http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/1014
Behind America's Facade
By John Pilger
New Statesman
The destruction caused by Katrina has enabled us to glimpse realities that
are usually carefully hidden away. And what we discover is that New Orleans
and Baghdad are not so far apart.
When I lived in the United States in the late 1960s, my home was often New
Orleans, in a friend's rambling grey clapboard house that stood in a section
of the city where civil rights campaigners had taken refuge from the
violence of the Deep South. New Orleans was said to be cosmopolitan; it was
also sinister and murderous. We were protected by the then district
attorney, Jim Garrison, a liberal maverick whose investigations into the
assassination of John Kennedy were to make powerful enemies behind "the
Facade".
The Facade was how we described the dividing line between the America of
real life - of a poverty so profound that slavery was still a presence and
of a rapacious state power that waged war against its own citizens, just as
it did against black and brown-skinned people in faraway countries - and the
America that spawned the greed of corporatism and invented public relations
as a means of social control ("The American Dream" and "The American Way of
Life" began as advertising slogans).
The wilful neglect by the Bush regime before and after Hurricane Katrina
offered a rare glimpse behind the Facade. The poor were no longer invisible.
The bodies floating in contaminated water, the survivors threatened with
police shotguns, the distinct obesity of American poverty - all of it mocked
the forests of advertising billboards, relentless television commercials and
news soundbites (average length 9.9 seconds) that glorify the "dream" of
wealth and power. Reality, a word long expropriated and debased, found its
true meaning, if briefly.
As if by accident, the US media, which are the legitimising arm of corporate
public relations, reported the truth. For a few days, a select group of
liberal newspaper readers were told that poverty had risen an amazing 17 per
cent under George W Bush; that an African American child born within a mile
of the White House had less chance of surviving its first year than a baby
in urban India. That the United States now ranked 43rd in the world for
infant mortality, 84th for measles immunisation and 89th for polio. That the
world's largest public oil company, ExxonMobil, would make $30bn in profits
this year, having received a huge slice of the $14.5bn in "tax breaks" that
Bush's new energy bill guarantees his elite cronies.
In his two elections, Bush has received most of his "corporate
contributions" - the euphemism for bribes totalling $61.5m - from oil and
gas companies. The bloody conquest of Iraq, the world's second-biggest
source of oil, will be their prize, their loot.
Iraq and New Orleans are not far apart. On 13 April 2003, Matt Frei, the
BBC's Washington correspondent, reported the bloodbath of the US invasion
with these words: "There's no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring
American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle
East . . . is increasingly tied up with military power." Frei's apologies
for the Bush regime from in front of the White House, and specifically for
the architect of the slaughter in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, were consistent with
his reporting from New Orleans, which was vivid. On 5 September, he
described battle-ready troops of the 82nd Airborne trudging through the
streets of New Orleans as the "heroes of Tikrit". Most of the killing in
Tikrit and elsewhere in Iraq has been done not by "insurgents" but by such
"heroes" - a fact almost never allowed in the "coverage", whether it is on
Fox or the BBC. Shaking his head in New Orleans, Frei wondered why Bush had
done so little. Reality's intrusion was complete.
Before the moment passes, and Bush's atrocities and lies in Iraq are again
allowed to proceed, it is worth connecting his disregard for the suffering
in New Orleans with other truths behind the Facade. The unchanging nature of
the 500-year western imperial crusade is exemplified in the unreported
suffering of people all over the world, declared enemies in their own homes.
The people of Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi town now in the news as "an
insurgent stronghold" - that is, those who refused to be expelled from their
homes - are being bombed and shelled and strafed, just as the people of
Fallujah were, and the people of Najaf, and the people of Hongai, a
"stronghold" in Vietnam, once the most bombed place on earth, and the people
of Neak Loeung in Cambodia, one of countless towns flattened by B-52s. The
list of such places consigned to notoriety, then oblivion, is seemingly
endless. Why?
The answer largely is that so much of western scholarship has taken the
humanity out of the study of nations, of people, congealing it with jargon
and reducing it to an esotericism called "international relations", the
grand chess game of western power which scores nations as useful or not,
expendable or not. (Listen to Jack Straw talk about "failed nations": the
pure invention of Anglo-American IR zealots.) It is this rampant orthodoxy
that determines how power speaks and how its historians and reporters
report. Such orthodoxy, says Richard Falk, professor of international
relations at Princeton and a distinguished dissenter, "which is so widely
accepted among political scientists as to be virtually unchallengeable in
academic journals, regards law and morality as irrelevant to the
identification of rational policy". Thus, western foreign policy is
formulated "through a self-righteous, one-way, moral/legal screen [with]
positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened,
validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence . . ." This is the
filter through which most people get their serious news. It is the reason
why the most obvious truths, such as the dominance of western state
terrorism over the minuscule Qaeda variety, is never reported. It is the
reason why America's destruction of 35 democracies in 30 countries (the
historian William Blum's latest count) is unknown to the American public.
More urgently, it is the reason why the historic implications of George
Bush's and Tony Blair's assaults on our most basic freedoms, such as habeas
corpus, are rarely reported. On 9 September, an American federal appeals
court handed down a judgment against Jose Padilla, an alleged witness to an
alleged "plot", allowing the US military to hold him without charge
indefinitely. Even though there is no case against him, the Supreme Court is
unlikely to overturn this travesty, which means the end of the Bill of
Rights and of the "very core of liberty . . . freedom from indefinite
imprisonment at the will of the executive", as an American jurist once
famously wrote.
This was hardly news in Britain, just as Lord Hoffmann's remarks passed most
of us by. A law lord, Hoffmann said that Blair's plans to gut our own basic
rights were a greater threat than terrorism. Indefinite imprisonment for
those innocent before the law and the intimidation of a minority community
and of dissenters: these are the goals of Blair's "necessary measures",
borrowed from Bush. Who challenges him? His Downing Street press conference
is an august sheep pen, the baaing barely audible. In India the other day,
reported the Guardian's political editor, "Mr Blair stood his ground when
challenged over the Iraq war" - by Indian reporters, that is. The Guardian
described neither these challenges nor Blair's replies.
Behind the Facade, the destruction of democracy has been a long-term
project. The millions of poor, like most of the people of New Orleans, have
no place in the US system, which is why they don't vote. The same is
happening under Blair, who has achieved the lowest voter turnouts since the
franchise. As with Bush, this is not Blair's concern, for his horizons
stretch far. Selling weapons and privatisation deals to India one day,
preparing the ground for attacking Iran the next. Under Blair, MI6 ran
Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam
Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Under Blair, young Pakistanis living
in Britain were trained as jihadi fighters and recruited for the first of
his wars - the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1999. According to the
Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, they joined this terrorist network
"with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American
intelligence agencies".
In his classic work The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather
of US policies and actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, writes that, for America
to dominate the world, it cannot sustain a genuine, popular democracy,
because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion .
. . Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation." He describes how he
secretly persuaded President Carter in 1976 to bankroll and arm the jihadis
in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a means of ensuring US cold war dominance.
When I asked him in Washington, two years ago, if he regretted that the
consequences were al-Qaeda and the attacks of 11 September 2001, he became
very angry and did not reply; and a crack in the Facade closed. It is time
that those of us paid to keep the record straight tore it down completely.
***
Witnessing History
By Scott Galindez
Monday 19 September 2005
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091905Q.shtml
I spent three weeks in Crawford, Texas. The heat was
unbearable; bugs were everywhere, including fire ants
crawling into my keyboard. But I wouldn't have traded
Camp Casey for any other story that I have ever
covered.
I remember the frigid cold of January in Washington DC,
when millions around the world said no to the war in
Iraq. We covered the Democratic and Republican
conventions, I went to Iowa and New Hampshire to cover
the primaries. These were all stories that I will not
forget, but what happened this August in Crawford,
Texas, was historic.
Twenty years from now, social studies classes will be
studying the impact that Cindy Sheehan, Camp Casey, and
the September 24th March on Washington had on George
Bush's Iraq policy.
There were several moments in Crawford when I thought
to myself, "I am witnessing history." Cindy Sheehan was
the spark plug, and has emerged as a leader of the
anti-war movement. Other leaders also emerged at Camp
Casey; it is not that they were new to protesting the
war, but Cindy's stand gave them the national stage
that they were unable to gain access to before.
I remember the first press conference that I attended,
Day 6 of the camp. Cindy opened with her emotional plea
for answers, and many other family members followed,
letting the world know that she was not alone.
I remember Bill Mitchell and Dante Zapalla in tears as
they placed flowers on their loved ones' crosses. It
was the first day that the crosses from Arlington West
were set up at Camp Casey. Veterans for Peace had been
setting those crosses up for over a year - now they
were on the national stage.
I remember when Larry Northern mowed those crosses down
with his pickup truck. I was at the Crawford Peace
House, typing my blog report; Cindy was a few feet away
typing her daily blog post. The phone call came,
letting us know that the crosses had been mowed down. A
few minutes later, a volunteer sitting behind us
shouted "No!" At first we thought she was just learning
about the crosses, but she had just learned that her
pen pal was killed in Iraq. Cindy immediately comforted
her. Cindy Sheehan has an amazing gift for connecting
with people individually. Everywhere she goes now,
people want to meet her, and while others would
probably be uncomfortable, Cindy with a hug or a word
of encouragement connects with them all.
I remember the candlelight vigil the night that tens of
thousands of people around the country held vigils in
their communities. Aidan Delgado, a veteran of the war
in Iraq, gave an impassioned plea for us to make sure
that our military is never used again until all other
means have been exhausted.
I remember Hart Viges, another Iraq War vet, talking
about how hard it is for him to deal with the knowledge
that he killed people defending their homeland. And
Charlie Anderson speaking after learning that his wife
had left him. Cody Camacho explained that his own wife
left him because she didn't recognize him when he
returned from Iraq.
Marine Jeff Key played taps at dusk every day, and one
night invited the counter protesters across the road to
join Camp Casey for a vigil honoring our fallen
soldiers. Jeff came back across the street carrying a
huge pole with the American flag on top, followed by
the counter protesters, who sang and vigiled with Camp
Casey.
Ann Wright, who, after decades in the military and
diplomatic corps resigned in protest of the Iraq war,
was the Camp Casey Commandant. Her leadership kept
things organized and from descending into chaos.
Beatriz Saldivar, Dante Zappala, Mimi Evans, Celeste
Zappala, Tamara Rosenleaf, and dozens of other family
members of fallen or deployed soldiers also emerged as
leaders of the anti-war movement.
Grammy Award-winning musician Steve Earle put it best:
"It wasn't the fact that I opposed the Vietnam War that
stopped it ... It was when my father came to oppose the
war that it ended."
With Cindy, Beatriz, Ann, Dante, Mimi, Charlie, Jeff,
Aidan, Cody, Celeste, Tamara, and the thousands of
others who got their voice at Camp Casey leading the
way to Washington this week, more mothers and fathers
will begin to oppose this war.
On April 24, 1971, Vietnam Veterans Against the War
were among the leaders of 500,000 people who converged
on Washington to end the Vietnam War. On September 24,
2005, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Gold Star Families
for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, and Veterans
for Peace will be leading another huge march against
today's war. As the call goes out far and wide to
gather in the nation's capitol, history stands to be
made again.
Scott Galindez is the Managing Editor of truthout.org.
---
Tuesday 20 September 2005
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