George Monbiot

Alexander Cockburn and the Corruption of Science

George Monbiot — 2007-05-31T09:26:00Z

This is a response to Alexander Cockburn's articles on global warming. You can find all the articles, and other responses, here:

http://www.zmag.org/debatesglobalwa...

I have now asked twice in public and four times in private. I have received three replies, each more vituperative and abusive than the last, but no answer to my question. It was not a complicated request. Alexander Cockburn maintained that the evidence that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere do not result from burning fossil fuels was contained in "papers" written by a Dr Martin Hertzberg. Knowing that papers carry no scientific weight unless they are published in peer-reviewed journals, I asked for references. This request, apparently, makes me an egotist, a liar and the "honorary chairman of the King Canute Action Committee"(1). But that is the extent of the information Cockburn has been kind enough to divulge to me. Of references, there is not a word. (...)

- george monbiot / ZNet

The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law

George Monbiot — 2007-02-13T07:43:00Z

How long can Britain's biggest arms company run a secret service and trump the armed forces in political influence?

There is a state within a state in the United Kingdom, a small but untouchable domain that appears to be subject to a different set of laws. We have heard quite a bit about it over the past two months, but hardly anyone knows just how far its writ runs. The state is BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms company. It seems, among other advantages, to be able to run its own secret service.

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This week, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) hopes to obtain a court order against BAE. The order would allow it to discover how the arms company obtained one of its confidential documents. CAAT instructed its lawyers, Leigh Day & Co, to seek a judicial review of the government's decision to drop the corruption case against BAE, which is alleged to have paid massive bribes to members of the Saudi royal family. Leigh Day sent CAAT an email containing advice on costs and tactics. The email ended up in the hands of the arms company.

How? Correspondence between a plaintiff and his lawyers couldn't be more private. The last people you would show it to are the defendants in the case. But somehow the letter found its way to BAE's offices. (...)

- george monbiot / Guardian

In a military democracy, it is the warriors who call the shots

George Monbiot — 2006-08-15T15:54:17Z

Last week I argued that Israel's attack on Lebanon was premeditated: Hizbullah's capture of two soldiers gave Israel's government the excuse to launch an assault it had been planning since 2004. Both Bush and Blair knew that it would happen and gave it their approval.

I was, of course, denounced by supporters of Israel's government as an anti-semite and an apologist for terror. But on Sunday this hypothesis was confirmed by an article Seymour Hersh published in the New Yorker. Israel, his sources told him, "had devised a plan for attacking Hizbullah - and shared it with Bush administration officials - well before the July 12 kidnappings". One US government consultant revealed that Israeli officials visited Washington earlier in the summer "to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear". (...)

- george monbiot / Guardian

If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq

George Monbiot — 2006-06-06T23:38:00Z

That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out.

In the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him - unfavourably - to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a "poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence ... The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds." I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening - and last night he refused to discuss the matter. (...)

- george monbiot / Guardian

For the sake of the world's poor, we must keep the wealthy at home

George Monbiot — 2006-02-28T20:51:00Z

We all know the damage aviation does, but the government and the airlines want to turn the country into Airstrip One

At last the battlelines have been drawn, and the first major fight over climate change is about to begin. All over the country, a coalition of homeowners and anarchists, of Nimbys and internationalists, is mustering to fight the greatest future cause of global warming: the growth of aviation.

Not all these people care about the biosphere. Some are concerned merely that their homes are due to be bulldozed, or that, living under the new flight paths, they will never get a good night's sleep again. But anyone who has joined a broad-based coalition understands the power of this compound of idealism and dogged self-interest. (...)

[page 27 | Comment & Debate]

- george monbiot / Guardian

When it won't need a tyranny to deprive us of our freedom

George Monbiot — 2006-02-21T11:47:00Z

The creeping extension of implantation technology will eventually break down all the barriers between us and the state

It received just a few column inches in a couple of papers, but the story I read last week looks to me like a glimpse of the future. A company in Ohio called CityWatcher has implanted radio transmitters into the arms of two of its workers. The implants ensure that only they can enter the strongroom. Apparently it is "the first known case in which US workers have been tagged electronically as a way of identifying them".

The transmitters are tiny (about the size of a grain of rice), cheap (£85 and falling fast), safe and stable. Without being maintained or replaced, they can identify someone for many years. They are injected, with a local anaesthetic, into the upper arm. They require no power source, as they become active only when scanned. There are no technical barriers to their wider deployment.

The company that makes these "radio frequency identification tags", the VeriChip Corporation, says they "combine access control with the location and protection of individuals". The chips can also be implanted in hospital patients, especially children and people who are mentally ill. When doctors want to know who they are and what their medical history is, they simply scan them in. This, apparently, is "an empowering option to affected individuals". For a while, a school in California toyed with the idea of implanting the chips in all its pupils. (...)

[page 29 | Comment & Debate]

- george monbiot / Guardian

They call themselves libertarians; I think they're antisocial bastards

George Monbiot — 2005-12-20T14:34:00Z

The road-rage lobby couldn't have been more wrong. Organisations such as the Association of British Drivers or Safe Speed - the boy racers' club masquerading as a road-safety campaign - have spent years claiming that speeding doesn't cause accidents. Safe Speed, with the help of some of the most convoluted arguments I've ever read, even seeks to prove that speed cameras "make our roads more dangerous". Other groups, such as Motorists Against Detection (officially known as Mad), have been toppling, burning and blowing up the hated cameras. These and about a thousand such campaigns maintain that speed limits, speed traps and the government's "war on the motorist" are shakedown operations whose sole purpose is to extract as much money as possible from the poor oppressed driver.

Well last week the Department for Transport published the results of the study it had commissioned into the efficacy of its speed cameras. It found that the number of drivers speeding down the roads where fixed cameras had been installed fell by 70%, and the number exceeding the speed limit by more than 15mph dropped by 91%. As a result, 42% fewer people were killed or seriously injured in those places than were killed or injured on the same stretches before the cameras were erected. The number of deaths fell by more than 100 a year. The people blowing up speed cameras have blood on their hands. (...)

[page 25 | Comment & Debate]

- george monbiot / Guardian

Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes

George Monbiot — 2005-11-22T20:32:13Z

We now know the US also used thermobaric weapons in its assault on Falluja, where up to 50,000 civilians remained

The media couldn't have made a bigger pig's ear of the white phosphorus story. So, before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones. There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called Falluja: the Hidden Massacre. It claimed that the corpses in the pictures it ran "showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh ... The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact." These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed "a biology degree".

I, too, possess a biology degree, and I am as well qualified to determine someone's cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that "nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt". They had turned black and lost their skin "through decomposition". We don't yet know how these people died. (...)

[page 31 | Comment & Debate]

- george monbiot / Guardian

Pentagon Reverses Position and Admits U.S. Troops Used White Phosphorous Against Iraqis in Fallujah

George Monbiot, Maurizio Torrealta — 2005-11-18T01:54:00Z

The U.S. government has now admitted its troops used white phosphorous as an incendiary weapon against Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah a year ago. Chemical weapons experts say such attacks are in violation of international law banning the use of chemical weapons. We speak with columnist George Monbiot and the news director of RAI TV, the Italian TV network that produced the film "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre."

The U.S. government has now admitted its troops used white phosphorous

as an incendiary weapon against Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah a

year ago.

Chemical weapons experts say such attacks are in violation of international law banning the use of chemical weapons.

Peter Kaiser, of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical

Weapons, said, "Chemicals used against humans or animals that cause

harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are

considered chemical weapons."

White phosphorous is often compared to napalm because it combusts

spontaneously when exposed to oxygen and can burn right through skin to

the bone.

The Pentagon"s admission comes after a week of denials that it used

white phosphorous as a weapon in Fallujah. While reporters have noted

the use of white phosphorous since the war began, it only became a

major story last Tuesday when Italian state broadcaster RAI TV aired

the documentary "Fallujuah: The Hidden Massacre."

On that same day Democracy Now aired an excerpt of the documentary and

interviewed Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, the director of the Pentagon's

Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad. During our show Boylan

denied the claims made in the documentary that white phosphorous was

used as a weapon to target Iraqis.

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan interviewed on Democracy Now, Nov. 8, 2005..

But the Pentagon was caught in a lie after it was

revealed that an official Army publication called Field Artillery

magazine had disclosed that the Army had in fact used white phosphorous

as a weapon.

The magazine, in its March-April issue,

reported "[White Phosphorous] proved to be an effective and versatile

munition... [and] as a potent psychological weapon against the

insurgents in trench lines and spider holes."

The magazine went on to report "We fired "shake and bake" missions at

the insurgents, using WP [White Phosphorous] to flush them out and HE

[high explosives] to take them out."

On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, another Pentagon spokesperson,

admitted on the BBC that white phosphorous was used as an offensive

weapon to target insurgents.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable interviewed on BBC.

The Pentagon has defended its use of white phosphorous

by claiming it is a not chemical weapon and that it was only used

against Iraqi insurgents, not civilians. However even this would have

been illegall according to the Army's own rules of combat. In 1999 the

Army published a handbook that read, "It is against the law of land

warfare to employ WP against personnel targets."

An Iraqi human rights team has reportedly gone into Fallujah to

investigate the use of white phosphorus as a weapon by U.S.

forces.

- george monbiot / Democracy Now!

The US used chemical weapons in Iraq - and then lied about it

George Monbiot — 2005-11-15T15:56:56Z

Now we know napalm and phosphorus bombs have been dropped on Iraqis, why have the hawks failed to speak out?

Did US troops use chemical weapons in Falluja? The answer is yes. The proof is not to be found in the documentary broadcast on Italian TV last week, which has generated gigabytes of hype on the internet. It's a turkey, whose evidence that white phosphorus was fired at Iraqi troops is flimsy and circumstantial. But the bloggers debating it found the smoking gun.

The first account they unearthed in a magazine published by the US army. In the March 2005 edition of Field Artillery, officers from the 2nd Infantry's fire support element boast about their role in the attack on Falluja in November last year: "White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosive]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

The second, in California's North County Times, was by a reporter embedded with the marines in the April 2004 siege of Falluja. "'Gun up!' Millikin yelled ... grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. 'Fire!' Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call 'shake'n'bake' into... buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week." (...)

[page 31 | Comment & Debate]

- george monbiot / Guardian

The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq

George Monbiot — 2005-11-08T15:23:22Z

We were told that the Iraqis don't count. Before the invasion began, the head of US central command, General Thomas Franks, boasted that "we don't do body counts". His claim was repeated by Donald Rumsfeld in November 2003 ("We don't do body counts on other people") and the Pentagon last January ("The only thing we keep track of is casualties for US troops and civilians").

But it's not true. Almost every week the Pentagon claims to have killed 50 or 70 or 100 insurgents in its latest assault on the latest stronghold of the ubiquitous monster Zarqawi. In May the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said that his soldiers had killed 250 of Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" (or so 500 of his best friends had told him). But last week, the Pentagon did something new. Buried in its latest security report to Congress is a bar chart labelled "average daily casualties - Iraqi and coalition. 1 Jan 04-16 Sep 05". The claim that it kept no track of Iraqi deaths was false. (...)

[page 31 | Comment & Debate]

- george monbiot / Guardian

It would seem that I was wrong about big business

George Monbiot — 2005-09-21T01:48:39Z

Corporations are ready to act on global warming but are thwarted by ministers who resist regulation in the name of the market

Climate-change denial has gone through four stages. First the fossil-fuel lobbyists told us that global warming was a myth. Then they agreed that it was happening, but insisted that it was a good thing: we could grow wine in the Pennines and take Mediterranean holidays in Skegness. Then they admitted that the bad effects outweighed the good ones, but claimed that climate change would cost more to tackle than to tolerate. Now they have reached stage four. They concede that climate change would be cheaper to address than to neglect, but maintain that it's now too late. This is their most persuasive argument. (...)

- george monbiot / Guardian

How to stop civil war

George Monbiot — 2005-08-30T14:15:00Z

Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow of occupation. Whatever the parliamentarians in Iraq do to try to prevent total meltdown, their efforts are compromised by the fact that their power grows from the barrel of someone else's gun. When George Bush picked up the phone last week to urge the negotiators to sign the constitution, he reminded Iraqis that their representatives - though elected - remain the administrators of his protectorate. While US and British troops stay in Iraq, no government there can make an undisputed claim to legitimacy. Nothing can be resolved in that country until our armies leave.

This is by no means the only problem confronting the people who drafted Iraq's constitution. The refusal by the Shias and the Kurds to make serious compromises on federalism, which threatens to deprive the central, Sunni-dominated areas of oil revenues, leaves the Sunnis with little choice but to reject the agreement in October's referendum. The result could be civil war.

Can anything be done? It might be too late. But it seems to me that the transitional assembly has one last throw of the dice. This is to abandon the constitution it has signed, and Bush's self-serving timetable, and start again with a different democratic design. (...)

[page 17 | Comment]

- george monbiot / Guardian

The new chauvinism

George Monbiot — 2005-08-09T12:25:00Z

I'm not ashamed of my nationality, but I have no idea why I should love this country more than any other

Out of the bombings a national consensus has emerged: what we need in Britain is a renewed sense of patriotism. The rightwing papers have been making their usual noises about old maids and warm beer, but in the past 10 days they've been joined by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, Tristram Hunt in the New Statesman, the New Statesman itself and just about everyone who has opened his mouth on the subject of terrorism and national identity. Emboldened by this consensus, the Sun now insists that anyone who isn't loyal to this country should leave it. The way things are going, it can't be long before I'm deported.

The argument runs as follows: patriotic people don't turn on each other. If there are codes of citizenship and a belief in Britain's virtues, acts of domestic terrorism are unlikely to happen. As Jonathan Freedland writes, the United States, in which "loyalty is instilled constantly", has never "had a brush with home-grown Islamist terrorism".

This may be true (though there have been plenty of attacks by non-Muslim terrorists in the US). But while patriotism might make citizens less inclined to attack each other, it makes the state more inclined to attack other countries, for it knows it is likely to command the support of its people. If patriotism were not such a powerful force in the US, could Bush have invaded Iraq? (...)

[page 17 | Comment]

- george monbiot / Ha'aretz

The treaty wreckers

George Monbiot — 2005-08-02T14:34:00Z

Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers are commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated.

As Robin Cook showed in his column last week, the British government appears to have decided to replace our Trident nuclear weapons, without consulting parliament or informing the public. It could be worse than he thinks. He pointed out that the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston has been re-equipped to build a new generation of bombs. But when this news was first leaked in 2002 a spokesman for the plant insisted the equipment was being installed not to replace Trident but to build either mini-nukes or warheads that could be used on cruise missiles.

If this is true it means the government is replacing Trident and developing a new category of boil-in-the-bag weapons. As if to ensure we got the point, Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, announced before the leak that Britain would be prepared to use small nukes in a pre-emptive strike against a non-nuclear state. This put us in the hallowed company of North Korea. (...)

- george monbiot / Guardian