Pilger punctures “war on terror” lies
Breaking the Silence, written and directed by John Pilger

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/pilg-j12.shtml

By Richard Phillips
12 January 2004

Breaking the Silence, the latest documentary by veteran journalist John
Pilger, is an important exposure of the lies and falsifications used to
justify the Bush administration’s global “war against terror” and its
illegal attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The one-hour documentary was
screened on December 9 by Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services
network and given a four-day release in a Sydney cinema.

Using archival footage and interviews with former intelligence analysts,
historians, human rights activists and some White House officials, the
documentary explains how the Bush administration seized on the September
11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center to activate long-held
plans to seize control of valuable oil resources in the Middle East and
elsewhere.

The documentary opens with a series of black and white photographs showing
the carnage inflicted on Iraqis by US and British military forces over the
past year. A voiceover from US President George W. Bush declares that
America will bring “food, medicine, supplies and freedom” to the people of
Iraq. Likewise, British Prime Minister Tony Blair claims the war in Iraq
is a “fight for freedom”.

Against these chilling images, Pilger explains that US actions have
nothing to do with fighting terrorism but are part of an opened-ended war
for American global dominance. The real danger facing humanity, he says,
is the increasingly aggressive military action of US imperialism and the
state terrorism orchestrated by the White House.

Breaking the Silence also includes firsthand reportage from Afghanistan.
Pilger, who has written and directed more than 50 documentaries during his
30-year career, describes Afghanistan as a country “more devastated than
anything I have seen since Pol Pot’s Cambodia”.

Among those interviewed is Orifa, an Afghan woman who lost eight members
of her family including six children, when the US airforce dropped a 500-
pound bomb on her mud-brick home in 2001. She describes the massacre and
declares: “What has America done for us? My day and night is full of
sorrow.”

Pilger speaks with New Yorker Rita Lasar, whose brother, Avraham
Zelmanowitz, was killed in the September 11 attack on the World Trade
Center (WTC). Lasar notes the remarkable similarity between the
fundamentalist rhetoric of Al Qaeda and that of the Bush administration.
She states that the US government used the death of her brother and other
WTC victims “to justify killing innocent people in Afghanistan”.

Angered and concerned, she decides to visit Afghanistan to help the
victims of US attacks. She meets Orifa and visits the US embassy with her
to try to secure compensation for the Afghan woman. Senior US officials,
however, refuse to see Orifa and denounce her as a beggar.

The documentary cuts to Bush telling the Congress that America was “a
friend of the Afghan people”. But as Pilger points out, few countries in
the world have been helped less by the US. Only 3 percent of all aid given
to Afghanistan is used for reconstruction. Kabul, the capital, is a maze
of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, with US cluster bombs still not
cleared from parts of the city and hundreds of families living in ruined
and abandoned buildings.

At the same time, the US government provides military hardware and finance
to a select group of Afghan warlords who have restored opium production to
record levels and maintained a reign of terror over the population. While
ordinary people in “liberated” Afghanistan live in dire poverty, the US
has a major military base and plans are underway for a US-controlled oil
pipeline from Central Asia.

Breaking the Silence highlights the role played by Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), the Washington think-tank established by Richard
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and other extreme-
right Republicans in the 1990s.

The PNAC developed detailed plans for the invasion of Iraq and helped
formulate the Bush administration’s “war against terror” to justify the
placement of American military forces in key oil and natural gas locations
around the world. Its Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and
Resources for a New Century forms the foundation of the US
government’s “National Security Strategy”.

Pilger also points to Washington’s long history of supporting Islamic
fundamentalist and other terror groups in the Middle East, Latin America
and elsewhere.

In mid-1979, six months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the
Carter administration authorised $500 million to help establish the
mujahedin. For many years Osama bin Laden was regarded as an ally by
London and Washington, both of which provided finance and political
backing.

In 1996, the Clinton administration established friendly relations with
the Taliban government in order to secure its backing for a US oil
pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan. Taliban officials were
flown to the US, where they were given red carpet treatment.


Iraqi casualties

Two brief but revealing interviews expose the Bush administration’s
criminal indifference to the human consequences of its actions and
highlight its sensitivity to any criticism.

Defence Undersecretary Douglas Feith, an extreme-right ideologue and
former member of the Reagan administration, denies that the US supplied
weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein during the early 1980s. His
claims, however, are contradicted by archival footage of Donald Rumsfeld
warmly greeting Hussein in Baghdad in 1983 during the Iran-Iraq war. The
US encouraged the former Iraqi dictator to wage war against Iran and
provided him with material and logistical support. This included chemical
and biological weapons and advice on how to use them.

Pilger points out that an estimated 10,000 Iraqis were killed in last
year’s invasion. Feith denies this figure but then declares that it
is “inevitable” that innocent people are killed in war. When Pilger
attempts to press the point about Iraqi casualties, an off-camera US
military official intervenes and orders an end to the interview.

Undersecretary of State John Bolton cynically tells Pilger that the US has
done “more to create the conditions for individual freedom than any other
country in the world”. Pilger answers this with an on-the-spot report from
Afghanistan about America’s Bagram Air Base and the arrest of Wazir
Mohamad, an Afghan taxi driver.

Mohamad, who is officially recognised as a political opponent of the
former Taliban regime, was seized by the US military in April 2002, jailed
in Bagram and then shipped to Guantanamo Bay after he asked why one of his
taxi-driver friends had been jailed by the US. While his friend has since
been released, Mohamad is still held incommunicado and without charge in
Guantanamo Bay.

Pilger asks Bolton about Iraq casualties. His answer: “I think Americans,
like most people, are mostly concerned about their own country. I don’t
know how many Iraqi civilians were killed. But I can assure you that the
number is the absolute minimum that is possible in modern warfare... One
of the stunning things about the quick coalition victory was... how low
Iraqi casualties were.”

Among other things, this chilling reply is aimed at denying the real
character of the unprovoked and illegal US military assault, which led to
the death of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Bolton, as it happens, was
centrally involved in the Bush administration’s campaign against the
International Criminal Court (ICC), which has a mandate to conduct war
crime hearings. He claims that the court, which the US refuses to support,
is “contrary to US principles”. Washington has demanded and obtained
agreements with up to 70 countries exempting Americans from war crime
trials.

As the interview ends, Bolton asks Pilger if he is a member of the British
Labour Party, suggesting this had something to do with the journalist’s
line of questioning. When Pilger explains that he is not, and that British
Labour consisted of “the conservatives”, Bolton retorts, “You’re a
Communist Party member then?”

Bolton’s reaction reveals the relations White House officials have come to
expect from the mass media, which slavishly parrots every government lie.
When confronted with a few probing questions, Bolton treats the journalist
as an outright political opponent, resorting immediately to his stock-in-
trade—provocative red-baiting.


WMD lies

Another significant interview in the film takes place with Andrew Wilkie,
the former Australian intelligence officer who resigned from the Office of
National Assessments in protest over Australia’s participation in the US-
led invasion of Iraq. Wilkie was the only serving intelligence analyst to
break ranks, quit his position and publicly challenge the government lies
about “weapons of mass destruction” before the Iraq invasion.

In measured language, Wilkie tells Pilger that the Bush, Blair and Howard
governments were guilty of “serious dishonesty”. Iraq possessed no secret
stockpiles of weapons and there were no links between Saddam Hussein and
Al Qaeda. Wesley Clark and others interviewed by Pilger back up Wilkie’s
statement.

Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and friend of former president
George Bush senior, tells Pilger that Bush senior regarded figures such as
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle as dangerous “crazies”.
McGovern bluntly states that the weapons of mass destruction claims used
by Bush and Blair against Iraq were “95 percent charade”.

Denis Halliday, a former UN assistant secretary-general, explains that the
Bush administration’s “axis of evil” and its preemptive strike doctrine
represents an “outrageous flaunting of international law”. Halliday, who
resigned from his position in 1998, has recently attacked the UN as “an
aggressive arm of US foreign policy”.

Pilger touches on the media’s pernicious role in circulating White House
lies about WMDs and amplifying paranoia about supposed impending terrorist
attacks on the US from Iraq. He also briefly interviews Kings College
Professor Richard Overy, an acclaimed expert on Nazi war crimes. Overy
makes clear that the unprovoked US-led attack on Iraq constitutes a war
crime as defined at the Nuremberg trials and in the Geneva Conventions.


Powell admits Iraq has no WMDs

Perhaps the most damning footage in the documentary concerns speeches by
US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser
Condoleeza Rice in 2001, a few months before the September 11 attacks.

Few will forget Powell’s lengthy address to the UN Security Council on
February 5, 2003, in which he solemnly declared that Iraq had vast
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was involved in an elaborate
campaign to conceal weapons materials and manufacturing facilities. But as
Pilger’s documentary reveals, two years earlier Powell and Condoleeza Rice
claimed the opposite.

Speaking in Cairo on February 24, 2001, seven months before 9/11, Powell
categorically declared: “He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any
significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is
unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.” Rice
repeated this in July 2001 when she told US television that the Iraqi
military had not been rebuilt since 1991 war.

The Bush administration at that time, for its own tactical reasons, was
proclaiming the effectiveness of sanctions against Iraq. But in the
aftermath of 9/11, the White House seized on the terrorist attacks to
unleash its military assault on Afghanistan and prepare for a full-scale
invasion of Iraq. The mass media dutifully ignored Powell and Rice’s
previous statements. Pilger’s use of this archival footage is powerful and
constitutes a damning exposure of the White House.

Pilger concludes his documentary with a direct appeal for people to
challenge Washington and London. What is required, he says, is for people
around the world to remember the lies and the ongoing military aggression.

“We need not accept any of this if we recognise that there are now two
superpowers. One is the regime in Washington the other is public opinion
now stirring all over the world. Make no mistake it is an epic struggle.
The alternative is not just conquest of far away countries; it is the
conquest of us, of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect. If we
remain silent, victory over us is assured.”

Pilger is one of a handful of serious journalists prepared to openly
challenge the Bush administration and its international allies and point
to the terrible human consequences of their policies. But Pilger’s
political perspective, which is aimed at pressuring rival imperialist
powers to oppose the US or making appeals to the UN, weakens the
documentary.

In his concluding remarks, Pilger states that the United Nations was
founded “so that we would never forget the crimes of the great powers”.

This comment is false and highlights the political flaws in Pilger’s
outlook. The United Nations was not established to highlight the “crimes
of the great powers” but was formed in 1945 by the victors of World War II
and from the outset operated as an imperialist institution.

While the UN mediated conflicts between US and the Soviet Union during the
Cold War period, its central function for almost 60 years has been as a
clearinghouse for imperialist intrigue and oppression against the backward
countries. The most obvious recent examples were the UN backing for the
1991 Gulf War and the harsh economic sanctions and invasive weapons
inspection regime imposed on Iraq over the ensuing decade.

Pilger’s inability to confront this reality means that he cannot explain
why the UN failed to challenge the latest US invasion of Iraq or why it
endorsed the illegal war after the fact. The viewer is left to draw the
conclusion that the replacement of the US occupation of Iraq with a UN
force would represent a positive alternative.

Notwithstanding this significant weakness, Pilger’s documentary is a
valuable work. It delivers an important blow against the mountain of lies
used to justify the US-led military aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq,
and therefore deserves the widest possible audience.

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