The Accessories to War Crimes Are Those Paid To Keep the Record Straight
The BBC's "Today" program is enjoying high ratings, and the Mail and Telegraph are, as usual, attacking the corporation as left-wing. Last month, a single edition of "Today" was edited by the artist and musician P.J. Harvey. What happened was illuminating.
Polly Harvey's guests caused panic from the moment she proposed the likes of Mark Curtis, an historian rarely heard on the BBC, who chronicles the crimes of the British state; and the lawyer Phil Shiner and journalist Ian Cobain, who reveal how the British kidnap and torture; and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and myself.
There were weeks of absurd negotiation at Broadcasting House about ways of "countering" us and whether or not we could be allowed to speak without interruption from "Today's" establishment choristers. What this brief insurrection demonstrated was the fear of a reckoning. The crimes of Western states like Britain have made accessories of those in the media who suppress or minimize the carnage.
The Faustian pacts that contrived a world war a century ago resonate today across the Middle East and Asia: from Syria to Japan. Then, as now, cover-up was the principal weapon. In 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared: "If people knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know."
On Polly Harvey's "Today" program I referred to a poll conducted by Comres last year that asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion. A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed: a figure so shockingly low it was a profanity.
I compared this with scientific estimates of "up to a million men, women and children (who) had died in the inferno lit by Britain and the US." In fact, the range is from less than half a million to over a million. John Tirman, principal research scientist at the MIT Centre for International Studies, who has examined all the credible estimates, told me that an average figure "suggests roughly 700,000." He pointed out that this excluded deaths among the millions of displaced Iraqis, up to 20 percent of the population.
more...
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/21787-the-accessories-to-war-crimes-are-those-paid-to-keep-the-record-straight
= new reply since forum marked as read
