Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: How Britain wages war

The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort
to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to
avoid legal scrutiny
Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former
Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in
a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of
medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery,
which he won serving in the British army.
He has been refused entry to Britain and treatment for a serious heart
ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after
a public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Down ing Street to hand his
Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to
see him.
The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children.
They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by Nato
bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their
roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, Nato planes
struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village:
children, women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22
civilians died like this. All, including the roasted children, are
described as "militants" or "suspected Taliban". The Defence
Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghan istan is "the noble
cause of the 21st century".
The third photograph is of a computer-generated aircraft carrier not
yet built, one of two of the biggest ships ever ordered for the Royal
Navy. The £4bn contract is shared by BAE Systems, whose sale of 72
fighter jets to the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia has made Britain
the biggest arms merchant on earth, selling mostly to oppressive
regimes in poor countries. At a time of economic crisis, Browne
describes the carriers as "an affordable expenditure".
The fourth photograph is of a young British soldier, Gavin Williams,
who was "beasted" to death by three non-commissioned officers. This
"informal summary punishment", which sent his body temperature to more
than 41 degrees, was intended to "humiliate, push to the limit and
hurt". The torture was described in court as a fact of army life.
The final photograph is of an Iraqi man, Baha Mousa, who was tortured
to death by British soldiers. Taken during his post-mortem, it shows
some of the 93 horrific injuries he suffered at the hands of men of
the Queen's Lancashire Regiment who beat and abused him for 36 hours,
including double-hooding him with hessian sacks in stifling heat. He
was a hotel receptionist. Although his murder took place almost five
years ago, it was only in May this year that the Ministry of Defence
responded to the courts and agreed to an independent inquiry. A judge
has described this as a "wall of silence".
A court martial convicted just one soldier of Mousa's "inhumane
treatment", and he has since been quietly released. Phil Shiner of
Public Interest Lawyers, representing the families of Iraqis who have
died in British custody, says the evidence is clear - abuse and
torture by the British army is systemic.
Shiner and his colleagues have witness statements and corroborations
of prima facie crimes of an especially atrocious kind usually
associated with the Americans. "The more cases I am dealing with, the
worse it gets," he says. These include an "incident" near the town of
Majar al-Kabir in 2004, when British soldiers executed as many as 20
Iraqi prisoners after mutilating them. The latest is that of a 14-year-
old boy who was forced to simulate anal and oral sex over a prolonged
period.
"At the heart of the US and UK project," says Shiner, "is a desire to
avoid accountability for what they want to do. Guantanamo Bay and
extraordinary renditions are part of the same struggle to avoid
accountability through jurisdiction." British soldiers, he says, use
the same torture techniques as the Americans and deny that the
European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act and the UN
Convention on Torture apply to them. And British torture is
"commonplace": so much so, that "the routine nature of this ill-
treatment helps to explain why, despite the abuse of the soldiers and
cries of the detainees being clearly audible, nobody, particularly in
authority, took any notice".
Arcane rituals
Unbelievably, says Shiner, the Ministry of Defence under Tony Blair
decided that the 1972 Heath government's ban on certain torture
techniques applied only in the UK and Northern Ireland. Consequently,
"many Iraqis were killed and tortured in UK detention facilities".
Shiner is working on 46 horrific cases.
A wall of silence has always surrounded the British military, its
arcane rituals, rites and practices and, above all, its contempt for
the law and natural justice in its various imperial pursuits. For 80
years, the Ministry of Defence and compliant ministers refused to
countenance posthumous pardons for terrified boys shot at dawn during
the slaughter of the First World War. British soldiers used as guinea
pigs during the testing of nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean were
abandoned, as were many others who suffered the toxic effects of the
1991 Gulf War. The treatment of Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun is typical.
Having been sent back to Nepal, many of these "soldiers of the Queen"
have no pension, are deeply impoverished and are refused residence or
medical help in the country for which they fought and for which 43,000
of them have died or been injured. The Gurkhas have won no fewer than
26 Victoria Crosses, yet Browne's "affordable expenditure" excludes
them.
An even more imposing wall of silence ensures that the British public
remains largely unaware of the industrial killing of civilians in
Britain's modern colonial wars. In his landmark work Unpeople:
Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses, the historian Mark Curtis uses
three main categories: direct responsibility, indirect responsibility
and active inaction.
"The overall figure [since 1945] is between 8.6 and 13.5 million,"
Curtis writes. "Of these, Britain bears direct responsibility for
between four million and six million deaths. This figure is, if
anything, likely to be an underestimate. Not all British interventions
have been included, because of lack of data." Since his study was
published, the Iraq death toll has reached, by reliable measure, a
million men, women and children.
The spiralling rise of militarism within Britain is rarely
acknowledged, even by those alerting the public to legislation
attacking basic civil liberties, such as the recently drafted Data Com
muni cations Bill, which will give the government powers to keep
records of all electronic communication. Like the plans for identity
cards, this is in keeping what the Americans call "the national
security state", which seeks the control of domestic dissent while
pursuing military aggression abroad. The £4bn aircraft carriers are to
have a "global role". For global read colonial. The Ministry of
Defence and the Foreign Office follow Washington's line almost to the
letter, as in Browne's preposterous description of Afghanistan as a
noble cause. In reality, the US-inspired Nato invasion has had two
effects: the killing and dispossession of large numbers of Afghans,
and the return of the opium trade, which the Taliban had banned.
According to Hamid Karzai, the west's puppet leader, Britain's role in
Helmand Province has led directly to the return of the Taliban.
Loans for arms
The militarising of how the British state perceives and treats other
societies is vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out of 14 of
the most impoverished and conflict-ridden countries are seduced into
buying British arms and military equipment with "soft loans". Like the
British royal family, the British Prime Minister simply follows the
money. Having ritually condemned a despot in Zimbabwe for "human
rights abuses" - in truth, for no longer serving as the west's
business agent - and having obeyed the latest US dictum on Iran and
Iraq, Brown set off recently for Saudi Arabia, exporter of Wahhabi
fundamentalism and wheeler of fabulous arms deals.
To complement this, the Brown government is spending £11bn of
taxpayers' money on a huge, pri vatised military academy in Wales,
which will train foreign soldiers and mercenaries recruited to the
bogus "war on terror". With arms companies such as Raytheon profiting,
this will become Britain's "School of the Americas", a centre for
counter-insurgency (terrorist) training and the design of future
colonial adventures.
It has had almost no publicity.
Of course, the image of militarist Britain clashes with a benign
national regard formed, wrote Tolstoy, "from infancy, by every
possible means - class books, church services, sermons, speeches,
books, papers, songs, poetry, monuments [leading to] people stupefied
in the one direction". Much has changed since he wrote that. Or has
it? The shabby, destructive colonial war in Afghanistan is now
reported almost entirely through the British army, with squaddies
always doing their Kipling best, and with the Afghan resistance
routinely dismissed as "outsiders" and "invaders". Pictures of nomadic
boys with Nato-roasted skin almost never appear in the press or on
television, nor the after-effects of British thermobaric weapons, or
"vacuum bombs", designed to suck the air out of human lungs. Instead,
whole pages mourn a British military intelligence agent in Afghanis
tan, because she happens to have been a 26-year-old woman, the first
to die in active service since the 2001 invasion.
Baha Mousa, tortured to death by British soldiers, was also 26 years
old. But he was different. His father, Daoud, says that the way the
Ministry of Defence has behaved over his son's death convinces him
that the British government regards the lives of others as "cheap".
And he is right.
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2008/07/british-pilger-britain-torture
chissà se mr. Mastroviti continuerà a rompere il cazzo col Daily Heil

 chissà se mr. Mastroviti continuerà a rompere il cazzo col Daily Heil
Io? Ma se sono mesi che continuo a dire che di lì bisogna andarsene 
subito...
-- 
http://inminoranza.blogspot.com

 Io?
minchia che reattività anche il sabato sera...ms. Inminoranza sarà
contenta di sapere che il consorte non approfitta della sua assenza
per gettarsi nelle folli notti londinesi...