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<h2 class="itemTitle"> You Are All Suspects Now. What Are You Going
to Do About It? </h2>
<span class="itemDateCreated"> Saturday, 28 April 2012 08:01 </span>
<span class="itemAuthor"> By John Pilger, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://truth-out.org">Truthout</a> | News Analysis </span>
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<p><span style="display: inline-block;" class="wf_caption"><img
src="cid:part4.03050806.09030705@gmail.com" alt="US
Soldiers" style="margin: auto;" height="277" width="637"><span
style="clear: both; text-align: left; margin-top: 3px;
width: 637px; display: block;">(Photo: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/isafmedia/3996873375/in/photostream/"
target="_blank">isafmedia / Flickr</a>)</span></span></p>
<p>You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live
in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East.
Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and
the US Department of Homeland Security's National Operations
Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely "al-Qaeda,"
but "exercise," "drill," "wave," "initiative" and
"organization": all proscribed words. The British government's
announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone
call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon
has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state
of permanent war has been launched by the United States and <b>a
police state is consuming Western democracy.</b></p>
<p>What are you going to do about it?</p>
<p>In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to
deal with "terror suspects." Habeas Corpus is dying. <b>The
European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men,
including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US
<u>even though none except one has been charged with a crime</u></b>.
All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK
Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal
invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as
likely to lead to "cruel and unusual punishment." One of the
men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73
recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the
Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was
high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic, who has
suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure
hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free
they go - along with young Richard O'Dwyer, who faces ten years
in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly
infringed US copyright on the Internet.</p>
<p>As the law is politicized and Americanized, these travesties
are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London
university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating "terrorism"
on the Internet, <b>appeal court judges in London ruled that
"acts ... against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the
world which sought to influence a government and were made for
political purposes" were now crimes</b>. Call to the dock
Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.</p>
<p>What are you going to do about it?</p>
<p>The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer
called "pre fascist" has metastasized. The US Attorney General,
Eric Holder, defends the "right" of his government to
assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protégé, is allowed
to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking glass world,
the lying is panoramic. <b>The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians
on 11 March, including at least nine children and four women,
is attributed to a "rogue" American soldier. The<u>
"authenticity" of this was vouched by President Obama
himself, who had "seen a video" and regarded it as
"conclusive proof." </u>An independent Afghan parliamentary
investigation produced eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence
of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging
their villages, killing and raping</b>: a standard, if
marginally more murderous, US Special Forces "night raid."</p>
<p>Take away the videogame technology of killing - America's
contribution to modernity - and the behavior is traditional.
Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally
trained, frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer
class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway
places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. <u><b>A
nation founded on the genocide of the native population
never quite kicks the habit.</b></u> Vietnam was "Indian
country" and its "slits" and "gooks" were to be "blown away.</p>
<p>The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in
the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a "rogue"
incident and, profanely, an "American tragedy" (the cover
headline of Newsweek). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was
convicted and he was let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai
is in Quang Ngai Province where, as I learned as a reporter, an
estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly
in what they called "free fire zones." This was the model of
modern warfare: industrial murder.</p>
<p>Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the
beneficiaries of America's new permanent war: NATO, the
armaments and high-tech companies, the media and a "security"
industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on
everyday life. The conquest or "pacification" of territory is
unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the
cultivation of your indifference.</p>
<p>What are you going to do about it?</p>
<p>The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now,
the Supreme Court in London will decide whether WikiLeaks'
editor, Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should
this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an
epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary
confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations.
Thanks to a secret deal between the US and Sweden, he can be
"rendered" to the American gulag at any time. In his own
country, Australia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has conspired
with those in Washington she calls her "true mates" to ensure
her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jump suit
just in case he should make it home. In February, her government
wrote a "WikiLeaks Amendment" to the extradition treaty between
Australia and the US that makes it easier for her "mates" to get
their hands on him. She has even given them the power of
approval over Freedom of Information searches - so that the
world outside can be lied to, as is customary.</p>
<p>What are you going to do about it? </p>
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<h2><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/44655">John
Pilger</a></h2>
<div>John Pilger, Australian-born, London-based journalist,
film-maker and author. For his foreign and war reporting,
ranging from Vietnam and Cambodia to the Middle East, he has
twice won Britain's highest award for journalism. For his
documentary films, he won a British Academy Award and an
American Emmy. In 2009, he was awarded Australia's human rights
prize, the Sydney Peace Prize. His latest film is "The War on
Democracy."</div>
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