http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1915328,00.htmlClick here to listen to Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture
Click here to read Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture
HAROLD PINTER, the ailing British playwright, used his Nobel prize lecture yesterday to call the invasion of Iraq “an act of blatant state terrorism” and to demand the prosecution of President Bush and Tony Blair.
In a pre-recorded broadcast in Stockholm by the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said: “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.
“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.” snip
He said that there were plenty of examples of Washington exercising “a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good”. Citing examples from the US-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua to the detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, he said that the US and its ally Britain — “its own bleating little lamb” — had traded in death and “employed language to keep thought at bay”.