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Fw: {John Pilger] The Truths They Never Tell Us
" Cheered by having replaced Afghanistan's bad terrorists with America's good
terrorists, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the Pentagon
to 'think the unthinkable', having rejected its 'post-Afghanistan options' as 'not
radical enough'."
----- Original Message -----
From: Vicki Andrada
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2001 11:12 AM
Subject: Fw: [iac-disc.] The Truths They Never Tell Us
----- Original Message -----
From: Louis Morgan
To: Coalition to End the Sanctions against Iraq ; Berkeley Stop the War Discussion
List ; iac discussion
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2001 3:12 AM
Subject: [iac-disc.] The Truths They Never Tell Us
New Statesman
November 26, 2001
The truths they never tell us Behind
the jargon about failed states and
humanitarian interventions lie thousands
of dead
John Pilger
Polite society's bombers may not have to wait long for round
two. The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned last week
that America could take action against '40 to 50 countries'.
Somalia, allegedly a 'haven' for al-Qaeda, joins Iraq at the
top of a list of potential targets. Cheered by having replaced
Afghanistan's bad terrorists with America's good terrorists,
the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the Pentagon
to 'think the unthinkable', having rejected its 'post-Afghanistan
options' as 'not radical enough'.
An American attack on Somalia, wrote the Guardian's man at
the Foreign Office,'would offer an opportunity to settle an
old score: 18 US soldiers were brutally killed there in
1993 . . .' He neglected to mention that the US Marines left
between 7,000 and 10,000 Somali dead, according to the CIA.
Eighteen American lives are worthy of score-settling; thousands
of Somali lives are not.
Somalia will provide an ideal practice run for the final
destruction of Iraq. However, as the Wall Street Journal reports,
Iraq presents a 'dilemma', because 'few targets remain'. 'We're
down to the last outhouse,' said a US official, referring to the
almost daily bombing of Iraq that is not news. Having survived
the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein's grip on Iraq has since been reinforced by one of
the most ruthless blockades in modern times,
policed by his former amours and arms suppliers in Washington and
London. Safe in his British-builtbunkers, Saddam will survive a
renewed blitz - unlike the Iraqi people, held hostage to the
compliance of their dictator to America's ever-shifting demands.
In this country, veiled propaganda will play its usual leading
role. Asso much of the Anglo-American media is in the hands of
various guardians of approved truths, the fate of both the Iraqi
and Somali peoples will be reported and debated on the strict
premise that the US and British governments are against terrorism.
Like the attack on Afghanistan, the issue will be how 'we' can
best deal with the problem of 'uncivilised' societies.
The most salient truth will remain taboo. This is that the
longevity of America as both a terrorist state and a haven for
terrorists surpasses all. That the US is the only state on
record to have been condemned by the World Court for
international terrorism and has vetoed a UN Security Council
resolution calling on governments to observe international law
is unmentionable.
Recently, Denis Halliday,the former assistant secretary
general of the UN who resigned rather than administer
what he described as a 'genocidal sanctions policy' on
Iraq, incurred the indignation of the BBC's Michael Buerk.
'You can't possibly draw a moral equivalence between Saddam
Hussein and George Bush Senior , can you?'said Buerk. Halliday
was taking part in one of the moral choice programmes that Buerk comperes, and had
referred to the needless slaughter of tens of
thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, by the Americans during
the Gulf war. He pointed out that many were buried alive, and that depleted uranium
was used widely, almost certainly the cause of an epidemic of cancer in southern Iraq.
That the recent history of the west's true crimes makes
Saddam Hussein 'an amateur', as Halliday put it, is the
unmentionable; and because there is no rational rebuttal
of such a truth, those who mention it are abused as
'anti-American'.
Richard Falk, professor of international politics at
Princeton, has explained this. Western foreign policy, he
says, is propagated in the media 'through a self-righteous,
one-way moral/legal screen with positive images of western
values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a
campaign of unrestricted political violence'.
The ascendancy of Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz,
and associates Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams means that
much of the world is now threatened openly by a geopolitical
fascism, which has been developing since 1945 and has
accelerated since 11 September.
The present Washington gang are authentic American
fundamentalists. They are the heirs of John Foster Dulles
and Alan Dulles, the Baptist fanatics who, in the 1950s,
ran the State Department and the CIA respectively, smashing
reforming governments in country after country - Iran, Iraq,
Guatemala - tearing up international agreements, such as the
1954 Geneva accords on Indochina, whose sabotage by John Foster
Dulles led directly to the Vietnam war and five million dead. Declassified files now
tell us the United States twice came
within an ace of using nuclear weapons.
The parallels are there in Cheney's threat to '40 to 50'
countries, and of war 'that may not end in our lifetimes'.
The vocabulary of justification for this militarism has long
been provided on both sides of the Atlantic by those factory
'scholars' who have taken the humanity out of the study of
nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves the dominant
power. Poor countries are 'failed states'; those that oppose
America are 'rogue states'; an attack by the west is a
'humanitarian intervention'. (One of the most enthusiastic
bombers, Michael Ignatieff, is now 'professor of human rights'
at Harvard). And as in Dulles's time, the United Nations is
reduced to a role of clearing up the debris of bombing and
providing colonial 'protectorates'.
The twin towers attacks provided Bush's Washington with both
a trigger and a remarkable coincidence. Pakistan's former
foreign minister Niaz Naik has revealed that he was told by
senior American officials in mid-July that military action
against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was then travelling
in central Asia, already gathering support for an
anti-Afghanistan war 'coalition'. For Washington, the real
problem with the Taliban was not human rights; these were
irrelevant. The Taliban regime simply did not have total
control of Afghanistan: a fact that deterred investors from
financing oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea, whose
strategic position in relation to Russia and China and
whose largely untapped fossil fuels are of crucial interest
to the Americans.
In 1998, Dick Cheney told oil industry executives: 'I cannot
think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly
to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.
'Indeed, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were
they welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas,
then governed by George W Bush, and entertained by executives
of the Unocal oil company. They were offered a cut of the
profits from the pipelines; 15 per cent was mentioned.
A US official observed that, with the Caspian's oil and gas
flowing,Afghanistan would become 'like Saudi Arabia', an oil
colony with no democracy and the legal persecution of women.
'We can live with that,' he said. The deal fell through when
two American embassies in east Africa were bombed and al-Qaeda
was blamed.
The Taliban duly moved to the top of the media's league
table of demons, where the normal exemptions apply. For
example, Vladimir Putin's regime in Moscow, the killers of
at least 20,000 people in Chechnya, is exempt. Last week,
Putin was entertained by his new 'close friend', George W
Bush, at Bush's Texas ranch.
Bush and Blair are permanently exempt - even though more
Iraqi children die every month, mostly as a result of the
Anglo-American embargo, than the total number of dead in
the twin towers, a truth that is not allowed to enter public consciousness.
The killing of Iraqi infants, like the killing of Chechens, like
the killing of Afghan civilians, is rated less morally abhorrent
than the killing of Americans.
As one who has seen a great deal of bombing, I have been struck
by the capacity of those calling themselves 'liberals' and
'progressives' wilfully to tolerate the suffering of innocents
in Afghanistan. What do these self-regarding commentators,
who witness virtually nothing of the struggles of the outside
world, have to say to the families of refugees bombed to death
in the dusty town of Gardez the other day, long after it fell
to anti-Taliban forces? What do they say to the parents of
dead children whose bodies lay in the streets of Kunduz last
Sunday? 'Forty people were killed,' said Zumeray, a refugee.
'Some of them were burned by the bombs, others were crushed
by the walls and roofs of their houses when they collapsed
from the blast.' What does the Guardian's Polly Toynbee say
to him:'Can't you see that bombing works?' Will she call him
anti-American? What do 'humanitarian interventionists' say to
people who will die or be maimed by the 70,000 American cluster
bomblets left unexploded?
For several weeks, the Observer, a liberal newspaper, has
published unsubstantiated reports that have sought to link
Iraq with 11 September and the anthrax scare. 'Whitehall
sources' and 'intelligence sources' are the main tellers of
this story. 'The evidence is mounting . . .' said one of the
pieces. The sum of the 'evidence' is zero, merely grist for
the likes of Wolfowitz and Perle and probably Blair, who can
be expected to go along with the attack. In his essay 'The
Banality of Evil', the great American dissident Edward Herman
described the division of labour among those who design and
produce weapons like cluster bombs and daisy cutters and those
who take the political decisions to use them and those who
create the illusions that justify their use. 'It is the function
of the experts, and the mainstream media,'
he wrote, 'to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.'
It is time journalists reflected upon this, and took the risk
of telling the truth about an unconscionable threat to much of
humanity that comes not from faraway places, but close to home.
http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm
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