1.FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH
2.French expat recalls bombing

COMMENT

One night in July 20 years ago the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior, was blown up while berthing in a New Zealand harbour. The ship's crew managed to escape with their lives but a freelance photographer on board was killed in the explosion (see item 2).

Years later this incident was transfomed in a posting on CS Prakash's AgBioView into Greenpeace having been responsible for murder. Another posting, following 9/11 accused to GM critical scientists of having "blood on their hands".

GM proponents frequently appear to have no hesitation about presenting critics of the technologys as dangerous extremists and even terrorists. An Internet posting from a close ally of Prakash, and the then editor of the AgBioTech Reporter, once claimed I consorted with terrorists on the basis that the environmental group Earth First had a link to the website I edited.

Ironically just five years after the bomb attack on Greenpeace, a bomb exploded in the car in which the Earth First activists and folksingers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving in Oakland California. Instead of launching an investigation into who had attacked Bari, who suffered a crushed pelvis, and Cherney who received cuts from the blast. The FBI launched an investigation into the pair that painted them as the prime suspects! It was more than a decade later before a jury finally vindicated the Earth First pair, ordering the FBI officers concerned to pay $4.4 million in compensation for their treatment.

Tony Blair too presents critics of GM as part of the forces of violent intolerance.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=68&page=1

But in a New Statesman article, John Pilger deals with another dislocation in reality involving Blair. Pilger contrasts two related 'global' events: the World Tribunal on Iraq - ignored by the world's media - and the G8 meeting in Scotland/Live8 etc. which has had almost saturation media coverage. Pilger points to the connection that is not being made.

"No one in the "mainstream" - from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities - made the obvious connection of Bush's and Blair's enduring crime in Iraq. No one stood and said that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" at best amounted to less than the money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef)."

Jonathan Matthews
www.gmwatch.org / www.lobbywatch.org
------

FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH
by John Pilger
New Statesman, 6 July 2005
http://www.johnpilger.com

Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related "global" events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain.

The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. "We are here," said the author Arundathi Roy in Istanbul, "to examine a vast spectrum of evidence (about the war) that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation, the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm, and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of torture . . . This tribunal is an attempt to correct the record: to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily anguished."

"Temporarily anguished" implies that, even faced with such rampant power, the Iraqi people will recover. You certainly need this sense of hope when reading the eyewitness testimonies which demonstrate, as Roy pointed out, "that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq."

The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the internet, you will not know who Dhar Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. With the exception of Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and several others, mostly freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, clich? crunching camp followers known as "embeds". A Lebanese with American citizenship, Jamail has been almost everywhere the camp followers have not. He has reported from the besieged city of Fallujah, whose destruction and atrocities have been suppressed by western broadcasters, notably by the BBC. (See www.medialens. org/ alerts).

In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter's witness to the thousands of Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib and other American prisons. His account of what happened to a civil servant in Baghdad was typical. This man, Ali Abbas, had gone to a US base to inquire about his missing neighbours. On his third visit, he was arrested without charge, stripped naked, hooded and forced to simulate sex with other prisoners . This was standard procedure. He was beaten on his genitals, electrocuted in the anus, denied water and forced to watch as his food was thrown away. A loaded gun was held to his head to prevent him from screaming in pain as his wrists were bound so tightly that the blood drained from his hands. He was doused in cold water while a fan was held to his body.

"They put on a loud speaker," he told Jamail, "put the speakers on my ears and said, 'Shut up, fuck, fuck, fuck!' He was refused sleep. Shit was wiped on him and dogs were used on him. "Sometimes at night when he read his Koran," said Jamail, "(he) had to hold it in the hallway for light. Soldiers would buy and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it." A female soldier told him, "Our aim is to put you in hell . . . These are the orders from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell."

Jamail described how Fallujah's hospitals have been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching the hospitals. Children were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.

The two men responsible for this, George Bush and Tony Blair, attended the G8