[Mb-civic] "Over There" and "Blair's Bombs"

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/070705A.shtml

Over There
    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Thursday 07 July 2005

    A British associate penned a quick response to the bombing attacks 
that took place in London this morning. "The message from those 
claiming responsibility says, in part, 'Britain is now burning with fear, 
terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western 
quarters,'" he wrote. "Well it isn't, so fuck them."

    Indeed.

    My first response was a wrenching horror, a kick to the gut when I 
checked my email and saw two hundred messages with the words 
'London attack' in the subject line. Suddenly, the television was on and 
I was reading every news report I could get my eyes on. At least thirty-
three people were killed and hundreds more wounded in four 
coordinated bombing attacks aimed at the mass transit system.

    All of a sudden I was back in my classroom, back in the middle of a 
bright September morning, surrounded by wall-eyed students asking 
me if this was World War III as we watched two buildings burn, and 
then fall, and then unannounced I had Ani DiFranco in my head and 
she was singing, "And every borough looked up when it heard the first 
blast, and then every dumb action movie was summarily surpassed, 
and the exodus uptown by foot and motorcar looked more like war 
than anything I've seen so far..."

    That was my first response, but I'm a little wiser nowadays. My 
second thought, bluntly, was that of all the Western cities in the world, 
London can handle this. From 1973 until roundabout the year 2000, 
bombings in that city took place with dreary regularity. In November of 
1974, two IRA bombs in Birmingham killed 19 and wounded 180. A 
1989 bombing at the Royal Marines School of Music killed 10 and 
wounded more than 30. There were more than a dozen different major 
incidents like these, and many smaller ones besides.

    London handled the Nazi blitz. 'Handled' is perhaps the wrong word. 
Londoners watched as their city was battered to rubble day after day, 
and squared their shoulders, and sent out the RAF, and prevailed. A 
fire chief named Deasy summed up the British response: "The idea of 
England folding up, that's a joke. That outfit will never fold up. They've 
got just as much guts as anybody in this man's world has and they'll 
carry right on. Anybody thinks they're gonna fold up, they're crazy."

    In other words, the British associate who wrote that note this 
morning hit the nail on the head.

    Now comes the so-called official response. Predictably, George W. 
Bush proclaimed that the War on Terror goes on. Conservative frother 
Rush Limbaugh got on the radio and made a few remarkable rhetorical 
contortions. To wit: The G8 summit, which was apparently the target of 
these attacks, is a liberal summit. Yes, you read that right. He called it 
a "leftist summit" aimed at achieving leftist goals like saving Africa 
("Again," he said) and stopping global warming, and so this was an 
attack on leftists who will now attack Bush.

    The idea that the G8 is a leftist organization is a new one to me. I 
must have missed a memo somewhere. Apparently, the three billion 
people who went out last weekend to ask the G8 to do the right thing 
likewise missed the memo. Other conservative commentators rushed 
to microphones to proclaim that if we had all been standing shoulder to 
shoulder with Mr. Bush, this London attack would never have 
happened. Never underestimate the ability of the right-wing to use 
tragedy as a means of beating on people they don't agree with.

    I am a little wiser nowadays, and perhaps a little more callous 
because of that wisdom. My first response was horror, and my second 
was a sense that the British people have the strength to endure this. 
My third response was to marvel at the news coverage. Four 
bombings, more than thirty dead, hundreds more wounded? In 
London, it is a terrifying, enraging, appalling act of despicable violence 
that must be immediately avenged.

    In Iraq, they call events like this "Tuesday."

    Tens of thousands of people have been killed and wounded in Iraq 
by way of deadly bombings that have been taking place every single 
day. These Iraqi people are no different from the Londoners who 
perished today. Their skin is darker perhaps, and they pray to a 
different God, but they have families and children and dreams and they 
die just as horribly as their British counterparts. Yet they earn perhaps 
a few sentences on the back page of the paper, and virtually no 
comment from the members of the international community which 
ginned up the invasion of Iraq in the first place.

    The world was warned about this, warned and warned and warned 
again. An invasion based on lies and disinformation, an occupation 
that grinds a civilian populace, becomes the perfect machine to 
manufacture terrorists who will happily die in order to see others die. 
The CIA calls what happened in London today "blowback." It is wrong, 
it is heinous, it is murder plain and simple, and it was as predictable as 
the sun rising in the East.

    The rhetoric about Iraq has been that we are "fighting the terrorists 
over there so we don't have to fight them over here." Today, "over 
here" became the streets of London. Where will it be tomorrow?

    One thing is certain. The perpetrators of this bombing bear the 
responsibility for this wretched act, and bear the responsibility for the 
gross miscalculation that many have made in the past: A democratic 
society is weak and decadent, and can be easily pushed. Ask Hitler if 
that is true. A democratic society, once enraged, is the strongest force 
on Earth, and those responsible for this are going to find that out to 
their woe.

    The other certainty: Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair bear the responsibility for 
this wretched act, as well. They decided in April of 2002 to start a war 
based on false pretenses, to fix the intelligence and facts around the 
policy, and now the whirlwind has come to be reaped. The blood that 
runs in the streets of London, and in the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah, 
Tikrit and Mosul, is on their hands.

    William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally 
bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush 
Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

  -------


    "Three weeks ago, a classified CIA report revealed that the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a focal point
of terrorism. None of the intelligence agencies regarded Iraq as such a
flashpoint before the invasion, however tyrannical the regime. On the
contrary, in 2003, the CIA reported that Iraq "exported no terrorist
threat to his neighbours" and that Saddam Hussein was 'implacably hostile
to Al-Qaeda'".


 Lest We Forget; These Were Blair's Bombs
    By John Pilger
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Sunday 10 July 2005

    In all the coverage of last week's bombing of London, a basic truth is
struggling to be heard. It is this: no one doubts the atrocious inhumanity
of those who planted the bombs, but no one should also doubt that this has
been coming since the day Tony Blair joined George Bush in their bloody
invasion and occupation of Iraq. They are "Blair's bombs", and he ought
not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about
"our way of life", which his own rapacious violence in other countries has
despoiled.

    Indeed, the only reliable warning from British intelligence in the
run-up to the invasion of Iraq was that which predicted a sharp increase
in terrorism "with Britain and Britons a target". A House of Commons
committee has since verified this warning. Had Blair heeded it instead of
conspiring to deceive the nation that Iraq offered a threat the Londoners
who died on Thursday might be alive today, along with tens of thousands of
innocent Iraqis.

    Three weeks ago, a classified CIA report revealed that the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a focal point
of terrorism. None of the intelligence agencies regarded Iraq as such a
flashpoint before the invasion, however tyrannical the regime. On the
contrary, in 2003, the CIA reported that Iraq "exported no terrorist
threat to his neighbours" and that Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile
to Al-Qaeda".

    Blair's and Bush's invasion changed all that. In invading a stricken
    and
defenceless country at the heart of the Islamic and Arab world, their
adventure became self-fulfilling; Blair's epic irresponsibility has
brought the daily horrors of Iraq home to Britain. For more than a year,
he has urged the British to "move on" from Iraq, and last week it seemed
that his spinmeisters and good fortune had joined hands. The awarding of
the 2012 Olympics to London created the fleeting illusion that all was
well, regardless of messy events in a faraway country.

    Moreover, the G8 meeting in Scotland and its accompanying "Make
    Poverty
History" campaign and circus of celebrities served as a temporary cover
for what is arguably the greatest political scandal of modern times: an
illegal, brutal and craven invasion conceived in lies and which, under the
system of international law established at Nuremberg, represented a
"paramount war crime".

    Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8,
its marches and pop concerts, and another "global" event has been
striking. The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no
coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date, has
been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.

    The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the
    invasion
and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. Its expert, eyewitness
testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a tribunal jury member,
"demonstrate that even those of us who have tried to follow the war
closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been
unleashed in Iraq." The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail, one of the
best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq. He described how the hospitals
of besieged Fallujah had been subjected to an American tactic of
collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the
wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows,
and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching them. Children,
the elderly, were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.

    Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed on
    the
London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's bombing.
Unimaginable? Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of whether the BBC
reports it, which is rare. When will someone ask about this at one of the
staged "press conferences" at which Blair is allowed to emote for the
cameras stuff about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not
journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well.

    While the two men responsible for the carnage in Iraq, Bush and Blair,
were side by side at Gleneagles, why wasn't the connection of their
fraudulent "war on terror" made with the bombing in London? And when will
someone in the political class say that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt
cancellation" at best amounts to less than the money the government spent
in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence is the
cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam
Hussein was overthrown (Unicef).

    The truth is that the debt relief the G8 is offering is lethal because
its ruthless "conditionalities" of captive economies far outweigh any
tenuous benefit. This was taboo during the G8 week, whose theme was not so
much making poverty history as the silencing and pacifying and co-opting
dissent and truth. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop
stars in Hyde Park included no pictures of murdered Iraqi doctors with the
blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's snipers. Real life
became more satirical than satire could ever be.

    There was Bob Geldoff on the front pages resting his smiling face on
smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his knighted jester. There
was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs
as saviours of the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" George
Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest achievements;
and there was Paul Wolfowitz, beaming and promising to make poverty
history: this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World
Bank, was an apologist for Suharto's genocidal regime in Indonesia, who
was one of the architects of Bush's "neo-con" putsch and of the bloodfest
in Iraq and the notion of "endless war".For the politicians and pop stars
and church leaders and polite people who believed Blair and Gordon Brown
when they declared their "great moral crusade" against poverty, Iraq was
an embarrassment. The killing of more than 100,000 Iraqis mostly by
American gunfire and bombs -- a figure reported in a comprehensive
peer-reviewed study in The Lancet -- was airbrushed from mainstream
debate.

    In our free societies, the unmentionable is that "the state has lost
    its
mind and is punishing so many innocent people", as Arthur Miller once
wrote, "and so the evidence has to be internally denied." Not only denied,
but distracted by an entire court: Geldoff, Bono, Madonna, McCartney et
al, whose "Live 8" was the very antithesis of 15 February 2003 when two
million people brought their hearts and brains and anger to the streets of
London. Blair will almost certainly use last week's atrocity and tragedy
to further deplete basic human rights in Britain, as Bush has done in
America. The goal is not security, but greater control. Above all this,
the memory of their victims, "our" victims, in Iraq demands the return of
our anger. And nothing less is owed to those who died and suffered in
London last week, unnecessarily.


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