John Pilger – The Diplomacy of Lying
In 1992, Mark Higson, the Foreign Office official responsible
for Iraq, appeared before the Scott inquiry into the scandal of arms
sold illegally to Saddam Hussein. He described a “culture of lying” at
the heart of British foreign policymaking. I asked him how frequently
ministers and officials lied to parliament.
“It’s systemic,” he said. “The draft letters I wrote for
various ministers were saying that nothing had changed, the embargo on
the sale of arms to Iraq was the same.”
“Was that true?” I asked.
“No, it wasn’t true.”
“And your superiors knew it wasn’t true?”
“Yes.”
“So how much truth did the public get?”
“The public got as much truth as we could squeeze out, given that we told downright lies.”
From British involvement with the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia,
to the supply of warplanes to the Indonesian dictator Suharto, knowing
he was bombing civilians in East Timor, to the denial of vaccines and
other humanitarian aid to the children of Iraq, my experience with the
Foreign Office is that Higson was right and remains right.
As I write this, the dispossessed people of the Chagos Islands in the
Indian Ocean await the decision of the Law Lords, hoping for a
repetition of four previous judgments that their brutal expulsion to
make way for a US military base was “outrageous”, “illegal” and
“repugnant”. That they must endure yet another appeal is thanks to the
Foreign Office – whose legal adviser in 1968, one Anthony Ivall Aust
(pronounced “oarst” and since knighted), wrote a secret document headed
“Maintaining the fiction”. This advised the then Labour government to
“argue” the “fiction” that the Chagossians were “only a floating
population”. Today, the depopulated main island, Diego Garcia, over
which the Union Jack flies, serves the “war on terror” as an American
interrogation and torture centre.
