{"id":47858,"date":"2013-07-04T22:25:22","date_gmt":"2013-07-04T21:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/forcing-down-the-bolivian-presidents-plane-was-an-act-of-piracy\/47858\/"},"modified":"2013-07-04T22:25:22","modified_gmt":"2013-07-04T21:25:22","slug":"forcing-down-the-bolivian-presidents-plane-was-an-act-of-piracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/forcing-down-the-bolivian-presidents-plane-was-an-act-of-piracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Forcing Down the Bolivian President\u2019s Plane was an Act of Piracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine the aircraft of the President of France being forced down in Latin America on \u201csuspicion\u201d that it was carrying a political refugee to safety \u2014 and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.<\/em><\/p>\n

Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the \u201cinternational community\u201d, as the governments of the West call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales\u2019s plane \u2014<\/em>\u00a0denied air space by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded to \u201cinspect\u201d his aircraft for the \u201cfugitive\u201d Edward Snowden \u2014<\/em>\u00a0was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name.<\/p>\n

In Moscow for a summit of gas-producing nations, Morales had been asked about Snowden who remains trapped in Moscow airport. \u201cIf there were a request [for political asylum],\u201d he said, \u201cof course, we would be willing to debate and consider the idea.\u201d That was clearly enough provocation for the Godfather. \u201cWe have been in touch with a range of countries that had a chance of having Snowden land or travel through their country,\u201d said a US state department official.<\/p>\n

The French \u2014<\/em>\u00a0having squealed about Washington spying on their every move, as revealed by Snowden \u2014<\/em>\u00a0were first off the mark, followed by the Portuguese. The Spanish then did their bit by enforcing a flight ban of their airspace , giving the Godfather\u2019s Viennese hirelings enough time to find out if Snowden was indeed invoking article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: \u201cEveryone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those paid to keep the record straight have played their part with a cat-and-mouse media game that reinforces the Godfather\u2019s lie that this heroic young man is running from a system of justice, rather than preordained, vindictive incarceration that amounts to torture: ask Bradley Manning and the living ghosts in Guantanamo.<\/p>\n

Historians seem to agree that the rise of fascism in Europe might have been averted had the liberal or left political class understood the true nature of its enemy. The parallels today are very different; but the Damocles sword over Snowden, like the casual abduction of the Bolivian president, ought to stir us into recognising the true nature of the enemy.<\/p>\n

Snowden\u2019s revelations are not merely about privacy, nor civil liberty, nor even mass spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the United States now barely conceal a systematic gangsterism historically identified with if not necessarily the same as fascism. On Tuesday, a US drone killed 16 people in North Waziristan, \u201cwhere many of the world\u2019s most dangerous militants live\u201d, said the few paragraphs I read. That by far the world\u2019s most dangerous militants had hurled the drones was not a consideration. President Obama personally sends them every Tuesday.<\/p>\n

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Harold Pinter referred to \u201ca vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed\u201d. He asked why \u201cthe systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities\u201d of the Soviet Union were well known in the West while America\u2019s crimes were \u201csuperficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged\u201d. The most enduring silence of the modern era covered the extinction and dispossession of countless human beings by a rampant America and its agents. \u201cBut you wouldn\u2019t know it,\u201d said Pinter. \u201cIt never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn\u2019t matter. It was of no interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

This hidden history \u2014 not really hidden, of course, but excluded from the consciousness of societies drilled in American myths and priorities \u2014 has never been more vulnerable to exposure. Edward Snowden\u2019s whistleblowing, like that of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, threatens to break the silence Pinter described. In revealing a vast Orwellian police state apparatus servicing history\u2019s greatest war-making machine, they illuminate the true extremism of the 21st century. Unprecedented, Germany\u2019s Der Spiegel<\/em> has described the Obama administration as \u201csoft totalitarianism\u201d. If the penny is finally falling, we might all look closer to home.<\/p>\n

For more information on John Pilger<\/strong>, please visit his website at www.johnpilger.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine the aircraft of the President of France being forced down in Latin America on \u201csuspicion\u201d that it was carrying a political refugee to safety \u2014 and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale. Imagine the response from Paris, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47858","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}