Our blindness and wishful thinking that these things aren't so are an intrinsic part of the system that kills. We are separated from these events by distance and depend on others to tell us what is going on.
The foreign journalists that theoretically exist to report to us the simple facts share these same flaws and make it even harder for themselves to get to the heart of the matter by living almost without exception in Israeli population areas.
As their even more remote editors relentlessly demand the "latest" information rather than insisting on the whole story, they can do no more than skip like stones on the shallow surface of reality, a process as inevitable as knowing a 1,000 kilogram bomb dropped on an apartment building will kill civilians.
Those who slow down, dig deeper, and report the obvious patterns find their stories spiked, their editors' mailboxes filled with angry letters from people who never read a word of their story and, if needed to finish them off, whispered accusations that they are motivated by a hatred of Jews.
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| Original AFP caption: A handout photograph released by the Israeli army shows an Israeli navy vessel shelling a beach in the northern Gaza Strip on 09 June 2006. The killing of eight Palestinians at a seaside picnic in Gaza has left Israel's embarrassed government scrambling to control the damage ahead of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's first trip to Europe. (IDF/File) |
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| This image taken from TV footage shows Huda Ghalya weeping next to the body of her father who was killed during a beach-side picnic on June 9. (Ramatan News Agency/File) |
After the 9 June 2006 Israeli shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed eight Palestinians, including seven members of the same family, and injured 32 civilians, including 13 children, the Israeli government initially expressed it's "deep regret" at the incident. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised an investigation, stating that "there has never been - and there isn't now - a policy of attacking civilians," a blatant but reassuring lie for those of us who want to believe that these things aren't so.
In the days following the event, Israel saw an opportunity and changed its story. Today, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' website prominently has posted a Jerusalem Post article that denies that Israel was responsible and offers the alternate possibility of a Palestinian mine. The media machine kicks in, people start to weigh in on both sides and -- suddenly -- the world is paralyzed, not knowing who or what to believe, however incredible Israel's latest story is.
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| The article linked from the Israeli Foreign Ministry's website. |
Today, we saw the full power of Olmert's lie, as another Israeli attack was carried out in Gaza in broad daylight. Witnesses reported that an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at a van on a busy highway. Civilians ran to help the passengers, two members of Islamic Jihad, and the aircraft fired a second missile into the crowd.
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| Palestinian medics examine a child wounded in an Israeli air strike at a car carrying militants in the northern Gaza June 13, 2006. A total of ten people, including two children and two militants, were killed in the air strike. (MaanImages/Thaeer al-Hassany) |
Eleven people were killed in total, nine of them civilians, and a further 30 civilians were injured. The dead included two medics and two children. As with the 1,000-kilogram bomb on the apartment building, what result other than this carnage could possibly have happened on a busy highway? With the state of the art targeting systems on an F-16, how could the targeting of the crowd possibly be accidental?
Assassinations carried out with heavy weapons in heavily populated areas are nothing new. From the beginning of the Intifada, until 1 May 2006, 552 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli assassinations. Of this number 181, or a third of the total, were innocent bystanders near the assassination target or simply people that ran to help and were killed when additional missiles were fired. (Source: PCHR).
Israeli occupation forces have killed over 3,000 Palestinian civilians since the Intifada began. Israel's contempt for Palestinian life stretches from the privates in its occupying army to its prime minister. Israel kills Palestinian civilians not only intentionally but also routinely, and this has been true for decades. The patterns speak for themselves.
Nigel Parry is one of the founders of the Electronic Intifada. Based in New York, he offers communications solutions "for clients with something to say", through his business, nigelparry.net.
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Editorial: New "al-Qaeda in Iraq" Boogieman: Abu al-Masri
Thursday June 15th 2006
Kurt Nimmo
No sooner did the corporate media parade gruesome photos of the freshly killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or the person we are expected to believe was al-Zarqawi, then it set about arranging his successor, as evil Muslim boogiemen must remain front and center in the forever war against manufactured terrorism. "An Egyptian associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claims to have succeeded him as the new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, even though an Islamic Web site said Monday that another man was in power," reports the Bush Ministry of Scary Campfire Stories, Fox News division. "Brig. Gen. Carter Ham said at a Pentagon news conference on Wednesday that Abu al-Masri, whose name surfaced shortly after reports of Zarqawi's death became widespread as a successor, had claimed to be in charge of Al Qaeda in Iraq." In short, the covert op pseudo-gang "al-Qaeda in Iraq" needs a new face, as the demonization of the resistance must continue.
According to Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, "If you had to pick somebody" as the probable new boogieman, it would be Abu al-Masri. Caldwell did not bother to tell us who would do the picking but this is of course a no-brainer-the picking was accomplished in the PSYOP unit at the Pentagon. Several candidates were bantered around the corporate media prior to al-Masri's selection: most notably Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, pegged as an "al-Qaeda" leader or "emir" (since he is dead, al-Iraqi was quickly removed from the candidate list) and Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, who we are told is sort of the CEO of the Iraqi resistance (the Mujahedeen Shura Council). Obviously, for the Pentagon, al-Masri has the most attractive skillset and thus he was appointed. Now it is up to the corporate media to build him up, probably only to eventually tear him down, as al-Zarqawi (or rather his stand-in) was torn down with the help of a couple 500lb bombs.
As is usually the case when the organizational chart is shuffled, a bit of tweaking is in order. "We think that Abu Ayyub al-Masri is in fact, probably, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir [the immigrant]. They are probably one and the same," Caldwell admitted. "Al Qaeda in Iraq's new leader is more violent than his predecessor," warns the Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat. "No one gets appointed to this position without having earned the group's trust and gained fighting experience. Perhaps Abu Hamza had traveled to Afghanistan or Bosnia to fight, or he took up armed resistance after the US military invaded Iraq. He might have carried out a number of operations famous throughout the organization," Dr. Hani al Sibai, head of al-Maqrizi Center in London, told the newspaper.
Abu Hamza al-Muhajir's CV fits the profile. If he did indeed travel "to Afghanistan or Bosnia to fight," he is surely an intel asset, as both operations were run by the CIA and a smattering of other intelligence services. Although the corporate media suffers from an allergic reaction to the truth and prefers official fairy tales, it is a well-documented fact the Clinton administration, under the sway of then CIA director-designate Anthony Lake working out of the National Security Council, "helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base," thus leading to the recruitment of thousands of Mujahideen from the Muslim world, a repeat of the CIA's Afghan operation a decade before, a fact revealed in a generally ignored congressional press release. "The evidence presented in Brendan O'Neill's article [How we trained al-Qa'eda] in the case of Bosnia confirms that Al Qaeda is not an 'outside enemy' but rather a creation of the US military-intelligence apparatus. The same pattern of collaboration between the US military (and indeed NATO) and the Islamic brigades was replicated in Kosovo (1995-99) and Macedonia (2000-2001)," notes Global Research. As the CIA and Pentagon are not wont to discard successful operations-and the CIA has boasted its Afghan operation was the most successful in its long and sordid history-we can assume with a large degree of accuracy the pattern was replicated in Iraq.
Even though Hamza al-Muhajir, as his name suggests, hails from outside of Iraq, it appears the PSYOP micromanagers in the Pentagon are in the process of domesticating "al-Qaeda in Iraq," thus attempting to taint the entire resistance as criminals of the al-Zarqawi stripe.
Eben Kaplan, a CFR "research associate," explains:
Al-Qaeda in Iraq was already in the midst of a steady transformation at the time of Zarqawi's death. The group was initially composed primarily of foreign fighters, but over the last several months it has begun to incorporate many more native fighters in hopes of creating an indigenous home base. "We can no longer talk about a foreign-born al-Qaeda in Iraq," [Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at Sarah Lawrence College] says. Part of the reason for this shift was many of Zarqawi's foreign-born lieutenants had been killed off and his ability to gain new recruits was diminishing. If speculation that al-Muhajir is a foreigner is correct, it runs somewhat against this trend. As Gerges explains, "Even if you have a foreign-born leader, the rank and file of al-Qaeda in Iraq is becoming more Iraqi."
In other words, as the premier globalist organization informs us, the "rank and file" of the Iraqi resistance is indistinguishable from "al-Qaeda." Of course, the Pentagon has worked long and hard to make this so, or at least make the impression so in the minds of Americans, who need to be inculcated with all manner of fantastical nonsense about the Iraqi resistance. It is Job One for the neocon-infested Pentagon to hitch the Iraqi resistance to "al-Qaeda" and thus the attack on America, never mind there is not a shred of evidence "al-Qaeda" had anything to do with the latter event, that is unless you think "inside job" when the word "al-Qaeda" is mentioned.
Original
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Editorial: The War on Children
John Pilger
New Statesman
June 14, 2006
The most vulnerable people in Gaza are suffering the worst acute mental and physical trauma as a result of Israel's actions: almost half the population is under 15.
Arthur Miller wrote, "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
Miller's truth was a glimpsed reality on television on 9 June when Israeli warships (1) fired on families picnicking on a Gaza beach, killing seven people, including three children and three generations. What that represents is a final solution, agreed by the United States and Israel, to the problem of the Palestinians. While the Israelis fire missiles at Palestinian picnickers and homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the two governments are to starve them. The victims will be mostly children.
This was approved on 23 May by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts amounting to $60m a month.
Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis' strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s. If the perpetrators have lost their minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet," joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
This is the price Palestinians must pay for their democratic elections in January. The majority voted for the "wrong" party, Hamas, which the US and Israel, with their inimitable penchant for pot-calling-the-kettle-black, describe as terrorist. However, terrorism is not the reason for starving the Palestinians, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, had reaffirmed Hamas's commitment to recognise the Jewish state, proposing only that Israel obey international law and respect the borders of 1967. Israel has refused because, with its apartheid wall under construction, its intention is clear: to take over more and more of Palestine, encircling whole villages and eventually Jerusalem.
The sniper's wound
The reason Israel fears Hamas is that Hamas is unlikely to be a trusted collaborator in subju-gating its own people on Israel's behalf. Indeed, the vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace. Palestinians were fed up with the failures and corruption of the Arafat era. According to the former US president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre verified the Hamas electoral victory, "public opinion polls show that 80 per cent of Palestinians want a peace agreement with Israel".
How ironic this is, considering that the rise of Hamas was due in no small part to the secret support it received from Israel, which, with the US and Britain, wanted Islamists to undermine secular Arabism and its "moderate" dreams of freedom. Hamas refused to play this Machiavellian game and in the face of Israeli assaults maintained a ceasefire for 18 months. The objective of the Israeli attack on the beach at Gaza was clearly to sabotage the ceasefire. This is a time-honoured tactic.
Now, state terror in the form of a medieval siege is to be applied to the most vulnerable. For the Palestinians, a war against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the previous four years, "Two-thirds of the 621 children... killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints...on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound." A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished. The Israeli wall "will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve."
The study described "a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The soldiers refused."
Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorised by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of which almost half is under 15. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma...99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."
These children suffer unrelenting nightmares and "night terrors" and the dichotomy of having to cope with these conditions. On the one hand, they dream about becoming doctors and nurses "so they can help others"; on the other, this is then overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experience this invariably after attacks by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes are no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".
That these children are now to be punished further may be beyond human comprehension, but there is a logic. Over the years, the Palestinians have avoided falling into the abyss of an all-out civil war, knowing this is what the Israelis want. Destroying their elected government while attempting to build a parallel administration around the collusive Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, may well produce, as the Oxford academic Karma Nabulsi wrote, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society...ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and broken into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Ariel Sharon] had in store for us."
The new "body count"
The struggle in Palestine is an American war, waged from America's most heavily armed foreign military base, Israel. In the west, we are conditioned not to think of the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" in those terms, just as we are conditioned to think of the Israelis as victims, not illegal and brutal occupiers. This is not to underestimate the initiative of the Israeli state, but without F-16s and Apaches and billions of American taxpayers' dollars, Israel would have made peace with the Palestinians long ago. Since the Second World War, the US has given Israel some $140bn, much of it as armaments. According to the Congressional Research Service, the same "aid" budget was to include $28m "to help [Palestinian] children deal with the current conflict situation" and to provide "basic first aid". That has now been vetoed.
Karma Nabulsi's comparison with Iraq is apposite, for the same "policy" applies there. The capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a wonderful media event: what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called "action as propaganda", and having little bearing on reality. The Americans and those who act as their bullhorn have their demon - even a video game of his house being blown up. The truth is that Zarqawi was largely their creation. His apparent killing serves an important propaganda purpose, distracting us in the west from the American goal of converting Iraq, like Palestine, into a powerless society of ethnic and religious tribalism. Death squads, formed and trained by veterans of the CIA's "counter-insurgency" in central America, are critical to this. The Special Police Commandos, a CIA creation led by former senior intelligence officers in Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, are perhaps the most brutal. The Zarqawi killing and the myths about his importance also deflect from routine massacres by US soldiers, such as the one at Haditha. Even the puppet prime minister Nouri al-Maliki complains that murderous behaviour of US troops is "a daily occurrence". As I learned in Vietnam, a form of serial killing, then known officially as "body count", is the way the Americans fight their colonial wars.
Put out more flags
This is known as "pacification". The asymmetry of a pacified Iraq and a pacified Palestine is clear. As in Palestine, the war in Iraq is against civilians, mostly children. According to Unicef, Iraq once had one of the highest indicators for the well- being of children. Today, a quarter of children between the ages of six months and five years suffer acute or chronic malnutrition, worse than during the years of sanctions. Poverty and disease have risen with each day of the occupation.
In April, in British-occupied Basra, the European aid agency Saving Children from War reported: "The mortality of young children had increased by 30 per cent compared with the Saddam Hussein era." They die because the hospitals have no ventilators and the water supply, which the British were meant to have fixed, is more polluted than ever. Children fall victim to unexploded US and British cluster bombs. They play in areas contaminated by depleted uranium; by contrast, British army survey teams venture there only in full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. Unlike the children they came to "liberate", British troops are given what the Ministry of Defence calls "full biological testing".
Was Arthur Miller right? Do we "internally deny" all this, or do we listen to distant voices? On my last trip to Palestine, I was rewarded, on leaving Gaza, with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children are responsible for this. No one tells them to do it. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and one or two climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it, believing they will tell the world.
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Editorial: Massacre on a Beach in Gaza
By Mike Whitney
06/15/06
Israel doesn't bother with low-intensity warfare anymore. It goes straight for the jugular. Day after day Israel has launched unprovoked attacks on Palestinian civilians only pausing long enough to assemble the requisite lies to fend off the media.
It's quite extraordinary. One day they blow up a family peacefully touring in their new car; killing 3 generations with one mighty blast, and then a few days later they fire a mortar round at a beach in Gaza wiping out 7 members of another family. The entire incident in Gaza was captured on video providing a heart-wrenching visual-account of a traumatized 12 year old girl running around while the limp and bloodied bodies of her parents are carted off to the morgue.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's response to the tragedy was astonishingly bland:
"The IDF is the most moral military in the world. There has never been, and there isn't now, a policy of attacking civilians."
Olmert's proclamations are meaningless; the IDF is neither more nor less "moral" than any other "organized killing-machine". The IDF simply reflects the prevailing ethos of the Israeli leadership; a leadership steeped in arrogance and racism. If we look at the recent American massacre in Iraq, we see that there's a straight line between the "execution-style" killing of women and children in Haditha and the Bush administration's promiscuous attitude towards torture and cruelty. A fish rots from the head; so it is with the military as well. The culture of impunity begins at the leadership level, not with a few "bad apples".
This explains why the very next day Israel fired off another 3 rockets into Gaza killing 9 more Palestinians including two children and one medic who was attending to the wounded. The policy hasn't changed a lick. The only difference is that the backlash from the Gaza massacre is now be managed by an Israeli public relations team.
According to the Jerusalem Post, "The Israeli Foreign Ministry has launched an information campaign to change the minds of the world that has already blamed Israel. Israel's message is simple: The Palestinians are responsible".
Once again, Israel has decided to invoke the familiar strategy of "blaming the victim". Fortunately, forensic evidence has already proved beyond a doubt that the shrapnel came from a "155 millimeter howitzer shell from a land-based Israeli firing device". On top of that, the last surviving member of the family, 12 year old Huda Ghalia, has provided a lurid description of the Israeli shelling of the beach.
"We were sitting and all of a sudden the shells just started falling on our heads," she said. What could be clearer?
There's no doubt that Israel is responsible. Their PR blitz is bound to fail. Never the less, Israel has drawn up 6 "talking points" that will be reiterated by government officials and agents in the media. The public relations campaign focuses on three main themes:
1 Deny everything
2 Blame the victim (Say that Hamas had land-mined the beach)
3 Create the appearance that Israel was just defending itself.
The Foreign Ministry has added 6 "bullet points" to these general ideas, but they're hardly worth going over except as a way of measuring the real depth of human cynicism. After all, we're talking about the life of one despondent, terrified girl whose parents have just been murdered in a senseless act of violence. Olmert has taken that tragic event and transformed it into an exercise for manipulating public perceptions. That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The broader question that arises from the Gaza Beach Massacre is whether Israel is deliberately killing civilians or not. Certainly Israel has never backed away from its defense of "targeted assassinations", but does that imply that killing innocent Palestinians can be rationalized as a matter of policy?
Here's a statement issued by the Israeli Foreign Ministry on this point:
"Israel does not target innocents, yet must fight terrorists who willingly shield themselves behind their own population in their ongoing campaign to kill and maim Israeli civilians".
The Israeli statement actually creates more questions than answers. It is clear, however, that the fight against terrorism is given priority over the lives of civilians, and that the state claims the right to kill "terror suspects" whether innocent people are sacrificed or not. This is a radical idea and it overturns long-held precedents about the "inalienable" right to life.
But how can the state authorize "targeted assassinations"? Government officials are required to comply with the law. Targeted assassinations are "extra-judicial" by their very nature; it is the deliberate killing of someone who has never been charged with a crime and has been deprived of all due process. The victim has no way to defend himself from completely arbitrary allegations. In Israel's case, the decision for these summary executions is placed in the hands of unreliable militarists, like Sharon, who have a long pedigree of lying and war crimes.
Are these people who can be trusted pronouncing death sentences on Palestinian "suspects"?
Targeted assassination is premeditated slaughter; it has no place in civilized societies. There's no link between justice and murder; the two are polar opposites. Security concerns should not be allowed to transform the law into a weapon for autocrats.
Never the less, targeted assassination is a central part of Israeli policy in the territories. As a result, incidents like the one on the beach in Gaza occur with increasing frequency. This leads us to question whether or not Israel has a policy of killing civilians.
The fact that 12 year old Huda Ghalya and her family were not intentionally fired on makes no difference. The issue is whether Israel has made reasonable assumptions about how many innocent people will be sacrificed in executing their policy.
We assume they have. We assume that Israel knows that from 2001, 552 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli assassinations, and that, 181 of these have been people who just happened to be in the vicinity or tried to help the victims when other missiles were fired. These figures prove that Israel knows "exactly" what the effects of its policy are, and that they still believe it is worth the outcome. Therefore, we can say with certainty that the killing of innocent people is a fundamental part of Israel's calculation. Whether it is intentional or not, makes no difference.
In Nigel Parry's "Does Israel have a Policy of Killing Palestinian Civilians?" the author digs into the larger issues surrounding targeted assassinations.
"After you see someone kill a child, you perceive humans very differently after that. We like to assume that when such a completely inexcusable event takes place that the deaths happened by some kind of "accident" or "error".
"Crossfire" was perhaps Israel's most successful lie at the onset of the Second Intifada, and no amount of statistics showing otherwise really seemed to penetrate our consciousness and make a difference.
It made no difference because inside we desperately want to believe that the murderers and serial killers of this world are aberrations, rare, that they are sick or somehow different. This conclusion is not possible when you witness a common, recurring pattern with your own eyes, across an entire army. At some point something gives way inside, and your fantasies about basic human decency crumble." (Electronic Intifada)
Parry draws from his years of first-hand experience living in the occupied territories and witnessing the violent reaction of the IOF to Palestinians protests. In the many cases when he saw young Palestinians shot dead by Israeli soldiers, he never remembers an incident when any of the soldiers were in a life-threatening situation. Parry continues:
"Out of nowhere, when the energy of the clashes seemed to be dissipating, a soldier would suddenly shoot a child or teenager, 100 feet away from them or more. Let me be clear. The events I am describing, in the clashes where people died, were not the exception. They were the rule. And not one soldier was ever punished."
Parry's description is revealing on many levels. The violence against Palestinians is oftentimes gratuitous, tribal, and steeped in racism. No one was punished in the confrontations he witnessed and no one will be held accountable for the deaths of 8 family members on the beach in Gaza. It is all part of a culture of impunity which has saturated every aspect of the Israeli leadership and trickled down to the soldiers in the field.
Israel's obfuscations mean nothing. They simply reinforce the belief that Israel will not conform to internationally-accepted standards of justice until it elects leaders who are committed to following the rule of law. Targeted assassination is never acceptable. It is a violation of the most essential principle of law; the right to life. No amount of public-relations wizardry or buck-passing can justify firing missiles into crowded areas or the random killing of blameless civilians. The law is written to protect civilians against disasters like the tragedy in Gaza, where a girls' life was ruined in a flash by an errant mortar-round. If the law had been applied, the order would never have been given and young Huda would not have been left wailing inconsolably on the sand.
The law is our only refuge from the terror of the state. We should make sure our leaders comply.
Signs Ed: What happens when the state makes the laws in such a way that they can break them with impunity? As for the shelling of the Palestinian family involving an "errant round"; there was nothing errant about it. As has often been the case in the past, this was another case of premeditated slaughter, designed to perpetuate the killing of the innocents, which in turn ensures that the "war" continues and Israel remains "under threat" and can puruse its murderous policies with impunity.
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Editorial: Comments on John Pilger's New Book Freedom Next Time
by Stephen Lendman
John Pilger is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker and one of the truly great ones of our time. For nearly 50 years, he's courageously and brilliantly done what too few others in his profession, in fact, do - his job. John has also been a war correspondent, is the author of 10 books and is best known in his adopted country Great Britain for his investigative documentaries exposing the crimes of US and Western imperialism.
Freedom Next Time is John's newest book just published and the fifth one of his I've read. The others were magnificent, and when I learned a new one was due out, I couldn't wait to read it knowing it would be vintage Pilger and not to be missed. I wasn't disappointed and am delighted to share with readers what it's about. What else, as John himself says in his opening paragraph: "This book is about empire, its facades and the enduring struggle of people for their freedom. It offers an antidote to authorized versions of contemporary history that censor by omission and impose double standards." Indeed it does, and John devotes his book to exposing the crimes of empire in five countries. I'll cover each one in a separate section.
The Introduction - An Explanation of the Imperial Mindset
In his introduction, John explains how the imperial notion of "colonial assumptions have not changed," and to sustain them the great majority of people everywhere "remain invisible and expendable." He poignantly recounts how while on September 11, 2001 a few thousand people tragically died in New York and Washington, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported the daily mortality rate of 36,615 children alone from the effects of extreme poverty. Not a word of it was in the news that day or any other. Nor was there any explanation of why these people were denied the bare essentials to survive in a world able to provide them. These and the ones killed daily in Iraq and elsewhere are what John calls the "unworthy victims" as distinguished from the "worthy ones" in the US on 9/11 and those in London on July 7, 2005 who died in a "terrorist" bombing. The only crimes we recognize are the ones committed by others - those we call "terrorists" or label as enemies, never any by us. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter refers to this as "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed." We only know what our leaders and complicit corporate media (BBC, NPR and PBS included) choose to tell us, and it's never the truth or full disclosure we're entitled to have. What they suppress is far more important than what they report.
Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the notion of imperialism in the US was that it was a European, not an American tradition. It was untrue, of course, but a proper education in the US, like the one I got, never let on. It hid the true history of my country that from inception practiced a policy of imperial expansion west and south and engaged in plunder and genocide against the original inhabitants living there to make it possible. George Washington was its first practitioner, referring to the new nation as a "rising empire." He helped build it by removing and exterminating its native Indians so expansion could proceed as the Founding Fathers and those who followed them wished. Washington believed the Indian peoples were subhumans (no different from how we view Iraqis today) and compared them to wolves and "beasts of prey" who must be destroyed. And our sacred Declaration of Independence contained the language "merciless Indian savages" which left no room for their independence or any justice either.
The tradition begun at the republic's birth never changed but until the end of the "cold war" was well hidden behind a respectable democratic facade and still mostly is. Any notion of imperialism was never something taught in school at any level, discussed in polite society or acknowledged publicly. But all that changed in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. What never before could be admitted now began to be seen as something respectable and even a matter of national pride. And with the advent of the Bush administration, imperial dominance and expansion began to be portrayed as something positive and contributing to the advance of civilization. How low we've sunk in coming so far.
John explains how fraudulent and dangerous Bush's priorities are based on its policy papers and one conceived a few years before it came to power. It began with a 1997 "messianic conspiracy theory" called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) written by many of the far right neoconservative ideologues now in power. This document is an imperial plan for US global dominance to extend well into the future and be enforced with unchallengeable military power. It was a blueprint for the current "war on terror" (which John calls a "war of terror') and "preventive war" that began after 9/11 and is now ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan with further conflicts likely ahead. The Pentagon goes even further in its Vision 2020 that lays out a goal that calls for "full spectrum dominance." By this is meant the total, unchallengeable control of all land, sea, air and space and the self-given right to enforce it with the use of nuclear or any other kinds of weapons.
The British government under Tony Blair is part of the same scheme as a complicit junior partner. It sees it in its own interest to be allied with the US and Bush administration and supports its imperial policies. As a result, John explains, it's no surprise Mr. Blair has taken his nation to war more often than any British Prime Minister in modern times. For him and George Bush, international law, norms and any sense of morality are irrelevant and aren't allowed to stand in the way of their unrestricted political violence portrayed as having a democratic face and purpose. Freedom Next Time exposes this hypocrisy to show that "imperialism, in whatever guise, is the antithesis of the 'benevolent and moralistic.' " It examines the history and events in five countries John knows well as a journalist and filmmaker.
Before beginning, John first addresses the present in his introduction. He quotes those who see the seeds of fascism and disturbing similarities in the US (and UK) today to Nazi Germany and Hitler's demonic appeal to his divine mission as that country's savior that he sold to his people in Christian religious terms. He did it in a country that was the pride of Western civilization and a very model of democracy. If it can happen there, it can anywhere and will unless enough committed people work to prevent it. But John stresses he hasn't written a pessimistic book. He cites the alternate seeds of hope, rebirth of democracy, and social equity in Latin America - especially in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and the poorest of all the continent's nations Evo Morales' Bolivia. He sees these forces as part of a "worldwide movement against poverty, war and misinformation that has arisen in less than a decade, and is more diverse, enterprising, internationalist and tolerant of difference than anything in my lifetime." John concludes his message of hope saying that the "wisest... know that just as the conquest of Iraq is unraveling, so a whole system of domination and impoverishment can unravel, too."
John's book is divided into five chapters for each nation he covers. Four are well-known, but few readers may know about the first one discussed below in the Chagos archipelago or even know where it is.
Chapter One: Stealing A Nation Called Diego Garcia
Diego Garcia is a small 84 square mile British controlled island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean(officially known as British Indian Ocean Territory) that lies strategically half way between Asia and Africa. It was once the home of 2,000 "gentle Creole" people who are British citizens, but between 1967 - 1973 they were tricked and expelled by the UK government so their island home could be given to the US for a military base. They were sent into exile to a very inhospitable new home in Mauritius where seven British governments watched their displaced citizens suffer and perish in the shanties they were forced to live in and the desperate poverty they were forced to endure.
This "act of mass kidnapping" was so devious and deceitful, it was carried out in secrecy, and for almost a decade was concealed from the Parliament and US Congress. The Chagossians were treated with contempt as they not only lost their homeland, they were "deemed not to exist." It was the US that made the demands and cut the deal. Washington wanted the entire population expelled and the whole dirty business covered up. Then as today, the British went along with the ugly scheme. The people had no say, and those who refused were lied to and told they had no choice because "their removal was 'legal' under the rules of the colony."
In their new home, life became a living hell. The Chagossians found themselves in a society foreign to their simple way of life, and they were unable to adjust. On Diego Garcia they had their own home, grew their own food, fished and worked on a plantation. In Mauritius they had to find jobs to survive and most couldn't. The result was by the mid-70s most of the exiles were unemployed, impoverished and began to die. The British Foreign Office and High Commission contemptuously ignored their plight saying the Chagossians should take up their problem with the Mauritian government. It hardly mattered that these people were British citizens and entitled to the same rights as all other Brits. All they got in compensation was 1,000 pounds (about $1,800) in exchange for agreeing to renounce their right ever to return to their homeland and do it on a document they couldn't read.
The history of this disgraceful episode was well hidden until the 1990s when a "treasure trove of declassified documents" was found in the National Archives at Kew in London. It proved there was a conspiracy between two governments that Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court referred to as a "deportation or forcible transfer of a population (and) a crime against humanity." It also violated Article 73 of the UN Charter that obliges a colonial government like Britain to obey its "sacred trust" to protect the human rights of its people. Britain shamelessly did none of this and instead dutifully bowed to the wishes of Washington and obeyed its commands as it still does today. The two countries also engaged is a huge cover-up for a decade that went to the highest level of both governments hoping to hide the truth from ever coming out. Those involved included Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and Presidents Johnson and Nixon among others. Everything was hidden including a secret financial kickback Washington made that was also concealed from the US Congress and British Parliament.
But once the truth began to come out, things changed. On November 3, 2000 the British High Court stunned the government by citing the Magna Carta and annulled the original deportation order. It meant the people were entitled to British passports and had the right to go home. But it was a short-lived pyrrhic victory as one year later the Chagossians were back in the High Court seeking compensation for their ordeal. This time they faced a hostile judge who described their case as "unmeritorious" and denied their claim. Then three months later, the Foreign Office minister responsible for the Chagos sent an "order-in-council" to the Queen for her "rubber-stamped" approval which overturned the High Court 2000 victory and banned the islanders from ever returning home. As John was writing, he reported the Chagossians were back in London for a last chance judicial review before the High Court to annul the government's denial of their right of return to their homeland. Even after all these years, these courageous people were and still are fiercely determined to achieve the justice they so rightfully deserve.
It finally came on May 11, 2006 (after John's book was finished), in a damning High Court verdict that condemned as "repugnant" the decision to remove the Chagossians at the US insistence. It overturned the Blair government "order-in-council" discussed above. The Foreign Office must now decide if it will appeal the verdict and may be pressured to do so by the US. But even if all litigation ends favorably for the Chagossians, it's by no means certain they'll ever be allowed to return as long as Diego Garcia remains an important US military base. The Bush administration is contemptuous of the law, may likely ignore it and a new US administration elected in 2008 may do the same. It thus remains to be seen if justice will ever be served in this long-running tragedy. However, it's likely the Chagossians will never stop seeking it.
Chapter Two: The Last Taboo - The Five and A Half Decade Cover-Up of Israel's Oppression of the Palestinians
John chose the title of this chapter from an essay with that title written by the eminent and courageous Palestinian-born writer, scholar and activist Edward Said shortly before his death in September, 2003. Said was a brilliant man and passionate fighter for justice for his people. In his essay he wrote: "The extermination of the Native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag (of the United States) publicly committed to flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear."
It appears boldly and courageously in John's chapter as he recounts the unexplained and irrational hatred most Israelis have for Palestinians, a people whose country they stole and have relentlessly oppressed for many decades. He explains what life is like for these defenseless people under a cruel occupying power in the refugee camps or the world's two largest open-air prisons of Gaza and the West Bank. He recounts how ordinary people who only want to live in peace and have normal lives are denied their most basic personal, economic and political freedoms, dignity and any sort of justice. He shows how Israelis with full financial and political backing from the US and the West have terrorized the Palestinian people with impunity, and when the victims dare defend themselves or resist they're called "terrorists."
I, too, have written about Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people in a recent article I called Life in Occupied Palestine. What John documented on the ground from the people who endure this brutal daily onslaught, I summarized in a few paragraphs I'd like to share here. I wrote as follows:
Try to imagine daily life under these conditions:
You live in limbo in a country occupied by an oppressive foreign army and a system of institutionalized and codified racism. You have no recognized nation, no right of citizenship and no power over your daily life. You live in a constant state of fear. The occupier imposes economic strangulation and collective punishment by restricting free movement; enclosing population centers; closing borders; barring most of your people from working inside their border; imposing regular curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences and separation walls and continues to build new settlements in your Occupied Territories (on your land in your country) violating the Geneva Conventions prohibiting an occupier from settling its population on conquered land.
The occupier denies your people their basic human rights including those under the Fourth Geneva Convention which governs the treatment of civilians in war and under occupation. There are 149 articles of this Convention. The occupier's government violates almost all of them and in so doing is committing war crimes according to international law. The UN Human Rights Commission determined it's also committing "crimes against humanity" against your people. This concept comes from the 1945 Nuremberg Charter drafted by the U.S. to try Nazi war criminals. The international notion of a "crime against humanity" was established to define what Hitler did to the Jews. The UNHRC ruled this is what the occupier is doing to your people, and that this act is the historical and legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The occupier also sends its troops, tanks and heavy armor into neighborhoods at will to maraud and destroy. It strikes at will from the air with sophisticated missle-firing attack helicopters and F-16s and deliberately inflicts eardrum shattering and terrifying sonic booms. And it gives its military the right to freely harass, arrest or kill extra-judicially any of your people - man, woman or child on any pretext with impunity. It bulldozes homes and the people in them if they don't escape in time (usually in middle of the night and without warning or notice) as punishment or for lacking a permit to build on their own land, in their own country or for any other reason. It steals land relentlessly hoping it will have it all one day or at least all the parts it wants. It detains, imprisons and tortures thousands of your people for the real or perceived crime of fighting for their freedom against an oppressive occupier.
To enact vengeance and to provide security for its illegal settlers in the Occupied Territories, it restricts or prevents access to essential and emergency health care, education, employment, the right to move goods and services from producer/suppliers to end users, and even enough food and water. It created a state of economic siege forcing up to nearly two-thirds of your people (according to the UN) below the poverty line of $2.20 a day (and half of those two-thirds on $1.60 or less) and over half the work force to be unemployed (the number varying with the intensity of the Israeli lockdown). It destroys your peoples' crops and orchards including more than 1 million olive trees. It imposes punitive taxes and provides few services or withholds them at will as collective punishment. You have no power to stop any of these abuses or receive any redress in the occupier's courts. How can you as a Muslim in a racist Jewish state.
John explains that Britain was the architect of this historic disaster and injustice. In 1917, it wanted a client state in the Middle East to watch over its economic interests and got one with the Balfour Declaration that promised a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The Declaration also made a hollow promise to the Palestinians who'd been living there for centuries that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities." It was not to be. The Jewish state came into being in 1948 and was born in the original sin of mass slaughter and forcible expulsion of the people living there, and nothing was ever the same thereafter. Israel systematically defies all international laws and norms, has the full backing and financial support of the US and the West, and the Palestinians are forced to endure the most outrageous abuses without end and with no help from the outside to stop them.
Most people in the West have little knowledge of any of this because the major media refuse to report it and only portray Israel as a beacon of democracy in a region that has precious little of it. It's a myth, but one that's widely believed. Those who dare expose it or Israeli crimes are called anti-semites or self-hating Jews. They also face extreme denunciation and even ostracism. There's an unwritten binding rule no one dare violate in the US especially: Israel can do no wrong and must be fully supported whatever it does. As a result, the myth of a so-called "peace process" that never was and never will be persists as well as the false hope that the Palestinians will ever have a state of their own beyond the bantustans the Israeli's have in mind for them after they've been fully ethnically cleansed or murdered in the areas the Israelis want for themselves.
John also exposes the fraud of the Oslo Accords and later Camp David meetings hosted by Bill Clinton at which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered nothing to Yasar Arafat. The public was fraudulently told otherwise and Arafat was unfairly blamed for turning down a proposal no sane and responsible leader could ever accept. We learned about the many massacres from the hundreds of Palestinians killed at Deir Yassin in 1948, the 18,000 slaughtered when Israel illegally invaded Lebanon in 1982 including the Ariel Sharon ordered massacre of up to 3,000 defenseless men, women and children at the Sabra and Shatila camps, to the rape of Jenin in April, 2002 when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded this city of 35,000 (including its refugee camp), cut it off from any outside help, destroyed hundreds of buildings (many with people buried alive under the rubble), cut off power and availability of food and water from the outside, prevented outside help from entering the city and murdered an unknown number of Palestinians.
John covers much more including the daily killings of defenseless people, the mass Israeli inflicted unemployment, poverty and deprivation, and the life of unending desperation these people are forced to endure. Yet they do and continue to cling to the hope that one day their stolen land will be returned and their rights fully restored. One of the many untold stories is that many outraged Israeli Jews have the same hope and are courageously defying their government and supporting the Palestinians to achieve it.
Chapter Three: Shining India - The False Facade of A Nation Where Over One Third of the People Live in Desperate Poverty
John explains how India is a nation of stark contrasts, and the country's richest city, Bombay, may show it best. At one extreme is a thriving business community of maritime trade, merchant banks and two stock exchanges. At the other is a city of one million humans per square mile and typified by the "rail roads" district foreigners and outsiders know nothing about. It teems with desperate people living under conditions "barely describable - a packing case for a home with sewage "ebbing and flowing in the monsoon." John asks how can a nation with memories of "great popular struggle" and democracy allow this. The answer is its leaders chose to sell its sovereignty to the neoliberal model of a global economy dominated by giant transnational corporations, especially those in the US.
The rise of the Hindu nationalist (proto fascist) BJP-led government in the 1990s accelerated the process. It removed the barriers in place to protect Indian industry and opened the country to invasion by foreign predatory corporations that took full advantage. The result is a nation that could be a poster child for how an adopted economic model got it all wrong and caused mass human misery. It's seen in an increase in "absolute poverty" to over one third of the population or about 364 million people. John explains that although India's growth rate is high, "this is about capital, not labour, about liberated profits, not people." He also exposes the myth of India being a high-tech juggernaut. While the nation has risen to "pre-eminence" in computer and other technology, the new "technocratic class" is tiny. Also, the so-called consumer boom has benefitted at most about 15% of the population.
Over two thirds of the people live in rural villages and depend on small scale agriculture for their livelihood and survival. These people have been devastated by the nation's embrace of the Western economic model. It's caused a hidden epidemic of suicides among them because they can't compete with agribusiness. Those opting for a less severe solution are forced off their land in a futile attempt to seek refuge among the teeming masses in the cities. The result is growing poverty, deprivation and extreme human misery on a massive scale. Because of its huge population of over one billion, India stands out as a warning of the kind of future people everywhere will face unless a way is found to reverse a failed economic model that enriches the few, devastates the many and is strangling the ability of the planet to continue sustaining the abuse afflicted on it.
Chapter Four: Apartheid Did Not Die - Predatory Capitalism Made It Worse
The hated apartheid may have ended in South Africa about 16 years ago, but the new neoliberal Washington Consensus was even worse. The obsession with race in a white supremacist society was replaced by the dominance and pursuit of wealth allowed only a privileged minority at the expense of the great mostly black majority. The result is that while average household income has risen for about 15% of the population (including some blacks), the overall black majority household income has fallen by about 20% making conditions today far worse than under apartheid.
The new South Africa under its heroic new president Nelson Mandela chose to embrace the Western economic model. He agreed to an "unspoken deal" that allowed the white elite to retain economic control in exchange for black majority rule that would be subservient to the former white government. The current president Thabo Mbeki cut the deal when he led a group of ANC officials in secret meetings in London between 1987 - 1990. They agreed to essentially betray their people and their 40 year struggle for freedom now lost. In came the World Bank and IMF dictating mass privatizations and structural adjustments to cut essential social services in return for financial aid. It's caused an oppressive level of debt, unemployment of about 38%, an HIV infection rate of about 20%, 40% of the schools with no electricity, 25% of the people with no access to clean water and most of those with access unable afford the cost, 60% with inadequate sanitation and 40% with no telephones. The result has been an economic apartheid replacing a legal one with the majority black population worse off today than under the political oppression of the past. It's a disturbing story of what's occurred in all countries that agreed to the Washington Consensus under which they sold their sovereignty to the interests of capital. The difference in South Africa is that the man oppressed blacks thought would win their freedom, in fact, sold them out instead.
John returned to South Africa after a 30 year absence following his expulsion by the apartheid government he abhorred. He interviewed Mandela in retirement and is nearly alone explaining the first ANC president's "ambiguity." He posed tough questions asking how could the ANC that struggled so long for freedom now have embraced "Thatcherism." Why would he allow his long-suffering people to suffer even greater harm under a system where virtually everything, including essential services, is privatized and deregulation allows big business free reign to pursue profit at the expense of the public interest. Mandela responded that "You can put any label on it you like; you can call it Thatcherite but, for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy." A sorrowful answer from a man who knows better. John also confronted Mandela about why he supported and showed deference to oppressive governments in Indonesia, Burma, Algeria, Colombia and Peru and even ordered a bloody invasion of neighboring tiny Lesotho. Again the answer he got was none too impressive and from a man who once was and still is in important ways a giant in the fight for social equity and justice.
Once again John shows how he discovered on his return that the spirit of resistance had survived. He found it among numerous "social movement" and allied organizations that he called the most "sophisticated and dynamic in the world." They've forged links to international human rights and anti-capitalist movements along with independent trade unionists. He said what South Africa has in abundance is a force called "ubuntu" - "a humanism that is never still.....a subtle concept....that says a person's humanity is expressed through empathy and solidarity with others; through community and standing together." It's what Steve Biko called "authentic black communalism." It's in that spirit that John hopes the future of South Africa lies.
Chapter Five: Liberating Afghanistan - the US Inflicted Nightmare on Another Long-Suffering People
John begins describing Afghanistan like it's more a moonscape than a functioning country - Kabul streets with "contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue......(with) no light or heat." It's an age-old story for these beleaguered people who've had a long history of conflict and suffering with little relief ever. For almost a century the country was victimized by the "Great Game" of competition between the British empire vying with Tsarist Russia for control of this part of the world. In recent history, it paid dearly again in the 1980s when a US recruited mujahedin guerrilla army battled against a Soviet occupation. It forced the occupiers out but only at the expense of a ravaged country that never recovered throughout the 1990s as a brutal civil conflict followed the Soviet withdrawal. Then came 9/11 and the US inflicted nightmare that continues to this day with no end in sight.
John explains that Afghanistan today is what the CIA called during the Vietnam war "the grand illusion of the American cause." While Kabul has some freedoms denied by the Taliban, the rest of the country has virtually none. In place of the Taliban, who've begun a resurgence, are the brutal regional "warlords" that human rights groups say have "essentially hijacked the country." The nation is a war zone and failed narco-state with regional "warlords" and drug kingpins controlling everything outside the capitol. The country's US selected and nominal president Hamid Karzai (a former CIA asset) is a caricature of a man and willing stooge who's little more than the mayor of Kabul. He has no mandate or support and wouldn't last a day on his own without the heavy protection afforded him round the clock by the US military.
Life was no bed of roses under the Taliban. But despite their ultra-puritanical ways and harsh treatment for the disobedient, at least they kept order and wouldn't tolerate banditry, rape or murder. They also virtually ended opium production. Now all that's changed. The US-British invasion in 2001 ended the ban on opium production, allowed the "warlords" to replant and the result is that 87% of the world trade in this drug is from these fields. In addition, unemployment is soaring at about 45%; there's been little reconstruction; the poverty is overwhelming; there's little electricity, clean water or most other essential services; lawlessness is back; Sharia law has been reinstated; the internal conflict has resumed; and no one is safe either from the country's warring factions or from the hostile occupying force. In addition, the Taliban have reclaimed parts of southern Afghanistan and are gaining supporters among the people fed up with the misery inflicted on them by the US and multinational force invaders. It may just be a matter of time before the violence again explodes into another catastrophic guerrilla war just like in Iraq. Already it seems to be beginning.
So what was the invasion and occupation all about? We now know it was planned before 9/11 and had nothing to do with a Muslim fundamentalist government that treated its people harshly. It had everything to do with an Afghan leadership that wouldn't surrender its authority to US demands and its imperial quest to dominate this strategically important region. It was explained earlier by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski under President Carter in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. He referred to Eurasia as the "center of world power extending from Germany and Poland in the East through Russia and China to the Pacific and including the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. By dominating this region, the US would assure itself control of a vast supply of energy and other essential resources. Afghanistan was a key part of the plan as it was across this country that the US wanted to build the oil pipelines needed to transship the Caspian basin oil to deep water ports where it could easily be shipped to the parts of the world the US would allow it to go.
At first the US was very content to work with the Taliban when they were in power. As long as it was felt a deal with them was possible, their religious extremism and human rights abuses were of no concern. It was only when agreement couldn't be reached that the decision was taken to remove them. And that brings us to the present. The country is in ruins, the conflict continues without end, and the people are suffering more than ever with no visible hope on the horizon for relief.
John wrote his book to document the history of imperial abuse he witnessed first-hand in five countries. But he also wants it to be a message of the hope he found that may one day lead to the same rebirth of democracy and social equity now growing in parts of Latin America like Venezuela. He finds courageous and dedicated people everywhere, even in Afghanistan where conditions are so bad it's hard finding any. He said that "Through all the humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has been abused and suffered more, and none has been helped less, than Afghanistan." It's still that way and seemingly getting worse. Unless it changes, a time of peace and an end to the violence and suffering of the Afghan people is a long way off at best. And yet hope persists. John finds it everywhere in the hearts of people who'll never give up the struggle for the fair and just world they want and are fighting to get.
A Summation
John has once again written a brilliant and magnificent book. Everyone should read it to learn from this great man what was and is ongoing in the five countries he chose to cover from among the many he knows well from having witnessed events around the world first-hand over his long career. He explains what few others do or would dare to help us understand how peoples' lives everywhere have been affected by the US economic model that's based on militarism and imperial expansion to control the world's markets, essential resources and cheap labor with no challengers to its dominance allowed. That's one message the book imparts. But it also breathes a special hope that the human spirit is indomitable and will find a way to overcome adversity and oppression and be able to endure. John believes a time of deliverance is ahead because committed people everywhere will never give up working for it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Faking Terror, Destroying Iraq
Father's Day: The Dangerous Notions of Michael Berg
By Chris Floyd
06/15/06
Part I: A Serviceable Villian and an Idealist Son
After last week's killing of terrorist chieftain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (or someone just like him) in Iraq, remembrances of his most celebrated alleged victim surfaced briefly in the press: Nicholas Berg, the American businessman whose horrific beheading was publicized in a video fortuitously released less than two weeks after the first revelations of U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib.
It was this video - which featured five surprisingly chubby terrorists, masked, one wearing a gold ring forbidden by extremist Islam, another reading in halting Arabic - that made Zarqawi the Pentagon poster boy for the insurgency. Pentagon documents unearthed by the Washington Post this April revealed that the elevation of Zarqawi's profile was a deliberate, multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign aimed at the American people to foment the lie that the insurgency was largely an al Qaeda terrorist operation, not a native rebellion against the occupation. As one Pentagon general told a group of deception commandos: "The Zarqawi Psy-Op program is the most successful information campaign to date."
Zarqawi - a Jordanian thug who, like so many others, had been radicalized by the American-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan - was a White House tool from the beginning. Before the war, his two-bit terrorist wannabe organization in the Kurdish-held Iraqi north had been targeted for destruction by U.S. Special Forces. But as the Atlantic Monthly reports, George W. Bush prevented at least three separate operations that would have eliminated the Zarqawi group - because such a strike would have interfered with that earlier psy-ops attack on the American people: the selling of the Iraq invasion on false pretenses. Although Zarqawi's gang was in U.S.-controlled territory where Saddam had no power, the Regime's war-peddlers used it to "prove" the non-existent link between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Spared by Bush, Zarqawi proved a serviceable villian after the invasion, always there to be blamed for a new terrorist spectacular whenever a spate of bad war news hit the Homeland press - despite, once again, being in the crosshairs of American forces on several occasions. On at least three occasions in the past year, Jordanian intelligence had pinpointed Zarqawi's location in Iraq and passed the intelligence to their close compadres in the American security organs; but every time, the Americans somehow "arrived too late," as the Atlantic reports.
However by this spring, with no amount of psy-ops able to halt Bush's plunge in the polls - and with the horrific sectarian civil war unleashed by Bush's aggression eclipsing all other violence - the "Zarqawi program" was obviously faltering: not enough PR bang for the buck. And so they did his quietus make - not with a bare bodkin but a thousand pounds of bombs: a little bit of "shock and awe" to goose the news cycle. Bush could have stopped him long ago; he could have spared the Iraqi people the ravages of his favored freebooter; but he chose not to.
Who can say if the beheading of Nicholas Berg - which made Zarqawi a "star" and adroitly demonized the whole Iraqi resistance at such a critical moment - was part of that "most successful information campaign to date"? One can only hope not; one can only hope that in this, as in so many other instances, the Bush Regime was just lucky. After all, who can forget that incredible stroke of good fortune on September 11, 2001 - just one year after a group led by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Jeb Bush declared that only a "new Pearl Harbor" could "catalyze" the American people into accepting their radical militarist program of conquering Iraq, establishing bases in Central Asia, waging "pre-emptive" wars, weaponizing space, gutting nuclear treaties, and larding the war-related industries with pork beyond the dreams of avarice. As Bush himself said while the Twin Towers were still smoldering: "Through my tears, I see opportunity."
Nicholas Berg, on the other hand, was remarkably unlucky. More of an idealist than a chest-thumping corporate predator like ex-CEOs Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Berg, 26, had developed a method for helping underdeveloped areas build safe, affordable structures where steel is hard to come by, as Wikipedia reports. Progress, not profit, was his motivating force. He was also an idealist in another way: he believed in his government. The president said Iraq had been liberated - "mission accomplished" - and that American companies needed to help the Iraqi people rebuild their land. Berg didn't realize that the president was a liar. Iraq had not been liberated but delivered into a new hell. Mass deaths, house raids, airstrikes, societal collapse and torture had spawned a fierce armed resistance. Bush's invasion had also loosed the most brutal, ignorant religious extremists - like Zarqawi - to prey upon the land. Meanwhile, "reconstruction" was a sick joke: it was just a pipeline for Bush cronies to drain Iraq, and the U.S. Treasury, bone-dry.
Berg came alone: no bodyguard of bristling mercenaries, no Halliburton subcontracts, no Beltway cronies. Work was promised, but without that insider grease, fell through. He decided to go home. Six days before his scheduled departure, he was suddenly seized by Iraqi police and turned over to U.S. forces. For reasons still unclear, he was held for 13 days - during which time the Abu Ghraib revelations ignited the land, and the tinderbox of Fallujah exploded when four mercenaries were killed in retaliation for the American shooting of Iraqi protestors a few days before.
Berg was released into this heightened turmoil one day after his family filed a lawsuit against his illegal detention; he disappeared four days later. His remains were found one month later near a Baghdad highway; the gruesome video appeared three days after that. Abu Ghraib disappeared from the front pages; it was not an issue in the presidential election that year.
Zarqawi - or "Zarqawi" - was the fake emblem of a fake war, the "war on terror" that the Bush Regime is pretending to fight while it goes about its long-planned business of exploiting "opportunities" like 9/11. Nicholas Berg was no emblem; he was just another human being literally ripped to shreds in that dark maw where high politics and low murder feast on the same lies, the same flesh.
Part II: A Dangerous Man
But despite the central role that Berg unwillingly played in the concoction of the Zarqawi legend, he was largely airbrushed from the lurid coverage of its grand finale. That's because any new story on Berg would naturally center around his most outspoken survivor, his father Michael. And Michael Berg is a man with a dangerous message, a radical subversion of every value that the Bush Administration is fighting to preserve.
In many ways, of course, it's an ancient danger, a destabilizing notion that has threatened the guardians of civilization for thousands of years. Its advocates have always been relegated to the lunatic fringe, ignored and forgotten, except in rare cases when their subversion has taken hold, usually among the lower orders. In each such case, however, down through the ages, the civilized world has, like a healthy body, acted swiftly to remove the carriers of disorder. Still, in every generation the bacillus emerges once again, and Michael Berg, no doubt weakened by his grief, has become seriously infected.
It's no wonder, then, that his media appearances last week were so brief and circumscribed. For there he was, father of a victim murdered in the most gruesome fashion imaginable by the terrorist Zarqawi (or someone just like him), a survivor fully entitled to exult in the revenging fury and violent self-righteousness that are among the chief values of the Bush Imperium - and all Berg could talk about was mercy and forgiveness, peace and restoration. He would not even take pleasure in the death of Zarqawi, whom he called a "fellow human being." Instead, he grieved for Zarqawi's family and wished that the brutal killer could have been subjected to "restorative justice" - made to work in a hospital with children maimed by war, for example - setting him on a path where his human decency might have been restored.
Nor would Berg praise the guardian of civilization, George W. Bush, for finally ending the career of the terrorist he had used so cynically to justify aggressive war. Instead, Berg blamed Bush for unleashing mass death on the people of Iraq, and instigating the cycle of violence that had consumed his son. But even for the authors of war, for the state terrorists who kill on an industrial scale, by remote control, ensconced in safety, comfort, privilege and wealth, Berg called for restoration, not revenge: they should be removed from power and compelled to some compassionate labor that might redeem their corrupted humanity.
It goes without saying that Berg's comments were instantly condemned throughout the vast engine of bile-driven groupthink known as the rightwing media. He was reviled as a traitor, a fool, a terrorist-lover, "less than human," a monster whose son will slap his face in the afterlife. He was derided for his quixotic Congressional campaign as the Green Party candidate for Delaware: what place do such weapons of the weak - mercy, forgiveness, non-violence - have in the halls of power? For the mainstream, he was just a blip, a quirky diversion in the flood of triumphant stories on Zarqawi's demise.
And to be sure, it is foolish to oppose the cherished values of our 21st century civilization: violence, bluster, ignorance and fear. It's foolish to take upon oneself the responsibility to break the cycle of violence at last, to say: "Let it end with me, if nowhere else; let it end now, no matter what the provocation; let something new, something more human, some restoration take root in this bloodstained ground."
But what if such folly is the only way for humankind to begin climbing out of the festering pit we have made of the world?
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Gunmen shoot dead 4 worshippers, wounds 14 in Iraq's Tikrit
China Daily
16/06/2006
Unknown gunmen shot dead four worshippers and wounded 14 others in a pre-dawn attack on Thursday at a Sunni mosque in a town near Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, a local police source said.
"Masked armed men driving three cars stormed the Imam Muslim mosque in the al-Alam town, some 10 km north of Tikrit, during the Muslim dawn prayer, killing four of them and wounding 14 others," the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Violence has mounted as a power vacuum has continued despite the formation of a new unity government in the war-torn country.
Comment: More evidence of the continuing attempts by US, British and Israeli government employees as they attempt, on behalf of those governments, to create the reality of civil war in Iraq.
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Mosque terror attack despite Iraq victories against Al-Qaeda
by Jay Deshmukh
AFP
Fri Jun 16, 2006
BAGHDAD - At least 11 people were killed by a suicide bomber inside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad despite a security crackdown in the capital and claims of successes in the battle against Al-Qaeda, police said.
The blast, which also wounded 25 people, came just an hour before the main weekly Muslim prayers, when the Baratha mosque would have been filled with thousands of worshippers.
The mosque, which is used by members of Iraq's Shiite majority, had been targeted by Sunni insurgents before.
On April 7, a triple suicide bombing by men dressed as women targeted worshippers just as they were leaving the mosque, killing 90 and wounding 175.
The police were exploring the possibility that Friday's bombing could have been the work of a man dressed as a woman or as a cleric, the only way to escape security checks put up at the mosque since the April bombings.
Two people were also killed and 16 others wounded when four mortar rounds struck the Sab al-Bur neighbourhood of north Baghdad.
The killing came despite a massive clampdown in the capital ordered by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that saw vehicles banned from the capital's streets during Friday prayer time and tens of thousands of Iraqi and US soldiers out on patrol.
The crackdown, which began Wednesday and is dubbed Operation Forward Together, is one of the largest since the US-led invasion of 2003. It is aimed at exploiting any power vacuum in insurgent ranks following the death of Al-Qaeda Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a US air raid last week.
The defence ministry said 160 additional checkpoints had been set up in Baghdad and 26,000 Iraqi soldiers, 23,000 Iraqi police and 7,200 coalition troops deployed on the streets.
The plan includes house-to-house searches in areas suspected of harbouring insurgents as well as a crackdown on civilians carrying weapons.
A night-time curfew in Baghdad has also been extended by two and a half hours.
Ahead of Friday's mosque bombing, the government and its US backers had already been talking up the success of the crackdown.
The US military said Thursday that it had killed 104 rebels and captured 759 in 452 operations since Zarqawi's death.
Iraqi national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie said "it was beginning of the end of Al-Qaeda in Iraq."
"We believe Al-Qaeda in Iraq was taken by surprise; they did not anticipate how powerful the Iraqi security forces are and how the government is on the attack now," he said.
Outside the capital, insurgent violence raged on Friday.
Just south of Baghdad, in an area dubbed the triangle of death for the frequency of rebel attacks, four people were killed and 10 kidnapped in separate incidents, police said.
An Iraqi army soldier was shot dead in the northern town of Hawija, while an employee of Northern Gas Company was shot dead in the oil city of Kirkuk.
In the restive city of Baquba, north of the capital, a woman and her four children were killed overnight when a bomb went off in a neighbour's house, police said.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that Iraq had asked the US-led coalition to halt the transfer of detainees to its custody because of fears that its prison service had been overrun by abusive Shiite militiamen.
"We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that," the paper quoted Deputy Justice Minister Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, a Kurd, as saying.
"Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad," he said, adding that there was particular concern about interior ministry-run prisons that house 1,797 inmates, 90 percent of them Sunni Arabs.
Yei said he had written to the US officer in charge of coalition-run prisons in Iraq asking him to suspend plans to transfer to Iraqi control five facilities housing more than 15,000 inmates.
Major General John D. Gardner told the daily that the transfer would not take place "until each respective facility and the Iraqi corrections system have demonstrated the ability to maintain" US standards of custody.
Separately, the US military announced it had launched a probe into the deaths of three male detainees in its custody in Salaheddin province around May 9.
And on Thursday, the US Congress approved 66 billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Security firm cleared by US army
BBC
14/06/2006
A British security firm has welcomed the outcome of a US army investigation clearing it of criminal offences.
The US military launched an inquiry after a video showing an Aegis Defence Services contractor firing at civilian cars in Iraq was shown on the internet.
Ageis, which has a Pentagon contract in Iraq said to be worth £157m, said the film had been edited to mislead.
It said the man responsible for the film is now the subject of legal action.
Aegis said its own investigation, which was handed to the US Army's Criminal Investigation Division, had found that the incident shown on the film was within the rules on the use of force by civilian personnel.
The company says its rules of engagement "allow for a structured escalation of force to include opening fire on civilian vehicles under certain circumstances".
In the film, a man is seen leaning out of a speeding car with a machine gun, firing wildly at following civilian vehicles on a highway, hitting some of them.
The footage was posted on a website in November 2005 set up by contractors, but was eventually seen by a wider audience.
The US military investigation concluded that no-one should be charged with any criminal offence.
Comment: Oh! The shock! How surprising that a US military investigation of one the members of its private army would conclude that firing wildly at civilians in Iraq is not a crime! We really need to sit down after this one.
Watch this short video about the abovementioned "Aegis" "security" contractor, where one of its employees states:
"We don't know whether it was an innocent civilian or whether that was an insurgent - we don't know, because we never stop".
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US Troops Covering Tracks in Samarra
Karen Button
Uruknet
June 15, 2006
In Samarra, where US troops have been accused of shooting two women--one pregnant--while on their way to the hospital, and trying to cover up the wrong-doing, another incident reveals a disturbing trend.
According to surviving family members, US troops killed three unarmed civilians, one a mentally disabled man, in their home on the evening of 4 May and then attempted to cover their tracks.
Around 5pm an IED exploded on Al-Burahman Street. Afterwards, US forces blocked the area and closed the streets. When a sniper shot at troops from a location close the Khalis family home, soldiers stormed the house. Fifteen people were crammed into one room, huddled together for safety. According to witnesses, troops broke down the door to the house when as they raided it, and began "shooting everywhere".
The "Americans were yelling, 'fuck you, shut up,'" says one of the survivors, 36 year-old Shireen, whose mother, brother and sister were killed in the incident. There were mostly women and children in the room, she says.
Shireen's mentally disabled brother, 40 year-old Khalid Zaidan Khalif, put his arms around his 66 year-old father, Zaidan Khalif Habib trying to protect him. Troops shot Khalid and then pushed the father onto the floor, says Shireen.
It all happened so fast she says that, "I couldn't see anything, I just heard the shooting." Her sister, 20 year-old Emam Zaidan, was holding Shireen's 18 month-old son in her arms when the shooting began.
"After the terrible shooting was a terrible silence. I thought they killed my father. I tried to talk to my sister. She was in her last year at school, studying for her final exams. I asked her, 'is my son ok or he is dead?' She didn't respond. She was slumped against the wall. I tried to touch her shoulder and my son's clothes were filled by blood. Then I realized she was dying."
"I tried to talk to my mother, 'why are you laying down like this?' I asked her. When I tried to make her sit up I saw something white hanging from her eyes. It was one of her eyes." Sixty year-old Khairiya N'sses Jasim had also been shot, her "other eye was stuck to the wall".
Her sister didn't die immediately. Shireen says in her last moments Emam begged the soldiers in English to help her. They left, she says, and brought back a military doctor, but Emam died almost immediately.
After the three were killed, Shireen says, the troops apologised, saying
they killed the wrong people.
According to Reuters, a spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division (which controls the area) claimed that soldiers from its 3rd Brigade Combat Team had "killed two unnamed men and a woman in a house who had 'planned to attack the soldiers'".
Yet, according to Iraqi police who said they witnessed the event, the civilians were unarmed. "They were not armed and there were no gunmen in the house," said an officer from the Joint Coordination Center, which acts as liaison between Iraqi and US security forces.
In a statement of what appears to be sheer fabrication, Master Sergeant Terry Webster of the 101st Airborne told Reuters that an injured woman who was taken from the scene "confessed that the three people killed had planned to attack the soldiers as they drove by the house."
Instead, according to survivors, troops attempted to cover up their wrong doing by methods becoming disturbingly more common. Shireen says before leaving, soldiers dragged her brother out into the corridor, shot him in the chest three more times, placed a gun next to his legs to make it appear he was armed, and then took pictures.
US troops were also accused of planting an AK-47 on a disabled man they shot to death in Hamdaniyah on 26 April. It's another case of wildly differing accounts that indicate a cover-up by Marines who executed an unarmed civilian.
Marines say they found 52 year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad al-Zobaie digging a hole to plant a bomb and killed him in a gun battle. Relatives of the dead man say he was taken from his home at 2am by Marines and that they later heard shots. Too afraid to investigate until morning, they eventually found Hashim with gunshots to his face. A next door neighbor says Marines had taken a shovel and AK-47 from his house the night before.
In another event, Iraqi police and witnesses told reporters of eleven people rounded up and killed by US troops in Ishaqi in March, most of them women and children. Though troops were cleared, according to witnesses soldiers attempted to cover up the massacre by blowing up the house afterwards.
Significantly, in both the Ishaqi and Samarra incidents, Iraqi police stepped forward to contradict US military accounts.
In response to these, and other civilian killings by US troops, even the new puppet-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has said enough is enough. In unprecedented criticisms against the US occupation, al-Maliki said violence against civilians is a "daily phenomenon" by many US troops who "do not respect the Iraqi people".
"They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion....There is a limit to the acceptable excuses," he stated. "Those who kill intentionally or through negligence should be tried."
He's right. And there are the laws to do such. Yet, with a US administration that thinks the Geneva Conventions are "archaic," it's not surprising that individual soldiers are committing crimes condoned at the highest levels.
Clearly, some troops are out of control and they know it. Otherwise they wouldn't be covering their tracks. But who is giving the orders that this is ok? This is where the focus of Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and all other investigations of abuse, murder, and torture ought to be. And where an inquiry into the destruction of Fallujah and the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians should begin.
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New documents suggest Pentagon lied about Cheney's role in awarding no-bid contract to Halliburton in 2003
15 June, 2006
Haliburtonwatch.org
WASHINGTON -- Newly-released government documents indicate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) may have publicly lied about Vice President Dick Cheney's role in awarding a $7 billion no-bid Iraqi oil reconstruction contract to Halliburton in the weeks preceding the March 2003 invasion, the conservative activist group Judicial Watch disclosed today.
Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Judicial Watch found an internal USACE email from April 2003 explaining that USACE Chief Counsel, Robert Andersen, told the 60 Minutes television program that, "There was no contact whatsoever (with the VP office)" in awarding the oil contract to Halliburton.
But this information contradicts another email uncovered by Judicial Watch in 2004. The email, dated March 5, 2003, sent by an official of the Army Corps of Engineers whose name was redacted, stated, "We anticipate no issue [with the Halliburton deal] since the action has been coordinated w VP's office."
"These new documents raise questions about the involvement of the Vice President's office in the controversial KBR deal," Tom Fenton, Judicial Watch President, said. "One has to wonder whether the Army was being forthright about the issue."
Judicial Watch was forced to obtain a court order to release the documents because USACE improperly claimed exemptions from the FOIA. One document USACE attempted to exempt from release includes a frank admission by an official who said, "I am copying you on this crap since I honestly believe the competitive procurement will never happen."
"It took the intervention of a federal district judge to force the Army to release the document," a Judicial Watch press release states.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is currently investigating possible criminal behavior in the way the Pentagon has awarded contracts to Halliburton. USACE demoted its highest-ranking civilian employee for blowing the whistle on improper and potentially illegal contracting practices committed by Halliburton and the Pentagon.
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Divided House rejects Iraq pullout date (one party America now a fact)
CNN
16/06/2006
Rancorous election-year debate in the House culminated today as Republicans forced Democrats to vote on a resolution that praises U.S. troops, labels the Iraq war part of a global fight on terrorism and says an "arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment" of troops is not in the national interest. The House vote comes a day after the Senate rejected a call to withdraw combat troops by year's end.
In a 256-153 vote, the GOP-led House approved the nonbinding resolution.
"Retreat is not an option in Iraq," declared House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "Achieving victory is our only option, for the American people and our kids."
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California countered: "Stay the course, I don't think so Mr. President. It's time to face the facts."
She called for a new direction in the conflict. "The war in Iraq has been a mistake. I say, a grotesque mistake."
Four months before midterm elections that will decide control of Congress, House Republicans sought to force Republicans and Democrats alike to take a position on the conflict that began with the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003.
Democrats denounced the debate and vote as a politically motivated charade, and several prominent Democrats joined Pelosi in saying they would vote against the measure because, they said, supporting it would affirm Bush's "failed policy" in Iraq.
Democrats denounced the debate and vote as a politically motivated sham, and several prominent Democrats joined Pelosi in saying they would vote against the measure even though Republicans could then try to claim that Democrats don't support U.S. troops.
Comment: A one party American political system has been a covert reality for many years, but it is only recently that events such as today's sham vote expose that reality for all to see.
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Koizumi said to announce Iraq withdrawal next week
AFP
Fri Jun 16, 2006
TOKYO - Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will announce next week that Japan is ending a military mission in
Iraq, its first since World War II to a country where fighting is underway, reports say.
Japanese troops are constitutionally barred from combat and are protected in part by British troops who have told Tokyo they will transfer authority in the area next week to Iraqi troops, the reports said.
Koizumi expects to announce the pullout on Wednesday, Kyodo News said. The Mainichi Shimbun reported in its evening edition that the withdrawal would be complete by mid-July.
Japanese officials had sent repeated signals that the pullout would take place in the summer as the domestically unpopular deployment would have run its course.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the government spokesman, earlier Friday denied that Britain had set a date to leave the southern city of Samawa where the 600 Japanese troops are based.
But Foreign Minister Taro Aso later said that Japan can "decide on the timeframe of a withdrawal fairly soon."
The humanitarian mission first launched in 2003 marks the first time since World War II that Japan has sent armed forces to a country where fighting is underway.
The deployment has been widely viewed as a way for Japan to exert influence as more than an economic power.
The troops have not suffered casualties or even fired their weapons due to Japan's pacifist 1947 constitution and have relied on Australian, British and earlier on Dutch forces for protection.
The mission has aimed to rebuild the area around the southern city of Samawa. As the region is relatively peaceful, Japan calls it a "non-combat zone" in Iraq so as not to violate the constitution.
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American Democracy
US opens new war front in North Africa
Asia Times
15/06/2006
Despite a setback in Somalia, where anti-Islamist warlords recently lost control of the capital, Mogadishu, to a jihadist militia, the United States is plunging into a far vaster set of commitments, stretching across the "Wild West" of Saharan Africa.
Over the next five years, Washington is expected to spend US$500 million on an overt counter-terror program to secure what it has dubbed the latest front in its "global war on terror". Detractors insist the move could backfire and have the same unintended consequences as in the Horn of Africa, albeit on a much larger scale with even more at stake.
The Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) kicked off last June to provide military expertise, equipment and
development aid to nine Saharan nations whose vast, ungoverned reaches are considered fertile ground for militant Islamist groups looking to establish Afghanistan-style terror training camps and to engage in smuggling and other illicit activities.
The TSCTI represents a massive upgrade from the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7 million forerunner that was initiated in 2002 in what Theresa Whelan, US deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, called "just a drop in the bucket" compared with the region's security needs.
In its campaign to justify the increase, the US military has likened the Sahara to the "Wild West", and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat, or GSPC) is its most wanted enemy. On the US State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations and estimated to have a few hundred remaining members based in Algeria, the group was formed in the late 1990s to overthrow the government in Algiers and create a hardline Islamic state. Its founders broke ranks with the notorious Armed Islamic Group over its policy of killing civilians indiscriminately during Algeria's 1992-99 civil war that left more than 100,000 dead. The GSPC was accused of kidnapping European tourists in 2003 and claimed responsibility for a spate of strikes around the Sahara last year that reportedly killed a total of 40 soldiers from Algeria and Mauritania. But some observers say terrorism in the Sahara is little more than a mirage and that protracted, high-profile US involvement could destabilize the region.
"If anything, the [initiative] ... will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall US presence and strategy," said Jeremy Keenan, a Sahara specialist at the University of East Anglia in Britain.
Aside from the 2003 kidnapping issue, US and Algerian authorities have failed to present "indisputable verification of a single act of alleged terrorism in the Sahara", Keenan insists. "Without the GSPC, the US has no legitimacy for its presence in the region," he said, noting that a growing US dependence on African oil, which the administration of President George W Bush has declared a "national strategic interest", has moved the United States to bolster its presence in the region.
A report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank, said that although the Sahara is "not a terrorist hotbed", repressive governments in the region are taking advantage of the Bush administration's "war on terror" to tap US largess and deny civil freedoms. The report noted that former Mauritanian president Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya - a US ally in West Africa who was deposed last August in a bloodless coup - used the threat of terrorism to justify human-rights abuses.
Taya jailed and harassed dozens of opposition politicians, charging that they were connected to the GSPC; this fed popular discontent, and it is said that the military junta that ousted Taya while he was abroad did so to appease a simmering public. Hundreds of Mauritanians took to the streets of the capital, Nouakchott, to denounce the United States at the start of the TSCTI.
The United States is already under fire for secretly supporting the anti-Islamist warlords who last week lost control of Mogadishu to jihadist militia after a 15-year stranglehold. A number of opponents of the Central Intelligence Agency-administered program claim that enterprising warlords have exploited US fears that the lawless East African country is becoming a terrorist haven. The warlords use this fear to gain funding and arms to reinforce existing criminal operations under the pretense of fighting radicals, they argue.
They also argue that the effect of this policy at the grassroots is a witches' brew of anti-American sentiment and Islamic radicalism among Somalis fed up with US involvement in their affairs, particularly when the Americans are backing forces that have torn the country apart.
Critics say the same scenario threatens to take hold in Saharan Africa, only there the warlords are dictators, and national borders substitute for city blocks.
They also contend that the limited threat the GSPC may have posed on the African continent in recent years has been all but snuffed out. Since the isolated attacks last summer, Algerian authorities have cracked down hard on the group: the latest fatal GSPC strike resulted in just one death and the unexpected surrender two days later of three ranking militants. This supports intelligence reports that the group's leadership is in tatters and on the run. Analysts say a recent threat by one ranking militant that US military installations may come under attack is little more than hot air.
GSPC founder Hassan Hattab, now in government custody, has called on all remaining militants to take advantage of a new government amnesty under which they can give up the gun in exchange for immunity from prosecution, saying those who continue to fight do not belong to his organization, since they harm Muslims. This week the Algerian army killed five GSPC gunmen and destroyed 30 hideouts in eastern Algeria; security sources confirmed that the operation was "based on accurate information given to the army by repenting gunmen". Algeria has freed some 2,200 jailed Islamist militants under the amnesty since February.
A limited number of holdouts still stir occasional trouble in the remote Algerian countryside, but the GSPC has shifted the focus of its operations to Europe, where an elusive network of sleeper cells has shown a willingness, and means, to target civilians. Dozens of operatives have been arrested and a number of major plots foiled over the past year, including a scheme to outdo the attacks of September 11, 2001. US and European intelligence officials also have evidence that Europe-based operatives continue to recruit, train and finance North African jihadists to fight US-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These factors make the GSPC-Europe "the largest, most cohesive and dangerous terrorist organization in the al-Qaeda orbit", according to a report by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think-tank.
In December, three Algerian members of a GSPC cell in southern Italy were arrested in a sweep and implicated in a plot to kill "at least 10,000 people" and blow up a vessel "as big as the Titanic". More than $22 million is said to have been found in the vehicle used by the three; attacks would have targeted ships, stadiums and railway stations in a deliberate attempt to exceed the September 11 carnage, according to Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu. The plan was foreshadowed in a communique issued by the GSPC four days after the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center came crashing down, pledging its support to al-Qaeda and threatening to harm "the interests of European countries and the US". It is still debated as to whether the GSPC has formally aligned itself with Osama bin Laden, but the group has repeatedly avowed a fierce allegiance.
Italy has "evolved from a logistics base" to a "de facto base of operations" for GSPC activities targeting Europe, says the Jamestown report. Algerian GSPC operatives based out of a Milan mosque were first arrested in 2002 for illegally acquiring explosives and weapons. In 2005, Italian police detained five of 11 Algerians suspected of belonging to the GSPC and investigated their involvement in a failed terrorist attack against the Spanish National Court in Madrid, among other incidents. "GSPC cells in Italy employ a dual-track approach to planning terrorist attacks and provide support infrastructure - safe houses, communications, weapons ... and [forged documents] to cells elsewhere in Europe," the report noted.
However, the terror group has singled out France as its primary foreign target. In January 2005, French authorities arrested 11 suspects with ties to the GSPC and charged them with recruiting suicide bombers to send to Iraq. In September, police seized three other Algerians affiliated with the GSPC purported to be preparing to bomb the Paris subway. "The only way to discipline France is jihad and Islamic martyrdom," group leaders said in a statement. "France is our Enemy No 1, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community."
Spain, too, has seen a spike in GSPC activity. Authorities there arrested 20 suspected terrorists on January 12 in Barcelona and Madrid. Among them were Moroccan-born Omar Nakhcha, the head of a GSPC cell said to recruit and give logistical support to Iraq-bound militants and suicide bombers. A spokesman for Spain's Interior Ministry said one of the group's recruits was responsible for a suicide attack in November 2003 in Nasiriyah, Iraq, that killed 19 Italians and nine Iraqis. Nakhcha, for his part, is thought to have led a cell of a shadowy GSPC affiliate, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, that helped the escape of three suspects in the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people and participated in the 2003 Casablanca attacks.
A prominent Spanish judge and the head of France's domestic security service are carrying out extensive inquiries into loose-knit terror networks in both countries. Those arrested have disclosed information on interconnected cells responsible for recruitment, falsifying documents and acquiring explosive materials. At least 50 French Arabs have journeyed to Iraq for suicide operations over the past two years, according to one Spanish research institute.
Western intelligence agencies estimate the GSPC has an exile network of 800-900 active operatives and supporters spread throughout Europe. So far arrests have been made in Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Britain and the Netherlands, but authorities fear that the group may hold a growing appeal to the thousands of frustrated young Muslims who idle at the fringes of major European cities.
North America has not been bypassed by the GPSC either. A Toronto-based cell that had included an al-Qaeda-trained bomb-maker was broken up in November. Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian militant recruited by the GSPC, was arrested by US authorities in Seattle after crossing from Canada. Tried on charges he planned to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
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US denies Britain consular access to Hicks
Reuters
15/06/2006
The United States has denied the British Government consular access to David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay. The British Government was seeking access so they could register him as a British citizen.Last year, Hicks won a British High Court ruling that he was entitled to become a UK citizen because his mother was born in England.
Hicks's legal team returned to the High Court yesterday in a bid to enforce the decision and register him as a British citizen immediately.
The legal team representing Hicks complained the process of registering him as a citizen had been delayed.
The court was told that the British Government had tried to gain access to Hicks to deliver the oath needed before he can register for citizenship.
The US has blocked those attempts because he is not a British citizen.
Britain has already won the freedom of all nine of its nationals held at the US detention camp.
The court was given an assurance from the British Government that the matter would be presented to Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett tomorrow and that she will consider "whether and, if so, what representations should be made to the US Government".
Lawyers told the court that the British Government accepts that it is dealing with the case of someone entitled to be registered as a British citizen.
Hicks, originally from Adelaide, has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002.
The 30-year-old convert to Islam was captured in Afghanistan where he allegedly fought alongside the ruling Taliban against US-led forces who invaded after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
He faces charges of conspiracy, attempted murder by an unprivileged belligerent and aiding the enemy.
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Judge rules in favor of racial profiling and prolonged detention of non-citizens
Center For Constitutional Rights
15/06/2006
Yasser Ebrahim, a plaintiff in the case, described his reaction today: "I am very disappointed and shocked. I can't believe the court would allow this to happen. I am frightened for other Muslims in the United States, who could face the same discrimination and abuse that I suffered."
"This ruling gives a green light to racial profiling and prolonged detention of non-citizens at the whim of the President. The decision is profoundly disturbing because it legitimizes the fact that the Bush Administration rounded up and imprisoned our clients because of their religion and race," said Rachel Meeropol, a CCR attorney in the case.
Yasser Ebrahim, a plaintiff in the case, described his reaction today: "I am very disappointed and shocked. I can't believe the court would allow this to happen. I am frightened for other Muslims in the United States, who could face the same discrimination and abuse that I suffered."
The ruling also states that there are effectively two tiers
