It is difficult to forget the courage of Helen Jeffries speaking on television about her 14-year-old daughter Zoe, who lay stricken beside her with vCJD and died a few days later. She accurately described Zoe's imminent death as murder. A proper justice system might prefer criminal manslaughter; but the weasel conclusions of the BSE inquiry, led by the establishment trustee Lord Phillips, ensured there was no justice for Helen Jeffries, and no truth that profit and greed had killed those like Zoe.
When the state and its vested interests are guilty of killing, those responsible are covered in a protective fog and their culpability is minimised. The American essayist Edward Herman described this as "normalising the unthinkable". The chief executive of Railtrack, Gerald Corbett, should be awaiting trial on a charge of corporate manslaughter, and John Prescott, at the very least, ought to have been publicly disgraced and sacked. The lives lost at Hatfield and Ladbroke Grove, also victims of profit and greed, require nothing less.
Consider the protective fog over British state killing in Iraq. On 23 October, Peter Hain, a Foreign Office minister, called a press conference at which he handed journalists "evidence" of Saddam Hussein's "obscene decadence". According to Hain, the dictator has built a theme park for his cronies and has been importing large amounts of alcohol and cigarettes, funded by smuggling. What Hain left out, as the Foreign Office admitted on 5 October, was that revenues from smuggling amount to less than 3 per cent of the total value of the oil-for-food programme. In the circumstances, that is negligible. Hain also failed to say that 25 per cent of Iraq's oil-for-food revenues (recently reduced from 30 per cent) are diverted from the desperate needs of the Iraqi people to western oil companies and the super-rich Kuwaiti sheikhs as "reparations". Hans von Sponeck, the chief UN relief official in Baghdad last year, told me: "The Security Council allows me to spend just $180 per person over six months. This must pay for all human needs, from hospitals to education, road repairs to electric light. It is a pitiful picture." Von Sponeck resigned in disgust at the economic embargo imposed by the UN and driven by the US and British governments. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, had gone before him, charging Washington and London with genocide. Their revolt is unprecedented in the history of the UN.
"I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible," wrote Tony Blair in his famously leaked memo of "touchstone issues", which included new Labour's foreign adventures. Halliday agrees. He makes the case that Blair and Bill Clinton are personally responsible for the deaths of the Iraqi children. They had all the intelligence; they knew what they were doing and who would die. For example, a recently declassified US Defence Intelligence Agency report was a blueprint for the destruction of Iraq's clean water treatment facilities, predicting "full degradation of the water treatment system within six months" which would cause epidemic illnesses. That has happened. Water-borne diseases have decimated under-fives; the Unicef figure is half a million children dead in eight years. This is the same figure as the Rwanda genocide.
Having been in office since 1997, Blair can be "personally associated" with a quarter of these deaths: 125,000 children. The motives are the same as those that allowed profit and greed to take over farming and the railways, and now dominate every section of the British state. Anglo-American control of the Middle East guarantees huge profits for the oil companies and the British arms industry, the second biggest in the world, whose deals are concentrated on the medieval regime in Saudi Arabia.
Hain's colourful descriptions of "decadence" in Iraq reflect Foreign Office panic that other governments are tired of sanctions and public opinion is revolted by them. The latest Foreign Office tale is the beheading of Iraqi prostitutes as "revealed" in "restricted Foreign Office documents obtained by the Guardian" and run in the Guardian under the byline of the diplomatic correspondent. If nothing else, this presents a vivid case for the abolition of the position of diplomatic correspondent, a conduit for what Mark Higson, the Foreign Office official commended by the Scott inquiry, described as a "culture of lying". Famous examples include Robin Cook's invention about an imprisoned Iraqi boy, and the lie about Kuwaiti babies thrown out of their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. What is curious is that they bother; Saddam's terrible human rights record needs no embellishment. My guess is that Hain, an enthusiastic convert to the modern colonialism he once denounced, is worried about his role as Foreign Office fall guy. He has even refused to supply parliament with a list of British companies that supplied weapons technology to Iraq and have since been back to Iraq.
In his play Ashes to Ashes, Harold Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning against totalitarian actions taken by polite politicians in western democracies and which are, in principle and effect, little different from those taken by fascists. The crucial difference is distance from the crime. Thus, half a million peasants were despatched by American bombers sent secretly and illegally to skies above Cambodia by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, igniting an Asian holocaust. Clinton and Blair, Cook and Hain and their Tory predecessors have done much the same in Iraq. The method of killing may be different, but the fact of a holocaust is beyond doubt, and, like Cambodia, the memory of their crime will not be suppressed.
