Iraq: the unthinkable becomes normal
Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign
"insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our
name.
John Pilger
11/11/04 "New Statesman" -- Edward S Herman's landmark essay, "The
Banality of Evil", has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible
things in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation',"
wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labour in doing and
rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing
done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving
technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive
napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace
patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream
media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."
On Radio 4's Today (6 November), a BBC reporter in Baghdad referred to
the coming attack on the city of Fallujah as "dangerous" and "very
dangerous" for the Americans. When asked about civilians, he said,
reassuringly, that the US marines were "going about with a Tannoy"
telling people to get out. He omitted to say that tens of thousands of
people would be left in the city. He mentioned in passing the "most
intense bombing" of the city with no suggestion of what that meant for
people beneath the bombs.
As for the defenders, those Iraqis who resist in a city that
heroically defied Saddam Hussein; they were merely "insurgents holed
up in the city", as if they were an alien body, a lesser form of life
to be "flushed out" (the Guardian): a suitable quarry for
"rat-catchers", which is the term another BBC reporter told us the
Black Watch use. According to a senior British officer, the Americans
view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to
describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans. This is how the Nazi
army laid siege to Russian cities, slaughtering combatants and
non-combatants alike.
Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such
racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the
reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of
the kind that behead people: for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a
Jordanian said to be al-Qaeda's "top operative" in Iraq. This is what
the Americans say; it is also Blair's latest lie to parliament. Count
the times it is parroted at a camera, at us. No irony is noted that
the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all
indications, loathed. These indications come from apparently credible
polling organisations, one of which estimates that of 2,700 attacks
every month by the resistance, six can be credited to the infamous
al-Zarqawi.
In a letter sent on 14 October to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura
Council, which administers the city, said: "In Fallujah, [the
Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year
has elapsed since they created this new pretext and whenever they
destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women,
they said: 'We have launched a successful operation against
al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he
exists, is not in Fallujah . . . and we have no links to any groups
supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to
prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet
government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as many
parts of the country."
Not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and
America.
"What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?" asked
the playwright Ronan Bennett in April after the US marines, in an act
of collective vengeance for the killing of four American mercenaries,
killed more than 600 people in Fallujah, a figure that was never
denied. Then, as now, they used the ferocious firepower of AC-130
gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers and 500lb bombs against slums. They
incinerate children; their snipers boast of killing anyone, as snipers
did in Sarajevo.
Bennett was referring to the legion of silent Labour backbenchers,
with honourable exceptions, and lobotomised junior ministers (remember
Chris Mullin?). He might have added those journalists who strain every
sinew to protect "our" side, who normalise the unthinkable by not even
gesturing at the demonstrable immorality and criminality. Of course,
to be shocked by what "we" do is dangerous, because this can lead to a
wider understanding of why "we" are there in the first place and of
the grief "we" bring not only to Iraq, but to so many parts of the
world: that the terrorism of al-Qaeda is puny by comparison with ours.
There is nothing illicit about this cover-up; it happens in daylight.
The most striking recent example followed the announcement, on 29
October, by the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study
estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the
Anglo-American invasion. Eighty-four per cent of the deaths were
caused by the actions of the Americans and the British, and 95 per
cent of these were killed by air attacks and artillery fire, most of
whom were women and children.
The editors of the excellent MediaLens observed the rush - no,
stampede - to smother this shocking news with "scepticism" and
silence. They reported that, by 2 November, the Lancet report had been
ignored by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the
Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the
report in terms of the government's "doubts" and Channel 4 News
delivered a hatchet job, based on a Downing Street briefing. With one
exception, none of the scientists who compiled this rigorously
peer-reviewed report was asked to substantiate their work until ten
days later when the pro-war Observer published an interview with the
editor of the Lancet, slanted so that it appeared he was "answering
his critics". David Edwards, a MediaLens editor, asked the researchers
to respond to the media criticism; their meticulous demolition can be
viewed on the [http://www.medialens.org] alert for 2 November. None of
this was published in the mainstream. Thus, the unthinkable that "we"
had engaged in such a slaughter was suppressed - normalised. It is
reminiscent of the suppression of the death of more than a million
Iraqis, including half a million infants under five, as a result of
the Anglo-American-driven embargo.
In contrast, there is no media questioning of the methodology of the
Iraqi Special Tribune, which has announced that mass graves contain
300,000 victims of Saddam Hussein. The Special Tribune, a product of
the quisling regime in Baghdad, is run by the Americans; respected
scientists want nothing to do with it. There is no questioning of what
the BBC calls "Iraq's first democratic elections". There is no
reporting of how the Americans have assumed control over the electoral
process with two decrees passed in June that allow an "electoral
commission" in effect to eliminate parties Washington does not like.
Time magazine reports that the CIA is buying its preferred candidates,
which is how the agency has fixed elections over the world. When or if
the elections take place, we will be doused in cliches about the
nobility of voting, as America's puppets are "democratically" chosen.
The model for this was the "coverage" of the American presidential
election, a blizzard of platitudes normalising the unthinkable: that
what happened on 2 November was not democracy in action. With one
exception, no one in the flock of pundits flown from London described
the circus of Bush and Kerry as the contrivance of fewer than 1 per
cent of the population, the ultra-rich and powerful who control and
manage a permanent war economy. That the losers were not only the
Democrats, but the vast majority of Americans, regardless of whom they
voted for, was unmentionable.
No one reported that John Kerry, by contrasting the "war on terror"
with Bush's disastrous attack on Iraq, merely exploited public
distrust of the invasion to build support for American dominance
throughout the world. "I'm not talking about leaving [Iraq]," said
Kerry. "I'm talking about winning!" In this way, both he and Bush
shifted the agenda even further to the right, so that millions of
anti-war Democrats might be persuaded that the US has "the
responsibility to finish the job" lest there be "chaos". The issue in
the presidential campaign was neither Bush nor Kerry, but a war
economy aimed at conquest abroad and economic division at home. The
silence on this was comprehensive, both in America and here.
Bush won by invoking, more skilfully than Kerry, the fear of an
ill-defined threat. How was he able to normalise this paranoia? Let's
look at the recent past. Following the end of the cold war, the
American elite - Republican and Democrat - were having great
difficulty convincing the public that the billions of dollars spent on
the war economy should not be diverted to a "peace dividend". A
majority of Americans refused to believe that there was still a
"threat" as potent as the red menace. This did not prevent Bill
Clinton sending to Congress the biggest "defence" bill in history in
support of a Pentagon strategy called "full-spectrum dominance". On 11
September 2001, the threat was given a name: Islam.
Flying into Philadelphia recently, I spotted the Kean congressional
report on 11 September from the 9/11 Commission on sale at the
bookstalls. "How many do you sell?" I asked. "One or two," was the
reply. "It'll disappear soon." Yet, this modest, blue-covered book is
a revelation. Like the Butler report in the UK, which detailed all the
incriminating evidence of Blair's massaging of intelligence before the
invasion of Iraq, then pulled its punches and concluded nobody was
responsible, so the Kean report makes excruciatingly clear what really
happened, then fails to draw the conclusions that stare it in the
face. It is a supreme act of normalising the unthinkable. This is not
surprising, as the conclusions are volcanic.
The most important evidence to the 9/11 Commission came from General
Ralph Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defence
Command (Norad). "Air force jet fighters could have intercepted
hijacked airliners roaring towards the World Trade Center and
Pentagon," he said, "if only air traffic controllers had asked for
help 13 minutes sooner . . . We would have been able to shoot down all
three . . . all four of them."
Why did this not happen?
The Kean report makes clear that "the defence of US aerospace on 9/11
was not conducted in accord with pre-existing training and protocols .
.. . If a hijack was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack
coordinator on duty to contact the Pentagon's National Military
Command Center (NMCC) . . . The NMCC would then seek approval from the
office of the Secretary of Defence to provide military assistance . .
.. "
Uniquely, this did not happen. The commission was told by the deputy
administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority that there was no
reason the procedure was not operating that morning. "For my 30 years
of experience . . ." said Monte Belger, "the NMCC was on the net and
hearing everything real-time . . . I can tell you I've lived through
dozens of hijackings . . . and they were always listening in with
everybody else."
But on this occasion, they were not. The Kean report says the NMCC was
never informed. Why? Again, uniquely, all lines of communication
failed, the commission was told, to America's top military brass.
Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence, could not be found; and when he
finally spoke to Bush an hour and a half later, it was, says the Kean
report, "a brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was
not discussed". As a result, Norad's commanders were "left in the dark
about what their mission was".
The report reveals that the only part of a previously fail-safe
command system that worked was in the White House where Vice-President
Cheney was in effective control that day, and in close touch with the
NMCC. Why did he do nothing about the first two hijacked planes? Why
was the NMCC, the vital link, silent for the first time in its
existence? Kean ostentatiously refuses to address this. Of course, it
could be due to the most extraordinary combination of coincidences. Or
it could not.
In July 2001, a top secret briefing paper prepared for Bush read: "We
[the CIA and FBI] believe that OBL [Osama Bin Laden] will launch a
significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in
the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to
inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack
preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no
warning."
On the afternoon of 11 September, Donald Rumsfeld, having failed to
act against those who had just attacked the United States, told his
aides to set in motion an attack on Iraq - when the evidence was
non-existent. Eighteen months later, the invasion of Iraq, unprovoked
and based on lies now documented, took place. This epic crime is the
greatest political scandal of our time, the latest chapter in the long
20th-century history of the west's conquests of other lands and their
resources. If we allow it to be normalised, if we refuse to question
and probe the hidden agendas and unaccountable secret power structures
at the heart of "democratic" governments and if we allow the people of
Fallujah to be crushed in our name, we surrender both democracy and
humanity.
John Pilger is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University,
New York. His latest book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism
and its triumphs, is published by Jonathan Cape
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in
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