Al-Qaeda is but a lethal flea when it comes to mass killings, writes John Pilger. The invasion of Iraq was "organised with lies", says the new Spanish Prime Minister. Does anyone doubt this any more? And yet these proven lies are still dominant in Australia. Day after day, their perpetrators seek to obfuscate and justify an unprovoked, illegal attack that killed at least 10,000 civilians, a figure confirmed last week by Amnesty International.

Set that carnage against the Madrid atrocity. Terrible though that act of terrorism was, it was small compared with the terrorism of the American-led "coalition". Yes, terrorism. How strange it reads when it describes the actions of "our" governments. So saturated are we in the West in the devilry of Third World tyrants (most of them the products of Western imperialism) that we have lost all sense of the enormous crime committed in our name.

This is not rhetoric. In 1946, the judges who tried the German leadership at Nuremberg called the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country "the supreme international war crime". That principle guided more than half a century of international law, until Bush and Blair and Howard tore it up, covering their actions with lies. In Washington, one of the CIA's most senior analysts and a friend of George Bush snr, Ray McGovern, told me: "It was 95 per cent charade. And they all knew it: Bush, Blair, Howard."

The real reasons for this are suppressed in Australia while the latest lies are channelled and amplified by journalists who affect a spurious national "debate". I am not referring to the usual parochial windbags of the far right, but those broadcasters who may sincerely believe they are being objective. When a dissenting voice such as mine, representing the views of a great many Australians, is allowed a fleeting appearance on ABC TV, ridiculous protests the next day by both the Foreign Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister and their tut-tutting media court underline the rarity of genuine debate in the Australian media.

Sunday's Insiders, on the ABC, excelled itself with interviews with Alexander Downer (Tweedledum) and Gerard Henderson (Tweedledee). How frightened of informed, alternative opinion they are as they perpetuate the orthodoxy that invading Iraq was necessary. By constantly framing the national debate in the terms and cliches of mendacious power, journalists actively collude with it, censoring by omission.

Do they ever consider that the very notion of a "war on terrorism" is absurd when the power in Washington claiming to combat terrorism has run an empire of terrorism: Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua and now Haiti, again? By comparison, al-Qaeda is a lethal flea. The true danger for the world lies in a rampant superpower and where it will strike next: Korea, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, even China?

As the prisoners begin to struggle home from the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, the scale of the crime is emerging. We now know that the British military command virtually refused to send troops to Iraq until Blair gave them a guarantee they would not be prosecuted by the newly constituted International Criminal Court. Blair's guarantee was worthless. That frightens the British establishment, and the Australian establishment, too. Unlike the US, Britain and Australia are signatories to the ICC.

The times are changing; Washington-manipulated show trials of Third World dictators are giving way to the promise of universal justice, however tenuous; and the dock awaits those Westerners who bring mass terrorism to faraway countries, then watch it blow back in our faces. Like al-Qaeda, they should not be allowed to get away with it.

John Pilger is an author, journalist and filmmaker.