basically committing genocide over here, mass extermination of thousands of Iraqis..."

Massey reported many shootings of civilians in cars at checkpoints and described how his own unit had machine-gunned peaceful protestors. He also described the effect of bombing: "They had tractor-trailer beds full of bodies. It was so bad - this is because of the bombing that we did - some of them had Iraqi flags on them, representing that they were a soldier, but 80% of them didn't. We would find tractor trailers literally full of stocked bodies."

Massey's conclusion:

"Marines are trained from day one that you go in - when you go in to boot camp you learn what the Geneva Convention is, what the rules of the Geneva Convention are, what the rules of engagement. However, Iraq violated every rule of engagement that I have ever been taught - violated every rule of the Geneva Convention that I have been taught. If you have young marines coming up you to and asking you, staff sergeant, what's going on? You know, we have got a problem."'

For my money, this kind of revision seems a little more pertinent.

Why then, one wonders, did Sgt. Massey’s keenly contextualised critique of a systematic violation of the Geneva Convention never appear on the BBC website? What about his confession of genocide, of mass extermination?

As the sanctimonious Karadzic circus plays out, the lessons laid down by our flagship media machines are clear: there is a time and a place to brandish international legal statutes.

But we need not let the BBC’s diligent research end here. We can carry on the good work ourselves. For starters, if we scan through the Article 147 criteria above, we might find that we are reading a near-exact record of “coalition” behaviour in Iraq since 2003.

If that’s not a useful Compare and Contrast exercise, I don’t know what is.

Try it, kids. Go through the list and tick them off.

All papers to be left on my desk as you leave class.

Wholesale terrorism: a reprehensible cycle of sanctioned slaughter

2008-07-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

That being the only way to describe the US/NATO regime’s self-styled “stabilising mission” in

Afghanistan

, which continues with the most unspeakable consequences.

The more keen-eyed reader will, perhaps, have glimpsed a version of the below at some point this month. Maybe.

US air strike wiped out Afghan wedding pa rty, inquiry finds
A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an official inquiry found today. The bride was among the dead.
Another nine people were wounded in Sunday's attack, the head of the Afghan government investigation, Burhanullah Shinwari, said.
"We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the air strikes and another nine were wounded," said Shinwari, who is also the deputy speaker of Afghanistan's senate.
"They were all civilians and had no links with the Taliban or al-Qaida." Around 10 people were missing and believed to be still under rubble, he said. The inquiry team were shown the bloodied clothes of women and children in a visit to the scene.
The Red Cross said 250 people had been killed or wounded in five days of military action and militant attacks in the past week.

Please – please – reflect on this for a moment.

Re-read it, and reflect.

And then consider that this incident caused barely a ripple in the apparently news-hungry pages of the UK’s mainstream press. Relegated deep into to mid-section obscurity by the ‘quality’ dailies – if covered at all – the deaths of 39 innocent women and children barely scratched the surface. The silence is mystifying.

The Times granted the massacre a total of 43 words – tacked onto the end of a piece, no less, which reported that nine British troops had been injured in a ‘friendly fire’ incident in Afghanistan. (For a full and frank discussion of this remarkable disparity, see the Media Lens report Some Matter M ore – wh en 47 lives are worth 43 words.)

And then, let us glance at the annals of six years ago:

No US apology over wedding bombing

US military officials in Afghanistan have refused to apologise following the mistaken bombing of an Afghan wedding party on Monday which killed at least 30 people, insisting that aircraft had come under sustained and hostile fire.
Afghans claim the wedding guests, who were celebrating near Deh Rawud village, in the mountainous province of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar, had been firing into the air - a Pashtun wedding tradition - when American planes struck.
The Pentagon has admitted that one of its bombs was "errant" and missed the target, but has refused to confirm that a missile hit the wedding party.
US forces killed 15 people in the same province in January in a firefight which they later admitted was "ill-advised".

A question: what does the concept of one’s ‘wedding day’ signify in this society? What thoughts, allusions, excitements and considerations are evoked by the thought of this occasion?

In turn, then, can we even countenance the kind of reality experienced by the obliterated Afghan communities above?

Another question: how many victims died in the London bombings of 2005? The outpouring of grief for those 52 souls still reverberates today. And rightly so. But what world do we live in where a wedding party of 47 civilians can be bombed from the air (I am referring here to the massacre of a few Sundays ago in Kacu, rather than the identikit 2002 episode in Deh Rawud, lest there be any confusion) and the ‘event’ register little more than a flicker on our social and moral radars?

I use the example of the London bombings with deliberate precision. Because our presence in Afghanistan, like it is in Iraq, is wholesale terrorism of the most horrific nature, carried out specifically for Western interests at the cost of people who have been deemed officially disposable.

As Tariq Ali asserts: “To portray the invasion [of Afghanistan] as a ‘war of self-defence’ for Nato makes a mockery of international law, which was perverted to twist a flukishly successful attack by a tiny, terrorist Arab groupuscule into an excuse for an open-ended American military thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia.”

Since 2001, Afghanistan has become a central theatre for reconstituting and extending the West’s power-political grip on the world order - at any cost. The agreement signed by the US with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan, potentially including nuclear missiles.

Our governments are liars and murderers, and our flagship media outlets complicit in the attendant slaughter. And the lives of Afghan children and women are, officially, superfluous.

Moral anaesthesia
Let us consider for a moment that at around the time of the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, Franco’s employment of German planes for airstrikes caused widespread outrage, for the now-inconceivable reason that bombing from the air was then considered utterly inhumane – even in warfare.

Yet eighty years on, it is genuinely routine to read of the most shocking atrocities carried out in just such a manner – and in situations officially deemed to be “humanitarian security operations”, let alone those designated “war”.

Moreover, it is not simply the methods of mass, state-sanctioned violence that are today normalised as judicious and necessary by our mainstream media and its readers, but the inestimable human costs of such methods, too.

What is it that indurates us to such crimes when they happen to Afghans and Iraqis? Their regularity, perhaps? Their remoteness, certainly. But there must be more…

Let us try to imagine what the response would be if a wedding party was bombed to death, with hi-tech airborne weapons, in the UK. Is it even possible to square such inexpressible levels of violence with our own ‘civilised’ reality? On a summer’s day in Brighton, the lives of 47 innocents eviscerated in a thunderous clap of splintered concrete and screaming and blood?

And then imagine if exactly the same incident occurred again, six years later.

What could we expect to float across our screens and front pages? Confidently, we can speculate that the events would be described as the most acutely shocking human injustice in modern history, garlanded by an avalanche of column inches, television reports and Hollywood movies stretching across the next decade – amid the tears, hysteria and wrecked lives of course.

The overarching answer to many of the above questions lies, of course, in considering what the response of the average UK citizen would be if they were asked what US/UK/Canadian/NATO "coalition" forces were and are actually doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. What would they answer? What would you answer? Why?

The near-total corporate media smokescreen in regard to the unilateral and geopolitical reasons for the instances of “military action” in Afghanistan described at the top of this piece (as distinct, of course, from "militant attacks") goes a long way towards illuminating the extraordinary chasm which separates our tears for London 2005 and our ambivalence for Afghan brides and Iraqi children.

Contrary to the daily flood of establishment-exonerating propaganda which swills through our flagship media channels, we must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the appalling human cost being levied upon the world’s innocent citizens as a result of our governments’ actions.

Those being strategic, violent, immoral occupation of sovereign territories.

Countless thousands of Afghans have been killed in a “war” which has raged for seven years. Life expectancy stands at 44, and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world.

This is their reality.

Roll up, roll up – the Karadzic circus is in town

2008-07-22T05:19:00.000-07:00

Archetypal war criminal Radovan Karadzic, perpetrator of the West's favourite modern slaughter episode, Srebrenica, is finally in the clink. And don't we just love it.

Watch out for a media/establishment avalanche of terms like "massacre", "genocide", "war crimes", "cronies" and "evil" over the coming days, along with breathtaking phrases such as "worst war crimes since the Second World War".

One news report alone on Radio 4 (AKA "Good news"), aired this morning, contained all of the above.

Incredibly, it followed a lengthy discussion of troop levels in Iraq, which contained nothing other than phrases such as "the lessons learned since 2003" and "safeguarding reconstruction and development", in response to Gordon Brown's latest announcement of a gradual reduction in Britain's "interventionist" presence on Basra's streets.

Perhaps most eye-watering was the inclusion, in the strident Karadzic item, of the words of the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal: "This arrest sends out a message that the international community will not tolerate war crimes, and that all fugitives will be brought to justice."

The first half of the sentence is so laughable as to warrant almost no attention; the second half - while almost as devoid of meaning - pricks the ear because it reminds us of those to whom law does not apply. Officially-sanctioned "fugitives" will be brought to justice, of course, but presumably not those persons who are now forging lucrative careers on the international speaking circuit and/or as "peace envoys" to the Middle East?

The volume and nature of the reporting splashed across this morning’s mainstream media could not be clearer: no amount of opprobrium is enough for certain crimes - such as the murder of 8,000 Muslims in a Bosnian town. Other acts of violence, both brazen, systemic and genuinely catastrophic in scope, however, are apparently not worthy of such keen critique.

This while Iraq lies in ruins, more than a million of its people dead, tortured, abused, starved; while Afghan wedding parties perish under cascades of 2000lb bombs as their country is strategically raped; while the US violates the UN Charter at will, rendition flights touch down at UK-operated bases and the outrage of Guantanamo remains; and while a Western monopoly on nuclear weapons is underwritten by acts of unspeakable international aggression.

A tribe called quest: Uni days hark back to a time of plenty

2008-05-10T14:32:00.000-07:00

Regardless of the Government's morbid fear of the impending day that an entire generation of spotty British teenagers question their all but automatic conscription into University (read: an ever-more-efficient production line of well-heeled, tax-paying, loan-swallowing, consumerist middle-class planners), those halcyon student days of calculated sloth and weak Carling remain a Holy Grail of sorts.

University is the closest thing to a reinscription of hunter-gatherer society we unappreciative grads will ever experience. The food/water/shelter sources are artificial, of course, but the social parameters - and their manifold benefits - are broadly the same. Rampant individualism aside, those horizontal days offered glimpses of a golden age.

Eating, sleeping and working together in close-knit community, maximum four hours per day dedicated to situational survival (attending minimum-quota lectures on corporate ethics/skewering venison), and almost limitless time for recreation and lovemaking - no wonder those years are traditionally referred to as 'the best years of your life.'

But isn't it also surprising, then, how readily we post-Uni masses trot out the 'lazy fucking students' line - in the same breath as giddily recalling such luxuriating freedom? Somehow we have unquestioningly internalised our own wage-slaving oppression - accepting that the communal heaven we acknowledge our University years to have been is now, "obviously", impossible.

Flamini: a lament

2008-05-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

Mathieu, Mathieu,
Adieu, adieu,
My sorrow knows no bounds,
To red and black
Your vigour snatched,
And all our hopes are drowned

Those unkempt locks
Flew box to box,
Gattuso snarled in vain,
Yet now with him
French fervour swims
While we absorb the pain

Could we have stopped
Your brutal hop?
Might we have stayed your hand?
A terrace chime?
A cunning rhyme?
(A weekly 90 grand?)

What price such might,
Such poise, such fight?
No less than Carrick’s fee,
Instead, forsooth!
The awful truth:
He’s gone – and on a free

A club distraught,
A fighter short,
Somewhere, somehow, we failed,
No sweet Sixteen
For Arsene’s dream,
This feisty ship has sailed

But hey, his choice,
So with one voice
Let Gooners doff their hats,
To say farewell
(Suppress the hell)
And thank you: nice one, Mat…

…You fucking twat.