http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,574808,00.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1016-01.htm
Gagging the Skeptics
The US, founded to protect basic freedoms, is now insisting that its
critics are its enemies.
By George Monbiot
Guardian
October 16, 2001
If satire died on the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace
Prize, then last week its corpse was exhumed for a kicking. As head of
the United Nations peacekeeping department, Kofi Annan failed to
prevent the genocide in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica. Now, as
secretary general, he appears to have interpreted the UN charter as
generously as possible to allow the attack on Afghanistan to go ahead.
Article 51 permits states to defend themselves against attack. It says
nothing about subsequent retaliation. It offers no license to attack
people who might be harboring a nation's enemies. The bombing of
Afghanistan, which began before the UN security council gave its
approval, is legally contentious. Yet the man and the organization who
overlooked this obstacle to facilitate war are honored for their
contribution to peace.
Endowments like the Nobel Peace Prize are surely designed to reward
self-sacrifice. Nelson Mandela gave up his liberty, FW de Klerk gave
up his power, and both were worthy recipients of the prize. But Kofi
Annan, the career bureaucrat, has given up nothing. He has been
rewarded for doing as he is told, while nobly submitting to a gigantic
salary and bottomless expense account.
Among the other nominees for the prize was a group whose
qualifications were rather more robust. Members of Women in Black have
routinely risked their lives in the hope of preventing war. They have
stayed in the homes of Palestinians being shelled by Israeli tanks and
have confronted war criminals in the Balkans. They have stood
silently while being abused and spat at during vigils all over the
world. But now, in this looking-glass world in which war is peace and
peace is war, instead of winning the peace prize the Women in Black
have been labeled potential terrorists by the FBI and threatened with
a grand jury investigation.
They are in good company. Earlier this year the director of the FBI
named the chaotic but harmless organizations Reclaim the Streets and
Carnival Against Capitalism in the statement on terrorism he presented
to the Senate. Now, partly as a result of his representations, the
Senate's new terrorism bill, like Britain's Terrorism Act 2000,
redefines the crime so broadly that members of Greenpeace are in
danger of being treated like members of al-Qaida. The Bush doctrine -
if you're not with us, you're against us - is already being applied.
This government by syllogism makes no sense at all. Osama bin Laden
and al-Qaida have challenged the US government; ergo anyone who
challenges the government is a potential terrorist. That Bin Laden is,
according to US officials, a "fascist", while the other groups are
progressives is irrelevant: every public hand raised in objection will
from now on be treated as a public hand raised in attack. Given that
Bin Laden is not a progressive but is a millionaire, it would surely
make more sense to round up and interrogate all millionaires.
Lumping Women in Black together with al-Qaida requires just a minor
addition to the vocabulary: they have been jointly classified as
"anti-American". This term, as used by everyone from the US defense
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Daily Mail to Tony Blair and
several writers on these pages, applies not only to those who hate
Americans, but also to those who have challenged US foreign and
defense objectives. Implicit in this denunciation is a demand for
uncritical support, for a love of government more consonant with the
codes of tsarist Russia than with the ideals upon which the United
States was founded.
The charge of "anti-Americanism" is itself profoundly anti-American.
If the US does not stand for freedom of thought and speech, for
diversity and dissent, then we have been deceived as to the nature of
the national project. Were the founding fathers to congregate today to
discuss the principles enshrined in their declaration of independence,
they would be denounced as "anti-American" and investigated as
potential terrorists. Anti-American means today precisely what
un-American meant in the 1950s. It is an instrument of dismissal, a
means of excluding your critics from rational discourse.
Under the new McCarthyism, this dismissal extends to anyone who seeks
to promulgate a version of events other than that sanctioned by the US
government. On September 20, President Bush told us that "this is the
fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and
freedom". Two weeks later, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, met
the Emir of Qatar to request that progress, pluralism, tolerance and
freedom be suppressed. Al-Jazeera is one of the few independent
television stations in the Middle East, whose popularity is the result
of its uncommon regard for freedom of speech. It is also the only
station permitted to operate freely in Kabul. Powell's request that it
be squashed was a pre-emptive strike against freedom, which, he hoped,
would prevent the world from seeing what was really happening once the
bombing began.
Since then, both George Bush and Tony Blair have sought to prevent
al-Jazeera from airing video statements by Bin Laden, on the grounds
of the preposterous schoolboy intrigue that they "might contain coded
messages". Over the weekend the government sought to persuade British
broadcasters to restrict their coverage of the war. Blair's spin
doctors warned: "You can't trust them [the Taliban] in any way, shape,
or form." While true, this applies with equal force to the techniques
employed by Downing Street. When Alastair Campbell starts briefing
journalists about "Spin Laden", it's a case of the tarantula spinning
against the money spider.
If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom
which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question
everything we see and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us
in wartime, most people seem to believe that this universal rule
applies to every conflict except the current one. Many of those who
now accept that babies were not thrown out of incubators in Kuwait,
and that the Belgrano was fleeing when it was hit, are also prepared
to believe everything we are being told about Afghanistan and
terrorism in the US.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. The magical appearance of
the terrorists' luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too
good to be true. The dossier of "evidence" purporting to establish Bin
Laden's guilt consists largely of supposition and conjecture. The
ration packs being dropped on Afghanistan have no conceivable purpose
other than to create the false impression that starving people are
being fed. Even the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just
as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about
extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving
envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labeled"a
gift from Iraq". This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may
have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty
of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public
opinion.
Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public skepticism.
Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to
dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our
governments are supposed to be fighting. The true defenders of America
are those who are now being told that they are anti-American.
Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
