- Photo by Maso Notarianni at the Emergency Hospital
in Lashkar Gah
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- The military has created a wall of silence around its
frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out
of its way to avoid legal scrutiny
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- Five photographs together break a silence. The first
is of a former Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged
87. He sits in a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board
full of medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery,
which he won serving in the British army.
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- He has been refused entry to Britain and treatment for
a serious heart ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded
only after a public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Down ing Street to
hand his Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused
to see him.
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- The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of
three children. They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been
hit by Nato bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away
their roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, Nato planes
struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village: children,
women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22 civilians died like
this. All, including the roasted children, are described as "militants"
or "suspected Taliban". The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, says
the invasion of Afghan istan is "the noble cause of the 21st century".
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- The third photograph is of a computer-generated aircraft
carrier not yet built, one of two of the biggest ships ever ordered for
the Royal Navy. The £4bn contract is shared by BAE Systems, whose
sale of 72 fighter jets to the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia has made
Britain the biggest arms merchant on earth, selling mostly to oppressive
regimes in poor countries. At a time of economic crisis, Browne describes
the carriers as "an affordable expenditure".
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- The fourth photograph is of a young British soldier,
Gavin Williams, who was "beasted" to death by three non-commissioned
officers. This "informal summary punishment", which sent his
body temperature to more than 41 degrees, was intended to "humiliate,
push to the limit and hurt". The torture was described in court as
a fact of army life.
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- The final photograph is of an Iraqi man, Baha Mousa,
who was tortured to death by British soldiers. Taken during his post-mortem,
it shows some of the 93 horrific injuries he suffered at the hands of men
of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment who beat and abused him for 36 hours,
including double-hooding him with hessian sa cks in stifling heat. He was
a hotel receptionist. Although his murder took place almost five years
ago, it was only in May this year that the Ministry of Defence responded
to the courts and agreed to an independent inquiry. A judge has described
this as a "wall of silence".
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- A court martial convicted just one soldier of Mousa's
"inhumane treatment", and he has since been quietly released.
Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families of Iraqis
who have died in British custody, says the evidence is clear - abuse and
torture by the British army is systemic.
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- Shiner and his colleagues have witness statements and
corroborations of prima facie crimes of an especially atrocious kind usually
associated with the Americans. "The more cases I am dealing with,
the worse it gets," he says. These include an "incident"
near the town of Majar al-Kabir in 2004, when British soldiers executed
as many as 20 Iraqi prisoners after mutilating them. The latest is that
of a 14-year-old boy who was forced to simulate anal and oral sex over
a prolonged period.
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- "At the heart of the US and UK project," says
Shiner, "is a desire to avoid accountability for what they want to
do. Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary renditions are part of the same struggle
to avoid accountability through jurisdiction." British soldiers, he
says, use the same torture techniques as the Americans and deny that the
European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention
on Torture apply to the m. And British torture is "commonplace":
so much so, that "the routine nature of this ill-treatment helps to
explain why, despite the abuse of the soldiers and cries of the detainees
being clearly audible, nobody, particularly in authority, took any notice".
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- Arcane rituals
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- Unbelievably, says Shiner, the Ministry of Defence under
Tony Blair decided that the 1972 Heath government's ban on certain torture
techniques applied only in the UK and Northern Ireland. Consequently, "many
Iraqis were killed and tortured in UK detention facilities". Shiner
is working on 46 horrific cases.
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- A wall of silence has always surrounded the British military,
its arcane rituals, rites and practices and, above all, its contempt for
the law and natural justice in its various imperial pursuits. For 80 years,
the Ministry of Defence and compliant ministers refused to countenance
posthumous pardons for terrified boys shot at dawn during the slaughter
of the First World War. British soldiers used as guinea pigs during the
testing of nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean were abandoned, as were
many others who suffered the toxic effects of the 1991 Gulf War. The treatment
of Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun is typical. Having been sent back to Nepal, many
of these "soldiers of the Queen" have no pension, are deeply
impoverished and are refused residence or medical help in the country for
which they fought and for which 43,000 of them have died or been injured.
The Gurkhas have won no fewer than 26 Victoria Crosses, yet Browne's=2
0"affordable expenditure" excludes them.
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- An even more imposing wall of silence ensures that the
British public remains largely unaware of the industrial killing of civilians
in Britain's modern colonial wars. In his landmark work Unpeople: Britain's
Secret Human Rights Abuses, the historian Mark Curtis uses three main categories:
direct responsibility, indirect responsibility and active inaction.
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- "The overall figure [since 1945] is between 8.6
and 13.5 million," Curtis writes. "Of these, Britain bears direct
responsibility for between four million and six million deaths. This figure
is, if anything, likely to be an underestimate. Not all British interventions
have been included, because of lack of data." Since his study was
published, the Iraq death toll has reached, by reliable measure, a million
men, women and children.
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- The spiralling rise of militarism within Britain is rarely
acknowledged, even by those alerting the public to legislation attacking
basic civil liberties, such as the recently drafted Data Com muni cations
Bill, which will give the government powers to keep records of all electronic
communication. Like the plans for identity cards, this is in keeping what
the Americans call "the national security state", which seeks
the control of domestic dissent while pursuing military aggression abroad.
The £4bn aircraft carriers are to have a "global role".
For global read colonial. The Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office
follow Washington's line almost to the letter, as in Browne's preposterous
description20of Afghanistan as a noble cause. In reality, the US-inspired
Nato invasion has had two effects: the killing and dispossession of large
numbers of Afghans, and the return of the opium trade, which the Taliban
had banned. According to Hamid Karzai, the west's puppet leader, Britain's
role in Helmand Province has led directly to the return of the Taliban.
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- Loans for arms
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- The militarising of how the British state perceives and
treats other societies is vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out
of 14 of the most impoverished and conflict-ridden countries are seduced
into buying British arms and military equipment with "soft loans".
Like the British royal family, the British Prime Minister simply follows
the money. Having ritually condemned a despot in Zimbabwe for "human
rights abuses" - in truth, for no longer serving as the west's business
agent - and having obeyed the latest US dictum on Iran and Iraq, Brown
set off recently for Saudi Arabia, exporter of Wahhabi fundamentalism and
wheeler of fabulous arms deals.
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- To complement this, the Brown government is spending
£11bn of taxpayers' money on a huge, pri vatised military academy
in Wales, which will train foreign soldiers and mercenaries recruited to
the bogus "war on terror". With arms companies such as Raytheon
profiting, this will become Britain's "School of the Americas",
a centre for counter-insurgency (terrorist) training and the design of
future colonial adventures.
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- It has had almost no publicity.
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- Of course, the ima ge of militarist Britain clashes with
a benign national regard formed, wrote Tolstoy, "from infancy, by
every possible means - class books, church services, sermons, speeches,
books, papers, songs, poetry, monuments [leading to] people stupefied in
the one direction". Much has changed since he wrote that. Or has it?
The shabby, destructive colonial war in Afghanistan is now reported almost
entirely through the British army, with squaddies always doing their Kipling
best, and with the Afghan resistance routinely dismissed as "outsiders"
and "invaders". Pictures of nomadic boys with Nato-roasted skin
almost never appear in the press or on television, nor the after-effects
of British thermobaric weapons, or "vacuum bombs", designed to
suck the air out of human lungs. Instead, whole pages mourn a British military
intelligence agent in Afghanis tan, because she happens to have been a
26-year-old woman, the first to die in active service since the 2001 invasion.
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- Baha Mousa, tortured to death by British soldiers, was
also 26 years old. But he was different. His father, Daoud, says that the
way the Ministry of Defence has behaved over his son's death convinces
him that the British government regards the lives of others as "cheap".
And he is right.
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- www.johnpilger.com
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