• Food and Travel
• Issue 1

It is in very few countries that investigative journalists enjoy the same notoriety as football players. Britain is one of those countries. And John Pilger is one of those journalists.

Yesterday saw the launch of Pilger's latest book "Freedom Next Time" (Bantam Press, Random House, 2006) at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre in London.

The book was born in Pilger's mind as an attempt to publicise much of the material he produced for his documentary Breaking the Silence - Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003), which was screened at the event before Pilger came on stage to take questions from the audience.

Four years after filming Breaking the Silence, it still has the power to remind us about the other 'good war', as it was ironically called by Tariq Ali. In 2003, just two years after the invasion of Iraq by British and American forces, the coalition of the willing had spent $10bn on Afghanistan. Just three per cent of that total was used for reconstruction. That's $300 m for a country which, in the words of the Afghan Minister of Public Infrastructure, had "no money at all".  (Which is, incidentally, the cost of four F16I fighter-jets).

Pilger reminded the 500 strong audience that Jimmy Carter's administration voted in favour of funding the Taleban six months before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. (The official justification for this has always been that the Taleban was fighting communist invaders).

He added that the Clinton era was one of the most violent the US has ever experienced. The neocons (the crazies, as they were called by the George Bush senior camp, says former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern) actually grew up during this period.

Pilger underlined the fact that the US administration is not going to leave one of the biggest producers of petrol - Iran - to proceed unchallenged. The same concern was raised some months ago by Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker) and Robert Fisk (The Independent). In the seventies, Iran was one of the four pillars of US influence in the region, along with Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Today, the US has more enemies than allies. Of its enemies, Iran is probably the most vulnerable.

Although optimistic about the role the United Nations could have in the future, Pilger says that "power should finally return to the general assembly". The UN is not an independent organisation anymore, and in recent times the situation has got stranger still; with some UN delegates undergoing searches every time they enter the United States.

Pilger spoke for almost two hours addressing a litany of controversies and double stndards in the US administration.  Lindsey German, member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers' Party, who introduced Pilger at the lecture, quoted Milan Kundera as she explained the importance of journalists of his standing: "People against power is memory against forgetting". And viceversa.