NP Behind the jargon...

[barbara100 at jps.net]

November 26, 2001

Behind the jargon about failed states and 
humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead
John Pilger

http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm

Polite society's bombers may not have to wait long for round two. The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned last week that America could take action against '40 to 50 countries'. Somalia, allegedly a 'haven' for al-Qaeda, joins Iraq at the top of a list of potential targets. Cheered by having replaced Afghanistan's bad terrorists with America's good terrorists, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the Pentagon to 'think the unthinkable', having rejected its 'post-Afghanistan options' as 'not radical enough'.
[...]
The most salient truth will remain taboo. This is that the longevity of America as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists surpasses all. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law is unmentionable. Recently, Denis Halliday, the former assistant secretary general of the UN who resigned rather than administer what he described as a 'genocidal sanctions policy' on Iraq, incurred the indignation of the BBC's Michael Buerk. 'You can't possibly draw a moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior , can you?' said Buerk. [...]
[...]
The twin towers attacks provided Bush's Washington with both a trigger and a remarkable coincidence. Pakistan's former foreign minister Niaz Naik has revealed that he was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was then travelling in central Asia, already gathering support for an anti-Afghanistan war 'coalition'. For Washington, the real problem with the Taliban was not human rights; these were irrelevant. The Taliban regime simply did not have total control of Afghanistan: a fact that deterred investors from financing oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea, whose strategic position in relation to Russia and China and whose largely untapped fossil fuels are of crucial interest to the Americans. In 1998, Dick Cheney told oil industry executives: 'I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.' 

Indeed, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were they welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas, then governed by George W Bush, and entertained by executives of the Unocal oil company. They were offered a cut of the profits from the pipelines; 15 per cent was mentioned. A US official observed that, with the Caspian's oil and gas flowing, Afghanistan would become 'like Saudi Arabia', an oil colony with no democracy and the legal persecution of women. 'We can live with that,' he said. The deal fell through when two American embassies in east Africa were bombed and al-Qaeda was blamed.   
[
] 
For several weeks, the Observer, a liberal newspaper, has published unsubstantiated reports that have sought to link Iraq with 11 September and the anthrax scare. 'Whitehall sources' and 'intelligence sources' are the main tellers of this story. 'The evidence is mounting . . .' said one of the pieces. The sum of the 'evidence' is zero, merely grist for the likes of Wolfowitz and Perle and probably Blair, who can be expected to go along with the attack. In his essay 'The Banality of Evil', the great American dissident Edward Herman described the division of labour among those who design and produce weapons like cluster bombs and daisy cutters and those who take the political decisions to use them and those who create the illusions that justify their use. 'It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media,' he wrote, 'to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.' It is time journalists reflected upon this, and took the risk of telling the truth about an unconscionable threat to much of humanity that comes not from faraway places, but close to home.  


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