[governance] "you are all suspects now. what are you going to do about it?" - on wikileaks...

Sun Apr 29 05:01:34 EDT 2012

    You Are All Suspects Now. What Are You Going to Do About It?

Saturday, 28 April 2012 08:01 By John Pilger, Truthout 
<http://truth-out.org> | News Analysis

  *
    447
    <http://truth-out.org/news/item/8782-you-are-all-suspects-now-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it#>

US Soldiers(Photo: isafmedia / Flickr 
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/isafmedia/3996873375/in/photostream/>)

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 *a police state is 
consuming Western democracy.*

What are you going to do about it?

In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with 
"terror suspects." Habeas Corpus is dying. *The European Court of Human 
Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be 
extradited to the US _even though none except one has been charged with 
a crime_*. 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.

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, *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*. Call to the dock 
Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.

What are you going to do about it?

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. *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_"authenticity" 
of this was vouched by President Obama himself, who had "seen a video" 
and regarded it as "conclusive proof." _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*: a standard, if marginally more 
murderous, US Special Forces "night raid."

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. _*A nation founded on the genocide of the native population 
never quite kicks the habit.*_ Vietnam was "Indian country" and its 
"slits" and "gooks" were to be "blown away.

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.

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.

What are you going to do about it?

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.

What are you going to do about it?

    John Pilger <http://truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/44655>

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."
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