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October 26, 2001
Rahul
Mahajan
Poisoning
the Well
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why I Opposed
the
Anti-Terrorism Bill
John Troyer
Put
the War to a Vote
Norman Madarasz
What It
Means to be
Against the War
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance Attacks
US Bombing Strategy
Richard Lloyd Parry
Terrible Images
of a "Just" War
October 25, 2001
Ghassan
Andoni
Raid
on Bethlehem
N.D. Jayaprakash
From
Hiroshima to NYC
Evan Schultz
Memo
to Ashcroft:
Read Marbury
The Sunshine
Project
Assault
on the BioWeapons
Convention
Sarah
Turner
Cashing
In on Patriotism
Latin American Colloquium
on Systemology
The Meridia Manifesto
Noam Chomsky
The
New War on Terror
October 24, 2001
Michael
Colby
Radioactive
Mail?
Lori Allen
Life
in an Occupied Land
During Wartime
Peter
Swire
New
Anti-Terrorism Bill
Poses Old Risks
Irina
Malenko
A
Non-Western Voice
David
Vest
Welcome
to Web Hell
Patrick Cockburn
Battle
of Mazar Gets Nasty
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Ashcroft's Onslaught
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Ridge Long Groomed
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Those CIA Killing
Bids Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
Responses to 9/11:
Chomsky, Russell Banks,
Zinn, and Alice Walker
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October 29,
2001
Hidden Agenda of the War on Terror
By John Pilger
The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three
weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks
on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.
Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken
nations has been terrorized by the most powerful - to the point
where American pilots have run out of dubious "military"
targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross
warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.
Unlike the relentless pictures from New
York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet
to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one
family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.
And why are cluster bombs being used?
The British public should know about these bombs, which the
RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only
one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode
lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step
on them.
If ever a weapon was designed specifically
for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of
American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian
toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown
off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your
name.
None of those directly involved in the
September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently
did their planning and training in Germany and the United States.
The camps which the Taliban allowed bin
Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself
is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s,
the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and
trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.
The hypocrisy does not stop there. When
the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why?
Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas,
to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.
With secret US government approval, the
company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil
and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted
to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.
A US diplomat said: "The Taliban
will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained
that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there
would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal
persecution of women. "We can live with that," he
said.
Although the deal fell through, it remains
an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush,
which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda
is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin,
the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough,
according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy
needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan
can the Americans hope to control it.
So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of
State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate"
Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation"
to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover
for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that
lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power.
The Royal Marines, who will do the real
dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's
imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions
of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for terrorism
with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush
nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield
where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the
Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years".
The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking;
the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented
crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many
wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians
eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves
would not say boo to a Taliban goose.
In the days of gunboats, our imperial
leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of
their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective
moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the
killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing
justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.
By killing innocents in Afghanistan,
Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in
New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders"
are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you
crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from
the Oval Office and Downing Street.
If Blair was really opposed to all forms
of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On
the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair",
selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles)
to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's
Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government.
Britain's biggest arms customer is the
medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the
religious fanaticism of the Taliban.
If he really wanted to demonstrate "the
moral fiber of Britain", Blair would do everything in his
power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world
where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger.
He would do more than make gestures;
he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine
and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered
by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member.
He would call for an end to the genocidal
blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has
imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade,
causing the deaths of half a million children under the age
of five.
That's more deaths of infants every month
than the number killed in the World Trade Center.
There are signs that Washington is about
to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to
most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already
bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV
news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing
campaign since World War Two.
The Wall Street Journal reported that
the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because
"few targets remain". "We're down to the last
outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago,
and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer?
800 Lbs million so far.
According to an internal UN report, covering
a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians.
In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children
were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd,
who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children
when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an
open valley; there were no military targets nearby.
"I want to see the pilot who did
this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family.
For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the
Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.
The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians,
and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their
caricatures in much of the Western media.
Far from being the terrorists of the
world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the
Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely
of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in
or near their countries.
There is no war on terrorism. If there
was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches
of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American
dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on
earth.
There is, however, a continuing war of
the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden
agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly
from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the
east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make
their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to
demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives
that require real political courage.
The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez,
a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We
read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading
in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons,
daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering,
and nursing further grievances against us.
"It is not the way to go...not in
our son's name."
A complete archive of John Pilger's stories
can be found at his website: http://www.johnpilger.com.
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