[MAPC-discuss] Forwarded mail....

[MAPC-discuss] Forwarded mail....

born-digital

email

yes

no

2001-11-02

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 08:18:05 -0800 (PST)
From: X
To: X

PILGER: THIS WAR IS A FARCE By John Pilger, Former
Mirror chief foreign correspondent



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 terrorised 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.





GRIEF: A father weeps over his dead son after the
bombs blunder in Kabul

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 fibre 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 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 X, 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."



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals.
http://personals.yahoo.com


_______________________________________________
discuss@madpeace.org mailing list
http://lists.OpenSoftwareServices.com/mailman/listinfo/madpeace-discuss

Friday, November 02, 2001 4:23 AM

[MAPC-discuss] Forwarded mail....