Normalising the crime of the century

John Pilger / Douglas Miller

Mark Higson in memoriam

The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised.

I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day only to learn he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honourable man. We met soon after he had resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor.

“Everyone knows,” he said, “except parliament and the public.”

“And the media?”

“The media – the big names – have been invited to King Charles Street (the Foreign Office) and flattered and briefed with lies. They are no trouble.”

As Iraq desk officer at the Foreign Office, he had drafted letters for ministers reassuring MPs and the public that the British Government was not arming Saddam Hussein. “This was a downright lie”, he said. “I couldn’t bear it”.

Giving evidence before the arms-to-Iraq enquiry, Higson was the only British official commended by Lord Justice Scott for telling the truth. The price he paid was the loss of his health and marriage and constant surveillance by spooks. He ended up living on benefits in a Birmingham bedsitter where he suffered a seizure, struck his head and died alone. Whistleblowers are often heroes; he was one.

He came to mind when I saw a picture in the paper of another Foreign Office official, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Tony Blair’s ambassador to the United Nations in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. More than anyone, it was Sir Jeremy who tried every trick to find a UN cover for the bloodbath to come. Indeed, this was his boast to the Chilcot enquiry on 27 November, where he described the invasion as “legal but of questionable legitimacy”. How clever. In the picture he wore a smirk.

Under international law, “questionable legitimacy” does not exist. An attack on a sovereign state is a crime. This was made clear by Britain’s chief law officer, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith, before his arm was twisted, and by the Foreign Office’s own legal advisers and subsequently by the secretary-general of the United Nations. The invasion is the crime of the 21st century. During 17 years of assault on a defenceless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers like “sanctions” and “no fly zones” and “building democracy”, more people have died in Iraq than during the peak years of the slave trade. Set that against Sir Jeremy’s skin-saving revisionism about American “noises” that were “decidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do [at the UN] in New York”. Moreover, “I myself warned the Foreign Office... that I might have to consider my own position...”.

It wasn’t me, guv.

The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. When he appears in January, Blair will play this part to odious perfection, dutifully absorbing the hisses and boos. All “inquiries” into state crimes are neutered in this way. In 1996, Lord Justice Scott’s arms-to-Iraq report obfuscated the crimes his investigations and voluminous evidence had revealed.

At that time, I interviewed Tim Laxton, who had attended every day of the inquiry as auditor of companies taken over by MI6 and other secret agencies as vehicles for the illegal arms trade with Saddam Hussein. Had there been a full and open criminal investigation, Laxton told me, “hundreds” would have faced prosecution. “They would include,” he said, “top political figures, very senior civil servants from right throughout Whitehall … the top echelon of government.”

That is why Chilcot is advised by the likes of Sir Martin Gilbert, who compared Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. That is why the inquiry will not demand the release of documents that would illuminate the role of the entire Blair gang, notably Blair’s 2003 cabinet, long silent. Who remembers the threat of the thuggish Geoff Hoon, Blair’s “defence secretary”, to use nuclear weapons against Iraq?

In February, Jack Straw, one of Blair’s principal accomplices, the man who let the mass murderer General Pinochet escape justice and the current “justice secretary”, overruled the Information Commissioner who had ordered the government to publish Cabinet minutes during the period Lord Goldsmith was pressured into changing his judgement that the invasion was illegal. How they fear exposure, and worse.

The media has granted itself immunity. On 27 November, Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, wrote that the invasion “was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain.” More than four years before the invasion, Ritter, in interviews with myself and others, left not a shred of doubt that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been disabled, yet he was made a non-person. In 2002, when the Bush/Blair lies were in full echo across the media, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in more than 3,000 articles, of which 49 referred to Ritter and his truth that could have saved thousands of lives.

What has changed? On 30 November, the Independent published a pristine piece of propaganda from its embedded man in Afghanistan. “Troops fear defeat at home,” said the headline. Britain, said the report, “is at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralising the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned.” In fact, public disgust with the disaster in Afghanistan is mirrored among many serving troops and their families; and this frightens the warmongers. So “defeatism” and “demoralising the troops” are added to the weasel lexicon. Good try. Unfortunately, like Iraq, Afghanistan is a crime. Period.

♣ ♣ ♣

Mark Higson
By Douglas Miller

In 1991 I worked with a guy called Mark Higson for around 18 months. In the 1980’s Mark was in charge of the Iraqi desk at the foreign office and was in a unique position to see the reality of what went on in the Arms to Iraq scandal in which ministers such as Alan Clarke and William Waldegrave were complicit. Mark resigned on principle at the corruption he felt was taking place. He became the chief witness in the Scott Inquiry into the sale of arms to Iraq. He quickly became almost unemployable and started to drink heavily. He lost his marriage and regular contact with his children in the early 1990’s.

In what was must have been a very strange experience for him he came to work for us selling the training films we had made over the phone and became a team leader very quickly. But he was also drinking and empty vodka bottles were found in the cistern toilets. Eventually a senior manager asked him to leave. We had all known about his background. I remember coming back late from a meeting and he was being interviewed live by Channel 4 news outside our offices while the scandal was unfolding in the public eye.

I kept in touch with Mark for a while afterwards and the last time I saw him we went to a rugby match together – in 1993 I should think. I read an excellent John Sweeney book on the crisis in which Mark was clearly the primary source of information.

Mark went to live in Birmingham, living in fear of being followed by the secret services which he undoubtedly was being for a least a while. I remember him saying ‘there are more than two of us watching this game of rugby’. He ended up living in a bedsit in Birmingham on social security and he couldn’t get a job. He died in 2000 aged 40 having had, it is assumed, a seizure and cracking his head as he fell. A Cambridge high flyer, a successful early career, a happy marriage all gone in a few years.

I say all of this for several reasons.

I knew quite a bit about Mark (and the arms to Iraq realities) but didn’t know what had happened to him after 1994 (we chatted on the phone then). Thanks to Steven Jacobi’s excellent play on radio 4 about Mark recently I was able to know what became of him. Steven Jacobi was his oldest friend and closest friend. I contacted him after the broadcast and he hopes to lengthen the play and take it to the stage.

A key point here – and totally relevant to the continuing carnage in Iraq – is that we made Saddam Hussein the man he became through supporting him in the Iran-Iraq war and keeping him supplied with arms. If he ever had WMD’s, and the evidence suggests that while they had gone by 2003 he had them (or was developing them) prior to this we can all guess where he might have got them from. Decisions made 20-25 years ago are being played out in real events now. Mark didn’t live to see the current fiasco. I wonder what he might have made of it.

The final point is that Mark was a lovely, honourable man working in a ghastly, dishonourable environment. He made an appalling career choice which killed him. A highly intelligent man he could have done many things more in keeping with his personality. Mark’s story tells us the dangers of trying to be something you aren’t or are unsuited to being. A horribly sad end to the life of such a warm, friendly guy.

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Source:
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=559
http://psychlogicaltravelling.blogspot.com/2007/05/mark-higson.html

Illustration:
http://image3.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID26956/images/protesters.jpg