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WORDS
AGAINST WAR
By
JOHN PILGER
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JOHN PILGER
is one of the world's most renowned and distinguished investigative
journalists and documentary film-makers. Twice a winner of Britain's
highest honour, that of Journalist of the Year, he writes for The Mirror
newspaper and New Statesman magazine. ColdType
is republishing his most recent anti-war articles from these journals
as pdf downloads, ready for printing as inserts into an 8.5" by
11" binder. The cover (above) and biography may also be downloaded
for printing. Pilger's latest book, The New Rulers
Of The World, is published by Verso (www.versobooks.com)
Click
here to download Cover (280kb)
CLICK
HERE FOR JOHN PILGER'S 2004 COLUMNS
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THE 2003 ARTICLES HERE:
NEW
– 31. The BBC and Iraq: Myth and reality
Greg
Dyke, the BBC’s director general, has attacked American television
reporting of Iraq. “For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader
for government is to undermine your credibility,” he said. “They
should be... balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one
side or the other.” He said research showed that, of 840 experts
interviewed on American news programmes during the invasion of Iraq,
only four opposed the war. “If that were true in Britain, the BBC
would have failed in its duty.”
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here to download (36kb)
NEW
– 30. An interview with John Pilger
Anthony
Arnove interviews John Pilger for Socialist Worker on the making of
his latest documentary, 'Breaking the Silence', and the extraordinary
evidence he unearthed that illuminates the lies of senior US officials.
Click
here to download (36kb)
NEW
29a. Bush and Blair are in trouble
Shortly
before the disastrous Bush visit to Britain, Tony Blair was at the Cenotaph
on Remembrance Sunday. It was an unusual glimpse of a state killer whose
effete respectability has gone. His perfunctory nod to “the glorious
dead” came from a face bleak with guilt. As William Howard Russell
of the Times wrote of another prime minister responsible for the carnage
in the Crimea, “He carries himself like one with blood on his hands.”
Having shown his studied respect to the Queen, whose prerogative allowed
him to commit his crime in Iraq, Blair hurried away. “Sneak home
and pray you’ll never know,” wrote Siegfried Sassoon in 1917,
“The hell where youth and laughter go.”
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29.
The silence of the writers
In
1935, the first Congress of American Writers was held at the Carnegie
Hall in New York, followed by another two years later. By one account,
3,500 crammed into the auditorium and a thousand more were turned away.
They were electric events, with writers discussing how they could confront
ominous events in Abyssinia, China and Spain. Telegrams from Thomas
Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out,
reflecting the fear that great power was now rampant and that it had
become impossible to discuss art and literature without politics. “A
writer,” Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, “must be
a man of action now . . . A man who has given a year of his life to
steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of racial prejudice,
has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where he belonged.
If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards
is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will last.”
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here to download (36kb)
28.
The rise and fall of liberal England
An
epic shame and silence covers much of liberal England. Shame and silence
are present in a political theatre of frenetic activity, with actors
running on and off the national stage, uttering their fables and denials
and minor revelations, as in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. From
the media gallery, there is a cryptic gesturing at the truth, so that
official culpability is minimised; this is known at the BBC as objectivity.
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27. Media censorship high on the agenda
Reducing
journalism to a branch of corporate and government public relations
is the hidden agenda of the media deregulators, in Britain and America.
The Australian novelist Richard Flanagan was recently asked by the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation to read a favourite piece of fiction on national
radio and explain his reasons for the choice. “I was unsure what
fiction to read to you this morning,” he said. “If we take
the work of our most successful spinner of fictions in recent times,
[Prime Minister] John Howard, I could have read from the varied and
splendid tall tales he and his fellow storytellers have concocted...”
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26.
Colin Powell said Iraq was no threat
Exactly
one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: “Saddam Hussein’s
weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.
“The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass
destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running now.”
Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented
in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used
to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real
reason for attacking Iraq. “It was 95 per cent charade,” a
former senior CIA analyst told me.
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25.
Iraq’s epic suffering is made invisible
For
the past few weeks, I have been watching videotapes of the attack on
Iraq, most of them not shown in this country. The tapes concentrate
on the epic suffering of ordinary Iraqis . . . It is difficult viewing,
but necessary if one is to understand fully the words of the Nuremberg
judges in 1946 when they laid down the principles of modern international
law: “To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international
crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other
war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole.”
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24.
Needed: An enquiry into a slaughter
The
1994 inquiry by Lord Justice Scott into the scandal of Britain’s
illegal supply of weapons to Saddam Hussein produced memorable moments.
There was Mark Higson’s detailed description of “a culture
of lying” at the Foreign Office, where he was the Iraq Desk Officer.
And there was the anxious moment when it seemed that Margaret Thatcher
might walk out. “Lady Thatcher,” said His Lordship, “we’ll
try and trouble you with as few papers as possible”. . . The Hutton
inquiry into the circumstances of Dr David Kelly’s death has its
memorable moments, too.
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here to download (36kb)
23.
Who are the extremists?
The
“liberation” of Iraq is a cruel joke on a stricken people.
The Americans and British, partners in a great recognised crime, have
brought down on the Middle East, and much of the rest of the world,
the prospect of terrorism and suffering on a scale that al-Qaeda could
only imagine. That is what this week’s bloody bombing of the United
Nations headquarters in Baghdad tells us. It is a “wake-up call”,
according to Mary Robinson, the former UN Humanitarian Commissioner.
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here to download (36kb)
22.
The ultimate terror attack
August
marks another anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, the ultimate
act of terrorism in which 231,920 people have now died, the latest,
the children of 1945, from a plague of cancers. I first visited Hiroshima
22 years after the atomic bombing. Although the city had been completely
rebuilt with glass boxes and ring roads, its suffering was not difficult
to find.
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21.
The war on truth
John
Pilger reports from the United States on the suppression of the genesis
and human cost of the 'war on terror' and the invasion of Iraq. As more
American GIs are killed every day, the propaganda apparatus struggles
to relay a positive message - while the next adventure is planned.
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here to download (36kb)
20.
Lies, distortions and arms sales (July
6, 2003)
Unless
we apply the lesson “all governments are liars” to our own
leaders, British fighter jets and chemical weapons technology will continue
to wreck lives all over the world. The conscious nature of Tony Blair’s
lies and distortions over Iraq is now clear. Collectors will have their
favourites. Mine is his statement in parliament on 29 January that “we
do know of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq”.
Click
here to download (36kb)
19.
Bush's Vietnam (June
23, 2003)
America’s
two “great victories” since 11 September 2001 are unravelling.
In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority
and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has
not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless of showcase
improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate.
Murder, rape and child abuse are committed with impunity by the private
armies of America’s “friends”, the warlords whom Washington
has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence
of stability.
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18.
WMD will be on Blair’s headstone (June
4, 2003)
Such
a high crime does not, and will not, melt away; the facts cannot be
changed. Tony Blair took Britain to war against Iraq illegally. He mounted
an unprovoked attack on a country that offered no threat, and he helped
cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The judges at the
Nuremberg Tribunal following World War tII, who inspired much of international
law, called this "the gravest of all war crimes".
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here to download (36kb)
17.
Britain supports terrorists (May
26, 2003)
In
recent weeks, a number of apparently unrelated news reports have, in
sum, told a truth that is never reported. According to Human Rights
Watch, thousands of British and American cluster bombs were fired at
and dropped on civilian areas in Iraq. British artillery fired more
than 2,000 of them at Basra. Each shell scatters bomblets over a wide
area, and many fail to explode. Their victims are “not known”,
says the Ministry of Defence. They are known. They are often children;
Iraq’s population is almost half children.
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here to download (36kb)
16.
Remembering Jim Howard (May
13, 2003)
On
29 August 1979, the afternoon monsoon in Phnom Penh was so powerful
that it roared like a broken river through the ruined Bank of Cambodia,
washing millions of brand new banknotes into almost deserted streets.
Starving children collected them and some tried to use them as fuel
beneath cooking pots filled with leaves. Such was the aftermath of a
decade of terror: of Pol Pot and his catalyst, the American bombing
and invasion in 1970. As two rats scampered to and fro across the puddles
in my room, a tall, ruddy-faced man opened my door. “I’m Jim
Howard,” he said. “Where do I start?”
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here to download (36kb)
15.
A crisis for journalism
(April 25, 2003)
On
8 April, newspapers around the world carried a despatch from a Reuters
correspondent, “embedded” with the US army, about the murder
of a ten-year-old Iraqi boy. An American private had “unloaded
machine-gun fire and the boy . . . fell dead on a garbage-strewn stretch
of wasteland”. The tone of the report was highly sympathetic to
the soldier, “a softly spoken 21-year-old” who, “although
he has no regrets about opening fire, it is clear he would rather it
was not a child he killed”
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here to download (36kb)
14.
The unthinkable is becoming the normal (April
20, 2003)
Last
Sunday, seated in the audience at the Bafta television awards ceremony,
I was struck by the silence. Here were many of the most influential
members of the liberal elite, the writers, producers, dramatists, journalists
and managers of our main source of information, television; and not
one broke the silence. It was as though we were disconnected from the
world outside: a world of rampant, rapacious power and great crimes
committed in our name by our government and its foreign master. Iraq
is the “test case”, says the Bush regime, which every day
sails closer to Mussolini’s definition of fascism: the merger of
a militarist state with corporate power. Iraq is a test case for western
liberals, too. As the suffering mounts in that stricken country, with
Red Cross doctors describing “incredible’’ levels of
civilian casualties, the choice of the next conquest, Syria or Iran,
is “debated’’ on the BBC, as if it were a World Cup venue.
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here to download (36kb)
13.
This is a crime against humanity (April
14, 2003)
A
BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by an American
fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with “friendly fire”,
spoke to his mother on a satellite phone. Holding the phone over his
head so that she could hear the sound of the American planes overhead,
he said: “Listen, that’s the sound of freedom.” Did I
read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being ferociously
ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever designed the Observer’s
page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel
headline: “The moment young Omar discovered the price of war”.
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here to download (36kb)
12.
We see too much. We know too much (April
6, 2003)
We
now glimpse the forbidden truths of the invasion of Iraq. A man cuddles
the body of his infant daughter; her blood drenches them. A woman in
black pursues a tank, her arms outstretched; all seven in her family
are dead. An American Marine murders a woman because she happens to
be standing next to a man in a uniform. “I’m sorry,’’
he says, “but the chick got in the way.’’
Covering this in a shroud of respectability has not been easy for George
Bush and Tony Blair. Millions now know too much; the crime is all too
evident. Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, a Labour MP for
41 years, says the Prime Minister is a war criminal and should be sent
to The Hague. He is serious, because the prima facie case against Blair
and Bush is beyond doubt.
Click
here to download (36kb)
11.
The war for truth (April
5, 2003)
"We
had a great day," said Sgt Eric Schrumpf of the US Marines last
Saturday. "We killed a lot of people." He added: "We
dropped a few civilians, but what do you do?" He said there were
women standing near an Iraqi soldier, and one of them fell when he and
other Marines opened fire. "I'm sorry," said Sgt Schrumpf,
"but the chick was in the way". For me, what is remarkable
about this story is that I heard almost the same words 36 years ago
when a US Marine sergeant told me he had killed a pregnant woman.
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here to download (36kb)
10.
Six days of shame
(March 26, 2003)
Today
is a day of shame for the British military as it declares the Iraqi
city of Basra, with a stricken population of a million men, women and
children, a “military target”. You will not read or hear those
words on the BBC or elsewhere in the establishment media that claims
to speak for Britain. But they are true. With Basra, shame is now our
signature, forged by Blair and Bush.
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here to download (36kb)
09.
How you can protest
(March 20, 2003)
When
Bush and Blair begin their illegal and immoral attack on a country that
offers us no threat, we all have a choice. We can wring our hands and
say there is nothing we can do in the face of such powerful piracy –
or we can reclaim the democracy that has been so corrupted by an elected
dictatorship (in Bush’s case, unelected). There is only one responsible
way to achieve the second goal. The polite term is civil disobedience.
The street term is rebellion. In 1946, Justice Robert Jackson, the chief
prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership, said that
the “very essence” of international justice “is that
individuals have international duties which transcend national obligations
of obedience imposed by the state”.
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here to download (36kb)
08.
This is the cost of Blair’s ‘moral’ war
(March 13, 2003)
The
Blair Government has known, almost from the day it came to office in
1997, that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly
destroyed following the Gulf War. Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair
and Bush, and their current threats giving Saddam Hussein yet another
deadline to disarm, what may be their biggest lie is exposed by this
revelation.
Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations debriefing of Iraqi
general Hussein Kamel was obtained by the American magazine, Newsweek,
and by Cambridge University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who last month revealed
that Blair’s “intelligence dossier” on Iraq was lifted,
word for word, from an American student’s thesis).
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here to download (36kb)
07.
Farce, morality and innocent victims (February
27, 2003)
Having
failed to fabricate a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and prove that
Iraq has a secret armoury of banned weapons, the warmongers have fallen
back on the “moral case” for an unprovoked attack on a stricken
country. Farce has arrived. We want to laugh out loud, a deep and dark
and almost grief-laden laugh, at Blair’s concern for the “victims
of Saddam Hussein” and his admonishment (reprinted in the Observer)
of the millions of protesters: “There will be … no protests
about the thousands of [Iraqi] children that die needlessly every year
…”
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here to download (36kb)
06.
Why we should march
(February 14, 2003)
Tomorrow
will be one of the most important public events in memory will take
place in central London. It is not possible to overstate the significance
and urgency of the march and demonstration against an unprovoked British
and American attack on Iraq, a nation with whom we have no quarrel and
who offer us no threat. The urgency is the saving of lives. First, let
us stop calling it a “war”. The last time “war”
was used in the Gulf was in 1991 when the truth was buried with more
than 200,000 people. Attacking a 70-mile line of trenches, three American
brigades, operating at night, used 60-ton armoured earthmovers to bury
alive teenage Iraqi conscripts, including the wounded and those surrendering
and retreating. Survivors were slaughtered from the air. The helicopter
gunship pilots called it a “turkey shoot”.
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here to download (36kb)
05.
Painful decisions
(February 13, 2003)
As
the world protests against war, we hear again the lies of old. “A
painful decision,” say the supporters of an invasion. But it is
not they who will feel the pain: it will be the Iraqi infants writhing
in the dust when the cluster bombs fall. In “Dulce et decorum est”,
his classic poem from the First World War, Wilfred Owen described young
soldiers, doomed to die, “like old beggars under sacks”, and
a man’s “hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin”.
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here to download (36kb)
04.
Paper turns its back on a great legacy
(January 30, 2003)
In
its leaders [editorials] supporting the war in Iraq, the Observer newspaper
proves that it has truly buried its great liberal editor David Astor,
and his principled, “freethinking” legacy. The Palestinian
writer Ghada Karmi has described “a deep and unconscious racism
[that] imbues every aspect of western conduct toward Iraq”. She
wrote: “I recall that a similar culture prevailed in the UK during
the 1956 Suez crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when Nasser was
the arch-villain and all Arabs were crudely targeted. Today, in Britain,
such overt anti-Arabness is unacceptable, so it takes subtler forms.
Saddam-bashing, a sport officially sanctioned since 1991, has made him
the perfect surrogate for anti-Arab abuse.”
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here to download (36kb)
03.
Bloody cowards!
(January 29, 2003)
William
Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of imperial
wars, may have first used the expression, “blood on his hands”,
to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the
mass killing of ordinary people. In my experience, “on his hands”
applies especially to those modern political leaders who have had no
personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who managed not to serve
in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair. There is about them the essential
cowardice of the man who causes death and suffering not by his own hand,
but through a chain of command that affirms his “authority”.
Click
here to download (36kb)
02.
In search of a new Pearl Harbor
(December 12, 2002)
Two
years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush
said what America needed was “a new Pearl Harbor”. Its published
aims have, alarmingly, come true. The threat posed by US terrorism to
the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail
in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently.
What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world’s
resources, it said, was “some catastrophic and catalysing event
– like a new Pearl Harbor”.
Click
here to download (36kb)
01.
Lies, damned lies and terror warnings (December
3, 2002)
On
November 7, the day before the United Nations Security Council voted
on a resolution that made an American and British attack on Iraq more
than likely, Downing Street began issuing warnings of imminent terrorist
threats against the United Kingdom. Cross-Channel ferries, the London
Underground and major public events were all said to be “targeted”.
The anonymous Government sources described “emergency security
measures” that included a “rapid reaction force of army reservists”
and a squadron of fighter jets “on constant standby”.
Plans were being drawn up to “evacuate major cities and deal with
large numbers of contaminated corpses”. Police snipers were being
trained “to kill suicide bombers” and anti-radiation pills
were being distributed to hospitals. By November 11, Tony Blair himself
was telling the British public to be “on guard” against an
attack that could lead to “maximum carnage”.
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