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January
31, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal:
Killer Dog, Weird Couple
Dr. Susan
Block
Blowback
and Daniel Pearl
January
30, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Linda
Lay, Hill and Knowlton and the Tears of a Clown
Jack McCarthy
Free
Noelle Bush!
Michael
Ratner
Memo
to Bush: Adhere to
the Geneva Convention
Jay Moore
Proud
to be an American?
Susan
Block
The
Great Pretzel Swallower
and Guantanamo Porn
January
29, 2002
Gary Leupp
Why
This War Was, and Remains, Utterly Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Birds of Kandahar
Patrick
Cockburn
Afghan
Opium Trade
Back in Business
January
28, 2002
Larry
Chin
Brosnahan
for the Defense
Mokhiber/Weissman
Tyranny
of the Bottom Line
George
E. Curry
Civil
Rights Nominee Called Affirmative Action "Racist"
Sen. Russ
Feingold
Campaign
Finance Reform?
Think Enron
John Chuckman
Liberal?
Media?
January
27, 2002
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Enron's
Drip, Drip, Drip
Tom Turnipseed
MLK
Jr.'s Dream Perverted
January
26, 2002
Norman
Madarsz
Adieu,
Bourdieu
January
25, 2002
National
Lawyers Guild
Know
Your Rights
Alexander
Cockburn
You
Call This Terrorism?
CounterPunch
Wire
Cal
Energy Crisis Hoax:
It Wasn't A Shortage,
It Was a Shakedown
Tariq
Ali
Kashmir,
Klinghoffer,
the Kurds and Chomsky
Nadine
Strossen
Protecting
MLK Jr.'s Legacy:
Justice and Liberty After 9/11
January
24, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Turkey
Targets Chomsky
Dean Baker
Lying
on Top:
Ken Lay One of Many
David
Vest
Idiot
Wind
January
23, 2002
Terry
Waite
Guantanamo
Prisoners:
Justice or Revenge?
Molly
Secours
The
Case of Abu-Ali:
Racism and the Death Penalty
Robert
Jensen
Speak
Out, Get Slimed
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
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January 31,
2002
The Colder War
By John Pilger
Last week, the US government announced that it
was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending
will rise to $379 billion, of which $50 billion will pay for
its "war on terrorism".
There will be special funding for new,
refined weapons of mass slaughter and for "military operations"
- invasions of other countries.
Of all the extraordinary news since September
11, this is the most alarming. It is time to break our silence.
That is to say, it is time for other
governments to break their silence, especially the Blair government,
whose complicity in the American rampage in Afghanistan has not
denied its understanding of the Bush administration's true plans
and ambitions.
The recent statements of British Ministers
about the "vindication" of the "outstanding success"
in Afghanistan would be comical if the price of their "success"
had not been paid with the lives of more than 5,000 innocent
Afghani civilians and the failure to catch Osama bin Laden and
anyone else of importance in the al-Qaeda network.
The Pentagon's release of deliberately
provocative pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant
to conceal this failure from the American public, who are being
conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a permanent
war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged
the Cold War.
The threat of "terrorism",
some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare.
The parallels are striking.
In America in the 1950s, the Red Scare
was used to justify the growth of war industries, the suspension
of democratic rights and the silencing of dissenters.
That is happening now.
Above all, the American industrial-complex
has a new enemy with which to justify its gargantuan appetite
for public resources - the new military budget is enough to end
all primary causes of poverty in the world.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary,
says he has told the Pentagon to "think the unthinkable".
Vice President Dick Cheney, the voice
of Bush, has said the US is considering military or other action
against "40 to 50 countries" and warns that the new
war may last 50 years or more.
A Bush adviser, Richard Perle, explained.
"(There will be) no stages," he said.
"This is total war. We are fighting
a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there ... If
we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace
it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy
but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs
about us years from now."
Their words evoke George Orwell's great
prophetic work, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In the novel, three slogans dominate
society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also
reverses meaning. The war is terrorism.
The next American attack is likely to
be against Somalia, a deeply impoverished country in the Horn
of Africa.
Washington claims there are al-Qaeda
terrorist cells there.
This is almost certainly a fiction spread
by Somalia's overbearing neighbour, Ethiopia, in order to ingratiate
itself with Washington. Certainly, there are vast oil fields
off the coast of Somalia.
For the Americans, there is the added
attraction of "settling a score".
In 1993, in the last days of George Bush
Senior's presidency, 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia
after the US Marines had invaded to "restore hope",
as they put it.
A current Hollywood movie, Black Hawk
Down, glamorises and lies about this episode.
It leaves out the fact that the invading
Americans left behind between 7,000 and 10,000 Somalis killed.
Like the victims of American bombing
in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Cambodia, and Vietnam and many
other stricken countries, the Somalis are unpeople, whose deaths
have no political and media value in the West.
WHEN Bush Junior's heroic marines return
in their Black Hawk gunships, loaded with technology, looking
for "terrorists", their victims will once again be
nameless. We can then expect the release of Black Hawk Down II.
Breaking our silence means not allowing
the history of our lifetimes to be written this way, with lies
and the blood of innocent people. To understand the lie of what
Blair/Straw/Hoon call the "outstanding success" in
Afghanistan, read the work of the original author of "Total
War", a man called Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President
Carter's National Security Adviser and is still a powerful force
in Washington.
Brzezinski not long ago revealed that
on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress,
President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500 million to create
an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic
fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the
Soviet Union.
The CIA called this Operation Cyclone
and in the following years poured $4billion into setting up Islamic
training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student").
Young zealots were sent to the CIA's
spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda
were taught "sabotage skills"--terrorism.
Others were recruited at an Islamic school
in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated Twin Towers.
In Pakistan, they were directed by British
MI6 officers and trained by the SAS.
The result, quipped Brzezinski, was "a
few stirred up Muslims"--meaning the Taliban.
At that time, the late 1970s, the American
goal was to overthrow Afghanistan's first progressive, secular
government, which had granted equal rights to women, established
health care and literacy programmes and set out to break feudalism.
When the Taliban seized power in 1996,
they hanged the former president from a lamp-post in Kabul.
His body was still a public spectacle
when Clinton administration officials and oil company executives
were entertaining Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston,
Texas.
The Wall Street Journal declared: "The
Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover,
they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment
route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other
natural resources."
No American newspaper dares suggest that
the prisoners
in Camp X-Ray are the product of this policy, nor that
it was one of the factors that led to the attacks of
September 11.
Nor do they ask: who were the real winners
of September 11?
The day the Wall Street stockmarket opened
after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the few companies showing
increased value were the giant military contractors Alliant Tech
Systems, Northrop Gruman, Raytheon (a contributor to New Labour)
and Lockheed Martin.
As the US military's biggest supplier,
Lockheed Martin's share value rose by a staggering 30 per cent.
Within six weeks of September 11, the
company (with its main plant in Texas, George Bush's home state)
had secured the biggest military order in history: a $200billion
contract to develop a new fighter aircraft. The greatest taboo
of all, which Orwell would surely recognise, is the record of
the United States as a terrorist state and haven for terrorists.
This truth is virtually unknown by the
American public and makes a mockery of Bush's (and Blair's) statements
about "tracking down terrorists wherever they are".
They don't have to look far.
Florida, currently governed by the President's
brother, Jeb Bush, has given refuge to terrorists who, like the
September 11 gang, have hi-jacked aircraft and boats with guns
and knives.
Most have never had criminal charges
brought against them.
Why? All of them are anti-Castro Cubans.
Former Guatemalan Defence Minister Gramajo Morales, who was accused
of "devising and directing an indiscriminate campaign of
terror against civilians", including the torture of an American
nun and the massacre of eight people from one family, studied
at Harvard University on a US government scholarship.
During the 1980s, thousands of people
were murdered by death squads connected to the army of El Salvador,
whose former chief now lives comfortably in Florida.
The former Haitian dictator, General
Prosper Avril, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture
on television.
When he was overthrown, he was flown
to Florida by the US government, and granted political asylum.
A leading member of the Chilean military
during the reign of General Pinochet, whose special responsibility
was executions and torture, lives in Miami.
The Iranian general who ran Iran's notorious
prisons, is a wealthy exile in the US.
One of Pol Pot's senior henchmen, who
enticed Cambodian exiles back to their certain death, lives in
Mount Vernon, New York.
What all these people have in common,
apart from their history of terrorism, is that they either worked
directly for the US government or carried out the dirty work
of US policies.
The al-Qaeda training camps are kindergartens
compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at
Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of
the Americas, its graduates include almost half the cabinet ministers
of the genocidal regimes in Guatemala, two thirds of the El Salvadorean
army officers who committed, according to the United Nations,
the worst atrocities of that country's civil war, and the head
of Pinochet's secret police, who ran Chile's concentration camps.
There is terrible irony at work here.
The humane response of people all over the world to the terrorism
of September 11 has long been hijacked by those running a rapacious
great power with a history of terrorism second to none. Global
supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only the
politically blind believe otherwise.
The "widening gap between the world's
"haves" and "have nots"', says a remarkably
candid document of the US Space Command, presents "new challenges"
to the world's superpower and which can only be met by "Full
Spectrum Dominance"--dominance of land, sea, air and space.
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