What They Don't Want You To Know - 'Normalising the Unthinkable'

With the report by Lord Hutton due to be published in Britain, John Pilger examines the work of those now hard at work, 'normalising the unthinkable'. What they don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq.

Excerpt-

...What the normalisers don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls a "misjudgement" - and the true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites. Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.

..snip..

This is not to say the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not real; what the normalisers don't want you to know is that the most pervasive danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism and scholarship cast always as benign: capable of misjudgement and blunder, never of high crime. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism", inspired by fear of lethal threats. Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself and to mankind". ..cont'd

http://pilger.carlton.com/print/133179

fine idea for their sons to seize peoples' wives and kids for "interrogation," bulldoze homes, destroy crops, and anybody who complains gets their mouth taped shut, a bag over their head and hauled off to a concentration camp.

that it's our families, our friends and our neighbors who think that whitewashing the horrors of what we are doing over there is find and dandy.

I don't understand people who deliberately choose to live in a protective little faerie tale.

at the hands of soldiers following orders. Somehow the suffering in the movie is more "real".

as the irony flies over their heads?

Pilger's written a lot of good stuff, but this ranks at or near the top . . . provides the kind of context that so many are missing . . . once they find it, their Bush fatigue turns into Bush rage rather quickly . . . and it's irreversible . . . not even $200 million will win this election for Bush . . . (that's not to say he isn't fully capable of stealing it, however) . . .

I needed the reading.

:kick:

<Nothing has changed. As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime Unchanged, the most senior and ruthless elements of Saddam's security network, the Mukha-barat, are now in the pay of the US and Britain, helping them to combat the resistance and recruit those who will run a puppet regime behind a facade. A CIA-run and -paid gestapo of 10,000 will operate much as they did under Saddam. "What is happen-ing in Iraq," writes Rai, "is re-Nazification... just as in Germany after the war.">