Six months after the invasion of Iraq in
March 2003 and two years after the
invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001,
John Pilger’s documentary Breaking the
Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on
Terror highlighted the hypocrisy and
double standards of the American and
British adventures of 2001-3, which led
to the deaths of more than a million
people.
The film opens with a series
of haunting war photographs. Over the
carnage, George W Bush says, ‘The United
States will bring to the Iraqi people
food and medicines and supplies, and
freedom.’ His voice dissolves into the
high-pitch of his co-conspirator, Tony
Blair, who exalts his actions as ‘a
fight for freedom’ and ‘a fight for
justice’.
Pilger asks, ‘What are the real aims
of this war and who are the most
threatening terrorists?' In a remote
village in Afghanistan, he interviews
Orifa, who lost eight members of her
family, including six children, when an
American plane dropped a 500-pound bomb
on her mud-brick home. This is
juxtaposed with Bush telling Congress
that the United States is ‘a friend to
the Afghan people’. Few countries have
been helped less by the United States –
less than three per cent of all aid to
Afghanistan is for reconstruction from
war damage.
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Kabul, the capital, is a maze of
destruction, with cluster bombs not
cleared from the city centre and
families living in abandoned buildings.
‘I’ve spent much of my life in places of
upheaval, but I’ve rarely seen such a
ruined city as Kabul,’ says Pilger,
standing in a shoe factory where the
populations of two villages have
squatted, destitute.
Most of the damage was inflicted not
by the ‘official enemy’, the Taliban,
but by warlords backed, trained and
funded by the United States, who
restored the poppy harvests and opium
trade, which the Taliban had banned.
Recalling the 1979 Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, Pilger reveals that
President Jimmy Carter signed a secret
presidential decree authorising the
bank-rolling of the warlords, known as
the mujahedin, to fight the Red Army.
Among them, the CIA and Britain's MI6
trained Islamic extremists, including
Osama bin Laden, as part of what was
called Operation Cyclone. From this,
says Pilger, ‘came the Taliban, Al-Qaeda
and [the attacks of] September 11th’.
The Taliban were also the United
States's secret friends. Shortly after
they took power in Afghanistan, they
were offered a bribe by the
administration of President Bill Clinton
if they backed a plan for an oil
pipeline from central Asia through
Afghanistan. However, when George W Bush
became President, the connection between
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was an
embarrassment, and the tie was cut.
Pilger's interviews with
administration officials – described by
former CIA analyst Ray McGovern as ‘the
crazies’ – are perhaps the highlight of
a film made when 9/11 and the invasion
of Iraq were raw. He interviews Under
Secretary of State John Bolton, who is
today Donald Trump's National Security
Adviser. Bolton tells Pilger that the
United States has done more ‘to create
conditions in which individuals can be
free around the world than any other
country’. When Pilger points to the US
record of bombing countries into
submission, Bolton says, ‘Are you a
Labour Party member… or a Communist
Party member?’ When Pilger replies that
Tony Blair's Labour Party are his
allies, he says, ‘Oh, really?’
Of all Pilger's films about American
foreign policy, Breaking the Silence
achieved something of a ‘cult’ status as
counter-history and was shown across the
United States – thanks in part to Ray
McGovern, who took the film on a tour of
campuses and small towns. ‘We warn
people,’ he said, ‘about the crazies.’
Nothing, he might add today, has
changed.
Awards: The Chris Statuette in the
War & Peace division, Chris Awards,
Columbus International Film & Video
Festival, Ohio, 2004.
'Breaking the Silence: Truth And Lies
In The War On Terror' was first
broadcast on ITV1, 22 September 2003
