John Pilger: There isn't a war ON terror, there is a war OF terror

john pilger on youtube...




a john pilger bio...

John Pilger was born and grew up in Bondi, Sydney, Australia. He launched his first newspaper at Sydney High School and later completed a four year cadetship with Australian Consolidated Press. "It was one of the strictest language courses I know," he says. "Devised by a celebrated, literate editor, Brian Penton, the aim was economy of language and accuracy. It certainly taught me to admire writing that was spare, precise and free of cliches, that didn't retreat into the passive voice and used adjectives only when absolutely necessary. I have long since slipped that leash, but those early disciplines helped shape my journalism and writing and my understanding of moving and still pictures".

Like many of his Australian generation, Pilger and two colleagues left for Europe in the early 1960s. They set up an ill-fated freelance 'agency' in Italy (with the grand title of 'Interep') and quickly went broke. Arriving in London, Pilger freelanced, then joined Reuters, moving to the London Daily Mirror, Britain's biggest selling newspaper, which was then changing to a serious tabloid.

He became chief foreign correspondent and reported from all over the world, covering numerous wars, notably Vietnam. Still in his twenties, he became the youngest journalist to receive Britain's highest award for journalism, Journalist of the Year and was the first to win it twice. Moving to the United States, he reported the upheavals there in the late 1960s and 1970s. He marched with America's poor from Alabama to Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. He was in the same room when Robert Kennedy, the presidential candidate, was assassinated in June 1968.

His work in South East Asia produced a iconic issue of the London Mirror, devoted almost entirely to his world exclusive dispatches from Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot's reign. The combined impact of his Mirror reports and his subsequent documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, raised almost $50 million for the people of that stricken country. Similarly, his 1994 documentary and dispatches report from East Timor, where he travelled under cover, helped galvanise support for the East Timorese, then occupied by Indonesia.

In Britain, his four-year investigation on behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide, and left out of the settlement with the drugs company, resulted in a special settlement.

His numerous documentaries on Australia, notably The Secret Country (1983), the bicentary trilogy The Last Dream (1988) and Welcome to Australia (1999) all celebrated and revealed much of his own country's 'forgotten past', especially its indigenous past and present.

He has won an Emmy and a BAFTA for his documentaries, which have also won numerous US and European awards, such as as the Royal Television Society's Best Documentary.

His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Aftonbladet (Sweden), Il Manifesto (Italy). He writes a regular column for the New Statesman, London. In 2001, he curated a major exhibition at the London Barbican, Reporting the World: John Pilger's Eyewitness Photographers, a tribute to the great black-and-white photographers he has worked alongside. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigous Sophie Prize for '30 years of exposing injustice and promoting human rights.' In 2009, he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

His latest film is The War You Don't See (2010), which was premiered in London both in the cinema and on telelvision.

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John Pilger: I have read almost every scrap of evidence in [the Julian Assange case] and it's clear ... that no crime was committed.

you know that if assange is extradited to sweden, it will be a very short period of time before sweden hands him over to the u.s... while i certainly don't have any special insight in to the particulars of the allegations against assange in sweden, i do know that sexual entrapment is the oldest kind of dirty trick and the incidences of it being used right up to the present day are legion...

an extract from an interview of pilger conducted by the swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter...

[T]he attempt to extradite Assange is unjust and political. I have read almost every scrap of evidence in this case and it's clear, in terms of natural justice, that no crime was committed. The case would not have got this far had it not been for the intervention of Claes Borgstrom, a politician who saw an opportunity when the Stockholm prosecutor threw out almost all the police allegations. Borgstrom was then in the middle of an election campaign. When asked why the case was proceeding when both women had said that the sex had been consensual with Assange, he replied, "Ah, but they're not lawyers." If the Supreme Court in London rejects Assange's appeal, the one hope is the independence of the Swedish courts. However, as the London Independent has revealed, Sweden and the US have already begun talks on Assange's "temporary surrender" to the US - where he faces concocted charges and the prospect of unlimited solitary confinement. And for what? For telling epic truths. Every Swede who cares about justice and the reputation of his or her society should care deeply about this.

[...]

One of the most fundamental human rights - that of the presumption of innocence - has been breached over and over again in Assange's case. Convicted of no crime, he has been the object of character assassination -perfidious and inhuman - and highly political smear, of which the evidence is voluminous. This is what Britain's most distinguished and experienced human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, has written: "Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions ... it is very hard to preserve for [Assange] any presumption of innocence. He has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country. [And] his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged."

pilger goes on to point out that it was the original wikileaks revelations contained cables that described the close and secret relationship sweden maintains with both the u.s. and nato...

pilger...

[The] Swedish elite ... has forged sinister and obsequious links with Washington. These powerful people have every reason to see Julian Assange as a threat. For one thing, their vaunted reputation for neutrality has been repeatedly exposed as a sham in US cables leaked by WikiLeaks. One cable revealed that "the extent of [Sweden's military and intelligence] co-operation [with NATO] is not widely known" and unless kept secret "would open up the government to domestic criticism."

what a travesty...

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John Pilger: Obama is as reactionary and violent as George W. Bush, and in some ways he is worse

john pilger is right up there with chris hedges in his unvarnished critique of the crap that is piled on our heads daily by our handlers...

The width of a cigarette paper separates the Democratic and Republican parties on economic and foreign policies. Both represent the super rich and the impoverishment of a nation from which trillions of tax dollars have been transferred to a permanent war industry and banks that are little more than criminal enterprises. Obama is as reactionary and violent as George W. Bush, and in some ways he is worse. His personal speciality is the use of Hellfire missile-armed drones against defenceless people. Under cover of a partial withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, he has sent US special forces to 120 countries where death squads are trained. He has revived the old cold war on two fronts: against China in Asia and with a "shield" of missiles aimed at Russia. The first black president has presided over the incarceration and surveillance of greater numbers of  black people than were enslaved in 1850. He has prosecuted more whistleblowers - truth-tellers - than any of his predecessors.  His vice-president, Joe Biden, a zealous warmonger, has called WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange a "hi-tech terrorist".  Biden has also converted to the cause of gay marriage.

One of America's true heroes is the gay soldier Bradley Manning, the whistleblower alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with the epic evidence of American carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the Obama administration that smeared his homosexuality as weird, and it was Obama himself who declared a man convicted of no crime to be guilty.

[...]

The truth is that what matters to those who aspire to control our lives is not skin pigment or gender, or whether or not we are gay, but the class we serve. The goals are to ensure that we look inward on ourselves, not outward to others and never comprehend the sheer scale of undemocratic power, and to that we collaborate in isolating those who resist. This attrition of criminalising, brutalising and banning protest can too easily turn western democracies into states of fear.

[...]

That is why the people of Greece ought to be our inspiration. By their own painful experience they know their freedom can only be regained by standing up to the German Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and their own quislings in Athens. People across Latin America have achieved this: the indignados of Bolivia who saw off the water privateers and the Argentinians who told the IMF what to do with their debt. The courage of disobedience was their weapon. Remember Bradley Manning.

greece is offering us a model and a template for what we should be opting for in the way of resistance to the inexorable takeover by our super-rich elites... i am reasonably sure spain will be next up...

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The war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles

john pilger...

Since the Second World War, the US has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name – from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable...

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism, and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy ("Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

[...]

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognizable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy." This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

there are times - and today is one of them - when i'd almost rather not know the truth...

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Hating on Chomsky for telling the truth

there's nothing in today's world more guaranteed to earn vitriol, hatred and death threats than telling the truth...

In a move likely to spark another annual round of healthy controversy, the veteran American linguist, social scientist and human rights campaigner Noam Chomsky was named 2011 winner of the Sydney Peace Prize last night.

Professor Chomsky said he was honoured by the award, whose previous recipients include the South African cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi and the Australian journalist John Pilger.

In recent weeks the 82-year-old has been one of America's most-hated men, subjected to ''obscenities, intellectual hysteria and death threats'' over remarks following the shooting of Osama bin Laden.

The al-Qaeda leader's crimes, he wrote, were vastly exceeded by those of the former president George Bush. ''We might ask how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at his compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic.''

Professor Chomsky said the ill-considered American operation had pushed the world to the brink of war, possibly even nuclear war. ''The commandos who violated Pakistani sovereignty were given orders to fight their way out if necessary. They risked coming into confrontation with the Pakistani army."

as jack nicholson playing colonel nathan r. jessup so famously said, "you can't HANDLE the truth...!"

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The uprising in Egypt has discredited every Western media stereotype about the Arabs

john pilger...

The uprising in Egypt has discredited every Western media stereotype about the Arabs. The courage, determination, eloquence and grace of those in Liberation Square contrast with “our” specious fear-mongering with its al-Qaeda and Iran bogeys and iron-clad assumptions, bereft of irony, of the “moral leadership of the West”. It is not surprising that the recent source of truth about the imperial abuse of the Middle East, WikiLeaks, is itself subjected to craven, petty abuse in those self-congratulating newspapers that set the limits of elite liberal debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps they are worried. Across the world, public awareness is rising and bypassing them. In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Cairo’s Liberation Square must seem an inspiration. “We won’t stop,” said the young Egyptian woman on TV, “we won’t go home.” Try kettling a million people in the centre of London, bent on civil disobedience, and try imagining it could not happen.

can you imagine what's happening in tahrir square transcending national boundaries and spreading across the world...? men, women, old, young, christians, muslims, buddhists, light skin, dark skin, rich, poor, singing, holding hands, taking care of each other, knowing and believing in their own power and refusing to surrender it to the super-rich elites who have come to believe that it's their birthright to tell us all what to do...

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Barack Obama is merely upholding tradition

john pilger speaking on the 4th of july in san francisco...

from axis of logic via antemedius...

Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum's histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama's wars.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter noted that "everyone knew that terrible crimes had been committed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, but "US crimes in the same period have been only superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all". It is as if "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening . . . You have to hand it to America . . . masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

so...? what's to be done...?

again, john pilger...

I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term to me. "I'll tell you what 'anti-American' is," she said. "It's what governments and their vested interests call those who honour America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America's citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the South with the civil rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional."

here's a 32-minute video clip of pilger that tells most of the story...

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John Pilger - Freedom Next Time

from google video...

Australian journalist, author, film maker John Pilger speaks about global media consolidation, war by journalism, US military's quest for domination/hegemony in the post 9/11 era, false history in the guise of 'objective' journalism.

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John Pilger: "The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states"

needless to say, in my present situation in afghanistan, i hear a lot of people mouthing "democracy," "free market economy," "reform," and "capitalism"... not surprisingly, those from whom i hear those things the most are the few who have managed to profit the most from the mess that the country is in...

"Democracy" is now the free market – a concept itself berefet of freedom. "Reform" is now the denial of reform. "Economics" is the relegation of most human endeavour to material value, a bottom line. Alternative models that relate to the needs of the majority of humanity end up in the memory hole. And "governance" – so fashionable these days - means an economic system approved in Washington, Brussels and Davos. "Foreign policy" is service to the dominant power. Conquest is "humanitarian intervention". Invasion is "nation-building".

Every day, we breathe the hot air of these pseudo ideas with their pseudo truths and pseudo experts. They set the limits of public debate within the most advanced societies. They determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They manipulate our compassion and our anger and make many of us feel there is nothing we can do. Take the "war on terror". This is an entirely bogus idea that actually means a war of terror. Its aim is to convince people in the rich world that we all must live in an enduring state of fear: that Muslim fanatics are threatening our civilisation.

In fact, the opposite is true. The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states. Ask the people of Iraq, who in five years ago have seen the physical and social destruction of their country. President Bush calls this "nation-building". Ask the people of Afghanistan, who have been bombed back into the arms of the Taliban - this is known in the West as a "good war". Or the people of Gaza, who are denied water, food, medicines and hope by the forces of so-called civilisation. The list is long and the arithmetic simple. The greatest number of victims of this war of terror are not Westerners, but Muslims: from Iraq to Palestine, to the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria and beyond.

We are constantly told that September 11th 2001 was a day that changed the world and - according to John McCain - justifies a 100-year war against America's perceived enemies. And yet, while the world mourned the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans, the UN routinely reported that the mortality rate of children dead from the effects of extreme poverty had not changed. The figure for September 11th 2001 was more than 36,000 children. That is the figure every day. It has not changed. It is not news.

The difference between the two tragedies is that the people who died in the Twin Towers in New York were worthy victims, and the thousands of children who die every day are unworthy victims. That is how many of us are programmed to perceive the world.

over the past few days, i have had several deep and passionate conversations with locals here who question me intensely on ways to change "the system," the term we have agreed best captures the powerful stranglehold the entrenched interests have on us all... i'm unable to give them the magic solution they're looking for simply because there isn't one... all i can say is that it's up to us, that we are all we have, and that it will be through each of us doing what we can, living our lives the way we know is right, and seizing opportunities to help others see the light that things will eventually change... the little understood fact is that revolution contains within it the seeds of its own gradual demise... for true systemic change to manifest, it will only be by letting our individual lights shine forth...

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The Iraq propaganda machine is running at top speed

the media is pulling out all the stops portraying iraq as now snatching victory from the jaws of defeat...

scotty's giving it everything he's got...

Cap’n... she canna take any more. She’s gonna blow!

check it out...

Iraqis are returning to their homeland by the hundreds each day, by bus, car and plane, encouraged by weeks of decreased violence and increased security, or compelled by visa and residency restrictions in neighboring countries and the depletion of their savings.

but wait...! we've learned the hard way that, for every media story that labors to convince us that something is true, there MUST be a hidden story somewhere, something they're NOT telling us, something that is usually the polar opposite of the story that's being pushed... and, by golly, who better to dig up the anti-story than robert parry...

While U.S. generals in Iraq have stressed the gentler aspects of their latest "surge" successes – and the American press has gone along by publishing front-page articles about new signs of normalcy in Baghdad – the darker side of the counterinsurgency has generally been shoved into brief stories deep inside the newspapers.

[...]

The harsh repression surrounding the “surge” has drawn far less U.S. press attention. The grim reality, however, is that an increasingly desperate American military has stepped up its indiscriminate killing and jailing of Iraqis, especially “military-age males” or MAMS.

[...]

Other tidbits of troubling information – which often end up below the fold on the inside pages of newspapers – reveal how Iraq steadily has been transformed into a more efficient police state than dictator Saddam Hussein could have ever imagined.

[...]

During a summer 2007 trip to Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies was briefed on U.S. plans to dramatically expand the number of Iraqis in American detention by the end of 2008. “The detainees have risen to over 18,000 and are projected to hit 30,000 (by the U.S. command) by the end of the year and 50,000 by the end of 2008,” Cordesman wrote in his trip report, adding that the vast majority were Sunnis. “Shiite detainees are often freed while Sunnis are warehoused,” he wrote.

[...]

The troubling picture is that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up to President Bush, has authorized “rules of engagement” that allow targeted killings – as well as other objectionable tactics including arbitrary arrests, “enhanced interrogations,” kidnappings of suspects in third countries with “extraordinary renditions” to countries that torture, secret CIA prisons, and “reeducation camps” for younger detainees.

[...]

In effect, Bush’s “global war on terror” appears to have reestablished what was known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist political allies.

Bush’s global strategy also has similarities to “Operation Condor” in which South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent assassins on cross-border operations to eliminate “subversives.”

[...]

Under Bush’s remarkable double standards, he has taken the position that he can override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who gets basic human rights and who doesn’t. He sees himself as the final judge of whether people he deems “bad guys” should live or die, or face indefinite imprisonment and even torture.

no surprises here, of course... it's business as usual for the bush administration and the united states, extending all the way back to the 60s...

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John Pilger's "War on Democracy"

all ten parts are available on youtube... this is part one...

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"We'll intervene whenever we decide it's in our national security interests to intervene, and if you don't like it, lump it."

a little background on the u.s. record for championing human rights and national sovereignty, and rejecting torture and death as a means of political control, set in the context of the western hemisphere institute for security cooperation (whinsec), formerly known as the school of the americas (* see below)...



john pilger interviews duane clarridge (** see below)...



and that youtube clip represents a part of our history we desperately need to know about that, for obvious reasons, seems to remain tucked away from public view... i probably wouldn't be nearly as aware of it myself had i not spent so much time in latin america... as i mentioned in a previous post on argentina's "guerra sucia" (dirty war), my home in buenos aires is a mere five blocks from the spot where many of the "disappeareds" were taken, a building that was also the hq of the argentine military criminals in charge of the guerra sucia, criminals trained by the school of the americas...

* After the legal authorization for the former School of the Americas was repealed in 2001 and the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation was established there were a number of changes at the school. A new human rights training program was developed and currently all students are given the option to attend classes, but are not required to receive the minimal eight hours of instruction in "human rights,^[10] as well as training in the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society." A "train the trainer" program was developed which equips students attending the course to return to their home country and establish human rights training classes of their own. In addition to that training other courses now focus on leadership development, counter-drug operations, peace support operations, disaster relief, or "any other matter the Secretary [of Defense] deems appropriate".

duane clarridge...

Duane Ramsdell "Dewey" Clarridge, (1932-) a CIA operative and supervisor for more than 30 years, became famous in the mid-1980s for his role in the Contra end of the Iran-Contra Affair. The brains behind the clandestine mining operations in the Nicaraguan port during the 1980s which many considered a state-sponsored terrorist activity, he is credited to have initiated the efforts for the establishment of the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA.

[...]

Clarridge was indicted in November 1991 on seven counts of perjury and false statements. However, on Christmas Eve 1992 in the waning hours of his presidency, George H. W. Bush pardoned Clarridge before his trial could finish. At the same time, Bush pardoned 5 of Clarridge's associates in the Iran-Contra Affair including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (in an unprecedented move, Weinberger was pardoned before his trial had even taken place), Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs; former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane; and former CIA employees Alan Fiers and Clair George.

again, folks, THAT'S our history, no matter how much we might want to pretend it isn't...

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