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COMMENT: Information the most valuable commodity

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“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” – Thomas Pynchon. (1937 – )

THERE was a piece of reassuring news this week. It was the first in what has felt like a long time. The Irish High Court rejected the application of the United States for an arrest warrant for the fugitive Edward Snowden. The former intelligence contractor has been identified as the main source of leaked classified information and has been, we are told, holed up in a Moscow transit lounge for the last few weeks. The rejection was not an act of rebellion but a straightforward adherence to a point of law. The judge stated that because the US had failed to indicate where the alleged offences took place, he was compelled to reject the application.

This incident was a timely reminder that, in fact, there is still a place for the rule of law in contemporary geopolitics. For the last few weeks, we have been deluged with stories that reveal exactly what is going on behind the scenes on the international stage. We have Snowden to thank for much of the information.

It revealed the extent of data collection on the parts of the British and American governments. In recent days, he has stated that Germany was ‘in bed’ with the American NSA. He described US surveillance as practically limitless and also revealed the careful behaviour of state operatives in order to preserve a sheen propriety in their actions. A sort of see no evil, hear no evil code is applied in order to stay on the right side of the law.

A cavalier attitude to international law on the part of the United States is nothing new. It is pushing on for a decade, since Shannon Airport was an important link in the network of airports internationally that facilitated the ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme that took prisoners to Guantanamo Bay and other so-called ‘black sites’ to be interrogated using ‘enhanced techniques’. This is what most of us would refer to as torture.

This week, Guantanamo Bay has been back in the news. Although it would be easy to forget that the base is still operational because of a lack of coverage and repeated statements by President Obama that it would be closed, it is very much in operation. There are currently 100 prisoners on hunger strike and 40 of them are being force fed. Thanks to another leak, a military manual on how to carry out force feeding has entered the public domain.

To raise awareness of the issue, the actor and rapper Mos Def has been filmed undergoing the procedure. It is among the most horrific and disturbing pieces of footage I have seen in some time. He can tolerate only the initial attempts to insert the feeding tube in his nose before he breaks down completely and weeps. The film tells us that the full procedure is carried out twice a day on prisoners and takes two hours.

So it is only through repeated leaks that we are getting some idea of what governments engage in on an everyday basis. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the rhetoric we hear in public and disseminated through a largely docile media is a façade put forward to keep us ignorant. The relentless talk of democracy that is the watchword of the west has been exposed as fallacy when it leads to the wrong leaders being elected, as Egypt has so clearly illustrated. The disconnect between what people on the ground want and what political elites feel is best for them seems to be growing at the moment.

The actions of Irish elites, which have led to so much misery in the daily lives of ordinary people, was the subject of an article in a German newspaper recently. Translated and reprinted by The Irish Times, it is a fascinating insight into how Ireland is viewed from the continent. Its content speaks of the conning of the Irish people by the nation’s ‘elites’. It is a deeply depressing read but does give a good overview of what the nation has been suffering for many years.

The Anglo Tapes have allowed us to hear what has gone on, and no doubt still does, behind closed doors. The depressing part of the story is that those who have the power to change it are the very elites who benefit from the system already. We are given the opportunity to elect our representatives at election time but the pool from which we are forced to select is so small and generic as to make it not so much a choice as a selection between the lesser of two evils.

A recently published book has revealed the extent of the British police’s use of spying to undermine protest movements. Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police details secret police activities whereby officers fathered children, broke the law and stole dead children’s identities. Since the exposure of one such officer a number of years ago, journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans have been able to piece together a story that involves many more officers and a specific secret unit. It raises questions as to what else is going on but has yet to be revealed.

The mounting numbers of scandals and exposures of government and police tactics, combined with the creeping suspicion that an elite hold the power and serve their own self-interests before those of the population is not a happy thought. Until there is genuine evidence to the contrary, the default position for now must be suspicion.

It is not a pleasant way to live but as most people will attest, when trust has been so utterly and totally smashed and the moral high ground exposed to be nothing more than a fictitious construct, it is best to refrain from trusting again. We live in dark times where those who attempt to expose the truth of what is actually happening are hunted down.

As information has become the most valuable commodity in the modern world, we should not be surprised that governments everywhere are doing their utmost to seize and monitor as much of it as they can, especially in the context of their historical and contemporary behaviour.

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