John Pilger
American terrorist
Fri Jan 9 15:09:49 2004
64.140.158.157
American terrorist
http://www.newstatesman.com/nscoverstory.htm
Forget Hutton. He will not reveal what the US and UK authorities really don't
want you to know: that radiation illnesses caused by uranium weapons are now
common in Iraq. By John Pilger
The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself
appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the
"discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories", which even
the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it not
merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against humanity.
(His crime, and George Bush's, is clearly defined as "supreme" in the
Nuremberg judgment.)
This is not what the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton, who
is due to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective
distraction, just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report
almost ten years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political class
escaped criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton's "brief" to deal with
the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will spread the blame for one man's torment
and death, having pointedly and scandalously chosen not to recall and
cross-examine Blair, even though Blair revealed during his appearance before
Hutton that he had lied in "emphatically" denying he had had anything to do
with "outing" Dr David Kelly.
Other guardians have been assiduously at work. The truth of public opposition
to an illegal, unprovoked invasion, expressed in the biggest demonstration in
modern history, is being urgently revised. In a valedictory piece on 30
December, the Guardian commentator and leader writer Martin Kettle wrote:
"Opponents of the war may need to be reminded that public opinion currently
approves of the invasion by nearly two to one."
A favourite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18 November,
the day Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page
headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war
surges". Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed Bush's
visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did not know. As for
support for the war "surging", the absurdly small number questioned still
produced a majority that opposed the invasion.
Across the world, the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon -
by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people are glad he
[Bush] came . . ."), by the equally warmongering William Safire in the New
York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere. Thus, the slaughter in
Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and civil liberties in the west and
the preparation for the next invasion are "normalised".
In "The Banality of Evil", Edward S Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in an
organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation' . . . There is usually a
division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct
brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on
improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more
adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace
patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to
normalise the unthinkable for the general public."
Current "normalising" is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to its
close, it is surely al-Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq, that
casts a darker shadow over Britain's future." How does he know this? The "mass
of intelligence flowing across the Prime Minister's desk", of course! He calls
this "cold-eyed realism", omitting to mention that the only credible
intelligence "flowing across the Prime Minister's desk" was the common sense
that an Anglo-American attack on Iraq would increase the threat from al-Qaeda.
What the normalisers don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the
"coalition" crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls a "misjudgement" - and the true
source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding
journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent
of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For
example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is
suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are
common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach
contaminated sites. Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in
British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore
white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn
them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.
Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery
illnesses" not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By
mid-April last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided
weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells. According to a November 2003
study by the Uranium Medical Research Centre, witnesses living next to Baghdad
airport reported a huge death toll following one morning's attack from aerial
bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then, a vast area has been
"landscaped" by US earth movers, and fenced. Jo Wilding, a British human
rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair
loss, and horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems among people living near
the area. Yet the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International
Atomic Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium
contamination in Iraq. The Ministry of Defence, which has admitted that
British tanks fired depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British
troops "will have access to biological monitoring". Iraqis have no such access
and receive no specialist medical help.
According to the non-governmental organisation Medact, between 21,700 and
55,000 Iraqis died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This includes up
to 9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded
cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative estimates; the
ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined. Neither the US
nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is "not relevant",
according to a US State Department official - just as the slaughter of more
than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated
in a Medical Education Trust study, was "not relevant" and not news.
The normalisers are anxious that this terror is again not recognised (the BBC
confines its use of "terrorism" and "atrocities" to the Iraqi resistance) and
that the wider danger it represents throughout the world is overshadowed by
the threat of al-Qaeda. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty
International USA, has attacked the anti-war movement for not joining Bush's
"war on terror". He says "the left" must join Bush's campaign, even his
"pre-emptive" wars, or risk - that word again - "irrelevance". This echoes
other liberal normalisers who, by facing both ways, provide propaganda cover
for rapacious power to expand its domain with "humanitarian interventions" -
such as the bombing to death of some 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan and the
swap of the Taliban for US-backed warlords, murderers and rapists known as
"commanders".
Schulz's criticism ignores the truth in Amnesty's own studies. Amnesty USA
reports that the Bush administration is harbouring thousands of foreign
torturers, including several mass murderers. By a simple mathematical
comparison of American and al-Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In
the past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in Latin
America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions. Again,
the documentation is in Amnesty's files. The dictator Suharto's seizure of
power in Indonesia was responsible for "one of the greatest mass murders of
the 20th century", according to the CIA. The US supplied arms, logistics,
intelligence and assassination lists. Britain supplied warships and black
propaganda to cover the trail of blood. Scholars now put Suharto's victims in
1965-66 at almost a million; in East Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third
of the population: 200,000 men, women and children.
Today, the mass murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his
billions safe in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by
comparison, there will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained obediently
within the US terror network. (One of Suharto's most outspoken protectors and
apologists in the State Department during the 1980s was Paul Wolfowitz, the
current "brains" behind Bush's aggression.)
In the sublime days before 11 September 2001,when the powerful were routinely
attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or
brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala,
there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on
9/11, there was terrorism.
This is not to say the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not
real; what the normalisers don't want you to know is that the most pervasive
danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism and
scholarship cast always as benign: capable of misjudgement and blunder, never
of high crime. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and
rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military
historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of an endangered
right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism",
inspired by fear of lethal threats. Bush's America, he warns, "has become a
menace to itself and to mankind".
The unspoken truth is that Blair, too, is a menace. "There never has been a
time," said Blair in his address to the US Congress last year, "when the power
of America was so necessary or so misunderstood or when, except in the most
general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our
present day." His fatuous dismissal of history was his way of warning us off
the study of imperialism. He wants us to forget and to fail to recognise
historically the "national security state" that he and Bush are erecting as a
"necessary" alternative to democracy. The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini,
understood this. "Modern fascism," he said, "should be properly called
corporatism, since it is the merger of state, military and corporate power."
Bush, Blair and the normalisers now speak, almost with relish, of opening mass
graves in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest mass
graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf war,
in direct response to a call by President George Bush Sr to "take matters into
your own hands and force Saddam to step aside". So successful were the rebels
initially that within days Saddam's rule had collapsed across the south. A new
start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand.
Then Washington, the tyrant's old paramour who had supplied him with $5bn
worth of conventional arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial
technology, intervened just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves
confronted with the United States helping Saddam against them. US forces
prevented them from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter, and
gave Saddam's Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order to
attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking
photographs, while Saddam's forces crushed the uprising. In the north, the
same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. "The Americans did everything for
Saddam," said the writer on the Middle East SaId Aburish, "except join the
fight on his side." Bush Sr did not want a divided Iraq, certainly not a
democratic Iraq. The New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a guard dog
of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington wanted was a
successful coup by an "iron-fisted junta": Saddam without Saddam.
Nothing has changed. As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime Unchanged,
the most senior and ruthless elements of Saddam's security network, the
Mukha-barat, are now in the pay of the US and Britain, helping them to combat
the resistance and recruit those who will run a puppet regime behind a facade.
A CIA-run and -paid gestapo of 10,000 will operate much as they did under
Saddam. "What is happen-ing in Iraq," writes Rai, "is re-Nazification . . .
just as in Germany after the war."
Blair knows this and says nothing. Consider his unctuous words to British
troops in Basra the other day about curtailing the spread of weapons of mass
destruction. Like so many of his deceptions, this covers the fact that his
government has increased the export of weapons and military equipment to some
of the most oppressive regimes on earth, such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and
Nepal. To oil-rich Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 11 September hijackers
and friend of the Taliban, where women are tormented and people are executed
for apostasy, go major British weapons systems, along with leg irons, gang
chains, shock belts and shackles. To Indonesia, whose unreconstructed,
blood-soaked military is trying to crush the independence movement in Aceh, go
British "riot control" vehicles and Hawk fighter-bombers.
Bush and Blair have been crowing about Libya's capitulation on weapons of mass
destruction it almost certainly did not have. This is the result, as Scott
Ritter has written, of "coerced concessions given more as a means of buying
time than through any spirit of true co-operation" - as Bush and Blair have
undermined the very international law upon which real disarmament is based. On
8 December, the UN General Assembly voted on a range of resolutions on
disarmament. The United States opposed all the most important ones, including
those dealing with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has contingency
plans, spelt out in the Pentagon's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, to use nuclear
weapons against North Korea, Syria, Iran and China. Following suit, the UK
Defence Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that for the first time, Britain
would attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons "if necessary".
This is as it was 50 years ago when, according to declassified files, the
British government collaborated with American plans to wage "preventive"
atomic war against the Soviet Union. No public discussion was permitted; the
unthinkable was normalised. Today, history is our warning that, once again,
the true threat is close to home.
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