The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of  civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed. (more…)

Last week, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich was sentenced to a reduction in rank but no jail time for leading his squad in a rampage known as “The Haditha Massacre.” (more…)

John Pilger New Statesman

This month’s Supreme Court hearing in the Julian Assange case has profound meaning for the preservation of basic freedoms in western democracies. This is Assange’s final appeal against his extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct that were originally dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm and constitute no crime in Britain.

The consequences, if he loses, lie not in Sweden but in the shadows cast by America’s descent into totalitarianism. In Sweden, he is at risk of being “temporarily surrendered” to the US, where his life has been threatened and he is accused of “aiding the enemy” with Bradley Manning, the young soldier accused of leaking evidence of US war crimes to WikiLeaks.

The connections between Manning and Assange have been concocted by a secret grand jury in Virginia that allowed no defence counsel or witnesses, and by a system of plea-bargaining that ensures a 90 per cent conviction rate. It is reminiscent of a Soviet show trial.

Moral choice

The Obama administration’s determination to crush Assange is revealed in secret Australian government documents, released under Freedom of Information, which describe Washington’s pursuit of WikiLeaks as “unprecedented”. It is unprecedented because it subverts the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects truth-tellers such as WikiLeaks. In 2008 Barack Obama said, “Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal.” Obama has since prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers as all previous US presidents.

With US courts demanding to see the worldwide accounts of Twitter, Google and Yahoo, the threat to Assange, an Australian, extends to any internet user anywhere. Washington’s enemy is not “terrorism” but the principle of free speech and voices of conscience within its militarist state and those journalists brave enough to tell their stories.

“How do you prosecute Julian Assange and not the New York Times?” a former administration official told Reuters. The threat is well understood by the New York Times, which in 2010 published a selection of the WikiLeaks cables. The editor at the time, Bill Keller, boasted that he had sent the cables to the state department for vetting. His obeisance extended to his denial that WikiLeaks was a “partner” – which it was – and to personal attacks on Assange. The message to all journalists was clear: do your job as it should be done and you are traitors; do your job as we say you should and you are journalists.

Much of the media’s depiction of Bradley Manning illuminates this. The world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, Manning remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to a “moral choice”. But according to theNew York Times, he is weird or mad, a “geek”. In an “exclusive investigation”, theGuardian reported him as an “unstable” gay man who got “out of control” and who “wet himself” when he was “picked on”. Such psycho-hearsay serves to suppress the truth of the outrage Manning felt at the wanton killing in Iraq, his moral heroism and the criminal complicity of his military superiors. “I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy,” he reportedly said.

The treatment handed out to Assange is well documented, though not the duplicitous and cowardly behaviour of his own government. Australia remains a colony in all but name. Australian intelligence agencies are branches of the main office in Washington. The Australian military has played a regular role as US mercenary. When Prime Minister Gough Whitlam tried to change this in 1975 and secure Australia’s partial independence, he was dismissed by a governor general using archaic “reserve powers” who was revealed to have intelligence connections.

Don’t explain

WikiLeaks has given Australians a rare glimpse of how their country is run. In 2010, leaked US cables disclosed that top government figures in the Labor Party coup that brought Julia Gillard to power were “protected” sources of the US embassy: what the CIA calls “assets”. Kevin Rudd, the prime minister Gillard ousted, apparently had displeased Washington by being disobedient, even suggesting that Australian troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

In the wake of her portentous rise to power, Gillard attacked WikiLeaks’s actions as “illegal” and her attorney general threatened to withdraw Assange’s passport. Yet the Australian Federal Police reported that Assange and Wiki­Leaks had broken no law. Freedom of Information files have since shown that Australian diplomats have colluded with the US in its pursuit of Assange. This is not unusual. The government of John Howard ignored the rule of law and conspired with the US to keep David Hicks, an Australian citizen, in Guantanamo Bay, where he was tortured.

Australia’s principal intelligence organisation, Asio, is allowed to imprison refugees indefinitely without explanation, prosecution or appeal.
Every Australian citizen in grave difficulty overseas is said to have the right to diplomatic support. The denial of this to Assange, bar the perfunctory, is an unreported scandal. Last September his London lawyer, Gareth Peirce, wrote to the Australian government warning that Assange’s “personal safety and security has become at risk in circumstances that have become highly politically charged”. Only when the Melbourne Age reported that she had received no response did a dissembling official letter turn up. In November, Peirce and I briefed the Australian consul general in London, Ken Pascoe. One of Britain’s most experienced human rights lawyers, Peirce told him she feared a unique miscarriage of justice if Assange was extradited and his government remained silent. The silence remains.

“Every five seconds, a child under 10 dies of hunger. – Thirty-five million people die each year from hunger or its immediate aftermath. – One billion people are permanently and severely malnourished and the situation is becoming increasingly catastrophic.” (Jean Ziegler) (more…)

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation located midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean.

The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced onto a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertilizer: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette’s youngest children, Jollice and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction,” the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “re-classifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along.” Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime – in exchange for a $14 million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine – was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said a ministry official, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons, a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalization, the war on democracy is unmentionable in Western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “it never happened even while it was happening.” Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy.” Since the Second World War, the US has:

1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected.
   
2. Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
   
3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
   
4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
   
5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism – but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of Western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the West, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – Western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Western policy (”Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists, but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century,” the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor, who were starved or murdered with Western connivance, British fighter bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of noncoercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound bites on BBC news and, now, the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries,” wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life.” No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor; no Blake proffers a vision; no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.” And, grievously, no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in “American Football”:

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things …
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust …

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of Western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat.” Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: “momentous, spine-tingling”: The Guardian UK. “The American future,” wrote Simon Schama, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed …” The San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist saw a spiritual “lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet.” Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long-planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3 billion together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas, but to fight in the “homeland” and provide “support to the civil authorities.” In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognizable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says The Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy.” This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe, where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society,” the theft of 84 billion pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax “legally” avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly, liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, “can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism.” Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offenses and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain “in order to protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” said Lisette. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”

I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

www.johnpilger.com

In his Truthdig column this week, Chris Hedges gave details about his decision to sue President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta over a particular part of the National Defense Authorization Act (Title X, Subtitle D, to be precise) that makes room for the military to take up domestic policing in the U.S. (more..)

For many Americans the progression toward war with Iran has the feel of cattle being herded from the stockyard into the slaughterhouse, pressed steadily forward with no turning back, until some guy shoots a bolt into your head. (more…)

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

— Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

On 5 December, the first day of the solemn, predominantly Shi’a Muslim marking of Ashura, the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson in 680 AD, in a statement few of the mainstream media thought worthy of mention, Saad Al Muttalibi, a Minister, ironically, at the Iraqi Ministry of National Dialogue and Reconciliation, announced another impending murder.Tareq Aziz, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, under Saddam Hussein, would be executed as soon as the Americans left.

The US troops were due to leave by 31 December, but remaining troops slunk out under cover of darkness – as did the British four years earlier – on 18 December. Another barbaric act representing the “New Iraq” may well be imminent.

At a ceremony marking the US military retreat at Baghdad Airport on 15 December, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that: “We spilled a lot of blood here … to achieve … making the country sovereign and independent and able to secure itself.”

The independence of this now US client state is as much a myth as the security, since the occasion took place with America’s home-bound heroes cowering behind vast blast walls. Chairs reserved for the Prime Minister, President and others in Iraq’s quisling government were empty. Perhaps they were too busy planning more celebratory post-departure blood spilling.

Tareq Aziz has to be top of the list. The fiercely patriotic, nationalistic reminder of an illegally overthrown government, which, whatever else, had put Iraq first and poured the country’s oil revenues into health care, education, clean water, modern infrastructure, turning a beautiful, but run down “third world” country into a “near first world” one, to use the West’s patronizing patois.

Last year, Tareq Aziz gave his first interview in his then over seven years incarceration by the Americans. His insight was as astute as ever as was his love and despair for his country.

There is nothing here any more. Nothing. For thirty years Saddam built Iraq, and now it is destroyed. There are more sick than before, more hungry. The people don’t have services. People are being killed every day in the tens, if not hundreds. We are all victims of America and Britain. They killed our country.

He talked of the Iraq prior to the invasion, feeling vulnerable to Iran, the US and Britain. It was this feeling of vulnerability which led, for a long time, to Iraq not saying categorically it had no weapons of mass destruction. Instead of those that threatened being uncertain if Iraq could retaliate, the country would be seen as the sitting duck they proved to be.

Further: “We are Arabs, we are Arab nationalists. We must be proud.”

Aziz knows the full extent of both Western and Iranian duplicity toward his country.

Prior to the invasion, this canny politician and diplomat opined that: “What the United States wanted, was not ‘regime change’ in Iraq, but rather ‘region change.’“ Recent years prove him chillingly correct.

He summed up the Bush Administration’s reason for war against Iraq tersely as “Oil and Israel.”

With a Prime Minister and others having deep ties to Israel, Iran, and the largest US Embassy on earth representing many still seeking to cover the tracks of illegalities, lies and duplicity, no wonder whilst the West counted down to Christmas, this indomitable, frail, ill, incarcerated seventy-four year old was alone, trying to count how many days he has left on earth.

The terrible shadow of Saddam Hussein’s sickening death in the Christmas season just before the the West’s New Year dawned, also on the eve of the great Muslim Feast of Eid al Awda, must lie as terror across the hours.

A Christian, he is also reminder of the secular nature of the previous regime, in a country now riven with sectarian divides. “divide and rule” played to murderous perfection. By 2006 half of Iraq’s Christians had fled the country fearing for their lives. Thousands more have fled since.

Last year, Aziz reached such a low ebb he expressed to his lawyer simply a wish that the nightmare of incarceration, isolation, injustice, and untreated illness was over with. Even his hope, indeed courage – as all the former regime, he swore he would never abandon Iraq and did not – faltered. Now he wants to spend his remaining time with the wife and family he has been parted from for nearly eight years. Ominously, this year he was denied a Christmas phone call with them for the first time.

In April 2003, he negotiated safe passage for his family with the invading US: “I told the Americans that if they took my family to Amman (in neighbouring Jordan) they could take me to prison. My family left on an American plane. And I went to prison on a Thursday.” The weight of pain and guilt on the family can only be imagined.

“My father served his country for more than twenty two years. He delivered himself to the US Army (after the fall of Hussein) because he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t do anything wrong. He served his country,” Aziz’s daughter, Zainab Aziz, has said. “He has been wronged.”

Forgotten or conveniently buried is that Tareq Aziz’s trials were entirely American affairs. 

The Judge who tried him and Saddam Hussein was “trained” by a legal team from Notre Dame University at South Bend, Indiana — ironically, a Catholic University.

Unsurprisingly there were also highly political overtones. The law professor, who led the training, Jimmy Gurule, has served, among other public law enforcement positions, as “point person in the hunt for financiers of terrorism in the wake of September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on America” to which the US was so keen to attempt to link Iraq.

On September11th, 2008, Nashville,Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University announced that the Iraqi Judge who convicted Saddam Hussein, Ra’id Juhi , was to join the US lawyers who created the Iraqi Special Tribunal, the kangaroo court responsible for his lynching.) “Vanderbilt law Professor Mike Newton played a pivotal role in the creation of the (Tribunal) that tried Saddam. He led the training for its judges and continues to advise the Tribunal today.”

Chicago’s De Paul University: “ … has designed and managed human rights and rule of law projects in Iraq”, since 2003.(vi) Saddam Hussein’s hideous treatment, or Tareq Aziz’s alleged forced appearance in Court in his pyjamas, both heckled by the Judge, are hardly De Paul’s finest legal zenith either.

St Paul also devised a “Comprehensive Strategic Plan for the Iraq Judiciary”, assisted with drafting the new Iraqi Constitution and the trials of former Ba’ath party members and affiliates. So much for Iraq sovereignty and George W.Bush’s:”Let freedom reign.”

Sabah Al Mukhtar, President of the UK-based Arab Lawyers Association, takes a dim view of this Colonial approach:

Under the Geneva and Vienna Conventions, the occupying force has both responsibility and limitations. There is a duty of protection for citizens, children and the environment. The law of the occupied territories cannot be changed.

Holding the British equally responsible, he argues that the occupiers were part of a leadership with: “Huge responsibility, who set up a system of trials that do not meet the basic international standards”, in accordance with the Vienna and Geneva Conventions.

Further: “Execution is the ultimate abuse of human rights.”

He points out that in the pre-invasion, formerly secular Iraq, where those of all faiths and none, previously shared feasts and celebrations, and where all religious institutions were annually provided maintenance grants by the government equally, Tareq Aziz, a Christian, was, in fact, charged with undermining Islamic movements.

Referring to a “Kangaroo Court”, Al Mukhtar is emphatic that it is incumbent on the Vatican and the Churches also to demand clemency for the seventy-four year old.

Aziz, of course, visited the Pope in 2003 to plead for the Vatican to intervene to avert invasion and save his country and people, who had suffered so terribly from 1991 onwards.

Further, says Al Mukhtar: “The US and the UK still have the duty, and indeed the power, to protect Tareq Aziz. This proposed execution is simply vengeance in its lowest form.”

Tareq Aziz is the man who, above all, stands between the lies, the duplicity, and who knows the wickedness of the spin, illegalities, duplicity, subterfuge, betrayal, bribery, theft, traitors and big business – prepared to cull every last Iraqi, so long as they could get their hands on the oil – and establish a base in this strategically vital country. The biggest US Embassy in the world looks pretty much like “mission accomplished” – for the moment.

Badi Arif, an attorney who used to represent Mr Aziz, said there is a political motive behind the death sentence: “Mr. Aziz used to always tell me, ‘They’ll find a way to kill me and there is no way for me to escape this’“, Arif commented.

Nuri Al Maliki made his groveling subservience to Washington clear when, on 12 December, he requested to go to the city’s Arlington Military Cemetery and jointly lay a wreath with President Obama at the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier, to pay his respects to US service personnel who lost their lives decimating the country of which he is – for now – Prime Minister.

Thanking the murderous, marauding, illegal, infanticide-addicted, raping and pillaging invader must be a historic first.

An extensive search has found no record of Maliki visiting Iraq’s lost and bereaved – from Falluja to Basra, Mosul to Mahmudiyah – the latter where fourteen year old Abeer al Janabi was multiply raped by US troops, then murdered and set fire to, with all her family. Presumably, they were also Obama’s “unbroken line of heroes”, to which he referred in another defeat ceremony at Fort Bragg.

If legality does not prevail in the case of not alone Tareq Azis and his colleagues, but of all those unaccountably detained simply for differing political or religious beliefs, facing a terrible demise in the name of Western “liberation”, all we collectively profess to hold dear, with legality’s Treaties and Conventions, stand condemned.

They include the relevant silent United Nations Organisations, cocooned in their great New York and Geneva Ivory Towers; their apparently speech deprived Secretary General; the great religious bastions, the Vatican; Archbishop Rowan Williams, Lambeth Palace; Vincent Nicholls, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and staff in his great building; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; The State Department; the UK Foreign Office; the European Union’s relevant, increasingly life threatened Organs; and the worlds great bastions of international law. They have been repeatedly approached and remained silent to the point of complicity.

Speaking at the 400th Anniversary of the printing of the King James Bible, on 16th December 2011, Prime Minister Cameron stated of the UK:

“We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so . The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today. Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend. The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option.”

A start would be displaying Britain’s “morals and values … standing up and defending” a brave, frail, Christian man from a barbarity imposed by an illegal invasion – a “Crusade” that Cameron voted for – and demanding of the US, who call Britain the “indispensable ally”, that they ensure Aziz is returned to his family and that 2012 starts with a prisoner amnesty in Iraq.

It shouldn’t be a problem. The US still has 8,000 troops, 14 war planes, 125 helicopters and 28 drones, largely based in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Their “total withdrawal” apparently nearly as phony as George W. Bush’s photo shoot, presenting the troops with a Thanksgiving turkey, which turned out to be plastic. )

“Moral neutrality”, is indeed not an option for one who enjoined in killing this former Foreign Minister’s country.

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Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in the Great City series for World Almanac books, she has also been Senior Researcher for two Award winning documentaries on Iraq, John Pilger’s Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq and Denis Halliday Returns for RTE (Ireland.) Read other articles by Felicity.