NP? the great game speeded up

[Doug Millison]

"The fanatics who attacked America came mostly from Saudi Arabia, the
spiritual home of al-Qaeda and the tutors of the Taliban, but no bombs fell
on that oil-rich American protectorate. According to an American study,
5000 civilians were bombed to death in stricken, impoverished Afghanistan,
where not a single al-Qaeda leader of importance has been caught, or to
anyone's knowledge, killed. Osama bin Laden got clean away, as did the
Taliban ruler Mullah Omah.

After this "victory", hundreds of prisoners, including the Australian David
Hicks, were shipped to an American concentration camp in Cuba, where they
have been held against all conventions of war and international law. No
evidence of their alleged crimes has been produced. In the United States,
more than 1000 people of Muslim background have "disappeared"; none has
been charged. Legislation undermining the Bill of Rights has been rushed
through Congress. For example, the FBI now has the power to go into
libraries and find out who is reading what.

Meanwhile, the British and Australian governments made fools of their
soldiers by insisting they followed America's orders and pursued Afghan
tribesmen opposed to this or that favoured warlord. This is what British
squaddies in puttees and pith helmets did over a century ago when Lord
Curzon, Viceroy of India, described Afghanistan as one of the "pieces on a
chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination
of the world".

There is no war on terrorism. It is the great game speeded up, and now more
dangerous than ever."

[,,,] "In the war against terrorism," said Bush, "we're going to hunt down
these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes." Strictly
speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training
and sanctuary in the US than anywhere in the world. They include mass
murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international
criminals.

There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed
by the President's brother, Jeb. In his book Rogue State, former senior
State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial of
three anti-Castro terrorists who had hijacked a plane to Miami at
knifepoint. "Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to
testify against the men," he wrote, "the defence simply told the jurors the
man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before
acquitting the defendants."

General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived in Florida since the 1990s. He
was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads
closely linked to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper
Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his
torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida
by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at
the UN, lives in Mount Vernon, New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran
the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but is untroubled
in the US.

Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with
the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia.
Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained 60,000 Latin
American soldiers, policemen, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in
terrorism.

In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who
had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had
been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran
Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1966,
the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training
manuals. For aspiring terrorists, these recommended blackmail, torture,
execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.



...continues at
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/02/1023864733062.html
"This is an edited extract from The New Rulers of the World, by John
Pilger, published this month by Pan Macmillan Australia."