Many Angry Gerbils

NO2ID: Government to use "coercion" against us.

NO2ID have spotted the following in a document entitled "NIS Delivery Strategy -Aligning strategy and delivery", part of a Powerpoint presentation prepared some time in late 2007. You can download the document here but the key paragraph is this:

NO2ID write:

UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about "coercing" its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The 'ID card' is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident - creating what NO2ID calls 'the database state'.

NO2ID's national coordinator, Phil Booth, exhorted bloggers, freedom lovers and anyone who gives a damn about personal privacy to mirror the annotate document on their site.

"The charade is over. While ministers try to bamboozle the British public with fairytales about fingerprints, officials are plotting how to dupe and bully the population into surrendering control of their own identities."

"Biometric ID cards are a sham; a magician's flourish to cover the biggest identity fraud there has ever been."   

Suharto is Dead. So is History

So, the butcher Suharto is dead. Few will mourn the monster.

Today’s Independent on Sunday carries a lengthy obituary of the man and cannot avoid discussing the horror he wrought after his takeover in 1965:

Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region's bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between 500,000 and 1 million.

It’s a brutal legacy from which the Independent omits the more pertinent truth: the close involvement of the British Labour Government, under Harold Wilson and the US Democratic Administration under Lyndon Johnson. As the Foreign Office said in a statement to its embassy in Jakarta in October 1965:

It seems pretty clear that the Generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-Western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the Communists. In the short run, and while the present confusion continues, we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the Generals.

Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, had put this matter a little more succinctly only a few days earlier, when he remarked to the F.O. that “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”. It was considerably more than “a little shooting” for which the British offered their tacit support – as they well knew. In December 1965, a British official reported to the Ambassador that he was “readier to accept” American statistics that over 100,000 had been butchered, after receiving “horrifying” details of the purges. Such details recorded by the F. O. included,

[Some victims being] given a knife and invited to kill themselves. Most refuse and are told to turn around and are shot in the back.

A woman of 78... was taken away one night by a village execution squad... Half a dozen heads were neatly arranged on the parapet of a small bridge.

As the British consul in Medan summarized events,

Posing as saviours of the nation from a Communist terror, [the army] unleashed a ruthless terror of their own, the scars of which will take many years to heal.

Another memo referred to the purges as “an operation carried out on a very large scale and often with appalling savagery.”

What I must stress is that this was all done with clear UK (and US) knowledge and encouragement. All the quotations above are taken from official UK Government memoranda, published  by the Public Records Office and related in Chapter 19 of Mark Curtis’ excellent “Web of Deceit”. We learn further from these documents that the British Government was keen not to “distract” the Indonesian army from  its slaughter and that it assured Suharto that they had no intention of interfering. The UK also launched black propaganda operations from its MI6 base in Singapore, designed to lead people to believe that China was arming the PKI opposition and so "blacken [them] in the eyes of the army and the people of Indonesia". Indeed, Britain knew that it could stop, or at the very least seriously impede, the slaughter because it was engaged in a military confrontation with Indonesia in nearby Borneo -but they stressed to Suharto that, were he to divert troops from that stand-off to take part in the butchery, the UK would not take “military advantage”. British callousness to the brutal mass murder of “bewildered peasants” was truly awesome, with one official noting of one group of 10,005 arrestees that, “I hope they do not throw the 10,005 into the sea..., otherwise it will cause quite a shipping hazard.”

This is just a small sample of the record -directly concerning UK complicity in the most gruesome atrocities, all carried out under the pretence (and it was a pretence: the real 'threat' was left-wing nationalism endangering Western business interests) of combating Communism. For instance, I have not touched on our support for Suharto’s genocidal invasion of East Timor. Yet even this brief survey of complicity is lost beneath gallons of Independent whitewash. "Disgraced and villified" reads the headline but that's Suharto, not us. Suharto is dead. So is history.

"...we create our own reality..."

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

So spoke a White House aide in 2002, if the journalist Ron Suskind is to be believed.

George Bush - or those who prepare his lines - is trying to manufacture reality again. He has, so Newsweek reports, 'disowned' the recent National Intelligence Estimate and continues to maintain that Iran "were a threat, they are a threat, and they will be a threat if we don't work together to stop their enrichment."

Tellingly, I think, Bush has distanced himself from the NIE, stating that he "defended our intelligence services, but made it clear that they're an independent agency; that they come to conclusions separate from what [he] may or may not want". It raises an interesting question that Bush, or any other leader, should "want" any conclusion at all from their intelligence services. Surely, that would suggest that they might be hoping to use intelligence findings to support rather than shape a policy? Surely not.

Nevertheless, we should all be worried. The intelligence agencies, perhaps still smarting from being traduced so roundly after the Iraq debacle and perhaps even desperate to prevent the US from blundering into another disaster, took measures to prevent their work being cherry-picked as it had been in 2002/03. Yet the White House appears intent on ignoring them and doubtless manufacturing a new pretext for bombing. The best hope, so far, is that other arms of the US Government will curb the crazies but this cannot be relied upon.

What is really needed is action from the US people -the only people who really matter in all of this. We can rely on journalists to study -and applaud- while the White House continues to make its own reality. The rest of us cannot afford to do the same.

A sliver of hope.

The chances of this going anywhere must be one in 10,000. Nevertheless, it represents progress of a kind. I still firmly believe that we are becoming more civilised as a species, even if that cannot be said for the cadre who control us.

12th January 2007

Press Release: Scotland Yard to investigate Tony Blair and ex-Attorney General Peter Goldsmith for war crimes
 
  Press Conference,
  Room C, 1 Parliament Street (just off Parliament Square)
  Tuesday 15th January 2008 3pm
 
 John McDonnell MP and members of the Campaign to Make War History will brief MPs and the media on allegations of war crimes committed against the people of Iraq by Britain's former Prime Minister and former Attorney General.

Officers from Scotland Yard have commenced a criminal investigation into the deaths of Iraqi citizens killed during the armed invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Metropolitan Police are acting in response to crimes reported by peace activists from We Are Change UK and The Campaign to Make War History. In an unprecedented step, the case was handed to the War Crimes division of the Counter Terrorism branch who are now investigating allegations of 14 criminal offences committed by Tony Blair, Lord Goldsmith and others. The offences are under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which came into effect under English common law, just two days before 9/11.

Two Members of We Are Change UK and a representative from the Campaign to Make War History were interviewed for six hours at Belgravia Police station on the 20th December 2007. Evidence was provided to the police relating to the crimes of:-

• genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and conduct ancillary to these crimes under Sections 51 and 52 of The International Criminal Court Act 2001.
• a crime against peace and complicity in a crime against peace under Articles 6 and 7 of The Nuremburg Principles.
• murder, incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.
• conspiracy to commit genocide, a crime against humanity and war crimes under the Criminal Law Act 1977.

  Details of the alleged breaches of international treaties and violations of the laws of war will be provided at the meeting.

Contacts:-
  John McDonnell MP: 020 7219 6908;
  Chris Coverdale (The Campaign to Make War History): 020 8540 2865;
Simon Moore: 0208 560 1319 and Rob Little: 07915 063322 (We Are Change UK)
 press@wearechange.org.uk

             

Why not contact a news provider and ask them to cover this? Media Lens have a list of useful contacts here.

We're living in the past.

It’s official: those who think Israel is subject to international law are living in the past. So said George W. Bush at his press conference today.

In response to an entirely reasonable question, why Iraq under Saddam Hussein was subject to UN resolutions but Israel is not, Bush replied as follows:

...look, the U.N. deal didn't work in the past. And so now we're going to have an opportunity to redefine the future by having a state negotiated between an elected leader of the Palestinian people, as well as the Prime Minister of Israel. This is an opportunity to move forward. And the only way for — the only way to defeat the terrorists in the long run is to offer an alternative vision that is more hopeful. And that's what we're attempting to do, sir.

We can stay stuck in the past, which will yield nothing good for the Palestinians, in my judgment. We can chart a hopeful future, and that's exactly what this process is intending to do; to redefine the future for the Palestinian citizens and the Israelis.

I'm confident that two democratic states living side by side in peace is in the interests not only of the Palestinians and the Israelis, but of the world. The question is whether or not the hard issues can be resolved and the vision emerges, so that the choice is clear amongst the Palestinians -- the choice being, do you want this state, or do you want the status quo? Do you want a future based upon a democratic state, or do you want the same old stuff? And that's a choice that I'm confident that if the Palestinian people are given, they will choose peace.

And so that's what we're trying to do, sir.

Of course, Bush does not mention – and I doubt any journalist will mention – that the US is the reason why the “UN deal” didn’t work in the past. 40 years of unilateral rejectionism and support for Israeli criminality ensured that the international law did not apply. Now this failure is itself being used as a justification for dispensing with even the pretence of the UN.

Notice too that only Palestinian terrorism is the problem and only the Palestinians need to choose peace. If they do that, in other words prostrate themselves before the US and Israel, they will be thrown the scraps of a ‘state’.

This is power scarcely clothed by rhetoric but, as ever, the media nods its head and respectfully applauds.

Polishing the Facts.

Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph had an interesting little story that the Israeli Government is set to warn President Bush, when he visits Israel this week, that Iran is intent on becoming a new superpower and is developing missiles that will eventually rain nuclear hell fire down on Europe and the world. Israel is “furious” that the recent US NIE judged that Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons and this is clearly a part of their redoubled efforts to get us all to soil ourselves in the shadow of The Next Hitler.

You don’t have to be Machiavelli to twig that the Israeli Government would not wait until Bush had arrived on their soil to ‘warn’ him of anything -they're both on the telephone. Instead, the ‘warning’ is intended for us -to make us afraid and thereby manufacture sufficient quiescence in Europe and the US to permit further hostile action against Iran and, indirectly, advance Israel’s programme to exterminate the Palestinians. You can read the article for yourself but it’s not what I’m about today. What caught my attention instead was a small but rather neat illustration of how the propaganda system operates and how facts can be ground and reshaped to fit current needs. This is, I confess, a small, perhaps even trivial, example but I found it interesting. The Telegraph article contains the following paragraph:

The Sunday Telegraph revealed last year how Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were spending billions of pounds on upgrading their armed forces to contain the growing threat from Iran.

Now, this is accurate in so far as it goes but one has to go back to the original reporting – from July and August last year – to see the whole truth.

Yes, these countries are spending billions on new arms. But, as the Telegraph reported at the time, it was the US who announced last summer that it had “agreed arms deals with Arab allies worth billions of dollars in an attempt to counter 'negative influences' such as Iran, Syria, and al-Qa'eda in the Middle East.” What is more, it seems clear that half a dozen Middle Eastern governments did not all decide to buy new toys at the same time. Rather, as the Arms Control Association reported last September, it was a US initiative – they offered the deal and announced their proposals before the fine detail had been worked out.

The US justified their policy of fighting fire with petrol on the grounds that the arms would help “bolster forces of “moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al-Qaida, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran.” Those forces of “moderation” include leading torturers like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two countries with gruesome human rights records. A further irony is that, by further arming the Saudi dictatorship, the US is propping up the most fundamentalist regime on earth (the one with whom the British Government, if not the British people, has “shared values”) and the state that supplies  approximately 40% of the relatively tiny contingent of ‘foreign terrorists’ in Iraq. The deal also plausibly serves to counter potential Russian and Chinese influence in the region.

Returning to my point, explicitly, the US publicised the deal as a counterweight to the Iranian “threat” and it seems clear that it was they who were the motivating force. Now, five months later, the fact that the ME states bought arms is presented as evidence of an Iranian threat but the agency is reversed. It’s like a shyster travelling door to door selling people rat traps on the basis that there is an infestation. A few months later, the shyster then points to a local newspaper story about the number of people who’ve bought traps as evidence that residents must fear there’s an infestation.  It’s all very neat, very likely unconscious, and is carried out with no actual dishonesty. All that is required is to strip away a small amount of journalistically expendable but vital context. It was only the faintest twinge of memory that prompted me to look into it at all but, once I did, it was literally only a moment's reading to recover the lost context. Yet, most people, occupied with every day life, will not know there was a context to be missed. And that's propaganda: the effacement and distortion of memory. It’s a small nugget from the propaganda mill but an instructive one.