Another fact-packed anti-war Web site is that of William Blum, founding editor of the '60s underground newspaper Washington Free Press. Today, Blum is still looking for trouble. "Accessing this site automatically opens a file for you at FBI headquarters," is the greeting of his home page. "This warning, of course, comes too late." According to Blum, from the end of World War II to the beginning of this century, the United States has "attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many million more to a life of agony and despair." Blum makes the point that Americans are taught it's wrong to murder, rob, rape and bribe, but that it's okay to topple foreign governments, quash socialist movements or drop powerful bombs on foreigners, so long as it serves the national interest. From plenty of examples which prove, despite the current rhetoric from the White House, that the West is not always on the side of the angels, these three capture the essence of much US foreign policy:– 1985, Lebanon. The CIA plants a truck bomb outside a mosque in Beirut, aiming to kill a Muslim cleric. As the faithful leave the mosque, the blast kills 80 and wounds 250, mostly women and children. (By comparison, the March attack on a Protestant church in Islamabad killed five worshippers and injured 40.) In Beirut, the targeted mullah was unhurt. None of the victims was compensated.
– 1989, Panama. After sustained Orwellian "hate week" campaigns against former US ally and puppet president Manuel Noriega, along the lines of those previously directed at Fidel Castro, Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, an aerial assault is launched on Panama City. The official reason is Noriega's drug trafficking, long known to Washington. Another motive is maintaining control of the Panama Canal, in the face of populist stirrings. An activist tenement barrio is bombed to rubble, a compliant government is installed. Various independent inquiries put the deaths between 3,000 and 4,000, most of the corpses still rotting in pits on US bases, off limits to investigators. American news networks did not regard the UN's overwhelming condemnation of the attack to be worth broadcasting.
– 1998, Sudan. The reign of Bill Clinton, the first black-schmoozing rock'n'roll pot-head President, is now derided as a time when America went soft on recalcitrant regimes (a period of "turning the other cheek", as one dipstick Sydney Morning Herald columnist put it). How soft is soft? In August 1998, Bill Clinton sent Tomahawk missiles to flatten the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, claiming it was concocting chemical weapons. Actually, this plant had bolstered pharmaceutical self-sufficiency, and produced 90 per cent of the drugs needed to treat malaria, TB and other diseases. Accusing its owner, Saleh Idris, of associating with terrorists, Washington froze his London bank account. The case was contested and the US backed down. The Sudan's death toll from this attack "continues quietly to rise", notes Chomsky, citing the "tens of thousands of people, many of them children", who have suffered or died from a range of treatable ailments. The chairman of the board of Al Shifa, Dr Idris Eltayeb, remarked that the destruction of his factory was "just as much an act of terrorism as the twin towers – the only difference is we know who did it".
A perspective at odds with the one espoused by Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News: "What we say is terrorists, terrorism, is evil, and America doesn't engage in it, and these guys do." One is reminded of Big Brother's slogans in George Orwell's laboured masterpiece, 1984: "War is peace, love is hate, truth is lies." In this dark vision, the Ministry of Truth manipulates the media to suit the political objectives of Big Brother. In our world, the media are fun-loving and raffish, but the core priorities reflect the priorities of people in power. Images of the twin towers' collapse are indelibly impressed on the planet's collective memory. And so they should be. But other images have vanished from history.
In the 1990 Gulf War, a bomb hurtled through the air duct of Baghdad's "safest" shelter, burning alive 500 people, mainly women and children. A documentary looking at US foreign policy from an Islamic perspective, Letter to America, recently screened on SBS, shows footage of relatives in the ruins of the Baghdad shelter weeping over rows of charred corpses. For such victims, no memorial service, no replay, no justice. The toppling of the Taliban is portrayed as a triumph, and perhaps it is, for the victors. On the ground, improvements are marginal. An early image of liberation was of Kabul's haggard residents watching TV, a seamless advertisement for freedom. Except, whose TV? The last US bomb on Kabul hit the studios of al-Jazeera, the independent voice of the Middle East. Funny, that. The Afghans may now need to settle for CNN and Fox, a victory, perhaps, for civilisation and US exports, as well as for the pipe dreams of Unocal. The Pentagon claims this "smart bomb" lost its bearings, as another one did over Belgrade in 1999, when it flattened Serbian TV, killing and maiming the staff.
For the Pentagon, media-seeking missiles are not enough. In February, it announced plans to provide news items to foreign journalists, "possibly even false ones", in order to manipulate emotions. After three months' bombing of Afghanistan, an estimate of civilian casualties was hard to find. It took Marc Herold, an economics professor from the University of New Hampshire, to amalgamate the disparate reports of "collateral damage" and come up with a total. If the evidence conflicted, said Herold, he settled for the lower death count. The number of injured was not included, not even of those likely to die from their wounds. Let me ask you, dear reader, in this ongoing "war against terror", how many innocent Afghans have lost their lives? If the number is unknown to you, what does that say about our media culture? At the very least, according to Marc Herold, the death toll is 3,700 – greater than the number slain in the twin towers. In January, Herold told ABC Radio that "a much more realistic" estimate of civilian deaths is 5,000. His research covers only the period from October 7 to December 10 last year, since which time the missiles have continued to rain upon Taliban and toddler alike.
Herold's estimate was given wide publicity in Europe, and next to none in America. Surprised that the US "quality press" had been so circumspect, e-mailed the casualty count to a journo mate at The Washington Post, asking, why the blackout? His reply was cool: "I think you would find most people here focused on our own thousands killed intentionally." End of discussion. The loophole, it seems, is intention. Civilian deaths are the price of ridding the world of terror. When B52s are sent to unknown lands with big payloads and bad intelligence, it is certain that civilians will die. Surely such a strategy reveals a "reckless disregard for human life", a legal definition of murder.
In December, Marc Herold stopped counting and the military action shifted to the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora, focusing on al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. How hard could it be, tracking down this tall, sick, neurotic figure attached to a dialysis machine? He was hiding in a cave, but which cave? It didn't matter. The Pentagon had a plan. It would blast apart every cave in Afghanistan.
Enter the "daisy cutter", a 4WD-sized bomb whose name evokes a firework display with floral motif, and which packs the punch of a tactical nuclear weapon. It is triggered above ground to clear vast surfaces of all structures and life. The blast inferno vaporises everything within hundreds of metres and produces a mushroom-shaped cloud, resulting in a vacuum of such force that it sucks out human eyes. A rush of oxygen then reignites what's left and sets off another explosion. In a sane world, the daisy cutter would be banned; right now, it's despoiling everything in its path.
During four weekend raids that struck villages near Tora Bora, at least 80 non-combatants were killed, according to pro-American local commander Hajji Muhammad Zaman, who kept asking: "Why are they hitting civilians?" Meanwhile, George Bush brooded over his dead terrorist scorecard on the White House desk, ready to cross out the names of senior al-Qaeda officials. "I'm a baseball fan," he told Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, "I want a scorecard." Alas, it was left largely incomplete, as the opposing team slipped away, not for the last time. On January 24, enter the US special forces, and an attitude of "whatever it takes". A stealth attack on two small compounds in Hazar Qadam resulted in the deaths of up to 21 Afghans and the capture of 27 others. Released two weeks later, the men revealed they had been severely beaten and rib-kicked.
Rumsfeld later admitted these Afghans were not, as first announced, Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters, but troops and local officials loyal to the current government. Photos appeared on the Web showing bodies of those shot displaying white plastic wrist restrainers bearing the words "Made in USA". As pointed out by the US magazine The Nation, Article 23 of the Hague Convention forbids a warring party "to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered". General Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central Command, defended this apparent war crime: "I will not characterise it as a failure of any type."
By mid-February, the baseball scorecard of George Bush was still blank. The Pentagon and the CIA dispatched a missile to kill three men near the village of Zhawar Kili, close to the Pakistan border. The reason? One was tall. "Maybe it's Osama." In fact, it was three impoverished scavengers, now obliterated. A Washington Post reporter who tried to poke around the scene has turned back at gunpoint by US troops. Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem lost his cool: "The Taliban has vanished. Al-Qaeda has vanished. It's a shadow war; these are shadowy people who don't want to be found." That's the thing about terrorists. They can't be trusted to die easy. Stufflebeem got one thing right – it is a war of shadows. Whose shadows? Who has the most to gain? An interlocking network of powerbrokers in oil, arms, politics and media, for whom the world is a goldmine and this war their windfall.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, is a boardroom veteran of the mighty Tribune Company, publishers of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. He is also a former director of Gulfstream Aerospace, acquired by General Dynamics in 1999, a deal which netted him a cool $11 million. What is General Dynamics? A major defence contractor. And so it goes.
Early warnings to the White House of Enron's hidden debt must have been timely for the 35 Bush officials holding its stock, including Army Secretary Thomas E. White, whose portfolio had topped $US50 million. But there is another America. A questing, compassionate America, which yearns to share its good fortune with the rest of the world and break the psychic gridlock of us/them, good/evil. New York on Valentine's Day saw the launch of a poignant initiative, "September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows", named from an utterance by Martin Luther King: "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." One member, a woman whose husband died in the twin towers, said she resented being used as an excuse to start a war, "a horrific thing, the idea that someone would do this for me to someone else". Peaceful Tomorrows raises funds to help the families of the Afghan dead, the widows now sending their toddlers to beg. Such a spirit may jolt Americans to consider the rest of the world's pain, as it jolts me to honour that country's ongoing contribution to the evolution and celebration of humanity.
Like the 17 founding families of Peaceful Tomorrows, it is time to transcend the belligerent imperialism of Old Guard America that is prepared to ravage the whole of earth in order to foster, for its spoilt elite, a lifestyle of careless opulence. The promise of globalisation is a shared destiny of nations working together to minimise conflict and poverty, restore ecosystems, reduce emissions, ban arms trafficking and thrash out an evolving agenda of ethics and fairness to which all can be a party, especially the strong. Its deeper meaning is a belated awareness that we are all connected – and connected in a deeper way than the choice of being with America or against America, of being a target market, or a target.
Original source of article
RichardNeville.com
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