DP
> DIARY
> By Charles Glass
> The US government will expend unlimited quantities of its taxpayers'
wealth to protect its soldiers from the foreigners whose villages and cities
we bomb in order to rule the world. Yet it is the British government that
has taken the protection of life an extra step in defending America's
uniformed boys and girls, not from Serbian bullets or Iraqi radar, but from
'harassment, alarm and distress'. The Crown Prosecution Service has just
conscripted Britain's anti-racism laws, which are in reality
anti-free-speech laws, to save young Oklahomans and Californians from the
sight of a protester mishandling an American flag outside the US base at
Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire. A health-worker named Lindis Percy stands to
pay a fine of £2,500 for having 'trailed' the Stars and Stripes on the
ground outside the National Security Agency's base that was, until recently,
codenamed the 13th USNSA Field Station. (Where are the other 12?) Menwith
Hill's 1,800 staff monitor communications - that is, they listen to your
telephone conversations, read your faxes and download your emails. One
wonders whether anyone criticising American foreign policy over the
telephone might be committing a racist offence when he is overheard by one
of the base's sensitive American eavesdroppers. As an American who is
mortally offended by any hint of anti-American sentiment anywhere on earth,
all I can say is 'Watch out'. We are listening and observing. If you get out
of line and hurt one of our soldier's feelings, Jack Straw will haul you
before a magistrate. If you don't pay your fine, he'll send you to a prison
managed by an American security firm. And those guys really don't like
people who spit on the flag.
>
> Sometimes the effort to enforce American law around the world can be
productive. One of the republic's first laws, enacted just after our
constitution, was the Alien Torts Claims Act. It promised to punish British
naval personnel who impressed American seamen. The extra-territorial
application of American law has never been relinquished, in itself a
pernicious doctrine that, among other things, makes the United States one of
the only countries to tax its nationals living abroad - except, of course,
those who, like Marc Rich, are exempted by President Clinton for tax (and
other) offences. Some clever lawyers in the USA have in recent years used
the Act to sue torturers from places such as Peru and Indonesia. A Peruvian
national in the US was given leave to sue his Peruvian military torturer,
then in America; and he won. When an Indonesian general was studying at
Harvard, the journalist Alan Nairn served him with a subpoena for alleged
war crimes. General Gramajo fled the country, although I never did find out
what he was taking his degree in. I wonder if any survivors of the 1953
Qibya massacre or the 1982 massacres at Beirut's Sabra and Chatilla refugee
camps have moved to the United States. If so, Ariel Sharon ought to be
careful to avoid process-servers during his first prime-ministerial visit to
the White House.
> An interview with Professor Ehud Sprinzak, who specialises in extremist
movements, on Israel's Channel 7, was reproduced in the weekly supplement of
Ha'aretz newspaper. Interviewer: What do you think about the executions in
the Palestinian Authority? Sprinzak: I have a very positive opinion. I mean,
it is a vital instrument, part of the struggle against terrorism. And I have
no reservation, except for one thing.... Interviewer: One moment. One
moment. I was referring to the executions of collaborators [working for
Israel] by the Palestinian authorities, not to the liquidations by our
forces. Sprinzak: Pardon. Pardon. I thought you were asking me....In any
case, about the Palestinians: it is disgusting, nauseating. This is how a
dictatorial system operates, without any judicial process. Absolutely
unacceptable. Shocking.
>
> We Americans are pretty good folk, really. We back Israel's occupation
policies, let Britain join our bombing sorties on Iraq, and gradually take
over your prisons, hospitals, schools and universities. It was particularly
generous of British American Tobacco, whose abuses of the legal system in
both our countries need no airing here, to grant £3.8 million to Nottingham
University. The funds are designated for Britain's first (and last?)
international centre for corporate social responsibility (i.e., ethics). Why
not the Slobodan Milosevic Centre for Ethnic Understanding? The McDonald's
School of Nutrition? The Clinton-Lewinsky Institute of Truth? BAT's
generosity is part of the government's plan to hand British universities
over to private corporations according to a pattern already established in
(dare I admit it?) the United States. No longer education, but education in
the interests of those who pay for it - those with the money who also pay
for our politicians' elections and, in many cases, their private lives.
> Although my ancestors fought under the flag in most of America's wars,
including the War Between the States, I bear no grudge against Lindis Percy
for her actions at Menwith Hill. Neither she nor the understandably
aggrieved Muslims of the Middle East, who occasionally set the
red-white-and-blue aflame, can disgrace our national emblem. That is the job
of our presidents. Bill Clinton, proving his critics were right all along,
sat, spat and shat on the flag with pardons for the real criminals, who
donated money to his cause (he has one cause: himself) and to his
brothers-in-law; while leaving thousands of youngsters to languish behind
privatised bars for inhaling marijuana. His successor, who doesn't need the
money, may do better with fiscal probity. (But keep an eye on his brother
Neil, the next Billy Carter/Roger Clinton in the making.) GWB's policies,
however, of leaving Iraq's children to starve, Palestinian children to bleed
and African Aids victims to die for want of the pharmaceutical corporations'
expensive drugs will lower Old Glory to half-mast in shame.
>
> (c)2001 The Spectator.co.uk