THE GLOBAL SPY APPARATUS:
You Are All Suspects Now.
What Are You Going To Do About It?
By John Pilger
Global Research, April 26, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30544
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 "organisation": 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 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit
because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet.
As the law is politicised and
Americanised, 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 protege, 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 is vouched by President
Obama himself, who had "seen a video" and regards it as "conclusive
proof". An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produces
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
behaviour 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 hi-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 the 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?
