I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day only to learn he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honourable man. We met soon after he had resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor. <\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone knows,\u201d he said, \u201cexcept parliament and the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the media?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe media \u2013 the big names \u2013 have been invited to King Charles Street (the Foreign Office) and flattered and briefed with lies. They are no trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Iraq desk officer at the Foreign Office, he had drafted letters for ministers reassuring MPs and the public that the British Government was not arming Saddam Hussein. \u201cThis was a downright lie\u201d, he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t bear it\u201d. <\/p>\n
Giving evidence before the arms-to-Iraq enquiry, Higson was the only British official commended by Lord Justice Scott for telling the truth. The price he paid was the loss of his health and marriage and constant surveillance by spooks. He ended up living on benefits in a Birmingham bedsitter where he suffered a seizure, struck his head and died alone. Whistleblowers are often heroes; he was one.<\/p>\n
He came to mind when I saw a picture in the paper of another Foreign Office official, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Tony Blair\u2019s ambassador to the United Nations in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. More than anyone, it was Sir Jeremy who tried every trick to find a UN cover for the bloodbath to come. Indeed, this was his boast to the Chilcot enquiry on 27 November, where he described the invasion as \u201clegal but of questionable legitimacy\u201d. How clever. In the picture he wore a smirk.
\nUnder international law, \u201cquestionable legitimacy\u201d does not exist. An attack on a sovereign state is a crime. This was made clear by Britain\u2019s chief law officer, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, before his arm was twisted, and by the Foreign Office\u2019s own legal advisers and subsequently by the secretary-general of the United Nations. The invasion is the crime of the 21st century. During 17 years of assault on a defenceless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers like \u201csanctions\u201d and \u201cno fly zones\u201d and \u201cbuilding democracy\u201d, more people have died in Iraq than during the peak years of the slave trade. Set that against Sir Jeremy\u2019s skin-saving revisionism about American \u201cnoises\u201d that were \u201cdecidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do [at the UN] in New York\u201d. Moreover, \u201cI myself warned the Foreign Office \u2026 that I might have to consider my own position \u2026\u201d. <\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t me, guv. <\/p>\n
The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. When he appears in January, Blair will play this part to odious perfection, dutifully absorbing the hisses and boos. All \u201cinquiries\u201d into state crimes are neutered in this way. In 1996, Lord Justice Scott\u2019s arms-to-Iraq report obfuscated the crimes his investigations and voluminous evidence had revealed. <\/p>\n
At that time, I interviewed Tim Laxton, who had attended every day of the inquiry as auditor of companies taken over by MI6 and other secret agencies as vehicles for the illegal arms trade with Saddam Hussein. Had there been a full and open criminal investigation, Laxton told me, \u201chundreds\u201d would have faced prosecution. \u201cThey would include,\u201d he said, \u201ctop political figures, very senior civil servants from right throughout Whitehall \u2026 the top echelon of government.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is why Chilcot is advised by the likes of Sir Martin Gilbert, who compared Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. That is why the inquiry will not demand the release of documents that would illuminate the role of the entire Blair gang, notably Blair\u2019s 2003 cabinet, long silent. Who remembers the threat of the thuggish Geoff Hoon, Blair\u2019s \u201cdefence secretary\u201d, to use nuclear weapons against Iraq? <\/p>\n
In February, Jack Straw, one of Blair\u2019s principal accomplices, the man who let the mass murderer General Pinochet escape justice and the current \u201cjustice secretary\u201d, overruled the Information Commissioner who had ordered the government to publish Cabinet minutes during the period Lord Goldsmith was pressured into changing his judgement that the invasion was illegal. How they fear exposure, and worse.<\/p>\n
The media has granted itself immunity. On 27 November, Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, wrote that the invasion \u201cwas made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain.\u201d More than four years before the invasion, Ritter, in interviews with myself and others, left not a shred of doubt that Iraq\u2019s weapons of mass destruction had been disabled, yet he was made a non-person. In 2002, when the Bush\/Blair lies were in full echo across the media, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in more than 3,000 articles, of which 49 referred to Ritter and his truth that could have saved thousands of lives.<\/p>\n
What has changed? On 30 November, the Independent published a pristine piece of propaganda from its embedded man in Afghanistan. \u201cTroops fear defeat at home,\u201d said the headline. Britain, said the report, \u201cis at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralising the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned.\u201d In fact, public disgust with the disaster in Afghanistan is mirrored among many serving troops and their families; and this frightens the warmongers. So \u201cdefeatism\u201d and \u201cdemoralising the troops\u201d are added to the weasel lexicon. Good try. Unfortunately, like Iraq, Afghanistan is a crime. Period. John Pilger reflects on how Tony Blair and his cronies paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and how the corporate media assisted <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Iraq"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/www.informationclearinghouse.info\/article24148.htm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"