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On 13 September, one of the world's biggest arms fairs opens in
London, backed by the British government. On 8 September, the London
Chamber of Commerce and Industry will hold a preview entitled "Middle
East: A vast market for UK defence and security companies". The host was
the Royal Bank of Scotland, a major investor in cluster bombs.
According to Amnesty international, the victims of cluster bombs are 98
per cent civilians and 30 per cent children. The Royal Bank of Scotland
has received £20 million in public money. The blurb for the bank's arms
party reads: "The Middle East is one of the regions with the greatest
number of opportunities for UK defence and security companies. Saudi
Arabia... is the world's top defence importer, having spent $56bn in
2009... a very worthwhile region to target."Such are the
Cameron government's priorities following the great "humanitarian"
victory in Libya. As Margaret Thatcher once declared: "Rejoice!" And as
the bankers and arms merchants raise their glasses, let us not forget
the heroic RAF pilots who made Libya ours again by incinerating
countless "pro Gaddafi elements" in their homes and cots and clinics,
and the unsung stalwarts of the British drone industry at Menwith Hill
in Yorkshire who, before and after lunch, provide the information for
drone targets so that Hellfire missiles can flatten homes and suck the
air out of lungs, a specialty. And cheers to QuinetiQ's drone testing
site at Aberporth and at UAV Engines Limited in Lichfield.
The
west's humanitarian mission is not quite finished. Nearly six months
after securing a UN resolution authorising "the [protection] of
civilians and civilian-populated areas under the threat of attack", Nato
is raining fragmentation bombs on civilian-populated Sirte and other
"Gaddafi strongholds" where, says a Channel 4 News reporter, "until they
cut off the head of the snake, Libyans will not feel safe". I quote
that not so much for its Orwellian quality but as a model of
journalism's role in justifying "our" bloodbaths in advance. This
is Rupert's Revolution, after all. Gone from the Murdoch press are
pejorative "insurgents". The action in Libya, says The Times, is "a
revolution... as revolutions used to be". That it is a coup by a gang of
Muammar Gaddafi's ex cronies and spooks in collusion with Nato is
hardly news. The self-appointed "rebel leader", Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was
Gaddafi's feared justice minister. The CIA runs or bankrolls most of
the rest, including America's old friends, the Mujadeen Islamists who
spawned al-Qaeda.
They told journalists what they needed to
know: that Gaddafi was about to commit "genocide", of which there was no
evidence, unlike the abundant evidence of "rebel" massacres of black
African workers falsely accused of being mercenaries. European bankers'
secret transfer of the Central Bank of Libya from Tripoli to "rebel"
Benghazi by European bankers in order to control the country's oil
billions was an epic heist of little interest. The entirely
predictable indictment of Gaddafi before the "international court" at
The Hague evokes the charade of the dying "Lockerbie bomber", Abdelbaset
Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, whose "heinous crime" has been deployed to
promote the west's ambitions in Libya. In 2009, Al-Megrahi was sent back
to Libya by the Scottish authorities not for compassionate reasons, as
reported, but because his long-awaited appeal would have confirmed his
innocence and described how he was framed by the Thatcher government, as
the late Paul Foot's landmark expose revealed. As an antidote to the
current propaganda, I urge you to read a forensic demolition of
el-Melgrahi's "guilt" and its political meaning in Dispatches from the
Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice (Verso) by the
distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce.
This is not
to detract from Gaddafi's awful dictatorship, a "rendition" destination
for MI6, we now learn. But his odium is unrelated to the rape of his
country by imperial caricatures such as Nicholas Sarkozy, a Napoleonic
Islamophobe whose intelligence services almost certainly set up the coup
against Gaddafi. US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks disclose
the west's panic over Gaddafi's refusal to hand over the greatest source
of oil in Africa and his overtures to China and Russia.
Propaganda
relies not only on Murdoch but on apparently respectable voices
inducing historical amnesia. The Observer, which has yet to apologise
for its catastrophic promotion of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass
destruction, is in thrall to the "honourable intervention" of Sarkozy
and Cameron and their "humanitarian and emotional" motives. Its
political columnist Andrew Rawnsley completes an impressive double. As
Media Lens reminds us, in 2003, Rawnsley wrote of Iraq: "The death toll
has been nothing like as high as had been widely feared." A million dead
Iraqis later, Rawnsley insists that, in Libya "Britain got it right"
and "the number of civilian casualties inflicted by the air strikes
seems to have been mercifully light". Tell that to Libyans with loved
ones obliterated by corporate-friendly Hellfires.
Nato
attacked Libya to counter and manipulate a general Arab uprising that
took the rulers of the world by surprise. Unlike his neighbours, Gaddafi
had come to power by denying western control of his country's natural
wealth. For this, he was never forgiven, and the opportunity for his
demise was seized in the usual manner, as history shows. The American
historian William Blum has kept the record. Since the second world war,
the United States has crushed or subverted liberation movements in 20
countries, and attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of
them democratic, and dropped bombs on 30 countries, and attempted to
assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.Rejoice!
Source: johnpilger.com
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