Israel?s Illegal Assault On The Gaza ?Prison?2 Mar 2008Attacking The Prisoners Israel has drawn international criticism for its latest series of onslaughts against the ?prison? of Gaza, the crowded home to 1.4 million Palestinians. Since last Wednesday (February 27), 112 Palestinians have died under Israeli air attacks and ?incursions? by Israeli troops. The dead include many women and children, such as four boys who had been out playing football and even babies killed in their homes. Last Saturday alone saw the deaths of 60 Palestinians under Israeli attacks. Three Israelis have died – one a civilian killed during a rocket attack by Hamas last Wednesday and, since then, two Israeli soldiers. On February 29, Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, said on the BBC Today programme that: ?We’ve been restraining ourselves for a very, very long time. But we have a responsibility to defend our citizens. This is the context.? (BBC Radio 4 Today interview with Edward Stourton, Friday, February 29, 2008, 7.30 am;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ram/today3_israel_20080229.ram) The same day, a senior Israeli source threatened a ?holocaust? in Gaza. Matan Vilnai, the deputy defence minister, warned: “The more [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” (BBC news online, ?Israel warns of Gaza ?holocaust?,? February 29, 2008; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7270650.stm) The disconnect with the view of the Israeli public was stark: 64% support negotiations with Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, in an attempt to bring about peace. Palestinian Terrorism: The “Inevitable Consequence” Of Israeli Occupation. Just before this latest escalation in violence, the newswire service Associated Press briefly flagged up a report on the Occupied Territories, commissioned by the UN. (Bradley S. Klapper, ‘Report: Israeli occupation causes terror’, Associated Press, Feb 26, 6:11 PM ET, published on Yahoo news website, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080226/ap_on_re_mi_ea/un_israel&printer=1). It has since been ignored by the corporate media. The report, authored by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, concludes that Palestinian terrorism is the “inevitable consequence” of Israeli occupation. While Palestinian terrorist acts are deplorable, “they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation.” Dugard, a South African professor of law, accuses the Israeli state of acts and policies consistent with all three. (‘Human Rights Situation in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories’, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, John Dugard, United Nations Human Rights Council, A/HRC/7/17; http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G08/402/29/PDF/G0840229.pdf) The report notes that Israel has attempted to justify its attacks and incursions as ?defensive operations? aimed at preventing the launching of rockets into Israel. Dugard states clearly that ?the firing of rockets into Israel by Palestinian militants without any military target, which has resulted in the killing and injury of Israelis, cannot be condoned and constitutes a war crime.? But he also notes that ?serious questions arise over the proportionality of Israel?s military response and its failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets. It is highly arguable that Israel has violated the most fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, which constitute war crimes.? In particular: ?Above all, the Government of Israel has violated the prohibition on collective punishment of an occupied people contained in article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.? In the days that followed, as killings and injuries rapidly rose under a massive Israeli assault, we could find not a single mention in any UK national newspaper of this important assessment by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories. Exchange With BBC Radio 4 Presenter On February 29, we wrote to Edward Stourton in response to his interview that morning with Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the UK. First, we pointed out that Stourton had not challenged Prosor’s erroneous assertion that Gaza could now run its own affairs following the withdrawal of Israeli military forces in 2005. Prosor claimed: “Israel disengaged completely out of Gaza more than two years ago” so that “the Palestinians would take responsibility, would run Gaza.” Indeed, the thrust of the BBC presenter?s own words, with multiple repetition of the loaded word “disengagement”, was that Israel was no longer the occupying power in Gaza. We pointed out, by contrast, the assessment of John Dugard: “it is clear that Israel remains the occupying Power as technological developments have made it possible for Israel to assert control over the people of Gaza without a permanent military presence.” We asked Stourton whether he was aware of this assessment. Moreover, as we saw above, Dugard had observed that Palestinian terrorism was the ?inevitable consequence? of Israeli occupation. We asked why the Today programme had not addressed Dugard?s important new report. On the same day, Stourton responded, but only to the first point: ?This is such a difficult area to get right and I always welcome constructive comments – so thank you for your thoughts. I suppose the only point I would make is that if you challenge every statement in an interview like that it can get a bit arid.? A similar email to Jeremy Bowen, the BBC?s Middle East news editor, about the corporation?s serious omission, went unanswered. Stourton?s response was standard for the BBC – friendly, well-meaning but ultimately vacuous. By contrast, in 2004, Tim Llewellyn, the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, blew a loud whistle on the deep bias in BBC reporting: ?Watching a peculiarly crass, inaccurate and condescending programme about the endangered historical sites of ?Israel? – that is to say, the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories – on BBC2 in early June 2003, I determined to try to work out, as a former BBC Middle East correspondent, why the Corporation has in the past two and a half years been failing to report fairly the most central and lasting reason for the troubles of the region: the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom.? He described some of his conclusions: ?In the news reporting of the domestic BBC TV bulletins, ?balance?, the BBC’s crudely applied device for avoiding trouble, means that Israel’s lethal modern army is one force, the Palestinians, with their rifles and home-made bombs, the other ?force?: two sides equally strong and culpable in a difficult dispute, it is implied, that could easily be sorted out if extremists on both sides would see reason and the leaders do as instructed by Washington… ?When suicide bombers attack inside Israel the shock is palpable. The BBC rarely reports the context, however. Many of these acts of killing and martyrdom are reprisals for assassinations by Israel’s death squads, soldiers and agents who risk nothing as they shoot from helicopters or send death down a telephone line. I rarely see or hear any analysis of how many times the Israelis have deliberately shattered a period of Palestinian calm with an egregious attack or murder. ?Quiet? periods mean no Israelis died… it is rarely shown that during these ?quiet? times Palestinians continued to be killed by the score.? (See our Media Alert: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040115_Ducking_Palestine_1.HTM) This is the reality of a systematic BBC bias that works to suppress public awareness of the true gravity of Israel?s human rights abuses. SUGGESTED ACTION The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Write to the following editors and ask them why they have not covered the latest assessment by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories; in particular that Palestinian terrorism is the ?inevitable consequence? of Israeli occupation and that ?the collective punishment of Gaza by Israel is expressly prohibited by international humanitarian law.? Write to: Jeremy Bowen, the BBC?s Middle East news editor
Email: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk Write to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s news director
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk Write to Ian Romsey, ITN?s head of output
Email: ian.romsey@itn.co.uk Write to Ian Black, the Guardian?s Middle East editor
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Email: editor@medialens.org The Media Lens book ?Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media? by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. John Pilger described it as: ?The most important book about journalism I can remember.? For further details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here:
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Labour means business2 Mar 2008After witnessing yet another theatrical but shallow slogging match at prime minister’s question time, I couldn’t help thinking there is something really surreal about the current political scene. As the positions of the two main parties become increasingly intertwined, and the differences between the Blairite and Brownite variations of neoliberalism become increasingly difficult to detect, the debate about the political fundamentals has dwindled almost to invisibility. Never was ideology more needed, and never was it more lacking. It isn’t as though there is little to debate. The free market Washington consensus, which has governed the global economy for the past quarter of a century, is in crisis as a result of the sub-prime market fiasco and the other excesses of two or more decades of deregulated markets. Yet neither in parliament nor in the media is there any serious debate about long-term reform. The power structure in Britain has dramatically altered over the same period, with the growing centralisation of power around No 10 balanced by the downgrading of parliament and linked to the dominance (until now) of the City, big business and, increasingly, the media. But nowhere is the loss of democratic accountability even discussed, let alone remedied. And since the Iraq invasion, nearly five years ago, there has still not been a parliamentary debate with a vote on the causes, handling and aftermath of the war. In the absence of discussion about the real big issues, politics has become a matter of narrow positioning, repositioning and counter-positioning between political elites around daily issues as they arise. Of course, these issues have to be addressed, but addressed in terms of an overarching philosophy with which people can identify. The Progress thinktank’s talk of “a future agenda that is post-Blair, but not anti-Blair; building on the achievements of the past decade, not running away from them”, is simply not fit for purpose. Labour will only make a major and sustained recovery when it stands up for its natural supporters – potentially more than half the population – against the forces of the market, which always favour the wealthy over the powerless. The new ultra-wealthy, epitomised by the 27m (519,230 a week) paid to Bob Diamond, of Barclays Capital, are seen by many as greed incorporated when living in the same society as those on a minimum wage of 200 a week. The ratio between top and bottom incomes, which was less than 50 to one only 30 years ago, has now risen to 2,600 to one. Labour voters expect their government to fight inequality, not side with it. What Labour needs to do, to make its potential supporters believe they have a government on their side, is to change the power structure in the manifold different ways that will strengthen the hand of those who at present have little or no power. This means implementing the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which the other 26 EU states have all accepted without demur. It means introducing the same employment protection rights as are enjoyed elsewhere throughout Europe, particularly for temporary and agency workers. And it must involve protecting individual freedoms from being eroded by cutbacks in legal aid, restrictions on jury trials, limits on the right to protest, and undue detention without charge. Money is power, too, so raising the minimum wage, currently just 5.52 an hour, to at least 7 in the first instance would empower many with little opportunities. And it means taking redistribution out of its taboo seclusion, and reclaiming a good chunk of the 25bn a year identified by the Institute of Fiscal Studies as tax avoided or evaded by large corporations or very rich individuals (including the hyper-rich non-doms who pay no tax at all) and using it to provide decent social care for the most vulnerable elderly. Labour is also expected to ensure that the market is kept in its proper place and not allowed to subvert the public values that give protection and rights and meaning to citizenship. The concept of “choice” in the health services and education has been largely a pretext to open them up to the private sector, without any firm evidence of better outcomes, and leads, bizarrely, to the Tories being rated in polls as better on health than Labour. This aberration should be stopped now, if Labour’s reputation as the party of the universality, equity and accountability of public service is to be retrieved. There are other reasons, too, for a major change of direction here. PFI has proved enormously wasteful, over-extended IT projects have cost billions and still failed, and consultants have enriched themselves at taxpayers’ expense out of all proportion to public benefit. Yet preventive health services, where both better health and much greater cost-effectiveness could be secured, remain hugely undersubscribed. A change here could bring enormous dividends. Above all, electors want a Labour government to deal effectively with market failures and excesses. Why is Labour so timid and diffident about public ownership for Northern Rock when private ownership has so spectacularly imploded amid dodgy securitisation, sub-prime blunders, a credit crunch now threatening millions of families, extreme short-termism, and Babylonian excesses of greed? Where privatisation has led to hospital infections and overcrowded trains, which people feel strongly about, they look to the state to act. They want a changed relationship with the market so that the private company brought in to upgrade London Underground, Metronet, cannot walk away leaving the public to pick up its 2bn debts. And they expect a Labour government to take on big business on their behalf where that is necessary: in the food industry, over unhealthy food and obesity, in the gaming industry, over casinos, in the drinks industry, over alcohol-fuelled violence and anti-social behaviour, and with the airlines, over climate change. It will not be easy for any government to begin to move away from the privatisation and deregulation, the tenets of unfettered market neoliberalism that have governed western political economy for the last three decades, and to re-establish a more healthy relationship between the market and society. But the international crisis gathering now that money and power have so clearly overreached themselves offers a real chance. And the task of reinspiring the Labour project in the run-up to the next election may leave ministers little choice.
Riots, Terrorism etc2 Mar 2008?Important? is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ?slightly above average?, or ?I was at university with her,? or ?I couldn?t be bothered to read it so I?m giving a quote instead.? Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ?a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject?. Nick Davies?s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies?s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It?s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and offers no hope that things will improve. His book starts at the point at which he got interested in the story of what he calls ?flat earth news?: ?A story appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true ? even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.? That?s flat earth news, and Davies became interested in the phenomenon, via the story of the millennium bug. How on earth did so many papers get sucked into producing so many millions of words of, it turns out, total nonsense about the impending implosion of all government, all commerce, all human activity, by the catastrophe which was going to be caused by the bug? ?National Health Service patients could die? (Telegraph); ?Banks could collapse? (Guardian); ?Riots, terrorism and a health crisis? (Sunday Mirror); ?Pensions contributions could be wiped out? (Independent); ?Nato alert over Russian missile millennium bug? (Times). The British government spent a figure variously reported as 396 million, 430 million and 788 million. And then, on the big night, a tide gauge failed in Portsmouth harbour. That was pretty much it. Countries which had spent next to nothing ? Russia, for instance, whose government of 140 million citizens spent less on the bug than British Airways ? had no problems. There are several ways of looking at this story, which has some of the aspects of a panic and some of those of a hoax or job-creation scheme.[1] Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of words written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists who had no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply didn?t know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most basic function of journalism, in Davies?s view, is to check facts. Journalists don?t just pass on what they?re told without making an effort to check it first. At least, in theory they don?t. In practice, contemporary journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost defies belief. The consequences of that are pervasive and systemic. Nick Davies is an unusual figure in British journalism, mainly because he has persisted in holding the admirable belief that reporting is the central task of the trade. Journalists report much less than they used to, and much less than they should, as the papers have switched over to a reliance on columnists and opinion. Back in the day, an ambitious young toad going into journalism would have seen All the President?s Men once too often, and would dream of bringing down governments with a single scoop. Good luck to them. Davies was like that. Today the equivalent ambitious young toad would dream of having a column with their picture at the top, as a precursor to a well-timed move to TV or politics or some other form of showbiz. Davies, however, is still a believer in legwork and in getting the story first-hand. This led him to recruit researchers at Cardiff University?s school of journalism to quantify what was happening in the British press. The result is illuminating and grim. The team looked at a fortnight?s production from the posh papers and the Daily Mail, and analysed in the process 2207 UK news pieces. They focused on two things: the number of stories that were derived directly from press releases; and the number that were taken straight from the main British news agency, the Press Association. The results were amazing, and not in a good way. They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked. So only 12 per cent of what is in the papers consists of a story that a reporter has found out and pursued on her own initiative; and only 12 per cent of key facts are checked. The rest is all rewritten wire copy and PR. This remaining 88 per cent is, in Davies?s stinging coinage, ?churnalism?. No wonder the papers feel a bit thin. As for the wire copy, most of it comes from the Press Association: When the queen wants to talk to the world, she gives a statement to the Press Association. When the poet laureate wants to publish a poem, he files it to the Press Association. Every government department, every major corporation, every police service and health trust and education authority delivers its official announcements to the Press Association. It is the primary conveyor belt along which information reaches national media in Britain. The boffins in Cardiff found that 30 per cent of home news stories are direct rewrites of PA and other news agency copy; another 19 per cent are ?largely reproduced? from this copy; another 21 per cent ?contained elements? of it. That?s 70 per cent of news stories wholly or in part from wire copy. The general rule in journalism, increasingly honoured more in the breach than the observance, is that a story has to have two sources to be confirmed, but according to BBC guidelines, ?the Press Association can be treated as a confirmed, single source.? That practice is widespread. As a result, it matters deeply what the PA actually does ? and here Davies has more grimness to impart. The agency?s network of reporters is stretched increasingly thin, with, for instance, four reporters (including trainees) to cover the whole of Cardiff, South Wales and the Welsh Assembly. The staffers, according to one of them, write an average of ten stories in a single shift: ?I don?t usually spend more than an hour on a story.? The emphasis is on catching what people say accurately. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, puts it, ?our role is attributable journalism ? what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.? If the government says Saddam has WMD, that?s what the PA will report. Because the PA is the basis for such a huge proportion of what?s in the papers, and because its stories tend not to be checked, it is a highly effective way for PRs to plant stories across all the national media simultaneously. ?It is infinitely preferable logistically to send it to the PA than to try and contact 150 journalists,? one of Davies?s sources, a PR who works for one of the political parties, told him. ?And we are rarely subjected to the sort of cross-examination that, say, the Sun or the Times would give us. PA does not do as much of the probing and difficult questions. They are journalists but to some extent they are an information service.? So we have arrived at a place where ?the heart of modern journalism? has become ?the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those who provide it?. In the old days, at this point in the story, it would be time to Name the Guilty Men. They would once have been the evil proprietors, top-hatted cigar-smoking manipulators of public opinion. I don?t agree with the conspiracy theory of the proprietor press, nor does Davies: he thinks that it?s sheer commercial pressure that is to blame. It?s the pressure on costs ? to produce more, cheaper copy ? that is the ultimate culprit for the state of the modern press. Flat Earth News breaks down the specific ways in which pressure is exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need to be cheap, meaning ?quick to cover?, ?safe to publish?; they need to ?select safe facts? preferably from official sources; they need to ?avoid the electric fence?, sources of guaranteed trouble such as the libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on ?safe ideas? and contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or context-rich problems; and always to ?give both sides of the story? (?balance means never having to say you?re sorry ? because you haven?t said anything?). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral panic. That?s the effect on the texture of journalism, the culture of the newsroom. Of course, the pressure on costs has other, simpler effects too. There is more space to fill ? in the British papers, three times as much ? but no equivalent expansion of the resources to do the work. Elsewhere, the pressure on resources is just as bad. In 1970, CBS had three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006, the entire US media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141 foreign correspondents to cover the whole world. As the pressures on journalism have increased, so the PR industry has come along with what appears to be a solution. Want news? We?ll give it to you. Britain now has 47,800 PR people to 45,000 journalists. It isn?t the case that PRs just beg for coverage for their clients: they?re much more cunning than that. Once one grows alert to the question, you can see PR influence almost everywhere in the press. The greatly missed Auberon Waugh used to say that behind any claim in any way interesting, striking or surprising in the news, there was either someone demanding more government money or a press release. That is truer than ever, only these days the press release will announce the result of a survey (a favourite PR tactic) or a ?release? statement from a phoney pressure group, such as one of the many set up to create uncertainty over the question of climate change. These pressure groups are known as ?astroturf? in the PR industry, because their grass-roots are fake, but that doesn?t stop their statements and surveys from getting on the news. PR is not exactly the villain of the piece, but Davies is persuasive about its all-pervading nature in modern journalism, and also about the increasing sophistication of its techniques. He cites the way the ?NatWest Three?, the British bankers involved in the Enron frauds, managed to have themselves depicted as victims of the American legal system, with businessmen, civil rights pressure groups and MPs all campaigning on their behalf, when, in truth, they were total crooks. There are plenty of other examples in Flat Earth News. Davies, informed by his knowledge of PR, even has a fresh angle on Alastair Campbell and the Kelly affair. In his account, ?Campbell used it as a decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which was emerging slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist.? Four weeks after the broadcast of Andrew Gilligan?s Today story, Campbell had not asked for an apology for it specifically, had not referred it to the BBC complaints department, and had not mentioned it at lunch with Gilligan?s boss, Richard Sambrook. But he then made ?three key moves?: on 25 June he denounced Gilligan?s story to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs (?Until the BBC acknowledges that is a lie, I will keep banging on?); on 26 June he wrote to Sambrook demanding a reply that same day, and released his own letter to the press; on 27 June he more or less invited himself onto Channel Four News to attack the BBC, live. Davies observes: ?This move finally established the decoy story as the main media line. The original questions about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were shunted into the sidings. Several political reporters wrote at the time that this looked like a diversionary tactic. Nonetheless, all of them agreed to be diverted. PR works.? This explains what Campbell meant, as recorded in his diary for 25 June: ?Flank opened on the BBC.? Davies adds a few chapters of detail on the ways in which the papers have gone astray: the industry-wide use of bent private detectives, the culture of error at the Daily Mail, the ease with which the government co-opted the Observer to make the case for war in Iraq. These chapters aren?t really necessary for the central thrust of the book, even though Davies?s specifics are uncheering. For instance, in Britain only the rich can sue for libel; everyone else has to seek remedy via the Press Complaints Commission, set up by the industry to regulate itself. But the PCC rejects 90.2 per cent of all complaints on technical grounds without investigation. Of the 28,227 complaints received by the commission over ten years, 197 were upheld by a PCC adjudication: 0.69 per cent. The one or two points at which Davies disses fellow investigative journalists have a strangely ad hominem feel; there are moments when it seems old grudges are playing a role. This has in turn led to something of a backlash in early reviews of Flat Earth News, including a bizarrely hostile (as opposed to merely negative) review by Peter Preston, editor of the Guardian, Davies?s paper, from 1975 to 1995. Preston had a number of harsh things to say about ?Saint Nick?, one of which had some traction: that he exaggerates the extent to which there was once a golden age of the British press. True. But all these details are less shocking than the more general data about the broad trend towards churnalism. So this is Davies?s ultra-bleak portrait. The British news media are crushed by commercial pressure, squeezed by the need for speed, corrupted by PR, indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts, systematically lied to by commercial interests and governments, and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality. I would add a couple of details to the indictment, to do with the way in which the papers have succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make no attempt to report on the world, in favour of sermonising about it. I would also add ? borrowing a point from a journalist I spoke to, who was in depressed and reluctant agreement with Flat Earth News ? that the collapse in news leads to a huge knock-on in the rest of the papers. Most columns and features are hung on a news-related peg, so if the news isn?t fulfilling its basic function to report and to check, then nor is anything else. Davies doesn?t mention that, but it doesn?t matter much, since his portrait of the British media could scarcely be any darker, or more convincing. His conclusion is in the same key as the rest of the book. ?I?m afraid that I think the truth is that, in trying to expose the weakness of the media, I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it helps a little to be able to see the illness. At least that way we might know in theory what the cure might be. But I fear the illness is terminal.? Notes: 1. As a nerd, I feel a duty to point out that computers do sometimes have these problems. Nasa has never had a space shuttle in the air at the end of a year, over the transition from 31 December to 1 January, precisely because it?s not confident about the onboard software coping with the switch. (Nasa?s annual budget is $16 billion.) The truth, according to Davies, seems to be that the bug, while theoretically a problem, would only occur in computers which fitted all the following conditions: they a. had internal clocks (most big, ?embedded? systems don?t), b. had clocks which calculated time using an internal calendar, rather than just by measuring the gap between dates, c. used two rather than four digits to calculate the date and d. were in use by programmes which were calculating dates across that boundary. The number of computers that ticked all those boxes turned out to be vanishingly small.
Into the Valley of DEFRA1 Mar 2008Running scared of midnight crop-trashings, the transnational corporations behind GM foods are demanding the right to grow them in secret. DEFRA (govt dept for farming, and er, of the ‘environment’) are looking at new ways of clamping down on direct action. The corporations have warned that trials of GM crops are becoming too expensive to conduct in Britain because of the additional costs of protecting fields from activists. The Agricultural Biotechnology Council, an industry lobby group (slogan: ‘promoting biotechnology in sustainable agriculture’) is pushing for secret locations and stiffer penalties for croptrashers. Last year only one GM trial went ahead in the UK, of potatoes developed by German company BASF. Two activists were arrested for damage to the trial site, which was later anonymously trashed and the trial abandoned (see SchNEWS 583). BASF plans to repeat the trial this year, at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridgeshire. Another trial is planned by scientists at Leeds University. Under existing laws, full details of every GM crop trial should be disclosed in advance on a government website, with a six-figure grid reference identifying the precise location of the field. Last week, Friends of the Earth (FoE), using the Freedom of Information Act, finally obtained – albeit still partial – information which shows that the Government provides at least 50m a year for research into agricultural biotechnology, largely GM crops and food. This generosity contrasts with the 1.6m given last year for research into organic agriculture, in spite of repeated promises to promote environmentally friendly, ‘sustainable’ farming. They also gained disclosure of letters which showed DEFRA (supposedly the watchdogs over the GM crop process) bending over backwards to accommodate BASF’s needs when it came to the potato trials. Another campaigning group, GM Freeze, got hold of letters clearly demonstrating that DEFRA allowed the biotech giant BASF to help to set the DEFRA conditions for their own trials! On the 1st of December last year, the company was given permission to plant 450,000 modified potatoes in British fields over the next five years, in a series of 10 trials. In one letter to BASF, a DEFRA official asked, “Please let me know whether or not the conditions as they stand would be agreeable to BASF or whether there are any conditions that would be difficult to meet.” Well SchNEWS knows who we’ll be rooting for… We won’t stop til the BASFs of this world have had their chips… See www.mutatoes.org www.gmfreeze.org and www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/real_food
Miliband is Very Sorry1 Mar 2008The European Court of Human Rights condemned the so-called “five techniques” used by UK military and security forces during that period. It ruled that the techniques – hooding, wall-standing, noise, deprivation of food and drink, and sleep deprivation – were cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, banned under the European Convention on Human Rights. The British government gave “a solemn undertaking” to the court that the techniques would never again be used on British soil." Human Rights Watch – Dangerous Ambivalence: UK Policy on Torture since 9/11 Never again on British soil, but we can solemnly undertake that you can ship it overseas and we shall turn a blind eye – especially if there are others who will do the actual dirty business. We shall not engage in torture (and if by chance you find a case or two, be sure that these are only rotten apples). This is the British way. Our public face is principled, well-spoken and well-educated. We play fair, and you can trust our simple swords of truth and trusty shields. In fact, if those dirty Americans (our special friends) should ever happen – perchance – to fly an aeroplane through our airspace, carting their prisoners of war off to secret detention camps to be tortured, you can be quite sure that we knew nothing about it, that it didn’t happen anyway, and if someone finds out that it did, we shall apologise for having told you otherwise. And so we did, or rather so our well-spoken, principled, well-educated Foreign Secretary did. The very same Foreign Secretary, incidentally, who features on the front page1 of Amnesty’s UK Section website with the Director of Amnesty UK (Kate Allen) and a candle in the background. You see: he believes in human rights, and our human rights organisations believe in him. But just for the record: Miliband was Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit in Downing Street from 1997 to 2001. The Policy Unit ‘provides expert advice to the Prime Minister’ – and presumably did so in those crucial years when the Prime Minister was a) bombing Iraq illegally, b) ensuring the continuation of a ‘genocidal’ (in the words of Denis Halliday) sanctions policy in Iraq, c) bombing Serbia illegally. In May 2001, Miliband entered Parliament as a Labour MP, from which time he has voted loyally with the Government on all major issues – including supporting the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, draconian anti-terrorism bills, pre-charge detention up to a maximum of 28 days, restrictions on free speech and the right to protest, and the imposition of control orders. No name but a few. From May 2005, Miliband has been a member of the Cabinet and from July 2007, Foreign Secretary. Since then, and despite much muttering that things would change, nothing has. He still says of the Iraq invasion ‘I believe this was done for the right reasons.’ He must be the only person left in the UK who does. It also makes it rather strange that he should have tried so hard to prevent the first draft of the dodgy dossier from being released under a FOI request, as he did. I wonder what he was afraid that we might see. Rendition, British-style And now there is this latest episode: Ben Griffin is a former SAS soldier who served in the US/UK Task Force in Afghanistan, and who has decided to go public on British complicity with torture. Last Monday, he made a statement to the press – his last, before the Government put a gagging order on him – in which he said: Throughout my time in Iraq I was in no doubt that individuals detained by UKSF and handed over to our American colleagues would be tortured. During my time as member of the US/UK Task Force, three soldiers recounted to me an incident in which they had witnessed the brutal interrogation of two detainees. Partial drowning and an electric cattle prod were used during this interrogation and this amounted to torture. It was the widely held assumption that this would be the fate of any individuals handed over to our America colleagues. Griffin says he has been told by his legal team that whenever British soldiers hand over detainees to the Americans (or the Afghan or Iraqi powers) – this is rendition2 It is rendition, and it is illegal, both because it is done secretly, or at least without formal procedures; but also because by now there is enough evidence to know that the recipient parties all engage in torture on a systematic basis. So quite apart from whether we, the British, torture with our own clean hands – and we do3 – we are still contravening human rights law, regularly, by handing those we detain over to hands that we know are dirty4. ...it is the essential responsibility of States to prevent acts of torture and other forms of ill-treatment being committed, not only against persons within any territory under their own jurisdiction… but also to prevent such acts by not bringing persons under the control of other States if there are substantial grounds for believing that they would be in danger of being subjected to torture. Report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment Can we then expect an apology from our Foreign Secretary, for our engaging in rendition, systematically, and deliberately? It might mean just a little more than an apology for his predecessor having misled the House 5 years ago about 2 aeroplanes touching down on British territory. ——————————- 1. I see they’ve taken it away from there now. It was up for a good 2 weeks. I do wonder what it would take for Amnesty International to realise that war IS a human rights issue, and that those who wage it unprovoked, or vote for it and try to hide its crimes, should be brought to trial, and certainly not portrayed as candlelit icons on human rights websites. 2. You can see Griffin speaking here 3. For example, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/23/iraq.military 4. See the Human Rights Watch report No Blood, No Foul for US soldiers’ testimony on torture; or Amnesty’s own report on the complicity of Nato forces in torture: Afghanistan: Detainees transferred to torture: ISAF complicity?
The Sound of the Suburbs1 Mar 2008In many ways the essence of ?Englishness? is encapsulated in traditional understandings of what constitutes ?suburbia?. But these twin concepts, evoking landscapes frozen in time, have little to do with twenty-first century multi-ethnic suburbia. Old associations of suburbia – ageing residents, net curtains, clipped hedges and whiteness – are in desperate need of updating as twentieth-century migration has given birth to the multi-ethnic twenty-first century suburb. Far from being settled and stable, the suburbs are now places of diaspora and in-betweenness. Looking at contemporary suburbia conjures up a range of issues relevant to the debate on national identity, against a backdrop of globalisation. It also raises sociocultural questions about the places that are beyond the metropolis so beloved of popular culture and academia: the suburbs provide a rich diversity of experience that is often ignored. Its dynamic social and cultural spaces are as much part of the risk society as the more commonly studied inner city – with all that means in terms of individualism, change and the collapse of tradition. Suburbia in fact and fiction: popular stereotypes The July 2005 Daily Mail headline ?Suicide Bombers From Suburbia? was clearly designed to shock. The sentiments are clear: old certainties are undergoing a process of fracture, a fundamental break from the norm. Suburbia, a place always seen as archetypically English, now harbours a new enemy within. The things that we have comfortably associated with suburbia – stability, safety, respectability and whiteness – no longer epitomise the English suburb. Instead risk and danger lurk around suburban corners. The suburbs, previously associated with the ordinary and mundane, are now a site of extraordinary happenings, thereby calling into question received notions of Britishness. And it is not just suicide bombers (Beeston, Leeds) that are disrupting our sense of the suburbs; they are now places where playground stabbings take place (Edgware, Middlesex), where the police carry out dawn raids (Forest Gate, East London) and where the far right thrive politically (the next-door town of Barking, Essex). It is unsurprising that the suburbs have become the place where the extraordinary happens, as it is here that the masses now live. All this is in strong contrast to the state of affairs noted by Medhurst: ?what one might call the newslessness of suburbia ? a cornerstone of the vision of tranquillity that sold the suburban dream?.1 The Mail ?s sense of affront is a predictable response to this upsetting of boundaries. Once seen as the home of the middle class, the suburbs have changed demographically, as class boundaries have become less clear ? both economically and culturally – and as our definitions of what constitutes the suburbs have widened. Suburbia has always been more diverse than the stereotype, and has elicited a wide range of responses. The safety and conformity of the suburban myth may be cherished by the Daily Mail , but their alleged conservatism and repression have been criticised by many. They have also been an object of derision for urban elites ? as seen in the frequently pejorative meaning of ?suburban?. You can hear the sneer in George Orwell?s reference, in Coming up for air , to ?the inner-outer suburbs. Always the same ? Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture chambers?. Stevie Smith is similarly disparaging: There is far too much of the suburban classes
Spiritually not geographically speaking. They?re asses.
Menacing the greatness of our beloved England, they lie
Propagating their kind in an eightroomed stye. The sound of the suburbs Sociological literature has tended to echo this metropolitan elitist snobbery, with a disproportionate amount of attention focused on urban locales at the expense of suburban settlement. According to popular wisdom, the inner-cities have an edginess that is missing from the cloying comfortableness of suburbia. At the same time there is a sense that people want to escape from the inner city to the suburbs, that they represent a place of exodus from the metropolis. This ambivalence is partly reflective of the diversity both of suburbia and of the inner city. Defining the suburbs The notion of ?white flight? adds an ethnic dimension to this – the implication being that it is the minorities who are left behind in the inner cities. However this ignores the fact that many of those that move are not white – the suburbs are becoming increasingly multicultural in character. Nor does it account for the increasing gentrification of inner-city areas. Neither the inner city nor the suburbs can be fitted into this simple picture. The suburb as the heart of English ordinariness, dull but somehow desirable, implicitly white, was evoked by Brixton-raised John Major when he predicted a lasting future for Britain as a country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, old maids on bicycles et al. This was roundly attacked for its cultural Canutism and white leanings, but it could be read as a simple celebration of mundanity, appropriate to a prime minister who was caricatured as a grey individual and seemed to cultivate an image of ordinariness. By contrast, Major?s predecessor Margaret Thatcher memorably remarked in 1987, on winning a third successive electoral term, that something should be done about ?those inner cities? – the losers under Thatcherism. Neither prime minister had much sense of the complex actualities of life in the country?s cities and suburbs. In fact, defining suburbia is problematic: definition seems to result from a process of elimination. We know that the suburbs are not the country and not the city. And it seems that we know what suburbia is through what it is in opposition to. Though an over-simplification, one could construct a list of oppositions between the suburb and inner city. In such a list, the merits of the semi-private spaces of suburbs are also their demerits: their supposed dreariness is derided but aspired to. Common associations of suburb and city White Ethnic mix Quiet Noise Space Built-up environment Aspiration/affluence Multiple deprivation, decay Choice Constraint Uniformity Difference Homogeneity Quirky Conformist Bohemian Boredom Excitement Fuddy-duddy Youth Privatised space Community Public policy thinking of recent years has tended to treat the inner cities as a problem, to be approached in problem-solving terms, for example through initiatives such as the Urban Task Force, supported by the Office of Deputy Prime Minister. New Labour?s respect agenda, and earlier emphases on social exclusion and antisocial behaviour, also implicitly target the inner-city population as opposed to those in the suburbs. By setting up a series of oppositional definitions, both the city and the suburb are misrepresented. In this case, the inner city is misrepresented as the place of problematic behaviour, whereas the suburbs are misrepresented as the place that doesn?t need resources. The exclusionary rhetoric leaves behind those in the suburbs. Moving to the suburbs Progressive outward diffusion of ethnic groupings from inner-city areas to suburban areas has been longstanding in the UK. Thus, for example, a large proportion of the Jewish population of the old East End are now settled in the London boroughs of Hackney, Redbridge and Barnet. There is an argument that as these processes of dispersal take place the ethnic group concerned becomes ?whiter?. In the US ?whitening? has happened to various ethnic groups, for example the Italians; this describes a prcoess whereby settlers begin to access structures of comparative privilege. Suburbanisation is a key component of this process. British geographer Ceri Peach some years ago made the observation that British Asian groups were split between the prospect of an Irish future (ghettoisation, lack of mobility) or a Jewish one (suburbanisation).2 Peach has also observed an outward movement by Caribbean settlers. Routes often follow familiar transport and road links – e.g. from Paddington to Brent along London Underground?s Metropolitan line, or from Brixton to Croydon, via the overground railways and the A24. In fact movement has always been a characteristic of suburbs; people move out to them and the city moves out through them. Transport has been one of the defining features of suburban London, as seen, for example, in the coining of the concept of Metroland in 1915 to describe the area to the north west of London in Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire through which the Metropolitan Railway operated and served Willmott and Young?s 1960 book, Family And Class In A London Suburb, following on from their classic Family and Kinship in East London, notes the interplay between inner east London and the outer eastern suburbs of Essex; such districts are part of a suburban drift, but one in which connections remain. The return to the city is part of this movement: one of Willmott and Young?s respondents describes Woodford as ?the place I?ve been looking for all my life ? a nice country village within easy reach of London?. Commuting – the movement between the suburb and the city – features as an integral part of suburban life in popular culture. On their 1995 album ?The Great Escape? Blur paint a pen-portait of ?poor? Ernold Sane, commiserating with him for his sad repetitive life of drudgery ?? Ernold Sane caught the same train/ At the same station/ Sat in the same seat/ With the same nasty stain/ Next to same old what?s-hisname/ On his way to the same place/ With the same name/ To do the same thing/ Again and again and again.? There are fewer representations of the journey of those escaping, but the links worked both ways. This movement to the suburbs has been well represented in fiction. Hanif Kureishi?s widely acclaimed 1990 novel The Bhudda of Suburbia drew on the author?s background of being a youngster of English/Pakistani parentage in Bromley on the south London/Kent border. Some years later there is now a new generation of black and Asian chroniclers of suburbia – often reminiscing about their own childhoods. Around the time of New Labour?s election and the associated cool Britannia rhetoric it sometimes seemed as if Asians had gone from invisibility to hyper-visibility. Recent events in the suburbs have led to a revisiting of these scenes, sometimes in the spirit of ?the Return of the Native?. Sarfraz Manzoor?s recent book reinterprets his own childhood in Luton in light of the fact that the 7/7 bombers came from the same setting.3 At a book-reading event held at the British Library in October 2007 he told the audience that, although Luton was only a twenty-minute train journey away from King?s Cross, it felt much further when he was growing up there; he commented of suburbia ?You can see the bright lights but you can?t reach them?. The Hidden Jihad , a 2002 Channel 4 documentary by second generation Asian journalist and DJ Imran Khan, showed the hip specimen retracing his steps to his childhood hometown of Peterborough to find (to his disbelief) that his male contemporaries had all turned away from clubbing and women to become devout Muslims. Generational and cultural changes, alongside the shifting patterns of urban migration, interact in complex ways within the wider context. For example there is an interesting story to be told in ?consuming suburbia?, in the way that the old suburban high streets have been affected by the growth of out-of-town shopping and the advent of the retail park, linked closely to the coming of the car economy. The individual character of many towns is evaporating, and this is reflected in their suburbs. (Though even superstores can be sites of unruliness: in 2005, when Swedish furniture store Ikea opened a branch in the north London suburb of Edmonton, riots ensued in the scramble to seek bargains. Five were hospitalised and several injured.) Here too the picture has been affected by the ?ethnicisation? of the suburbs. Ethnic commerce has reinvigorated many suburban high streets, including Rusholme, scene of Manchester?s ?curry mile?, and Green Street in East Ham, London. Further examples exist in Ealing Road in Wembley and Southall. Representing suburbia Fictitious portrayals of suburbia have tended to reinforce stereotypes of suburban drabness and drudgery. A litany of UK situation comedies have portrayed the suburbs as entirely in keeping with the table sketched out above, and the genre has tended to reinforce the dullards of suburbia as the object of ridicule. Terry and June lived behind net curtains in Purley. The ahead-of-their-time eco-warriors of The Good Life experimented with sustainable living in Surbiton. Both are south London suburbs. Indeed such fictitious mass-media depictions have contributed to the images of places in the popular imagination: successful suburbs, it seems, have tended to be concentrated in the south. Northern urban areas have tended to be represented in different ways (see, for instance, Shameless). There is a rich vein of English pop documenting the daily mundanity of English suburbia, including tracks by Morrissey, the Kinks and the Beatles; while the Pet Shop Boys had a hit single in the 1980s entitled ?Suburbia?. In 1970 George Melly observed: ?Despite his carefully grubby and poverty-stricken appearance, and painfully restricted vocabulary, the average young pop fan today is drawn in the main from a middle-class or suburban background and is educationally in one of the higher streams.?4 For all its urban posturing, punk was an intrinsically suburban phenomenon in the 1970s. The South London ?Bromley contingent? were thus called because they were based on the South London/Kent border which had earlier spawned David Bowie. Billy Idol and Siouxsie Sioux were among members. Here again transport played a key role in the production of suburban youth cultures. Accounts of the punk Bromley contingent commonly describe how the British Rail line to London Bridge threw a lifeline to the nascent punks from deep south London suburbia. The practitioners of Britpop, also revelling in urban chic, had mostly suburban roots, though these included many different types of suburb. The Gallagher brothers grew up in the suburbs of Manchester, spending their formative years in the council cottage estate of Burnage, based on the garden suburb model. John Savage traces the roots of the Gallaghers and fellow Mancunians Morrissey and Johnny Marr (of the Smiths) as Ireland via council estate Manchester suburbia.5 He calls the latter ?a step up? from inner-city ghettos such as Moss side and Hulme, describing the 1930s semidetached suburbs of Burnage and Stretford and the garden city of Wythenshawe as ?ambiguous zones, far from the city centre; superficially pleasant, yet also prone to inner-city problems: broken homes, poverty, unemployment?. This is another case of immigrant experience being filtered through suburbia. And the idea of escape from suburban chains figures strongly in this music. Morrissey sings, in Paint a Vulgar Picture: ?In my bedroom in those ugly new homes /I danced my legs down to the knees?. Individualisation and suburbia Willmott and Young flag up as a key difference between Bethnal Green and Woodford the split between public and private. In their words: ?In Bethnal Green people are vigorously at home in the streets, their public face much the same as their private. In Woodford people seem to be quieter and even more reserved in public ?? – appearing to endorse Lewis Mumford?s description of suburbs as the apotheosis of ?a collective attempt to lead a private life?. However this move to the private could also be interpreted as part of a wider move to individualisation, and this may hold some clues in explaining the unsettled nature of modern suburbia. Beck?s sociology of the risk society argues that there has been a breakdown of tradition; people have been set free from the old social forms of industrial society, and aspire to a greater degree of individualism. Unsurprisingly, this detraditionalisation of society has affected the suburbs. Suburban subjects, as much as any one else, are susceptible to the social and cultural changes of post-fordism. Changes in family life – particularly in the role of women, and the move away from the 2.4 children model; in educational structures – especially in the numbers staying in further and higher education; changes to working lives, including the effects of de-industrialisation and the flexibilisation of working hours – all these have entailed major shifts in the way suburban life is lived. As Beck has said, ?individualisation means the variation and differentiation of lifestyles and forms of life, opposing the thinking behind traditional categories of large group societies – which is to say classes, estates and social stratification?.6 Social class has long been bound up in academic considerations of suburbia. Its replacement by other forms of identification has wide-ranging consequences, including for those living in suburbia. Some of these new forms of identification may, of course, be in reaction to risk and the excesses of consumer society: it seems to have been the traditional structure of religion that threw together the networks that gave rise to the personnel of 7/7. The cultural cartography of twenty-first century Britain Any conclusions to be made about the suburbs are complicated by their complexity. Certainly recent events demonstrate that the suburbs are a much more dynamic place than they have long been given sociological credit for. Indeed they are sites in continual flux, including in their ethnic mix. And British Asians following the pattern of suburban drift are not the most recent arrivals, having been joined by Somalis and Eastern Europeans. New Labour?s obsession with middle England is focused on a very particular view of what goes on there – strongly informed by the Orwell/Major fantasy. My argument is that, in fact and fiction, the much overlooked terrain of suburbia has been an active and dynamic site of popular culture and politics since well before 1997. Beeston is not the same as Surbiton, which is not the same as Blackbird Leys or Chadderton – the list could go on. By attributing a singular identity to all suburbs, whether in a positive or negative sense, we overlook the diversity of practices within them. Urban renewal means just that. So mock-Tudor semis were decried by urban sophisticates at the time of their building in the 1930s, but they are now highly desirable, marketed as ?period properties?. Meanwhile twenty-first century new-built architecture harks back to an age before the ribbon developments of the 1930s, with Victorian-style heritage lamp-posts frequently adorning new inner-city housing developments. Perhaps we are seeing a convergence of styles: formerly suburban styles of living are permeating the inner-city, and formerly urban lifestyles are now common-place in the suburbs. There are many aspects of the suburban question that space has not allowed me to deal within the constraints of this article. In France, for example, the Gallic model of urban relations offers a different perspective of the ethnicised suburb, as was evident in the riots in banlieux. This a further graphic demonstration of the need for new ways of conceptualising suburbia in the multiethnic set-up that is the new Europe, against a backdrop of globalisation. This is a field that is central to twentyfirst century society, and one where new research is much needed. Notes 1. A. Medhurst, ?Negotiating the Gnome Zone: Versions of Suburbia in British Popular Culture?, in R. Silverstone (ed), Visions of Suburbia, Routledge 1997, p244.
2. C. Peach, Ethnicity in the 1991 Census, Vol 2: the ethnic minority populations of Great Britain, HMSO 1996; and ?Does Britain have ghettos??, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21(1) 2005.
3. S. Manzoor, Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock ?n? Roll. Bloomsbury 2007.
4. George Melly, Revolt into Style: the pop arts in the 50s and 60s, OUP 1970.
5. J. Savage, Time Travel: pop, media and sexuality 1976-96, Chatto and Windus 1996, p393
6. U. Beck, Risk Society: towards a new modernity, Sage 1992, p98.
This War on Terrorism is Bogus1 Mar 2008Massive attention has now been given – and rightly so – to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier. We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush’s younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The plan shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says “while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”. It refers to key allies such as the UK as “the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership”. It describes peacekeeping missions as “demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN”. It says “even should Saddam pass from the scene”, US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently… as “Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has”. It spotlights China for “regime change”, saying “it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia”. The document also calls for the creation of “US space forces” to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent “enemies” using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons “that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”. Finally – written a year before 9/11 – it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a “worldwide command and control system”. This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways. First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested. It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that “al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House”. Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001). Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002). All of this makes it all the more astonishing – on the war on terrorism perspective – that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate. Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.” Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan’s two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured”. The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that “the goal has never been to get Bin Laden” (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called “war on terrorism” is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: “To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11” (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that “the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East”. Submitted to Vice-President Cheney’s energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, “military intervention” was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002). Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October”. Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban’s refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs” (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001). Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into “tomorrow’s dominant force” is likely to be a long one in the absence of “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the “go” button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement. The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world’s oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s. This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing “severe” gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil. A report from the commission on America’s national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron’s beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India’s west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas. Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that “the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts” with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002). The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the “global war on terrorism” has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course. Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003 meacherm@parliament.uk
Machine Feed29 Feb 2008Aimed at mitigating climate change, a whole slew of policies and investments in agrofuels have emerged, supported by the EU?s Biofuels Directive and a web of corporate interests. The EU set targets for 2.5% agrofuel in transport fuel by April this year, 5% by 2010 and 10% by 2020. Yet, these targets cannot be met without significant imports – the UK government?s own figures state that only 2.5% of the agrofuel target can be met by domestic production. November 2007 saw the UK government create a Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) to oversee its Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO). The chairman stated, ?I am looking forward to working with the oil industry, biofuel companies, environmental groups, motorists and the general public.? The RFA?s board, however, comprises energy, oil, motoring and agrofuel interests alone ? no environmentalists or members of the general public. The RFA opposes regulation in favour of ?praising those companies who operate responsibly while openly shaming those that do not.? These weak sustainability criteria will be unenforceable until 2011, and labour rights are likely to be exempt. The interests promoting agrofuels across the world include oil companies (BP, Shell, Petrobras, Repsol), banks (Rabobank, Barclays), agribusiness behemoths (Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge, ConAgra, and Primark?s owners Associated British Foods or ABF), biotech corporations (Bayer Crop Science, Syngenta, Monsanto), supermarkets (Tesco), energy companies (Greenergy) and many new companies capitalising on a booming market and government subsidies – US subsidies for the ethanol industry have been estimated at $7 billion. In Europe the EBB (European Biodiesel Board) a major agrofuel lobby represents sixty agrofuel producers, including agrofuel giants Cargill and ADM (Archer Daniels Midland). Its website boasts high level access to the EU. One of the larger UK processors and distributors of agrofuels, D1 Oils Plc partnered with BP in June 2007. Working with Keygene in the Netherlands D1-BP Fuel Crops are developing strains of jatropha, an oil yielding shrub valued for its potential role in agrofuel production across Africa and in India and Indonesia. ?D1 will act as the exclusive supplier of selected, high-yielding Jatropha seeds and seedlings to D1-BP Fuel Crops?, thereby holding a monopoly on high-yield jatropha. Sun Biofuels, another UK based agrofuel company, specialises in African jatropha plantations. Sun were granted 9,000 hectares in Tanzania, displacing eleven villages. With Sun?s projected income from a hectare of jatropha around 390, the compensation offered was revealed to be between 31 and less than 100 per person. According to Biofuelwatch seven processing plants are already operational in the UK ? two run by D1 Oils and one each by British Sugar, Argent Energy, Greenergy, Petroplus and Earls Nook. Seven more are under construction and another seven proposed. Greenergy, the supplier of agrofuel to Tesco and Virgin, expects to source over 150,000 tonnes per annum of UK grown rapeseed as feedstock for their plant. A thousand farmers are reportedly participating in the ?Field to Forecourt? contract. ?Cargill has been appointed to manage the supply of rapeseed grown under the Field to Forecourt contract and will work alongside Frontier Agriculture, a company which it jointly owns with ABF Holdings Ltd.? Earls Nook, formerly Biofuels Corp, is working with a cluster of agribusiness, oil and genetic engineering interests (BP, ABF and DuPont). They plan to process Malaysian palm oil – one of the worst contributors to deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Working with ABF, plantations in Africa may also supply their refinery. In November 2007 ABF, which owns a 51% stake in African based sugar company Illovo Sugar, announced a 70% stake and 100 million investment in a sugar mill, an ethanol plant and electricity co-generation unit in Mali. Illovo will manage a government sponsored agricultural development (plantation) supplying 1.5 million tonnes of sugar cane a year to the plant. Argent Energy claim to use less energy intensive biofuel, from waste animal and vegetable fats. Argent Energy New Zealand signed a letter of intent with Shell New Zealand last year; Shell is looking into algae as agrofuel in Hawaii. The proposed plant will consume 20,000 hectares if algae becomes commercially viable. So far tests in the US show that only when grown near fossil fuel power plants does algae agrofuel become viable. Far from emblematic of a post-fossil fuel economy. The EU, confronted with grain stocks at their lowest for twenty five years and spiralling food prices, has abolished regulations for farmers to set aside around ten per cent of farmland. Land left fallow is being returned to industrial agriculture ? but not to wheat production . Oilseed rape cultivation has increased by twenty percent (100,000 hectares) in the UK. A nutrient hungry crop, oilseed rape requires high amounts of nitrogen fertiliser (c. 200kg per hectare). Fertliser run-off causes eutrophication – algal blooms in waterways – and Defra?s designated Nitrate Vulnerable Zones will increase in 2008 to cover 70% of England; up from 55% in 2002. Nitrogen-based fertilisers also release nitrous oxide (N2O) as they decompose in the soil. N2O is a greenhouse gas 296 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Agriculture accounts for around 7% of the UK?s emissions: 4.5% of which is nitrous oxide. Nitrogen-based fertilisers also depend on oil/gas for their manufacture. Fertiliser prices, as with natural gas, are rising. Wealthier farmers alone may benefit from lucrative crops, such as oilseed rape, which require high fertiliser inputs. The EU agrofuel targets represent a tiny reduction in CO2 emissions – an overall cut of 80% in greenhouse gas emissions is required if runaway climate change is to be averted. Substituting 10% of transport fuel with biofuel by 2020 does not alter tailpipe emissions; ethanol also combusts to produce CO2. The biodiesel fantasy envisages a cut in emissions during production, with crops absorbing CO2 as they grow and thus balancing out that which they release in combustion. Yet, as research from Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has shown, significant amounts of greenhouse gases are released through changes in land use, deforestation, fertiliser. The life cycle emissions from bioethanol from maize and biodiesel from oilseed rape often exceed those of fossil fuels. The EU is scrambling to regain lost ground. Stavros Dimas, EU?s environment commissioner, has admitted that the European Biofuels Directive introduced targets without sufficient scientific and socio-ecological assessment. Refusing a moratorium on agrofuels he seeks to focus on second and third generation agrofuels (such as waste, grasses, trees and genetically engineered crops). These still require vast swathes of land, while biotech firms will find their power over markets and the world?s ecosystems significantly enhanced.
The Day I Bombed the House of Commons29 Feb 2008The security of the House of Commons in London was breached again on Wednesday in a spectacular manner by the environmental protest group Plane Stupid, who scaled the roof of the parliament building and unfurled banners proclaiming "NO THIRD RUNWAY’. They were protesting about plans to build a third runway and sixth terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport, already the world’s busiest international airport. Earlier in the week a team of Greenpeace activists penetrated the security of the airport itself and draped a banner around the tail fin of an aircraft. Of the Parliament roof protest, a spokesman for Plane Stupid said: "This is all about no third runway. The direct action movement knows we have got to take these protests to another level to get the government to listen." Good luck to them, and it’s interesting to see that despite all the intense tightening of security in Britain today that it is still possible to pull off such a spectacular non-violent stunt. It reminded me of a day back in the early 1980’s when I went to bomb the House of Commons. Chaining my bicycle to the railings of Saint Mary’s Church, I crossed the road to join the queue waiting to gain admittance to the Houses of Parliament. It was long. I cursed myself for not getting there earlier. Perhaps the gallery would be too packed. I might have known that the debate in progress would have attracted a big crowd. It was an important sitting – a discussion on the American bombing of Libya, which would result in either the support or condemnation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for allowing US bombers to take off from American bases in Britain to carry out a raid on Libya. I joined the end of the line and began to wait as patiently as possible, erasing thoughts of what I was about to do as they came into my head. It was no good thinking about it—or what they would do with me afterwards. I must just do it. A totally premeditated act – and I was the agent to carry it out. Besides, if I worried too much about it I might get nervous and arouse suspicion by my expression. There were plenty of police around, shepherding groups in through the portals and patrolling the queue with watchful eyes. Assuming the innocent mien of a mere tourist eager to see a sitting of Parliament in progress, I began a vacuous chat with a young English couple ahead of me. They’d been promising themselves a visit to the Houses of Parliament for a long time, they said, but found it unfortunate that they’d chosen this particular day for it. The brown suit and tie I wore added to the innocuous image I had assumed. The bombs were in a cigarette packet in my inner breast pocket. To strengthen my resolve to commit the deed—just in case I should chicken out at the last moment – I began to think of the events that had brought me there, standing in line, waiting to bomb the House of Commons. A few days earlier I had woken up, turned on my bedside radio, and been angered by the news I heard. While I was sleeping, American planes had taken off from bases in England, flown half-way across the world, and bombed the city of Tripoli, with the full knowledge and permission of the British Prime Minister. Civilian areas had been hit, including a hospital, and many people had been killed and injured – Colonel Gadaffi’s adopted daughter among the casualties. As I listened to the new all morning torpor had vanished in a flash, and I lay there burning with anger at the outrage and hypocrisy – a blatant terrorist act against innocent civilians – sanctioned by a government which loudly decried the terrorism of others. Jumping out of bed, I pulled on my clothes and cycled across town to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The police had already erected barricades along the pavement, and I took my place with a small handful of people who had already arrived. The crowd grew throughout the day and there were chants and shouts, but it wasn’t enough to cause more than an inconvenience to the staff and visitors who entered and left the embassy building. One pretty young secretary, who flaunted out on her lunch break, disdainfully ignoring the demonstrators, had her blonde hair parted in the middle, one side falling down in a curvy wave over one eye. "Oh look! It’s Veronica Lake!" I shouted. She suddenly stopped, turned and smiled—her secret identity recognized, but then frowned and flounced off away from these agitating enemies of America. It didn’t seem enough to stand bawling insults from behind the barriers at embassy clerks, none of whom had had any say in the atrocity. There had to be a more explicit, more dramatic gesture of protest. A couple of days later, when it was announced that Parliament was to hold a special debate on the bombing, the idea came to me. I passed through the newly erected metal detector at the entrance to the House of Commons quite easily. The body-search by the copper revealed just a half empty packet of cigarettes. (Although he looked in the packet, he didn’t see the bombs, which were small and hidden underneath.) Going upstairs to the Visitors Gallery, the young couple I’d befriended "oohed and ahhed" at the statues and murals that decorate the interior of the building. Ushered into our seats along with the other visitors in the packed gallery, we gazed down at the chamber below where the politicians who ruled our country and made the decisions for us were (mostly) congratulating themselves and justifying the strike by the American warplanes. Mrs. Thatcher had vindicated herself and left a little earlier, unfortunately. I would have particularly liked her to have been there to witness my own particular revenge attack. One old right-wing fart was on his feet waffling on about how the British Army should have stepped in to restore the King of Libya when he was deposed in the 1969 coup. I decided to waste no time. Reaching into my pocket I took out the cigarette packet, extracted the three bombs and threw them with all my might over balustrade into the chamber of politicians below, then sat back as if nothing at happened. Almost immediately an usher strode down the aisle to our row; and mistaking the young couple for the perpetrators, gestured at them to follow him. Shocked and dumbstruck, they pointed at me, and the usher ordered me to come out. I stalled, saying I was listening to the proceedings, but a threatening policeman appeared by the usher’s side, and I decided to go without more ado. I had done what I came for. All heads in the packed gallery turned and stared as I was led away. Just as we exited, I had the pleasure of smelling a very nasty aroma wafting up from the floor of the Speaker’s Chamber. "Why did you do it?", the copper asked. "I suppose you just wanted to cause a stink, right?" He escorted me to a room full of officers who wanted to know if I was a terrorist, but they soon realized I wasn’t dangerous. I was informed that due to the recently laid carpet on the chamber floor, only one of my bombs had exploded, but that if any of the politicians had been hit by a missile, or their suits stained by the liquid, I should be prepared to face charges. I was taken away and had the privilege of being held in the only tiny cell in the House of Commons for several hours while they decided what to do with me. A previous occupant, obviously another protester with a cause, had secretly stuck a ‘SUPPORT THE MINERS STRIKE!’ sticker on the inner doorframe, so undetected by the cops. I was bored, but not particularly worried; because I was sure no charges would be brought against me. The embarrassment of the government at the defence of my action in court would have been too great—my own little stink-bombs an answer to their real ones, a protest at their unprovoked murder of innocent civilians in a foreign country. I was released after midnight, when the sitting had finished and the politicians gone home, and officially informed by an officer that I was henceforth banned from visiting the House of Commons. "So you won’t be back for a while?" enquired the copper who escorted me out of the building. "Not until I return as President." I replied. "D’you mean it?" he asked gravely. I walked across the road, unchained my bike from the railings, and cycled away in the dark. When I got home my flat mates asked why I was so late, and I told them. "Whaat? Was that you?" My bombing mission had been briefly mentioned on the ten o’clock TV news. And this appeared in one of the national papers next day – Police detained a man after two stink bombs were thrown from the public gallery of the Commons on to the floor of the chamber during the debate, despite tightened security at Westminster. Michael Dickinson, whose artwork graces the covers of Dime’s Worth of Difference, Serpents in the Garden and Grand Theft Pentagon, lives in Istanbul. He can be contacted via his website http://yabanji.tripod.com/ or at: michaelyabanji@gmail.com
Atrocity Exhibition29 Feb 2008Writing about torture in the Guardian, Philip Zimbardo emphasises systemic issues in explaining how “ordinary people could be led to behave in ways that qualify as evil.” His context is images, many previously unseen, of “documented depravity and dehumanisation” by US soldiers of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. He is absolutely right to emphasise systemic issues, and it is important for the British public in that context to understand two points about the UK’s detention policy in Iraq. The first is the massive similarities between the insights these images give into human rights violations in US detention facilities and the publicly available evidence as to violations of Iraqis’ most fundamental of human rights in UK detention facilities. The second is to understand the source and nature of the systemic failings within the UK’s policy. The Abu Ghraib images depict [disturbing content] male Iraqis forced into sexual positions with one another, into simulated oral sex, being threatened by soldiers’ punches or of US soldiers alongside what are either badly abused or dead Iraqis. Most UK citizens seem to believe that we would never do such things. Nothing could be further from the truth. The photographs from the Camp Breadbasket court martial show male Iraqis forced by UK soldiers to simulate anal and oral sex with one another. In the incident that led to the death of Baha Mousa, UK soldiers flushed dirty toilet water over male Iraqis. Later, at the military facility, they photographed each other punching hooded detainees, some of whom were threatened with execution. One was offered release in exchange for sex with his sister. The litany of sexual and religious humiliation is endless. There appears to be no material difference between the two forces, US and UK, when it came to degrading treatment. Worse still, there are now witness statements prepared for UK High Court proceedings by myself and my colleague Martyn Day, which suggest that, in May 2004, UK soldiers in Abu Naji facility may have executed up to 20 Iraqis, tortured another nine, and subjected some of the 20 dead to unspeakable atrocities before final dispatch. The systemic failings that underpin these violations go to the top of government, the civil service and the military. We had a written policy allowing stressing and hooding, and our interrogators were trained to do so. Scores of Iraqis now complain of torture, abuse, and killings in UK detention facilities. When the Head of Army Legal, Nicholas Mercer, blew the whistle on hooding, stressing and the use of noise in March 2003 – and, in May, complained of a “number” of Iraqi deaths in custody with “various units in theatre” – he was rebuked, ridiculed and overruled. The civil servants at Permanent Joint HQ knew but did nothing, telling themselves, for example, that the ban on the five techniques from Northern Ireland in 1972 (hooding, stressing, sleep deprivation, food and water deprivation and noise) only applied to the UK and Northern Ireland. Nobody seemed to have recognised that what was happening breached every possible humanitarian and human rights provision, including the European Convention on Human Rights (which was held by the House of Lords in June 2007 to apply). The next time you see these images, just remember what UK forces did in our name. We must face up to this national disgrace.
Human Rights in West Papua27 Feb 2008Editor’s note: the following two speeches were given in a House of Lords debate on the human rights situation in West Papua, on 26 February 2008. The full debate can be read here. Lord Harries of Pentregarth: My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to raise an issue that is of such life and death significance to the suffering people of West Papua. When I go round to our local shops, I almost invariably carry over my shoulder a handmade bag. On this bag is a star against a red background with some blue and white stripes. If I shopped in West Papua with that bag, I would immediately be labelled a separatist and treated with brutality, as a woman was recently who was found making such a bag. Similarly, on 1 December last year, seven West Papuans were arrested for raising this morning star flag in the Catholic Church compound at Kwamki Baru village. Again, when the editor of a West Papuan newspaper was asked what would happen to him if he called for independence, he said quite simply, “Go to jail. Go to jail”. Perhaps this total lack of freedom?the freedom of the press and the freedom to form political parties?does indeed fall into the category of what the Minister said on 13 November last year were abuses, “of a relatively small kind”,?[Official Report, 13/11/07; col. 346.] even though we regard such freedoms as fundamental to the life of this country. I wonder about torture. Two hundred and forty two cases of torture have been recorded in the past nine years in West Papua. All are well documented and set out in the recent report of Franciscans International. As that report put it: “Torture is regarded by Indonesian security services as one of the most effective methods to obtain forced confessions and instil a climate of fear and is conducted repeatedly and systematically. Torture in Papua is also used strategically as a means to control the whole community”. If this is still regarded as abuse “of a relatively small kind”, will the Minister say how many more cases of torture have to be recorded before it is admitted that there are abuses of a very grave kind indeed?abuses that the Government need to address with great seriousness and urgency? This systematic brutality is of course all in support of the 1969 “act of no choice”. On 14 January this year, the Minister in the other place wrote to a Member describing the act in these words: “A group of 1,000 Papuan representatives, who were given the responsibility to make the choice on behalf of the Papuan people, voted to remain part of Indonesia”. The bland disingenuousness of that statement is almost unbelievable. Let us remind ourselves of the facts. Suharto sent this clear order to his military forces in West Papua: “See that the” act “on West Irian’s“?that is Papua’s? “future status will yield a clear pronouncement in favour of Indonesia”. The forces were duly obedient. As Brigadier-General Ali Murtopo put it to those selected to take part in the so-called “act of free choice” on August 1969: “This is what will happen to anyone who votes against Indonesia. Their accursed tongues will be torn out. Their full mouths will be wrenched open. Upon them will fall the vengeance of the Indonesia people. I myself will shoot them on the spot”. So it was that the then Minister in this House, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, referring to this on 13 December 2004, said that, “1,000 handpicked representatives … were largely coerced into declaring for inclusion in Indonesia”.?[Official Report, 13/12/04; col. 1084.] Later, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, described the 1969 process as “extremely flawed”. Will the Minister therefore say, in the light of the recent letter from the Minister in the other place, whether the Government are now back-tracking from the truth which they previously admitted? The acknowledgement of the truth of the 1969 travesty by the British Government has been one of the few crumbs of comfort offered to the suffering West Papuan people in recent years. Is even that crumb of truth now to be snatched away? If all this is not serious enough, I have yet to come to the most devastating fact of all. In 1971, there were 887,000 Papuan people and 36,000 Asian Indonesians in West Papua, so even after eight years of Indonesian control, Papuans comprised 96 per cent of the population. On the basis of the latest figures, it is estimated that in 2005 Papuans comprised 59 per cent of the population and others 41 per cent. On present trends, by 2030 Papuans will comprise only 15.6 per cent and non-Papuans 84.8 per cent. These figures speak for themselves. Papuans are becoming a minority in their own country. Juan Mendes, UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, described West Papua as being among those countries whose populations were “at risk of extinction”. The most decisive statement to date on the subject of genocide in West Papua has come from the Allard K Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, which published a paper in 2005 entitled Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control. It said: “Although no single act or set of acts can be said to have constituted genocide, per se, and although the required intent cannot be as readily inferred as it was in the cases of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, there can be little doubt that the Indonesian government has engaged in a systematic pattern of acts that has resulted in harm to?and indeed the destruction of?a substantial part of the indigenous population of West Papua. The inevitability of this result was readily obvious, and the government has taken no active measures to contravene it. According to current understanding of the Genocide Convention, including its interpretation in the jurisprudence of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals, such a pattern of actions and inactions?of acts and omissions?supports the conclusion that the Indonesian government has acted with the necessary intent to find that it has perpetrated genocide against the people of West Papua”. West Papua is a small country a long way away. Indonesia is a big player with which we have major trade deals. West Papua is rich in natural resources, and major international companies such as BP, Rio Tinto and BAE Systems, among others, are active in utilising them. There are those who think that if only they stall long enough the problem will go away, solved by demography if nothing else. But I should like to assure the Government and reassure the West Papuan people that this issue will not be dropped and already momentum is gathering round the world. Recently two US congressmen, Donald Payne and Eni Faleomavaega, have taken up the issue with the UN Secretary-General. They were particularly concerned with the way that human rights defenders were harassed after the visit of Mrs Jilani, the UN special envoy, last year. Mrs Jilani concluded that a climate of fear prevails in West Papua, which has been borne out by the way in which those who sought to contact her have been singled out for special intimidation. The human rights abuses in West Papua are very grave and I ask the Government to pursue that issue with very great seriousness, conviction and urgency. In particular, human rights defenders need special protection, so I would ask the Minister to work for an international presence in West Papua to ensure that those who are raising human rights issues can do so without the present fear of intimidation, torture and death.
—— Lord Archer of Sandwell: My Lords, the House is indebted, not for the first time, to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for calling attention to this tragic situation. This is not the first occasion on which we have discussed the appalling events in West Papua. Sadly, our debates have failed to lead to any improvement for the people of West Papua, or, apparently, to impress on our Government the magnitude of the suffering. The last occasion on which we spared a thought for this situation was on 13 November 2007, when the noble and right reverend Lord asked a Starred Question. My noble friend Lord Malloch-Brown replied with an undisguised candour that the Government do not propose to raise the matter in the Security Council and do not support Papuan independence. We have not been privy to the Government’s reasoning which led to that conclusion, but if there are two propositions which defy reputation they are, first, that if they were permitted to express a view, the overwhelming majority of the population would choose independence. As the noble and right reverend Lord has said, the so-called act of free choice was a blatantly transparent charade. We know that the American ambassador reported at that time that 85 to 90 per cent of the population were in sympathy with the Free Papua Movement. Secondly, West Papua passes all the tests in international law for a right to the free choice of its own destiny. I shall not weary your Lordships by repeating what I said on that issue on 8 January 2007. However, the subject of today’s debate is not about the right of self-determination, but about the consequences of leaving West Papuans to the mercy of a brutal, alien regime. During our exchanges on 13 November, my noble friend stated as the Government’s view that, while they are concerned by continuing human rights abuses in Papua, they believe that they are, “of a relatively small kind”.?[Official Report, 13/11/07; col. 346.] That is hardly the impression which emerges from what we have just heard from the noble and right reverend Lord. It is hardly the impression that emerges from the 2007 annual report of Amnesty International, which records that the torture and ill treatment of detainees is widespread, and we recall of course that many detainees are imprisoned for peaceful protests. The report continues that prison conditions fall short of international standards. It speaks of extra-judicial executions and records that in 2007, there were at least six occasions when security forces opened fire on civilians. It tells us that the perpetrators appear to enjoy immunity. Nor did my noble friend’s characterisation of the human rights infringements accord with the recent Human Rights Watch country summary on Indonesia, which said that, in West Papua, peaceful political activists continue to be classified as “separatists”, which is a criminal offence. The report speaks of village “sweeping operations” carried out with great brutality by the army, the police and paramilitary units. It mentioned too that the regional military commander appointed in 2007, Colonel Siagian, was indicted by the United Nations for crimes against humanity in East Timor. The Government’s view was not supported by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva last August, which commented that at last Indonesia had complied with its reporting obligations under the convention. The report?six years overdue?refrained from commenting that this road-to-Damascus conversion may be connected with Indonesia’s ambition to be re-elected to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The report adds that Indonesia has still not implemented the convention in its domestic legislation. Nor is the Government’s assessment in accordance with the report by Franciscans International, which notes that, “in the Province of West Papua, the steadfast pattern of human rights violations, including torture, repression of the freedom of expression, unfair trials, arbitrary detention and the denial of social, economic and cultural rights, have created a culture of fear and have resulted in a stagnated development, which has made Papua the least developed province of Indonesia”. I leave it to other noble Lord to comments on the rape of Papua’s mineral wealth, which is now being shared between the Indonesian Government and foreign investors, but not by the Papuan people. In at least one respect, I sympathise with the Government’s problem. It is not easy in the present state of international law, and in the absence of charter reform, to suggest a simple remedy. Of course, no one would recommend an invasion as anything but a final resort when diplomatic approaches, appeals from human rights organisations and sanctions have failed to provide a solution. But a reference to the Security Council by a Government who carry the international respect of the United Kingdom could be a beginning and could reassure the West Papuan people that someone cares. I suspect that history will not understand how human suffering on such a scale continued year after year while the world looked on complacently and Governments in more fortunate countries pronounced the atrocities as “of a relatively small kind”. What a pity that we cannot ask the people of West Papua whether they agree.
A system to enforce imperial power will only be resisted27 Feb 2008It might have been expected that the catastrophe of Iraq and the bloody failure of Afghanistan would have at least dampened the enthusiasm among western politicians for invading other people’s countries in the name of democracy and human rights. But the signs are instead of a determined drive to rehabilitate the idea of liberal interventionism so comprehensively discredited in the killing fields of Fallujah and Samarra. First there was the appointment of the committed interventionist Bernard Kouchner as French foreign minister. Then, late last year, the supposedly reluctant warrior Gordon Brown used the lord mayor’s banquet to reassert the west’s right to intervene across state borders. This month the foreign secretary David Miliband argued that “mistakes” in Iraq and Afghanistan should not weaken the moral impulse to intervene around the world in support of democracy, “economic freedoms” and humanitarianism, whether peacefully or by force. Meanwhile in the US, both contenders for the Democratic party nomination have signed up longstanding liberal interventionists as foreign policy advisers: the academic Samantha Power in the case of Barack Obama; and the 1990s administration veterans Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright in Hillary Clinton’s. The interventionists, it seems, are back in business. And now Kosovo’s declaration of independence has given them a banner to rally the disillusioned to a cause that gripped the imagination of many western liberals in the 90s. John Williams, the foreign office spin doctor who drafted the infamous Iraq war dossier in 2002, wrote last week that the Kosovo war had convinced him to follow Tony Blair over Iraq – and it would be a “tragedy” if Iraq made future Kosovos impossible. The Independent on Sunday went further, calling Kosovo’s new status a “triumph of liberal interventionism”. But it’s hard to see much triumph in the grim saga of Kosovo. Nato’s 1999 bombing campaign, unleashed without UN support and widely regarded as a violation of international law, was supposed to halt repression and ethnic cleansing, but triggered a massive increase in both; secured a Serbian withdrawal only through Russian pressure; and led to mass reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma, including almost the entire Serb population of Pristina. After nine years of Nato occupation under a nominal UN administration, crime-ridden Kosovo is more ethnically divided than ever, boasts 50% unemployment and hosts a US military base described by the EU’s human rights envoy as a “smaller version of Guantnamo”. Its independence – declared in defiance of the UN security council and damned by Russia, China and EU states such as Spain as illegal – is a fraud and will remain so as an EU protectorate controlled by Nato troops. By encouraging a unilateral breakaway from Serbia, without negotiation and outside the UN framework, the US, Britain and France have given the green light to secessionist movements from Abkhazia to Kurdistan. The claim that Kosovo sets no precedent because it suffered under Serbian rule is absurd. Haven’t the Kurds or Chechens suffered? The difference boils down to power and who is supporting whom, not justice. Of course the Kosovans have the right to self-determination, but they certainly won’t get it as a Nato colony, nor at the expense of other nationalities in the Balkans, where the impact of Kosovo’s declaration on Bosnia and Macedonia could be conflagrationary. The significance of the breakaway has meanwhile not been lost on the Muslim world, which has long been urged to see American support for Muslim Kosovo and Bosnia as proof of US good intentions, but has been notably slow to recognise the breakaway province. As Yasser az-Za’atra wrote in the Jordanian daily al-Dustour this week: “Besieging Russia is the main reason that led Bush to support Kosovo’s independence. The rise of Russia and China provides a balance to the US and is undoubtedly in the Muslims’ interest. It is not in the Muslims’ interest to secede – not in Kosovo, nor in Chechnya, nor even in China.” Far from helping to rehabilitate liberal interventionism, the Kosovo experience highlights the fatal flaws at its heart. By supporting one side in a civil war, bypassing the UN and acting as judge and jury in their own case, the western powers exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, bequeathed a legacy of impoverished occupation and failed to resolve the underlying conflict. They also laid the ground for the lawless devastation of Iraq: the bitter fruit of the Kosovo war. At the height of the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, Blair set out five tests for intervention as part of his “doctrine of international community”, a catechism for liberal interventionists much admired by the Washington neoconservatives who followed them. Arguably, only one of the five was met in Iraq. What’s more, both the US and Britain not only committed military aggression on the basis of falsehoods, they have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees in Iraq and Afghanistan: a humanitarian crisis that dwarfs anything that happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Between them, they have also been responsible for torture, kidnapping and mass detentions without trial. The latest allegations of beatings, killings and mutilations of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers at Camp Abu Naji near Amara in 2004 are only the most extreme of a series that include the unpunished beating to death of Baha Mousa in custody in Basra. But there is of course not the slightest prospect of any humanitarian intervention against the occupiers of Iraq for the obvious reason that they are the most powerful states in the world who act in the certain knowledge that they will never be subject to any such violent sanction for their own violations of humanitarian and international law. But it is exactly that widely understood reality that undermines the chances of a genuine multilateral basis for humanitarian intervention. As the ability of the US to dictate to the UN weakens, it’s not surprising that pressure to revive unilateral liberal interventionism has grown. But any rules-based system of international relations has to apply to the powerful as well as the weak, allies as well as enemies, or it isn’t a system of rules at all – it’s a system of imperial power enforcement which will never be accepted.
Lifetime Homes26 Feb 2008Maybe it?s my age, but I had more than a sense of dj vu when Hazel Blears and Caroline Flint announced the government?s policy on lifetime homes this week. It?s great to see the enthusiasm, but it is a bit like watching a teenager discover rock-?n?-roll. For those who missed this seismic moment, the government has decreed that new standards of accessibility (lifetime homes, to those in the know) should apply to new housing ? and that we shouldn?t stop there, but should think in terms of ?lifetime neighbourhoods? too. I?m all for this, as I?m already worrying about how I?ll get my pavement buggy down to the local alehouse and back up the hill after a pint or three. But for those who equate government announcements with action, let?s just pause and consider how long it?s taken to get here. Back in the mid 1990s, I edited a magazine about housing and was quite closely involved in this sort of thing. We ran a campaign calling on the then Tory government and on social landlords, then quaintly known as housing associations, to ensure all new homes were built to lifetime homes standards. Fast forward a decade and a half, and here?s the announcement we?ve been waiting for. From 2013. Oh, and social housing should lead the way, with new homes conforming to the standards by 2011. And there?ll be a national housing advice service, something else that did the rounds a decade or two ago. Apart from the sheer cheek of presenting such tardiness as a great leap forward, while giving the construction industry another three years of unsustainable practice, this new national strategy is far less visionary than it purports to be. Lifetime neighbourhoods is a fine concept, but surely there?s more to it than better lighting and appropriately positioned bus stops. The heart of a neighbourhood is the activity that goes on there, and there?s a great opportunity to invest in neighbourhood centres and organisations that bring older people together, enabling them to use their talents for mutual support and volunteering. People wouldn?t get so irate about post offices closing if something better took their place. Perhaps the most amusing line in the announcement was this: ?The government is clear that urgent action is required now to better design communities and support older people.? Most of us show more urgency in visiting the dentist.
Heathrow Expansion26 Feb 2008Any government which, on the one hand pledges to make a significant reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020, and in the next breath gives the green light to the greatest expansion of aviation in a generation is guilty of either the most shameless hypocrisy, or the most unforgivable ignorance and stupidity. Green Party Principal Speaker Dr. Caroline Lucas has submitted damning evidence to the Government’s consultation on the proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport, and today labelled the plans for a third runway as ‘irresponsible, deceptive and environmentally disastrous’. In her consultation response, Dr Lucas condemns the proposals, citing the devastating effects on climate change, noise and air pollution, as well as risks to public safety that would be caused by expanding Heathrow capacity from 430,000 flights to between 700,000 and 800,000 flights per year. She goes on to criticise the “flawed” and ‘leading’ methods of the public consultation, accusing the Government of continuously ‘moving the goalposts’ in their arguments. In her submission to the Heathrow Consultation, Dr Lucas urged the Government to give full consideration to the views of her constituents in the South East, whose lives will be adversely affected by an expansion. Dr. Lucas, who has campaigned against Heathrow expansion for several years, addressed a ‘Stop Heathrow Expansion’ rally at Westminster on Monday (25th February), a landmark event which attracted a huge attendance of over 3,000 people. She said: “The Government’s continuing support for an expansion of Heathrow airport demonstrates a complete contempt for the environment, the health of UK citizens and for our democratic processes. “A third runway would have disastrous consequences for residents in my South East constituency – leading to serious environmental damage and social upheaval through increased pollution, and the destruction of local communities. Dr Lucas warned that the Transport Secretary’s proposals for Heathrow would condemn the UK to an unsustainable future of significantly higher noise and air pollution – and to accelerating climate change. “Any government which, on the one hand pledges to make a significant reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020, and in the next breath gives the green light to the greatest expansion of aviation in a generation is guilty of either the most shameless hypocrisy, or the most unforgivable ignorance and stupidity. “Despite the promises which were made to limit further expansion, this Government has persisted in a deceptive campaign for a third runway which its own figures estimate will almost double the number of flights using Heathrow each year. “Whichever way you look at the Government’s proposals on aviation, they are a social and environmental disaster. What we need is a sustainable transport policy which incentivises train travel, makes aviation pay its true costs and restricts airport capacity. She concluded: “It is crucial for the environment and our democratic processes that the Government responds to the concerns expressed during the consultation, and accepts that there is no simply public appetite for a third runway.” The full text of Dr. Lucas’s submission can be found at the Green Party’s website
Seen But Not Heard26 Feb 2008On Tuesday evening, around a 100 women and men were heard protesting noisily outside Ealing town hall at the council decision to cut funding for Southall Black Sisters. Among the oldest women’s organisations aimed at helping ethnic minority women, SBS has been caught in the crossfire of two political trends that started since the July 7 bombings in 2005. The first has been for the government, in an effort to give the impression that it is trying to deal with terrorism, to shift funding to Muslim groups at the expense of other minority groups. In October last year, Hazel Blears announced 70m to combat extremism. Here too there has been a shift, initially from funding top-down “community leaders” to grassroots groups to a bigger focus on empowering women. Either way, the government is chucking money at the problem and hoping it works. That agenda has inevitably sucked funds out of other priorities. That in itself is likely to breed resentment due to its politically motivated nature. The second trend has been for commentators of every stripe to decry multiculturalism as the source of all evil and the collapse of our society, without specifying how they define the term and what exactly they object to. In accordance with the political weather, the commission on integration and cohesion last year declared that funding groups based around ethnicity fuelled separatism. Curiously it said very little on specifically funding religious groups, probably because one of its commissioners, Ramesh Kallidai, is the one-man-band otherwise known as the Hindu Forum of Britain. Giving money to groups on the basis of ethnicity rather than need can fuel resentment and separatism, especially if that group in question deliberately sets out to exclude others. Plus, I have my own criticisms of multiculturalism. But SBS’s case is rather different. It provides spec
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