pilger

While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole.

In 1982, we filmed a family of Chagos Islanders in exile in Mauritius. Here all 25 of them sleep in shifts in one squalid room with the baby in a cardboard box. [15 years later], we found the same family, living in the same shack, in the same terrible conditions. They still sleep on the floor, the rain still pours in, the toilet is still a hole in the ground. They are still so poor that they often go hungry. What was done to these people is today defined in international law as a crime against humanity.

Barely one month after [Halabja] in 1988, Tony Newton, Margaret Thatcher's Trade Secretary, flew to Baghdad to offer Saddam £340 million of taxpayers' money in export credits. Three months later, the smiling Newton was back, this time to celebrate with Saddam the joyous news that Iraq was now Britain's third-largest market for machine tools, from which a range of Iraqi weapons was forged - some of them used against British troops in the Gulf War.

In 1995, General Kamel was debriefed by senior officials of the United Nations inspections team, then known as UNSCOM, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The complete transcript ... contradicts almost everything Bush and Blair have said about the threat of Iraqi weapons.

For example, General Kamel says categorically: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed." All that remains, he says, are the blueprints, computer disks and microfiches.

... a group of us found classified files in the Public Record Office in London, which revealed just how the American and British governments had conspired to expel the entire population of this British colony, all of them British citizens, and dumped them in the slums of Mauritius 1,000 miles away and how the deal was set up. Britain got $14 million off the cost of a Polaris submarine as a thank you for giving them the Chagos islands... The expulsion was done with coercion, with trickery.