[R-G] Pilger: American Terrorist

[Tim Murphy]

Monday, January 12, 2004

New Statesman (London)

American Terrorist

by 

John Pilger

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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