BREAKING THE SILENCE
It’s often the combination of events personal & specific & public & general that concentrate the mind. I’ve just finished watching a documentary called Breaking the Silence, an analysis by John Pilger of George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’. I missed it on Monday night &, with Emma out on the town tonight with other renegade mothers of 1-year-old babies, I’ve been alone with a still snuffling Reuben. The programme lasted an hour & Reuben managed to sleep through it. But his blocked nose woke him up eventually & I went down the corridor to put him over my shoulder for ten minutes to get him back to sleep.
As I stood there in the semi-darkness, with Reuben shifting down the gears through crying sleepily to snoring loudly, I ran through some of the data that John Pilger’s slow, calm, lugubrious voice had communicated. As film sequences ran depicting urban wastelands untended by the healing hands of the American liberators, Pilger’s flat, melancholy tones catalogued the facts that have somehow skipped the attention of the world’s media:
· …that only 3% of international aid to Afghanistan goes towards reconstruction;
· …that Afghan President Hamid Kazai can only venture beyond the presidential compound in the presence of 42 bodyguards;
· …that the warlords leading the old Mujhadin armies set up, armed & financed to the tune of $500,000,000 by the United States before the Soviet invasion in the ‘70s, have taken effective control in Afghanistan;
· …that within the bloody chaos their internecine struggle has brought about, the mass kidnapping & rape of women has gone on in all parts of the country;
· …that on one occasion 35 women fleeing from a mass rape by marauding soldiers leaped into a river & drowned rather than submit.
We learned too of the activities of a small group of men dubbed by intelligence officials close to George Bush Sr. during his administration ‘the Crazies’. Men like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz & Donald Rumsfeld & their Project for a New American Century. Men who are now at the side of George Bush Jr. informing domestic & foreign policy with their wisdom, shaping a new, aggressive America untroubled by the inconveniences of conscience, fired only by a ruthless, amoral pragmatism & the concept of ‘full spectrum dominance’.
Pilger pondered too the entire definition of ‘international terrorism’ & the right of the United States to proclaim war against it from that highest of moral ground upon which is built the White House. We learned as well of the School of the Americas in Georgia in which Latin American ‘freedom fighters’ were trained in the '60s & '70s by US military experts. Such ‘freedom fighters’ as those who brought down President Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government of Chile. And we heard about the Kabul taxi driver with an unimpeachable record of opposition to the Taliban who ended up in Camp X-Ray, where, after two years without prosecution, trial or sentence he remains. And about the British Asian from the West Midlands also incarcerated in Camp X-Ray in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan, where, after two years without prosecution, trial or sentence he remains.
And we saw & heard on treacherous newsreel from 2001 Colin Powell & Condoleeza Rice stating with calm assurance that Saddam Hussein posed no military threat to Western interests. Interviewed for the programme, a shifty, blinking, hesitant Under Secretary of State Douglas Feith denied categorically both information contained within Library of Congress records that the United States sold WMD materials to Iraq & the figure of 10,000 civilian deaths as arising from the invasion. (Fortunately his dignity - & maybe his job – were saved by the timely intervention of an American army colonel exercising his democratic right to bring the interview to an end). Under Secretary of State John Bolton had no problem with the figure of 10,000 but considered it a pretty acceptable splash of collateral damage considering the scale of the military operation. (He required no assistance from the US military, but he did ask John Pilger at the conclusion of the interview whether he was a member of the Communist Party).
In the final few minutes of this devastating programme, Pilger quoted to a retired American intelligence official Normal Mailer’s assertion that the USA had now entered a pre-fascist era. Looking as sad & tired as Pilger’s dry voice sounded, the official delivered his chilling verdict that in his judgement the pre-fascist stage had already been passed…
As a teacher of Drama I have too much respect for the canons of World Theatre to indulge readily in melodrama or sentimentality. But as I laid Reuben carefully down on his side in his cot & watched his dreamless slumber I wondered what kind of a world my generation has prepared for him. And momentarily I could see all too clearly children burned & maimed on hospital beds and bandaged & splinted in the street. Not in some distant, primitive, reassuringly alien Middle Eastern setting but here in the West where we are safe from the long reach of international terrorism.
1:51:32 AM 
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