ARTICLES FROM THE AFTERMATH OF 9 -11
"Rogue Nation"
by
Richard DuBoff
First published in Z-Magazine
21st December 2001
1. In December 2001, the United States officially
withdrew from the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, gutting the landmark agreement - the
first time in the nuclear era that the US renounced a major arms control accord.
2. 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention ratified by 144 nations including the
United States. In July 2001 the US walked out of a London conference to discuss a 1994
protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections. At
Geneva in November 2001, US Under Secretary of State John Bolton stated that "the
protocol is dead," at the same time accusing Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan,
and Syria of violating the Convention but offering no specific allegations or supporting
evidence.
3. UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms, July 2001: the US
was the only nation to oppose it.
4. April 2001, the US was not re-elected to the UN Human Rights Commission, after years of
withholding dues to the UN (including current dues of $244 million) - and after having
forced the UN to lower its share of the UN budget from 25 to 22 percent. (In the Human
Rights Commission, the US stood virtually alone in opposing resolutions supporting
lower-cost access to HIV/AIDS drugs, acknowledging a basic human right to adequate food,
and calling for a moratorium on the death penalty.)
5. International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty, to be set up in The Hague to try political
leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Signed
in Rome in July 1998, the Treaty was approved by 120 countries, with 7 opposed (including
the US). In October 2001 Great Britain became the 42nd nation to sign. In December 2001
the US Senate again added an amendment to a military appropriations bill that would keep
US military personnel from obeying the jurisdiction of the proposed ICC.
6. Land Mine Treaty, banning land mines; signed in Ottawa in December 1997 by 122 nations.
The United States refused to sign, along with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq,
Vietnam, Egypt, and Turkey. President Clinton rejected the Treaty, claiming that mines
were needed to protect South Korea against North Korea's "overwhelming military
advantage." He stated that the US would "eventually" comply, in 2006; this
was disavowed by President Bush in August 2001.
7. Kyoto Protocol of 1997, for controlling global warming: declared "dead" by
President Bush in March 2001. In November 2001, the Bush administration shunned
negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise the accord, mainly by watering it down in a
vain attempt to gain US approval.
8. In May 2001, refused to meet with European Union nations to discuss, even at lower
levels of government, economic espionage and electronic surveillance of phone calls,
e-mail, and faxes (the US "Echelon" program).
9. Refused to participate in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
sponsored talks in Paris, May 2001, on ways to crack down on off-shore and other tax and
money-laundering havens.
10. Refused to join 123 nations pledged to ban the use and production of anti-personnel
bombs and mines, February 2001
11. September 2001: withdrew from International
Conference on Racism, bringing together 163 countries in Durban, South Africa
12. International Plan for Cleaner Energy: G-8 group of industrial nations (US, Canada,
Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, UK), July 2001: the US was the only one to oppose
it.
13. Enforcing an illegal boycott of Cuba, now being made tighter. In the UN in October
2001, the General Assembly passed a resolution, for the tenth consecutive year, calling
for an end to the US embargo, by a vote of 167 to 3 (the US, Israel, and the Marshall
Islands in opposition).
14. Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty. Signed by 164 nations and ratified by 89
including France, Great Britain, and Russia; signed by President Clinton in 1996 but
rejected by the Senate in 1999. The US is one of 13 non-ratifiers among countries that
have nuclear weapons or nuclear power programs. In November 2001, the US forced a vote in
the UN Committee on Disarmament and Security to demonstrate its opposition to the Test Ban
Treaty.
15. In 1986 the International Court of Justice (The Hague) ruled that the US was in
violation of international law for "unlawful use of force" in Nicaragua, through
its actions and those of its Contra proxy army. The US refused to recognize the Court's
jurisdiction. A UN resolution calling for compliance with the Court's decision was
approved 94-2 (US and Israel voting no).
16. In 1984 the US quit UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and
ceased its payments for UNESCO's budget, over the New World Information and Communication
Order (NWICO) project designed to lessen world media dependence on the "big
four" wire agencies (AP, UPI, Agence France-Presse, Reuters). The US charged UNESCO
with "curtailment of press freedom," as well as mismanagement and other faults,
despite a 148-1 in vote in favor of NWICO in the UN. UNESCO terminated NWICO in 1989; the
US nonetheless refused to rejoin. In 1995 the Clinton administration proposed rejoining;
the move was blocked in Congress and Clinton did not press the issue. In February 2000 the
US finally paid some of its arrears to the UN but excluded UNESCO, which the US has not
rejoined.
17. Optional Protocol, 1989, to the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, aimed at abolition of the death penalty and containing a provision banning the
execution of those under 18. The US has neither signed nor ratified and specifically
exempts itself from the latter provision, making it one of five countries that still
execute juveniles (with Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria). China
abolished the practice in 1997, Pakistan in 2000.
18. 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
The only countries that have signed but not ratified are the US, Afghanistan, Sao Tome and
Principe.
19. The US has signed but not ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
which protects the economic and social rights of children. The only other country not to
ratify is Somalia, which has no functioning government.
20. UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966, covering a
wide range of rights and monitored by the Committee on Economic,Social and Cultural
Rights. The US signed in 1977 but has not ratified.
21. UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,1948. The US
finally ratified in 1988, adding several "reservations" to the effect that the
US Constitution and the "advice and consent" of the Senate are required to judge
whether any "acts in the course of armed conflict" constitute genocide. The
reservations are rejected by Britain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece,
Mexico, Estonia, and others.
22. Is the status of "we're number one 1" Rogue," overcome by generous
foreign aid to given less fortunate countries_ The three best aid providers, measured by
the foreign aid percentage of their gross domestic products, are Denmark (1.01%), Norway
(0.91%), and the Netherlands (0.79%), The three worst: USA (0.10%), UK (0.23%), Australia,
Portugal, and Austria (all 0.26%).
"I plead guilty to the charge of
`foaming malevolence' "
by
Mark Steel
The Independent
20th September 2001
Dare to suggest that there may just possibly be a slight link between America's past
behaviour and the hijackings, and out pour the accusations. If you do, you are said to be
guilty of "foaming malevolence", according to one paper yesterday. Because all
decent people know the only humanitarian response is to shake your head, mutter a sentence
containing the words "evil" and "monsters" and demand that someone,
somewhere gets bombed.
Maybe they argue amongst themselves, these types. Perhaps they approach a fellow columnist
and say, "How callous to describe the terrorists as `evil' when they're at least
`despicably evil' - though I care more than anyone, because I wrote: `Words can't describe
this despicable evil.' Top that."
Strangely, many of those who appear the most horrified haven't always been so sensitive
about the loss of innocent lives. They managed to watch the Gulf War on telly, for
example, and even seemed to enjoy the experience. I wonder whether Iraqi TV showed the New
York disaster in the same way we covered the bombing of Baghdad. Maybe a panel of experts
sat around a table chatting about the extraordinary accuracy of the pilots, while the
presenter said, "And we're being told that so far there's not a single Iraqi
casualty, so that really is fantastic news, isn't it_"
Some people are almost poetic in their selective grief. On Radio 4 one morning we were
treated to an `adviser' to Vladimir Putin, sombrely running through his "evils"
and "despicables", beside himself with bewilderment at how anyone could cause
such carnage. Well, if I was his counsellor I might suggest he works through his confusion
by asking the bloke he advises: who slaughtered 50,000 civilians in the city of Grozny_
Some Palestinians were so malicious they danced in the streets, raged the newspaper that
screamed "Gotcha!" after the drowning of 300 conscripted Argentinians. It could
be argued that that was different, because they weren't civilians. But the 500 women and
children blasted by a cruise missile in a Baghdad bomb shelter certainly were. As were
countless Nicaraguans, or one million Vietnamese, such as the victims in this account of
the My Lai massacre by US forces: "The killings began without warning. Soldiers began
shooting women and children who were kneeling, weeping and praying round a temple.
Villagers were killed in their homes. Helicopters shot down those who fled. Many of the
GIs were laughing, `Hey, I got me another one. Chalk one up for me.' Soldiers took breaks
to rest and smoke before resuming the killing."
Maybe this was a long time ago and therefore irrelevant to today's story, except that when
George Bush senior launched the war against Iraq, he promised that it "won't be like
Vietnam, where we were fighting with one hand tied behind our back". And this has
summed up their attitude ever since - "We lost in Vietnam because we were too bloody
liberal." All that stopping for fags between killings, it's no wonder they lost.
Then there was Chile and Lebanon and so on, thousands of innocent people with innocent
families, amongst them firemen and fathers and people with faces who were never displayed
on the centre pages of the Daily Mail, never remembered with silences at the start of
football matches.
So how can it be explained, this erratic caring of presidents and advisors and those who
are opposed to "foaming malevolence"_
Could it be that their grieving is, perchance, in some way politically motivated_ That
they weep not for the devastated families, shell-shocked citizens and unimaginable torment
of the victims, but in horror and disbelief that this could happen to America_
Now the selective grievers demand retribution, and don't seem too bothered who against.
The implication is that anything less than devastation of somewhere or other would be
showing a lack of respect for the victims. Like teenage lovers, they're pleading: "Go
on, you'd do it if you really, really cared."
So, it looks as if Afghanistan will do for a start - though I can't see the point in
bombing buildings there, since the Taliban seem happy to blow them up themselves. After a
cruise missile strike, they'd probably send Bush a note saying, "Cheers George,
that's saved us from doing that infidel street, with its provocative curvy bit."
Still, there's probably a Chinese Embassy somewhere that could be flattened.
So now an atrocity is likely to be answered with atrocity, together with the inevitable
webs of lies bound up as part of a package. Already we're told that the CIA satellites can
"pinpoint a cigarette". Really. Yet they haven't the foggiest idea where Bin
Laden is. I suppose the one thing they didn't reckon on was that he doesn't smoke. If only
he stopped for one occasionally between killings, they'd have him in a flash.
You can be - and if you're human, should be - extraordinarily moved by both sets of
victims. But if you're only extraordinarily moved by the victims on one side, you're at
least halfway to foaming.
As Mark Steel's article above vividly illustrates, the overwhelming bias towards what Noam Chomsky terms 'worthy victims' is highly prevalent in the Western press. To suggest that the US and other Western states have culpability in the deaths of 'unworthy victims' is simply not newsworthy. Who now remembers what happened to the Sudanese people after the US detsroyed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in August 1998, claiming it manufactured chemical weapons_ Who knows that between 10,000 and 30,000 people have died in Sudan, directly and indirectly, as a result_ And who remembers what happened in Bhopal, India in 1984_ The death tolls of just these two these terrible events puts the attacks on the World Trade Centre in a very grim perspective.
Here's another, concise, accurate, and even more passionate article by a former Booker prize winner....
The algebra of infinite justice
by
Arundhati Roy
Justice for Bhopal - Corporate Crimes and Their Body Count
Published on July 15, 2002
by Rahul Mahajan
Recently, Americans have been focused on corporate crimes that cheated stockholders and
taxpayers out of money to benefit executives and politicians.
This week we must focus on a crime that cost thousands their lives, as executives and
politicians try to cut a deal to escape what little accountability remains.
To persuade us of its importance, Rashida Bi -- one victim of that corporate crime -- is
risking her life on hunger strike (for constant updates on the hunger strike, as well as
details about the strikers' demands, see ).
The story began goes back to the 1984 Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India, which
released a cloud of methyl isocyanate (MIC), hydrogen cyanide, and other toxins. Somewhere
between 4000 and 8000 people died at the time, and victims' advocates estimate that in
total over 20,000 have died as a
result of this largest industrial accident ever, with 150,000 suffering continuing
injuries and medical problems
The cause was extreme corporate malfeasance. The plant was not up to minimal Union Carbide
safety standards -- large quantities of MIC were unwisely stored in a heavily populated
area, the refrigeration unit for the MIC (which is supposed to kept at temperatures below
32 F) was deliberately kept turned off to save $40 per day in Freon costs, the safety
systems were dismantled, and the alarm system was turned off. This even though the same
plant had earlier suffered potentially lethal accidental releases of gases like the deadly
nerve agent phosgene. Both civil and criminal charges were filed, including a charge of
culpable homicide against Warren Anderson, then Carbide's CEO.
The civil case was settled, after extreme obstructionism on the part of Carbide, for a
paltry $470 million -- a few hundred dollars each for victims still suffering a
nightmarish array of cancer, tuberculosis, severe birth defects, reproductive and
menstrual abnormalities, eye problems, and more. The settlement, reached without
consulting the victims, was so favorable that when it transpired Carbide's stock jumped
two points.
Carbide's callousness is so extreme that it has disclosed neither the exact chemical
composition of the gas cloud, calling it a "trade secret," nor the results of
its own medical studies on the effects of MIC. As a result, the few doctors available to
help the victims have great difficult working out the best methods of treatment.
The U.S. government has consistently refused to honor its own extradition treaty with
India, which requires it to send Anderson to be tried in India for his reckless
indifference to human life.
Dow Chemical, which acquired Union Carbide in 2001, refuses to admit any liability for
Carbide's actions. Dow also plans to mass-market Dursban, a product banned by the EPA in
2000 because it can cause severe neurological damage (especially to children), to Indians
as a household insecticide (see ).
This happy state of affairs, however, is not enough for Dow. It has also pressured the
Vajpayee government in India to reduce the charges on Anderson and others from
"culpable homicide" to "hurt by negligence," a non-extraditable
offense -- and also to use part of the pathetically low compensation to victims for
cleanup of the area, shifting liability from the polluter to the victims of the pollution.
The final decision on some charges will be made on July 17.
Rashida, another victim named Tara Bai, and activist Satinath Sarangi of the Bhopal Group
for Action and Information are ready to fast to the death to prevent these moves. Although
the fast is just into its third week, because of the extreme heat in Delhi and the
crippling effects of gas injuries, Rashida and Tara are failing fast.
The fast is also intended to draw world attention to the continuing exigent circumstances
of Carbide's victims. For years, none of the victims had access to any sustained
affordable medical care. More recently, the Sambhavna trust (), a nonprofit NGO, provides some
care to about 10,000, barely 6% of the total number of surviving victims. At least 5000
families must still regularly drink water contaminated by mercury and roughly a dozen
volatile organic compounds as a result of the accident.
It is easy to focus on the shameful complicity of the Indian government, which has
consistently shown more interest in courting foreign investors than in the health of its
citizens -- and activists are calling for Americans to complain to the Indian ambassador
(see ).
It's also clear that Dow must be held accountable.
But let's not forget the actions of our own government, which consistently goes to bat for
U.S. corporations, no matter how disgusting their actions. Enron was a major beneficiary,
with both Clinton and Bush officials on numerous occasions pressuring India, Mozambique,
Argentina, and countless other countries into signing sweetheart deals that benefited
Enron stockholders and not their own people (see ).
Enron was hardly unusual, however; U.S. corporations count on this kind of coercion in
their international dealings. Although this latest initiative is still new, and there is
as yet no direct evidence in the news that U.S. government officials are running
interference for Dow, whatever we find out later - presumably after the hunger strikers
are dead - will hardly come as a surprise, with the most pro-corporate administration in
U.S. history currently in power.
Recent scandals make it very clear that we are governed by politicians who are little more
than corporate shills, enriching themselves as they defraud the public. This is no mere
matter of individuals, but a cancer at the heart of our political system. Rashida and her
associates remind us that these scandals are not just about ill-gotten gains for a few
folks like George W. Bush. They have a body count.
Three Indian activists are on hunger strike in New
Delhi, ready to fast to the death in protest of proposed Indian government actions that
would essentially eliminate the responsibility of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical (which
acquired Carbide in 2001) to provide any further restitution for the approximately 150,000
surviving victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial accident in history. A
woman in Texas is about to join them on hunger strike (see )
We are asking people to take two actions:
1. Register protest of Indian government actions with the Indian ambassador to the United
States. There is a form (with more info) at
2. Write to Dow and urge it to accept its legal liability for Carbide's actions, to do
more to provide for the victims, and to abandon its plans to
introduce the toxic pesticide Dursban, banned by the EPA, into Indian households. A form
is available at .
If you are interested in helping in other ways, please email
Thank you,
India Action
Dirty Bombs and Civil Rights
NY Times [Lead Editorial]
June 12, 2002
The word from Washington yesterday was that Abdullah al-Muhajir, the American citizen
accused of plotting a "dirty bomb" attack on the United States, may never be
given a trial, or at least not anytime soon. "We are not interested in trying and
punishing him at the moment," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared
yesterday. "We are interested in finding out what he knows." What the Bush
administration must realize is that its job, even during these challenging times, is to do
both: to investigate terrorism while also protecting the constitutional rights of those
caught in the dragnet.
Mr. Muhajir is an American of Puerto Rican descent who was born Jose Padilla in Brooklyn,
grew up in Chicago and changed his name as part of his conversion to Islam. Federal law
enforcement officials contend that he became part of Al Qaeda's terrorist network, and
that he talked with network leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan about a plot to build and
detonate a radioactive bomb. Mr. Muhajir was taken into custody on May 8 at O'Hare
International Airport in Chicago, upon returning from Pakistan.
It is difficult, at least at this point, to gauge the strength of the case against Mr.
Muhajir. He was picked up on a material witness warrant and has not been charged with any
crime. Law enforcement officials concede that whatever he might have been plotting never
got beyond the discussion stage. So far, the government has produced no evidence that a
dirty-bomb plot existed, or of Mr. Muhajir's role in one. We do, however, have President
Bush's assurance, given when he was meeting with members of Congress at the White House
yesterday, that "This guy Padilla is a bad guy."
If Mr. Muhajir's case had proceeded along the normal criminal-law path, it would have
triggered procedures designed to protect his rights. He was scheduled for a hearing
yesterday at which prosecutors might have had to decide whether to charge him with a
crime. And he would have been able to challenge his detention; a federal judge in New York
ruled recently that material witnesses cannot be held indefinitely. Instead the government
chose to label Mr. Muhajir, who is now in a high-security jail in South Carolina, an
"enemy combatant." The administration contends that merely by labeling him in
this way, it can hold him indefinitely.
The government's position is unacceptable. Our Constitution guarantees that those
suspected of crimes must be informed of the charges against them, be able to confront
their accusers, consult with a lawyer and have a speedy and open trial. But that means
very little if the government can revoke all those rights merely by labeling someone a
combatant. And as Mr. Mujahir's case shows, the government is prepared to strip away the
rights of American citizens as readily as those of foreigners.
The real problem with the government's approach is one that has been evident since Sept.
11: The Bush administration has too little faith in the criminal justice system. The
government must be vigilant about fighting terrorism, but this war can be waged without
suspending the Constitution.
Summer of All Fears
NY Times
June 12, 2002
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON -- Washingtonians are well known for being hypersensitive to the elements. A
dusting of snow or a heat wave can shut down schools. A Code Red unhealthy air alert, as
we had here yesterday, leaves the streets deserted.
So you can imagine the panic spread by the prospect of radioactive mist settling on
monuments, and uranium-laced, cell-mutating gamma rays ricocheting down Pennsylvania
Avenue.
John Ashcroft's announcement that the military has in custody a bona fide Al Qaeda
operative who was exploring how to set off a dirty bomb in D.C. or elsewhere was designed
both to make our teeth chatter and our gratitude well up. Weren't we thankful that the
Bushies were finally catching somebody and protecting us_
To maximize the drama of the moment, Ashcroft aides went into the Justice Department in
the pre-dawn hours to prepare the attorney general to give the news live by satellite from
Moscow.
On the Hill yesterday, Republican lawmakers were using headlines about the dirty-bomb plot
to try to hurriedly push through the president's homeland security makeover.
"This is what's at stake," said Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas.
"This kind of attack, using chemical, biological, nuclear weapons, radiological
weapons, or some other kinds of suicide bombers of the kind we've seen. We must act
quickly."
It's bad enough that the terrorists are using fear as a device. Does the Bush
administration have to do the same thing_
The Islamic enemy strums on our nerves to hurt our economy and get power. The American
president strums on our nerves to help his popularity and retain power.
Both the bad guys and the good guys are playing with our heads and ratcheting up the fear
factor.
If you'd only paid cursory attention lately, you'd think the government had grabbed the
offensive against terrorists and that the C.I.A. and F.B.I. were now cuddle buddies. But
the question is being asked here: Is the Bush crowd hyping things_
First the government leaked word that it had identified a Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11
plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a development hailed as an investigative coup. But the creep
is still at large.
Then the president unveiled his Homeland Security Department plan. But yesterday even top
Republicans were dubious about whether it could work without the F.B.I. and C.I.A. under
its umbrella.
And on Monday Mr. Ashcroft, Bobby Three Sticks and Paul "Bomb Iraq" Wolfowitz
breathlessly told the nation that they had thwarted a scary radiological bombing plot.
In its eagerness to convince itself and us that it has prevented something, the Bush
administration has built up the dirty bomber into an Atta-like terrorist capable of
leveling downtown Washington.
But privately it acknowledges that he may be far less than that. The plotter was a Chicago
street punk named Jose Padilla, a hothead with a long criminal record who was thrown in
jail in Florida for shooting at a motorist in a road-rage incident.
Even law enforcement officials and counterterrorism experts were skeptical about whether
he had the brains, know-how and materials to build a dirty bomb from scratch, or whether
he was even an officially sanctioned Qaeda terrorist.
"There is no indication he had the means to do it or was given the authority to do
it," said a law enforcement official in New York familiar with the case. "It is
a bit of stretch to say he was here to do it."
The mind games of fear begin with Abu Zubaydah, the U.S. captive, one of Osama bin Laden's
top lieutenants, who fingered Padilla.
Based on nuggets and head fakes given to them by Zubaydah, American agents are fanning out
all over the world, possibly going on wild goose chases. Some of his tips have checked
out, some have not.
The feds do not know for sure if Zubaydah is playing them, or if he has led them into a
wilderness of mirrors. With Padilla, is Zubaydah throwing agents a decoy_ A small fish
that they're turning into a big marlin, while there's another Mohamed Atta running around
undetected in this country_
The Qaeda leadership has regrouped. Osama and Mullah Omar are out there scheming
somewhere. But Mr. Ashcroft says we can sleep more soundly tonight: Jose Padilla, Chicago
street thug, is in the brig.
We won't deny our consciences
Prominent Americans have issued this statement on the war on terror
Friday June 14th 2002
The Guardian
Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government
declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. The signers
of this statement call on the people of the US to resist the policies and overall
political direction that have emerged since September 11 and which pose grave dangers to
the people of the world.
We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free
from military coercion by great powers. We believe that all persons detained or prosecuted
by the US government should have the same rights of due process. We believe that
questioning, criticism, and dissent must be valued and protected. We understand that such
rights and values are always contested and must be fought for.
We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own
governments do - we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name.
Thus we call on all Americans to resist the war and repression that has been loosed on the
world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral and illegitimate. We choose to
make common cause with the people of the world.
We too watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. We too mourned the
thousands of innocent dead and shook our heads at the terrible scenes of carnage - even as
we recalled similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City and, a generation ago, Vietnam. We too
joined the anguished questioning of millions of Americans who asked why such a thing could
happen.
But the mourning had barely begun, when the highest leaders of the land unleashed a spirit
of revenge. They put out a simplistic script of "good v evil" that was taken up
by a pliant and intimidated media. They told us that asking why these terrible events had
happened verged on treason. There was to be no debate. There were by definition no valid
political or moral questions. The only possible answer was to be war abroad and repression
at home.
In our name, the Bush administration, with near unanimity from Congress, not only attacked
Afghanistan but arrogated to itself and its allies the right to rain down military force
anywhere and anytime. The brutal repercussions have been felt from the Philippines to
Palestine. The government now openly prepares to wage all-out war on Iraq - a country
which has no connection to the horror of September 11. What kind of world will this become
if the US government has a blank cheque to drop commandos, assassins, and bombs wherever
it wants_
In our name the government has created two classes of people within the US: those to whom
the basic rights of the US legal system are at least promised, and those who now seem to
have no rights at all. The government rounded up more than 1,000 immigrants and detained
them in secret and indefinitely. Hundreds have been deported and hundreds of others still
languish today in prison. For the first time in decades, immigration procedures single out
certain nationalities for unequal treatment.
In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. The
president's spokesperson warns people to "watch what they say". Dissident
artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and
suppressed. The so-called Patriot Act - along with a host of similar measures on the state
level - gives police sweeping new powers of search and seizure, supervised, if at all, by
secret proceedings before secret courts.
In our name, the executive has steadily usurped the roles and functions of the other
branches of government. Military tribunals with lax rules of evidence and no right to
appeal to the regular courts are put in place by executive order. Groups are declared
"terrorist" at the stroke of a presidential pen.
We must take the highest officers of the land seriously when they talk of a war that will
last a generation and when they speak of a new domestic order. We are confronting a new
openly imperial policy towards the world and a domestic policy that manufactures and
manipulates fear to curtail rights.
There is a deadly trajectory to the events of the past months that must be seen for what
it is and resisted. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to
resist. President Bush has declared: "You're either with us or against us." Here
is our answer: We refuse to allow you to speak for all the American people. We will not
give up our right to question. We will not hand over our consciences in return for a
hollow promise of safety. We say not in our name. We refuse to be party to these wars and
we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare. We
extend a hand to those around the world suffering from these policies; we will show our
solidarity in word and deed.
We who sign this statement call on all Americans to join together to rise to this
challenge. We applaud and support the questioning and protest now going on, even as we
recognise the need for much, much more to actually stop this juggernaut. We draw
inspiration from the Israeli reservists who, at great personal risk, declare "there
is a limit" and refuse to serve in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
We draw on the many examples of resistance and conscience from the past of the US: from
those who fought slavery with rebellions and the underground railroad, to those who defied
the Vietnam war by refusing orders, resisting the draft, and standing in solidarity with
resisters. Let us not allow the watching world to despair of our silence and our failure
to act. Instead, let the world hear our pledge: we will resist the machinery of war and
repression and rally others to do everything possible to stop it.
From:
Michael Albert
Laurie Anderson
Edward Asner, actor
Russell Banks, writer
Rosalyn Baxandall, historian
Jessica Blank, actor/playwright
Medea Benjamin, Global Exchange
William Blum, author
Theresa Bonpane, executive director, Office of the Americas
Blase Bonpane, director, Office of the Americas
Fr Bob Bossie, SCJ
Leslie Cagan
Henry Chalfant,author/filmmaker
Bell Chevigny, writer
Paul Chevigny, professor of law, NYU
Noam Chomsky
Stephanie Coontz, historian, Evergreen State College
Kia Corthron, playwright
Kevin Danaher, Global Exchange
Ossie Davis
Mos Def
Carol Downer, board of directors, Chico (CA) Feminist Women's Health Centre
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, professor, California State University, Hayward
Eve Ensler
Leo Estrada, UCLA professor, Urban Planning
John Gillis, writer, professor of history, Rutgers
Jeremy Matthew Glick, editor of Another World Is Possible
Suheir Hammad, writer
David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology, CUNY Graduate Centre
Rakaa Iriscience, hip hop artist
Erik Jensen, actor/playwright
Casey Kasem
Robin DG Kelly
Martin Luther King III, president, Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Barbara Kingsolver
C Clark Kissinger, Refuse & Resist!
Jodie Kliman, psychologist
Yuri Kochiyama, activist
Annisette & Thomas Koppel, singers/composers
Tony Kushner
James Lafferty, executive director, National Lawyers Guild/LA
Ray Laforest, Haiti Support Network
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun magazine
Barbara Lubin, Middle East Childrens Alliance
Staughton Lynd
Anuradha Mittal, co-director, Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First
Malaquias Montoya, visual artist
Robert Nichols, writer
Rev E Randall Osburn, executive vice president, Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Grace Paley
Jeremy Pikser, screenwriter
Jerry Quickley, poet
Juan Gumez Quiones, historian, UCLA
Michael Ratner, president, Centre for Constitutional Rights
David Riker, filmmaker
Boots Riley, hip hop artist, The Coup
Edward Said
John J Simon, writer, editor
Starhawk
Michael Steven Smith, National Lawyers Guild/NY
Bob Stein, publisher
Gloria Steinem
Alice Walker
Naomi Wallace, playwright
Rev George Webber, president emeritus, NY Theological Seminary
Leonard Weinglass, attorney
John Edgar Wideman
Saul Williams, spoken word artist
Howard Zinn, historian
Contact the Not In Our Name statement
If Mr. Bush doesn't want talk of outrageous conspiracies, then let's merely speculate a little. The followin garticle, in retrospect on many htmlects, was stunningly accurate, considering that it was written just one week later.
Why Washington Wants Afghanistan
by
Jared Israel, Rick Rozoff & Nico Varkevisser
18th September 2001
Emperor's Clothes
"Does my country really understand that this is World War III_ And if this attack
was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead."
- Thomas Friedman, 'New York Times,' September 13, 2001
Key U.S. government representatives and media figures have used the bombing of the WTC and
Pentagon to create an international state of fear. This has swept Washington's closest
allies (notably Germany and England, though not Italy) into agreeing carte blanche to
participate in U.S. reprisals.
It has also served to obscure a most important question: does Washington have a hidden
agenda here, a strategy other than hurling bombs_ If so, what
is it, and what does it mean for the world_
Amid the increasingly implausible and frequently contradictory explanations [1] offered by U.S. government officials for their inability or
unwillingness to intervene effectively before and during this past vTuesday's aerial
attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. - and as the cries for war drown out voices of
reason - a deadly scenario is unfolding.
Columns in major mainstream newspapers have borne such titles as:
"World War III" ('New York Times,' 9/13)
"Give War A Chance" ('Philadelphia Inquirer,' 9/13)
"Time To Use The Nuclear Option" ('Washington Times,' 9/14)
A government that claims it had no knowledge of or was at a loss knowing how to deal with
painstakingly organized terrorist attacks, now calls for "exterminating"
previously unseen assailants by "ending states who sponsor terrorism," in the
words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. [2]
Henry Kissinger argues ('Los Angeles Times,' 9/14) that alleged terrorist networks must be
uprooted wherever they exist. Former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu writes an article
entitled "Dismantle Terrorist Supporting Regimes" ('Jerusalem Post,' 9/14). And
to raise the level of international intimidation a notch, we have R.W. Apple, Jr. in the
'Washington Post' (9/14):
"In this new kind [of] war...there are no neutral states or geographical confines. Us
or them. You are either with us or against us."
Initially, a mix of countries was threatened as so-called 'states supporting terrorism,'
who are not with us and therefore against us: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan
and Syria. Although differing in most respects, especially political ideology, they are
alike three ways: They all bear decades of U.S. government hostility; they all have
secular governments; they all have no connection to Osama bin Laden.
In, "Give War A Chance" ('Philadelphia Inquirer') David Perlmutter warns that if
these states do not do Washington's bidding, they must:
"Prepare for the systematic destruction of every power plant, every oil refinery,
every pipeline, every military base, every government office in the entire country...the
complete collapse of their economy and government for a generation."
[My note: These actions are fundamental breaches of the
Geneva Conventions and The Nuremberg Charter, and other than attacking a military base,
war crimes each and every one.]
Meanwhile, the countries which collaborated to create
the Taliban, training and financing the forces of Osama bin Laden, and which have never
stopped
pouring money into the Taliban, namely Pakistan, close U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates, and the United States itself (documentation below) have not been
placed on the "we've got to get them"list. Instead these states are touted as
core allies in the New World War against terrorism.
Raising the pitch, yesterday:
"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the US would engage in a 'multi-headed
effort' to target terrorist organizations and up to 60 countries believed to be supporting
them. The US, Mr. Rumsfeld told American TV, "had no choice" other than to
pursue terrorists and countries giving them refuge."
The threats to bomb up to a third of the world's countries has scared many people,
worldwide. This, we think, is the intention. It serves two functions.
First, it means that if Washington limits its aggressive action mainly to attacking
Afghanistan, the world will breathe a sigh of relief.
And we think Washington will mainly attack Afghanistan - at first. Other immediate
violations of sovereignty, such as the forced use of Pakistan, will be backup action to
support the attack on Afghanistan.. There may also be some state terror, such as
increased, unprovoked bombing of Iraq, as a diversion. But the main immediate focus will,
we think, be Afghanistan.
Second, this scare tactic is meant to divert attention from Washington's real strategy,
far more dangerous than the threat to bomb many states. Washington wants to take over
Afghanistan in orderto speed up the fulfillment of its strategy of pulverizing the former
Soviet Republics as Washington in the same way that Washington has been pulverizing the
former Yugoslavia. This poses the gravest risks to mankind.
WHAT DOES WASHINGTON WANT WITH IMPOVERISHED AFGHANISTAN_
To answer this question, look at any map of Europe and Asia. Consider the immense spread
of the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia.
European Russia is 1,747,112 square miles. That's between a third and half the landmass of
all Europe. Add the Asian part of Russia and you get 6,592,800 sq. mi. That's equal to
most of the US and China combined. More than half of Africa.
Russia borders Finland on the far West. It borders Turkey and the Balkans on the south. It
extends to the edge of Asia in the Far East. It is the rooftop of Mongolia and China.
Not only is Russia spectacularly large, with incalculable wealth, mostly untapped, but it
is the only world class nuclear power besides the U.S. Contrary to popular opinion,
Russia's military might has not been destroyed; indeed, it is arguably stronger, in
relation to the US, than during the early period of the cold war. It has the most
sophisticated submarine technology in the world.
If the U.S. can break up Russia and the other former Soviet Republics into weak
territories, dominated by NATO, Washington would have a free hand. Despite talk of Russia
and the U.S. working together, this remains the thrust of US policy. [3]
Afghanistan is strategically placed, not only bordering Iran, India and even, for a small
stretch, China (!) but most important, sharing borders and a common religion with the
Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union (SU), Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and
Tajikistan. These in turn border Kazakhstan, which borders Russia.
Central Asia is strategic not only for oil, as we are often told, but more important for
position. Were Washington to take control of these Republics, NATO would have military
bases in the following key areas: the Baltic region; the Balkans and Turkey; and these
Republics. This would constitute a noose around Russia's neck.
Add to that Washington's effective domination of the former Soviet Republics of Azerbaijan
and Georgia, in the south, and the US would be positioned to launch externally instigated
'rebellions' all over Russia.
NATO, whose current doctrine allows it to intervene in states on its periphery, could then
initiate "low intensity wars" including the use of tactical nuclear weapons,
also officially endorsed by current NATO doctrine, in 'response' to myriad 'humanitarian
abuses.'
It is ironic that Washington claims it must return to Afghanistan to fight Islamist
terrorism, because it was precisely in its effort to destroy Russian power that Washington
first created the Islamist terrorist apparatus in Afghanistan, during the 80s.
This was not, as some say, rewriting history, a matter of aiding rebels against Russian
expansionism. Whatever one thinks about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, it was in
fact conceived as a defensive action to preserve, not alter, the world balance of power.
It was the United States which took covert action to 'encourage' Russian intervention,
with the goal of turning the conservative rural Afghan tribesmen into a force to drain the
Soviet Union. This is admitted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the key National Security chief at
the time.
Consider excerpts from two newspaper reports. First the 'N.Y. Times':
"The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United
States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory
targeted last week [this was published after the August, 1998 U.S. missile attack on
Afghanistan], a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden
has financed a kind of 'terrorist university,' in the words of a senior United States
intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency."
"... some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are
now fighting under Mr. bin Laden's banner...." ('NY Times,' 24 August 1998 pages
A1 & A7 )
And this from the London 'Independent':
"The Afghan Civil War was under way, and America was in it from the start - or
even before the start, if [former National Security Adviser, and currently top foreign
policy strategist Zbigniew] Brzezinski himself is to be believed. '"We didn't push
the Russians to intervene,' he told an interviewer in 1998, 'but we consciously increased
the probability that they would do so. This secret operation was an excellent idea. Its
effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap. You want me to regret that_'
"The long-term effect of the American intervention from cold-warrior Brzezinski's
perspective was 10 years later to bring the Soviet Union to its knees. But there were
other effects, too. "To keep the war going, the CIA, in cahoots with Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan's military intelligence agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate),
funneled millions and millions of dollars to the Mujahedeen. It was the remotest and the
safest form of warfare: the US (and Saudi
Arabia) provided funds, and America also a very limited amount of training. They also
provided the Stinger missiles that ultimately changed the face of
the war.
"Pakistan's ISI did everything else: training, equipping, motivating, and advising.
And they did the job with panache: Pakistan's military ruler at the time, General Zia ul
Haq, who himself held strong fundamentalist leanings, threw himself into the task with a
passion." ('The Independent' (London) 17 September 2001)
Right up to the present, U.S. ally Saudi Arabia has been perhaps the key force in
maintaining the Taliban. BUt the U.S. has helped directly, as well. Despite the Taliban's
monstrous record of humanitarian abuse:
"The Bush administration has not been deterred. Last week it pledged another $ 43
million in assistance to Afghanistan, raising total aid this year to $124 million and
making the United States the largest humanitarian donor to the country."
Why have the US and its allies continued - up to now - to fund the Taliban_ And why
nevertheless is the US now moving to attack its monstrous creation_
It is our conviction, and that of many observers from the region in question, that
Washington ordered Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fund the Taliban so the Taliban could do a
job: consolidate control over Afghanistan and from there move to destabilize the formerly
Soviet Central Asian Republics on its borders.
But the Taliban has failed. It has not defeated the Russian-backed Northern Alliance.
Instead of subverting Central Asia in businesslike fashion, it has indulged in blowing up
statues of Buddha and terrorizing people who deviate from the most regressive
interpretation of Islam.
At the same time, Russia has been moving in the 'wrong' direction. The completely
controllable Yeltsin has been replaced with President Putin, who partially resists the
U.S., for example, putting down the CIA-backed takeover of Chechnya by Islamist
terrorists, linked to Afghanistan. Worse, China and Russia have signed a mutual defense
pact. And despite immense European/U.S. pressure, Russian President Putin refused to
condemn Belarussian President Lukashenko who, like the jailed but unbroken Yugoslav
President Milosevic, calls for standing up to NATO.
It is this unfavorable series of developments that has caused Washington to increase its
reliance on Washington's all-time favorite tactic: extreme brinkmanship.
Thus, on the very eve of recent Belarussian presidential elections:
"[Ambassador to Belarus Michael Kozak wrote to a British newspaper that]
America's 'objective and to some degree methodology are the same' in Belarus as in
Nicaragua, where the US backed the Contras against the left-wing Sandinista Government in
a war that claimed at least 30,000 lives." ("The Times" (UK), 3
September 2001.) [4]
As you may recall, the Contras were a U.S.-financed terrorist outfit that specialized in
attacking farming villages and slaughtering supporters of the left-wing nationalist
Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Just as a few weeks ago, U.S. Ambassador Kozak openly advocated a policy of state terror
against the former Soviet Republic of Belarus in the Baltic area - for no phrase other
than 'state terror' can describe the U.S. sponsorship of the Contras in Nicaragua -
Washington has decided to intervene directly in strategic Afghanistan, set smack in the
middle of Asia and positioned so as to complete a three-pronged encirclement of Russia:
Central Asia, the Balkans and the Baltic.
Washington has cynically used the mass slaughter at the World Trade Center and the lesser
attack on the Pentagon to rally its NATO forces, invoking Article Five of NATO's charter,
under which all members of NATO must respond to an attack on any one, with the goal of:
a) putting together a "peacekeeping force" for Afghanistan
b) launching air and possibly ground attacks
c) eliminating the obstinate and incompetent leadership of theTaliban, and
d) taking direct control through the creation of a U.S. dominated NATO military
presence.
Some argue that NATO would be crazy to try to pacify Afghanistan. They say the British
failed to do it in the 1800s, and the Russians failed in the 1980s.
But Washington does not need or intend to pacify Afghanistan. It needs to create a
military presence sufficient to organize and direct indigenous forces to penetrate the
Central Asian republics and instigate armed conflict, to (as we shall hear groups like
Human Rights Watch saying soon enough) "free victims of humanitarian abuses from the
oppressive hand of soviet style governments," etc.
Rather than trying to defeat the Taliban, Washington will make the Taliban an offer they
cannot refuse: fight the U.S., and die, or join it, getting plenty of money and guns, plus
a free hand to handle the drug trade, just as the U.S. has permitted the KLA to make a
fortune from drugs in the Balkans. [5]
This would duplicate what Washington did in Kosovo, training and consolidating a Kosovo
Liberation Army-type terrorist force, in this case out of elements of the Taliban and
others, and directing this army against the former Soviet Central Asian Republics, just as
it has directed the KLA against Macedonia. At the same time it could increase its offers
of military assistance to these same Republics, thus penetrating the region on both sides
of conflict in fact instigated by Washington, simultaneously attacking and defending
Central Asia - precisely as it has done in Macedonia. The goal: decimated, NATO-dominated
territories in place of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. [6]
This strategy cannot be sold to the American people. We repeat: it cannot be sold.
It is for that reason, that the Bush administration is using the tragic nightmare of
murder in New York, which itself occurred under circumstances suggesting the complicity of
American covert forces, to create an international hysteria in order to drag NATO into the
strategic occupation of Afghanistan and an intensified assault on the former Soviet Union.
[7]
Before anyone sighs with relief, thinking, "Thank God this is all that's
happening," consider that apart form the violation of national sovereignty and many
other very negative htmlects of Washington's plans, the attack on Afghanistan brings NATO
to Russia's Central Asian doorstep. This is a strategic escalation of conflict, moving us
all much closer - nobody knows how much closer and nobody knows how fast things will
escalate - to worldwide nuclear war.
Will Washington get away with it_ Washington, and the giant capitalists who control it,
obviously think Russia will let itself be destroyed. But then, as the Greeks say,
"Pride is followed by self-destruction."
The Russians are very deceptive. They try to avoid a fight. But as Mr. Hitler discovered,
when they are pushed to the wall, they fight with the ferocity of lions. And they have
tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Thus Washington is playing with the possibility of a war which would make the horror that
occurred last Tuesday at the World Trade Center, or even the much larger-scale horror of
NATO's terror-bombing of Yugoslavia, look like minor incidents. [8]
Further Reading:
[1] 'Criminal Negligence
or Treason' Can be read at
[2] Like a man with a guilty conscience, the U.S. government
and its NATO allies constantly denounce terror, while in fact routinely using it in
international affairs. See for example:
'WASHINGTON: PARENT OF THE TALIBAN AND COLOMBIAN 'DEATH SQUADS' at
'WHAT NATO OCCUPATION WOULD MEAN FOR MACEDONIANS' First-hand report of the state of terror
instituted when NATO took over Kosovo. Can be read at
''Five Years On & the Lies Continue.' Discussion of the use by the U.S.-sponsored
Islamist regime in Sarajevo of systematic terror against Serbian villagers in Bosnia. Can
be read at
'Meet Mr. Massacre' - Concerning U.S. Balkans envoy William Walker's death squad
activities in Latin American. Can be read at
[3] 'Why is NATO Decimating the Balkans and Trying to Force
Milosevic to Surrender_' by Jared Israel and Nico Varkevisser. Can be read at
[4] 'Tough Measures Justified in Belarus' by Jared Israel at
[5] 'WASHINGTON: PARENT OF THE TALIBAN AND COLOMBIAN DEATH
SQUADS' by Jared Israel. Can be read at
[6] 'SORRY VIRGINIA BUT THEY ARE NATO TROOPS, NOT 'REBELS'
Can be read at
[7] - Click here please. [My note:
sorry....have lost the link.]
[8] 'Yugoslav Auto Workers Appealed to NATO's Humanity...'
Can be read at
[9] Rick Rozoff takes a critical look at Washington's
response to Tuesday's tragedies in 'Bush's Press Conference: Into the Abyss' at
[10] While Washington points to Osama bin Laden as
"suspect # 1" in yesterday's horrific violence, the truth is not being told to
the American people: 'Washington Created Osama bin Laden' by Jared Israel can be read at
[11] If one looks carefully, one can find in the
Western media evidence that bin Laden has been involved - on the U.S.-backed side - in
Kosovo, Bosnia and now Macedonia. Can be read at
[12] Bin Laden was propelled into power as part of the U.S.
drive to create an Islamist terrorist movement to crush the former Soviet Union. See, the
truly amazing account from the 'Washington Post,' 'Washington's Backing of Afghan
Terrorists: Deliberate Policy.' at
[13] Head of Russian Navy says official scenario couldn't
have happened. See 'Russian Navy Chief Says Official 9-11 Story Impossible' at
[14] Emperor's Clothes has interviewed Rudi Dekkers from the
Huffman Aviation facility, at which two of the hijack suspects were students a year ago.
Though Mr. Dekkers' told the interviewer he had received many calls, the media has not
published his comments. The interview was taped and the text on Emperor's Clothes is a
verbatim transcript, including the grammatical errors common in daily speech. See
"Interview With Huffman Aviation Casts Doubt on Official Story" at
HOON'S TALK OF PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKES COULD BE
CATASTROPHIC
by
HUGO YOUNG
THE DEFENCE SECRETARY'S DEFIANCE MAKES NUCLEAR WAR
MORE LIKELY
Before Jack Straw went to the subcontinent to lecture India and Pakistan on the
consequences of nuclear war, he irritably brushed aside a pertinent question. Asked by
John Humphrys why they should pay attention to a country that had itself never renounced
first use of nuclear weapons, he said everyone knew the prospect of Britain (and the US
and France) using nuclear weapons was "so distant as not to be worth
discussing". It sounded like a reassuring platitude. In fact it was about as
misleading an answer as can be found in the entire record of Britain's conduct as a
nuclear power.
Normally, British ministers are reticent about their nuclear weapons. The standard formula
is to say, if asked, that we don't rule anything out if anyone attacks us. All this has
now changed. The first person who says nuclear use is worth discussing happens to be
Straw's colleague, Geoff Hoon, the defence
secretary. In March, Hoon said, in the context of Iraq: "I am absolutely confident,
in the right conditions, we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons."
Those who heard him say this, including some expert advisers, were startled. Such
explicitness broke a norm that even Washington has usually observed. But they thought it
was an accidental one-off occurring, as it did, at the end of a select committee session
and without obvious premeditation. However, a few days later Hoon gave more particulars to
Jonathan Dimbleby, insisting that the nuclear option would be taken pre-emptively, if we
thought British forces were about to be attacked by Iraqi chemical or biological weapons.
My colleague Richard Norton-Taylor reported and commented on this at the time, but there
was little political fall-out.
Then, to make sure we understood, Hoon said it for a third time, telling the full House of
Commons: "A British government must be able to express their view that, ultimately
and in conditions of extreme self-defence, nuclear weapons would have to be used."
This triple whammy, insisting on Britain's right to use nukes, pre-emptively if necessary,
against states of concern that aren't themselves nuclear powers, has made the quietest of
impacts. Yet it has no precedent in the policy of any government, Labour or Conservative.
It's not merely the words that are new. Some officials close to high policy making tried
to pretend to me that Hoon was merely saying what any informed interpreter of British
nuclear policy could have known all along. This is nonsense. Dr Stephen Pullinger, author
of an instructive recent Isis paper on military
options against Iraq, shows clearly how much has changed.
In cold war days Britain, like Nato as a whole, opposed a policy of no-first-use because
we feared superior Warsaw pact conventional forces might make the nuclear option
imperative to save Europe. The scenario Hoon envisages is quite different. Instead of
deploying nukes in a conflict initiated by the other side, we claim the right to start
nuclear war before any attack is made; and we contemplate doing so, for the first time,
against a state that is neither nuclear itself nor allied with a nuclear power.
The best case for this language is that it's intended to be deterrent. Leaders unversed in
the calculations that sustained nuclear inertia in the cold war need to be reminded in
plainest detail of the terrible risks they might be running. That certainly seems to be
true of Pakistan. But if further evidence were needed of how much has changed in the case
of Iraq, it's supplied by what happened under the Major government, at which time Saddam
Hussein was deterred from using chemical and biological (CB) weapons, which he had in
plenty, by less apocalyptic means. John Major was asked about that at the start of the
Gulf war. He said Britain had a range of weapons and resources to deal with CB attacks on
her troops. "We [do] not envisage the use of nuclear weapons," he added.
"We would not use them."
It's still possible to argue that his successors are engaged in sabre-rattling against a
reckless enemy, though Saddam didn't show that kind of recklessness in 1991. There's not
much doubt, either, that Iraq is trying to become nuclear-equipped. Maybe intelligence
sources think they're closer to getting there than the public can be allowed to know, and
far sooner than outside experts have contemplated. In which case a break with the old
nuclear grammar might start to be defensible.
What's more obviously happening is a change in the rules of the game being written in
Washington. Hoon's readiness to import first-strike thinking into his public discourse,
which has shocked old nuclear hands, is consistent with many hours spent in the company of
the visitor whom Tony Blair and he received in Downing Street yesterday, the US defence
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. The Pentagon's nuclear posture review, leaked in March,
scatters nuclear threats around the globe, listing Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and North
Korea, as well as any Chinese threat to Taiwan, as potentially necessary first-strike
targets. It also
spells out a plan for the US to develop new nuclear weapons, allegedly low-yield,
"smart", mini not mega, perhaps bunker-busting bombs eventually applicable
against al-Qaida's caves and Saddam's labs alike.
Britain has no such weaponry. Our usable nukes are almost entirely on top of Trident
ICBMs. Is this what Hoon means we might use against Baghdad_ What exactly would be our
targets_ How hard have we thought about Iraqi civilian casualties_ Or about what we say
when Saddam turns out to have survived our nuclear strike_ These are questions of detail,
which the defence secretary should surely answer. But more general issues arise from the
strategic turmoil that's replacing the nuclear discipline of the cold war.
First, what's supposed to happen to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the bulwark on
which so much depends_ A crucial element of the treaty was the 1978 pledge by the US,
Britain and the Soviet Union never to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states,
except when they started a war in alliance with a nuclear state. In 1995, China and France
joined in reiterating this. More than 180 non-nuclear states accepted the deal. If the US
or Britain takes Iraq as a pretext to break the promise, what's to stop many countries
rushing to acquire the only weaponry they think might keep them safe_
Second, and more acutely, we're witnessing the banalisation of nuclear weapons. Suddenly
they seem to have lost their unique horror. Pakistan and India needed teaching about the
truth, and may yet not have learned it even with a potential 12 million deaths held out
for their inspection. The British case is much worse. The defence secretary's strutting
defiance makes the nuclear option sound like merely a stepped-up version of a regular
battlefield weapon. Every time he flourishes it, his insouciance renders it more normal,
instead of the most terrible calamity that could be visited on the earth. Any use of it,
by any power, at any time, would fit such a description. What is it about our times that
allows a Labour minister - a Labour minister - to forget that_
Copyright 2002 The Guardian.
There is a firestorm coming, and it is being provoked
by Mr Bush
by
Robert Fisk
More and more, President Bush's rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of Osama bin
Laden
The Independent, 25th May 2002
So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is
fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt
he was attacking Hitler in Berlin - his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut,
killing thousands of civilians, "Hitler" being the pathetic Arafat - have we had
to listen to claptrap like this. But the fact that we Europeans had to do so in the
Bundestag on Thursday - and, for the most part, in respectful silence - was extraordinary.
I'm reminded of the Israeli columnist who, tired of the wearying invocation of the Second
World War to justify yet more Israeli brutality, began an article with the words: "Mr
Prime Minister, Hitler is dead." Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war
that was fought and won before most of us were born_ Do we have to live forever with
living, diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or
Roosevelt_ "He's a dictator who gassed his own people," Mr Bush reminded us for
the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam
viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time, was on
Saddam's side.
But there is a much more serious side to this. Mr Bush is hoping to corner the Russian
President, Vladimir Putin, into a new policy of threatening Iran. He wants the Russians to
lean on the northern bit of the "axis of evil", the infantile phrase which he
still trots out to the masses. More and more, indeed, Mr Bush's rhetoric sounds like the
crazed videotapes of Mr bin Laden. And still he tries to lie about the motives for the
crimes against humanity of 11 September. Yet again, in the Bundestag, he insisted that the
West's enemies hated "justice and democracy", even though most of America's
Muslim enemies wouldn't know what democracy was.
In the United States, the Bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be
nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with
exploding belts - note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli
colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America's ever weirder "war on
terror" - and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush,
Vice-President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
over the past three days, you'll find they've issued more threats against Americans than
Mr bin Laden.
But let's get back to the point. The growing evidence that Israel's policies are America's
policies in the Middle East - or, more accurately, vice versa - is now being played out
for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the
chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee announcing that Hizbollah - the
Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israel's demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year
2000 - is planning attacks in the US. After that, we had an American television network
"revealing" that Hizbollah, Hamas and al- Qa'ida - Mr bin Laden's organisation -
have held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US.
American journalists insist on quoting "sources" but there was, of course, no
sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American media. Then
take the "Syrian Accountability Act" that was introduced into the US Senate by
Israel's friends on18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israel's Foreign
Minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards "operate freely" on
the southern Lebanese border. Now there haven't been Iranian Revolutionary Guards in
Lebanon - let alone the south of the country - for 18 years. So why is this lie repeated
yet again_
Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threat - its
"terrorism" status has been heightened by the State Department - and so is Iraq.
But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister held personally responsible by Israel's own
enquiry for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, is -
according to Mr Bush - "a man of peace". How much further can this go_ A long
way, I fear.
The anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East is palpable. Arab newspaper
editorials don't come near to expressing public opinion. In Damascus, Majida Tabbaa has
become famous as the lady who threw the US Consul Roberto Powers out of her husband's
downtown restaurant on 7 April . "I went over to him," she said, "and told
him, 'Mr Roberto, tell your George Bush that all of you are not welcome - please get
out'." Across the Arab world, boycotts of American goods have begun in earnest.
How much longer can this go on_ America praises Pakistani President Musharraf for his
support in the "war on terror", but remains silent when he arranges a
dictatorial "referendum" to keep him in power. America's enemies, remember, hate
the US for its "democracy". So is General Musharraf going to feel the heat_
Forget it. My guess is that Pakistan's importance in the famous "war on terror"
- or "war for civilisation" as, we should remember, it was originally called -
is far more important. If Pakistan and India go to war, I'll wager a lot that Washington
will come down for undemocratic Pakistan against democratic India.
Across the former Soviet southern Muslim republics, America is building air bases, helping
to pursue the "war on terror" against any violent Muslim Islamist groups that
dare to challenge the local dictators. Please do not believe that this is about oil. Do
not for a moment think that these oil and gas-rich lands have any economic importance for
the oil-fuelled Bush administration. Nor the pipelines that could run from northern
Afghanistan to the Pakistani coast if only that pesky Afghan loya jirga could elect a
government that would give concessions to Unocal, the oddly named concession whose former
boss just happens to be a chief Bush "adviser" to Afghanistan.
Now here's pause for thought. Abdelrahman al-Rashed writes in the international Arabic
daily Asharq al-Awsat that if anyone had said prior to 11 September that Arabs were
plotting a vast scheme to murder thousands of Americans in the US, no one would have
believed them. "We would have charged that this was an attempt to incite the American
people against Arabs and Muslims," he wrote. And rightly so.
But Arabs did commit the crimes against humanity of 11 September. And many Arabs greatly
fear that we have yet to see the encore from the same organisation. In the meantime, Mr
Bush goes on to do exactly what his enemies want; to provoke Muslims and Arabs, to praise
their enemies and demonise their countries, to bomb and starve Iraq and give uncritical
support to Israel and maintain his support for the dictators of the Middle East.
Each morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great
foreboding. There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival;
indeed, we are provoking it.
SchNEWS
Issue 355
Friday 17th May 2002
AMERICAN WET DREAM
On Tuesday the UN Security Council unanimously voted to overhaul the economic sanctions
against Iraq - a move so radical it was immediately condemned by the sanctions-busting
group Voices in the Wilderness, four of whom are currently in Iraq distributing medical
supplies. They called the resolution "a deadly fraud that will do little to alleviate
the ongoing humanitarian crisis."
Forget the cruel tyrant Saddam Hussein (once supported by the West when he towed their
line), what about the ordinary people of Iraq_ Who, thanks to these economic sanctions
imposed on them by the West for nearly 12 years have seen 500,000 of their children die.
Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck, who were both at one time responsible for the UN's
humanitarian programme in Iraq, both resigned in protest at what the sanctions were doing.
Last year they wrote, "The death of 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to
contaminated water, lack of medicines and malnutrition."
And it will be the ordinary Iraqi people who will again be suffering if President Bush and
his cronies use their so-called war on terrorism to start bombing a country, that has
already been bombed back to the dark ages. The Pentagon's 'medium case scenario' is that a
war on Iraq could condemn to death more than 10,000 civilians. But this could be even
worse if, as journalist John Pilger puts it, the Americans "implement their current
strategy of 'total war' and target Iraq's electricity and water."
Not that we should forget that American and British aircraft have, in a largely forgotten
war, been bombing Iraq week-in week-out, for more than four years. The Wall Street Journal
reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" because "few targets
remain." "We're down to the last outhouse" bemoaned a Pentagon official.
Still, the US insists that action is necessary because Iraq has been defying United
Nations resolutions and represents an imminent threat to the world, and to the U.S. in
particular. Excuse us, but defying UN resolutions and ignoring international treaties is
what the Bush administration does best, with Bush making it clear that he will not honour
any treaty if he reckons it might harm U.S. interests. In fact just last week Bush pulled
out of the International Criminal Court - you know that radical idea to create the world's
first permanent tribunal to prosecute people for war crimes, genocide, and other crimes
against humanity (see SchNEWS 326).
Bush and his militaristic government argue that they have to bomb Iraq because Saddam
won't comply with United Nations weapons inspectors. So best forget that the Bush
administration denied international inspectors access to U.S. chemical and biological
weapons-related facilities because it might violate "commercial interests".
Still the truth slipped out earlier this month when US Secretary of State Colin Powell
said "regardless of what the inspectors do, the people of Iraq and the people of the
region would be better off with a different regime in Baghdad." Not that SchNEWS
could disagree with that - a lot of countries would be better off without dictators and
corrupt governments - it's just the US wants another Saddam Hussein, but this time one
who'll do what they say.
Meanwhile Cuba is now being added to the US hit list, because hey the US right has always
hated Cuba. In a speech entitled 'Beyond the Axis of Evil', Under Secretary of State John
Bolton pointed the finger at Cuba because of the country's advanced biomedical industry.
Forget that Cuba's advance biomedics has more do with their better-than-the-US Health
Service and their policy of sending doctors to help third world countries (so hey, let's
add them to the list). Plus Castro's visits last year to three "rogue states"
accused by the US state department of sponsoring terrorism: Iraq, Syria and Libya.
"States that renounce terror and abandon WMD [weapons of mass destruction] can become
part of our effort," Mr Bolton said. "But those that do not can expect to become
our targets."
So it's back to that old "you are either with us or against us" mantra. Each new
stage of the war against terrorism makes it clearer that the real aim has little to do
with what happened on September 11th and more to do with what the American military
describes as "full spectrum dominance". A document from the US Space Command
spells it out: "The United States will remain a global power and exert global
leadership. Widespread communications will highlight disparities in resources and quality
of life - contributing to unrest in developing countries." So while everyone else
must abandon those weapons of mass destruction the US this week got the green light from
Russia this week to go ahead with its plan for the National Missile Defence Project or
Star Wars II to keep us all in check (SchNEWS 307).
Rotten Apple Pie
When it comes to Israel of course then it's a different tune. Israel has been defying U.N.
resolutions for more than 30 years. No action has been taken against their bloody and
illegal rampage through Palestine. Hey, they were after terrorists. They face no sanctions
for blocking a United Nations fact-finding mission into military action at the Jenin
refugee camp. In fact their two fingers to the world earned them a serious reprimand in
the US Senate who er.... voted for an increase in military aid to Israel.
Is this because the Palestinian civilians, just like the Iraqis and the five thousand
Afghani civilians killed in the last holy war against terror, are what John Pilger calls
the Unpeople. "The killing of Iraqi infants, like the killing of Chechens, like the
killing of Afghan civilians, is rated less morally abhorrent than the killing of
Americans."
America's war on terrorism is just another word for imperialism - and Iraq is currently
head of its wish list of countries where a new head of state needs to be put in place, one
that will be a lot more open to Uncle Sam's way of doing things.
Behind 'Plot' on Hussein, a Secret Agenda
by
SCOTT RITTER
Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector in
Iraq, is author of "Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem, Once and for All"
(Simon & Schuster, 1999).
President Bush has reportedly authorized the CIA to use all of the means at its
disposal-including U.S. military special operations forces and CIA paramilitary teams-to
eliminate Iraq's Saddam Hussein. According to reports, the CIA is to view any such plan as
"preparatory" for a larger military strike.
Congressional leaders from both parties have greeted these reports with enthusiasm. In
their rush to be seen as embracing the president's hard-line stance on Iraq, however,
almost no one in Congress has questioned why a supposedly covert operation would be made
public, thus undermining the very mission it was intended to accomplish.
It is high time that Congress start questioning the hype and rhetoric emanating from the
White House regarding Baghdad, because the leaked CIA plan is well timed to undermine the
efforts underway in the United Nations to get weapons inspectors back to work in Iraq.
In early July, the U.N. secretary-general will meet with Iraq's foreign minister for a
third round of talks on the return of the weapons monitors. A major sticking point is
Iraqi concern over the use-or abuse-of such inspections by the U.S. for intelligence
collection.
I recall during my time as a chief inspector in Iraq the dozens of extremely fit
"missile experts" and "logistics specialists" who frequented my
inspection teams and others. Drawn from U.S. units such as Delta Force or from CIA
paramilitary teams such as the Special Activities Staff (both of which have an ongoing
role in the conflict in Afghanistan), these specialists had a legitimate part to play in
the difficult cat-and-mouse effort to disarm Iraq. So did the teams of British radio
intercept operators I ran in Iraq from 1996 to 1998-which listened in on the conversations
of Hussein's inner circle-and the various other intelligence specialists who were part of
the inspection effort.
The presence of such personnel on inspection teams was, and is, viewed by the Iraqi
government as an unacceptable risk to its nation's security.
As early as 1992, the Iraqis viewed the teams I led inside Iraq as a threat to the safety
of their president. They were concerned that my inspections were nothing more than a front
for a larger effort to eliminate their leader.
Those concerns were largely baseless while I was in Iraq. Now that Bush has specifically
authorized American covert-operations forces to remove Hussein, however, the Iraqis will
never trust an inspection regime that has already shown itself susceptible to infiltration
and manipulation by intelligence services hostile to Iraq, regardless of any assurances
the U.N. secretary-general might give.The leaked CIA covert operations plan effectively
kills any chance of inspectors returning to Iraq, and it closes the door on the last
opportunity for shedding light on the true state of affairs regarding any threat in the
form of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Absent any return of weapons inspectors, no one
seems willing to challenge the Bush administration's assertions of an Iraqi threat. If
Bush has a factual case against Iraq concerning weapons of mass destruction, he hasn't
made it yet.
Can the Bush administration substantiate any of its claims that Iraq continues to pursue
efforts to reacquire its capability to produce chemical and biological weapons, which was
dismantled and destroyed by U.N. weapons inspectors from 1991 to 1998_ The same question
applies to nuclear weapons. What facts show that Iraq continues to pursue nuclear weapons
htmlirations_Bush spoke ominously of an Iraqi ballistic missile threat to Europe. What
missile threat is the president talking about_ These questions are valid, and if the case
for war is to be made, they must be answered with more than speculative rhetoric.
Congress has seemed unwilling to challenge the Bush administration's pursuit of war
against Iraq. The one roadblock to an all-out U.S. assault would be weapons inspectors
reporting on the facts inside Iraq. Yet without any meaningful discussion and debate by
Congress concerning the nature of the threat posed by Baghdad, war seems all but
inevitable.
The true target of the supposed CIA plan may not be Hussein but rather the weapons
inspection program itself. The real casualty is the last chance to avoid bloody conflict.
The axis of nonsense
The Guardian
15th May 2002
Washington's war is going a la carte. Each passing week is placing both new targets and
new justifications for attack on the menu for military action. There is now not the
slightest pretence that the scope of the US's regime-change wishlist is in any way
tethered to the attacks of September 11. Instead, the world is witnessing the rapid
emergence of a plan to dispose of any government hateful to the sight of US
ultra-conservatism.
First there was the Taliban. Beyond them lay the improbable axis of evil - at the apex of
which is Iraq, clearly still the next target for the unilateral attentions of the
Pentagon. Now the administration's planning has moved "beyond the axis of evil",
in the words of John Bolton, one of the creatures of the night occupying sub-cabinet rank
in the Bush regime. The under-secretary of state identified Syria, Libya and, above all,
Cuba as states that needed to come round to Washington's view of the world before
Washington comes round to them, guns blazing.
The rationale behind the Bolton addendum to the axis - threadbare is perhaps too kind a
word for it - is that the latest "rogue" trio are preparing to threaten the US
with weapons of mass destruction. It is therefore paradoxical that Mr Bolton's boss,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, was at almost the same time asserting that weapons of
mass destruction were no longer really here nor there. When it comes to removing Saddam
Hussein from power, Powell said, the issue of weapons inspection was now to be considered
"separate and distinct and different" from the need for "regime
change".
That may seem prudent: with no justification to hand, why not make it clear that
justifications are no longer required_ So rumours of possessing weapons of mass
destruction may serve as sufficient pretext to get a regime on to the "must
change" list, but the subsequent provable absence of them will not get it off again.
Only the British government is still playing along with the pretence. Everyone else has
twigged that this is not a "war on terrorism", nor a "war on weapons of
mass destruction". Nor can the nudge-and-a-wink sponsors of the coup against
Venezuela's elected government convince anyone other than hapless Foreign Office junior
Denis MacShane that they are leading a "war for democracy".
It is instead an open-ended war to make the world congenial for the most chauvinistic
elements in US public life. Every government in the world they dislike is to be removed,
every grudge they have been nursing from the cold war (there can be no other reason for
targeting Fidel Castro) is to be exorcised. Military force may be used in some cases;
while in others the well-tried methods of destabilisation, sanctions and coup will be
deployed.
Where evidence and argument fail, the administration relies on effrontery. The national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, demanded that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez
"respect the constitution" on the day he was restored to office, following the
failure of the US-backed military coup against the constitution. Bolton, Rice et al seem
to regard themselves as masters of the universe, and show every sign of planning to
implement their maximum global programme before the US people gets the chance to elect
anyone slightly more sensible.
Optimistic Europeans have clung to the illusion that September 11 would help Bush
rediscover the rest of the world. If it has, then that world is to be called Texas. That
may recommend itself to a British prime minister eager to dock benefits from the
impoverished parents of children who truant, a Lone Star idea if ever there was one.
However, he is almost alone. Even governments and peoples who may admire the US economic
and political system increasingly fear the brazen lawlessness of this administration, and
worry at the implications of the endless war, with its ever-expanding list of governments
to be ousted.
Already the axis of evil embraces governments of widely differing kinds on three
continents. Now, three more countries have been casually added to the hitlist. And who can
believe that this represents the limit of US ambitions_ The Bush administration and its
friends don't seem to like Europeans much either. Tony Blair may imagine that by
supporting the war to make the world safe for the US, he is helping in some way to make
the US safe for the world. Every utterance from John Bolton and his cronies exposes the
hollowness of that pretension. Britain appears to be determined to defend the
ever-increasingly indefensible - right over the edge of the abyss.
Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition.
Rense.com
Documentary Of US 'War Crimes' In Afghanistan Stuns Europe
By Clive Freeman in Berlin
13th June
2002
American soldiers have been involved in the torture and murder of captured Taliban
prisoners, and may have aided in the "disappearance" of up to 3,000 men in the
region of Mazar-i-Sharif, according to Jamie Doran, an Irish documentary film-maker.
Doran's latest film, Massacre At Mazar, was shown on Wednesday in in the Reichstag,
the German parliament building in Berlin, and there were immediate calls for an
international commission to be set up to investigate charges made in the documentary.
Andrew McEntee, a leading international human rights lawyer, who has viewed the film
footage and read full transcripts, believes there is prima facie evidence of
serious war crimes having been committed by American soldiers in
Afghanistan. 'The Americans did whatever they wanted.' McEntee, who was in
Berlin for Wednesday's special screening, said war crimes had been committed not
just under international law but, also, "...under the laws of the United States
itself"
Much of the footage shown in Doran's 20-minute documentary was taken secretly, and
although witnesses were said to be living in fear of reprisal from within Afghanistan
itself they had all agreed to appear at any future international war crimes tribunal to
give evidence, it was claimed.
One witness in the film claimed he had seen an American soldier break an Afghan prisoner's
neck and pour acid on others. "The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no
power to stop them," he alleged. Sometimes prisoners who were beaten up and taken
outside had "disappeared", he
said.
In other sequences witnesses, among them two men, claimed they had been forced to drive
into the desert with hundreds of Taliban prisoners. The living were then summarily shot
while 30 to 40 American soldiers purportedly stood by, it was alleged. The prisoners had
been taken there on the orders of the local American commander, according to the
documentary.
In the film, an Afghan witness admitted to killing prisoners himself, and another officer,
allegedly a senior officer in the army of deputy defence minister Dostum's forces, was
said to have gone into hiding following threats to his life.
The far-left Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) arranged for the special showing of
'Massacre At Mazar' in the Reichstag. Party chairman Roland Claus
was cautious regarding its content but did spoke of its attempt at
"authenticity."
Andre Brie, a PDS member of the European Parliament, concerned by reports of ill treatment
of Taliban prisoners, said he would be in favour of
an
international commission looking into "disturbing" questions raised by the
film. At a press conference Brie said he had known of Doran's dangerous film
activity in Afghanistan, and had helped to support him financially. The PDS
party faction had wanted to obtain authentic footage of the war in Afghanistan, he
said.
The film was due to be screened at the European Parliament in Strasbourg later on
Wednesday evening.
Sapa-DPA
ANTI-TERRORISM AS A COVER FOR TERRORISM
By
Edward S. Herman
During the Cold War the United States supported a string of terror states, from the
immediate post-World War backing given Thailand dictator Phibun Songkhram, "the first
pro-Axis dictator to regain power after the war," to its support of Suharto, Marcos,
Mobutu, Diem, Duvalier, Trujillo, Somoza, Pinochet and a string of murderous military
regimes in Latin America. This was all done on the rationale of needing to "stop
Communism," but this excuse was used in cases where the threat was non-existent and
laughable.
In May 1954, just one month before the United States
overthrew an elected government in Guatemala with a proxy army from dictator Somoza's
territory in Nicaragua, the National Security Council issued a report on the threat of
"Guatemalan Aggression in Latin America," and in a mode of panic described that
tiny country as "increasingly an instrument of Soviet aggression in this
hemisphere." Guatemala had not moved an inch outside its territory, was virtually
disarmed by a U.S. boycott, and was quickly overthrown a month later. Did the NSC really
believe their hysterical nonsense_ Whether they did or not this was a wonderfully
convenient ploy to deflect attention from the U.S. desire to dominate the hemisphere, and
it was used regularly to create governments of terror that quickly opened their doors to
foreign investment and kept labor markets as "flexible" as the transnationals
and IMF might desire.
Anti-communism was a superb rhetorical instrument for rationalizing U.S. support of
convenient terrorism, and in the 1954 Guatemala case and regularly elsewhere the
mainstream media helped make it work.
There was some reaction to U.S. support of terror regimes in the Carter years in the
1970s, with a claim that this country should give a little more attention to "human
rights." This new look never took hold, except in government rhetoric (and in the
Carter years aid to Indonesia was stepped up as its attack on East Timor reached genocidal
levels in 1977-1978, and relations with Marcos, the Brazilian generals and Mobutu remained
solid). But with the coming of Reagan there was a famous turn-about: from our devotion to
human rights we were going to turn our attention to "terrorism," announced
Secretary of State Alexander Haig in 1981. It was alleged that the Soviet Union was behind
a terror network, and in a book that became the bible of the Reagan administration, The
Terror Network, Claire Sterling claimed a Soviet hand everywhere, from support of
terrorists that threatened governments from Italy and Germany to Argentina and South
Africa.
The problem with this new look is that it focused only on retail terrorism--and
selectively--and ignored state terrorism. It attended to the Red Brigades and
Baader-Meinhof gang in Italy and Germany, but neglected the Cuban refugee terrorist
network working out of Miami, Savimbi and Renamo in Angola and Mozambique, and the
Nicaraguan contras--these were OUR terrorists, therefore "freedom fighters" or
ignored. Even more important, Reagan supported Marcos, Suharto, the murderous governments
of El Salvador and Argentina, and "constructively engaged" South Africa. These
were premier state terrorists; South Africa, crossing its borders into the neighboring
states and killing scores of thousands, was probably the leading terrorist state in the
1980s. Kaddafi's Libya was an insignificant terrorist state by comparison. Argentina,
which Reagan rushed to embrace in 1981, was also a violent terrorist state, and in a
report on the history of that regime sponsored by the Alfonsin government after the
military government's ouster in 1984, it was stated that "the armed forces responded
to the terrorists' crimes with a terrorism infinitely worse than that which they
were combatting." But this had never registered in the U.S. mainstream media while
that terrorism took place; they had always called the retail terrorists terrorists, but
not the "infinitely worse" state terrorists. The Alfonsin report was given very
little attention, and in a miracle of propaganda service the Reagan administration,
supporting the world's worst terrorists, engaging in it directly by military actions in El
Salvador and Nicaragua, and sponsoring terrorism by supporting the Nicaraguan contras and
Savimbi in Angola (among others), was allowed to be fighting terrorism!
So coming to George W. Bush's new dedication to fighting terrorism, we are in familiar
territory. The rule is that terrorism is what the U.S. government says it is--if it or its
allies or clients do precisely the same thing as the named terrorists, that is not
terrorism, by rule of affiliation. Thus, if we bombed Serbian civilian facilities to
intimidate that population, killing many hundreds, that cannot be terrorism because we did
it. It isn't put this crudely of course, it is
merely understood, a silent double standard, just as it is tacitly understood that
international law applies to others but not to us.
And if we have refused to allow Iraq to import equipment to repair its destroyed water
treatment plants, and if this and the overall sanctions regime kills hundreds of thousands
of civilians, as we strive to remove or control Saddam Hussein, this intimidation and
large-scale killings is not terrorism, because we are doing it. U.S. support of the
Colombian army (and indirectly, its paramilitaries) is not sponsoring terrorism, despite
the thousands killed and scores of thousands displaced each year, because we cannot
sponsor terrorism by definition. Similarly, although Ariel Sharon's crucial role in the
killings at Sabra and Shatila, Qibya, and elsewhere gives him a civilian death toll that
exceeds that of Carlos the Jackal by better than fifteen to one, Carlos is EVIL, a major
terrorist, whereas Sharon is accepted and supported as Prime Minister of Israel and is not
labelled a terrorist. Israel, also, can invade Lebanon repeatedly, maintain a murderous
"contra" army in Lebanon, and kill and expropriate freely in its occupied
territories, without designation as a terrorist state or sponsor of terrorism, by rule of
affiliation.
And George W. Bush can threaten to attack Afghanistan if its Taliban rulers (or faction)
does not surrender bin Laden, without providing the Taliban with any evidence of his
participation in the World Trade Center/Pentagon bombings, putting large numbers of
Afghanis into flight for fear of bombing; and Bush can force Pakistan to close its
borders, threatening the several million Afghanis already in peril of starvation with
accelerated death--but nowhere in the mainstream media is this described as terrorism,
although it fits perfectly the dictionary definition: "a mode of governing, or
opposing government, by
intimidation."
I noted earlier that during the Cold War the Red Threat provided the intellectual cover
for support of a string of terror states that served U.S. political and economic
interests. The Bush war on terrorism is already providing the same kind of cover for
supporting OUR terror regimes, and they have been delighted with the new developments.
Benjamin Netanyahu could barely contain his pleasure at the bombings, barely catching
himself to note his regrets at the deaths! "It's very good....well, not very good,
but it will generate immediate sympathy." Sharon immediately stepped up his own
campaign of intimidation, and the new war on terrorism plays into his hands, as Israel has
long been perceived to be only a victim of terror, fighting terrorism, but never itself
engaging in terror; therefore a natural ally in the war on terrorism from whom we can
learn much. Only the Palestinians terrorize and are never obliged to fight terrorism.
Bush is strengthening ties with Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, and Indonesia, among other
states that engage in serious terror, just as Reagan built his relationship with South
Africa, Argentina, Marcos, and the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s.
There wasn't an insurmoutable public relations problem then and there hasn't been a
problem currently, because the mainstream media take it as gospel that we are virtuous and
terrorists are those who we say are terrorists. The liberal E. J. Dionne, Jr., writes that
"Progressives who believe in justice should be able to back war on terror"
(Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 29, 2001). In the great tradition of apologetics for U.S.
and U.S. sponsored terrorism, Dionne never bothers to discuss what terror is; he just
takes it as a patriotic premise that his country never engages in it, or supports it. He
follows his predecessors, who never discussed whether overthrowing the elected government
of Guatemala in 1954 was legal, moral, or based on a real Red Threat; or whether perhaps
Reagan's antiterrorism campaign of the 1980s was really a cover for the support of
terrorisms "infinitely worse" than those Reagan and the media played up.
In sum, the propaganda system works extremely well, providing Big Brother-quality results
under a system of "freedom." The only losers are what Thorstein Veblen called
"the underlying population."
''Has God finally given us what we truly deserve_
Lord have mercy!''
June 11th 2002
By
George Lewandowski
YellowTimes.org Content Director
(YellowTimes.org) – Am I the only American sitting bolt upright in bed tonight, in a
cold sweat, thinking about the crime that has just landed top dead center on the front
page of every newspaper in the country_ The news that robs me of my sleep is the arrest of
Abdullah al Muhajir, who is accused of Lord knows what. The official spin on this story is
changing by the minute.
Incidentally, the arrest took place over a month ago but it didn't come to light, for some
reason, until our newspapers were full of inconveniently embarrassing stories about
ignored intelligence warnings and tales of obvious incompetence at the highest levels of
our security apparatus.
A few timid members of Congress had even begun to think about asking, ever so politely, if
they could "pretty please, possibly convene a hearing to pose some, er well, some
gentle questions" about what the administration knew in advance of "hitting the
trifecta," as Bush puts it.
The crime that has me sitting on the edge of my bed tonight, wide awake at midnight, is
not the cobbled and goobered-up half-retracted story of a possible plan by persons unknown
to maybe, somehow, commit some sort of nasty terrorist bombing using a "dirty
bomb." No, that is not the crime that has me losing sleep, for no one, not even
Ashcroft asserts that the crime actually took place, that the bomb was detonated, that the
bomb was built, nor that the defendant had begun assembling the materials for making such
a bomb.
In fact, the most recent reports don't even assert that the defendant had obtained any
blueprints for this wonderful tyrants' toy, a devilish device that, according to today's
NPR report, had previously been perfected and tested by our own Pentagon for use against
populations outside the U.S., that is, for proper and morally righteous disposal of people
who aren't us. No, that bomb is not the criminally inspired catastrophe that haunts my
nocturnal peace, and robs me of my sleep.
In fact, the latest CBS coverage admits "U.S. officials are backing away from
assertions that a man arrested last month in Chicago was plotting a 'dirty' bomb attack on
the United States, CBS Correspondent Jim Stewart reports U.S. officials now admit they're
not sure what American-born Abdullah al Muhajir's plans were when he returned to the U.S.
last month."
No, I am dosing my insomnia with NyQuil tonight, trying to forget the crime that actually
DID happen. It took place right in front of millions of American TV viewers and newspaper
readers.
The crime that frightens me was not committed by the defendant, a native born United
States citizen. It was committed by his accusers, my rulers. It was committed against that
defendant, and by implication, against all of us who want to be free of tyranny. The
defendant was summarily stripped of his civil rights and he has been condemned to suffer
the indignity of a "military tribunal."
This tribunal is a politically efficient form of rough justice, carried out by military
officers who answer through their chain of command to the same Commander in Chief who
created this new venue and who formally accused the defendant in the first place.
The tribunal travesty was hastily concocted by photo-op politicians to replace a full and
fair civilian trial. Real trials, fair trials, impose uncooperative rules of jurisprudence
on the accusers, rules that have been worked out through more than two hundred years of
judicial experience, on at least two continents.
The carefully constructed rules of evidence, the entitlement to a jury of peers, the right
to a defense attorney, the right of appeal to a Supreme Court, a court that is subordinate
to the U.S. Constitution, even the right to be released from jail if not convicted, are
all being denied this defendant by the politicians who now seem to rule us at their
pleasure.
These politicians, the same men who saw fit to order thousands of dollars worth of
draperies to hide the shame of one offending tin booby, in the hall of justice, have now
ruled that any defendant, any person whom they choose to accuse, may be locked up for the
rest of their life, with no trial and no real avenue of appeal. The only appeal open to
Mr. Muhajir is to the tender mercies of the same simple-minded ruler who made the quiet
decision a month ago to lock him up and throw away the key.
This absurdity gets worse. The reason given for this total disregard of proven methods of
impartial investigation is that this defendant is accused of a crime so special in its
evil intent that it doesn't really matter if he is guilty or not.
Mr. Muhajir, who may indeed be a very dangerous and evil person, is simply a person who
has been accused of thinking about doing an evil deed. The alleged deed, a plan to
detonate a "dirty bomb," is so nasty that our rulers have decided to dispense
with the rule of law and with the carefully crafted judicial process that has proven, over
the centuries, to be more reliable than tribal politics for sorting out the truth.
Apparently, that truth is secondary to the need to punish someone, anyone. We may never
know what Mr. Muhajir has, or has not done, for our rulers have decided that it is more
important to punish someone than to spend the time and energy necessary to gather enough
evidence sufficient to convict.
This tribunal will jump straight to the sentencing phase, dispensing "justice"
without any need to construct the kind of formal proof that would stand up in a real
court, the kind of proof that would assure the rest of us that the real culprit has indeed
been caught, that our Keystone Kops in Washington D.C. have actually hanged the guilty man
instead of merely lynching a conveniently dark skinned scapegoat.
Suddenly, two centuries of checks and balances, carefully constructed rules of evidence,
and logical frameworks for legal arguments, have all been abandoned in favor of the Salem
dunking stool.
This means two things: 1) That any citizen whom the President elects to toss into jail, or
to execute, can be legally dispatched by the mere application of a convenient accusation,
and 2) that we citizens are no longer entitled to expect a formal and logical proof of
guilt.
The President has given himself the right to set aside two centuries of western thought
and political reforms, for the sake of his political necessities.
Most Americans felt that this judicial joke, the "tribunal," when first unveiled
several months ago, was a handy device for hanging aliens, an appropriate way for
disposing of those who were undesirables born without God's blessing, without proper U.S.
citizenship. Now it turns out that the tribunal is also to be the blunt instrument for
dispatching the rest of us cattle.
Only Americans who are "logic challenged" will feel safer tonight. Their TVs
will tell them to close their eyes and relax, secure in the knowledge that finally someone
is going to be severely punished, in retribution for a crime which might take place
sometime in the future. How comforting.
Using this logic, perhaps the royal monarch will see fit to toss the Senate Majority
Leader and a few uncooperative journalists into a vat of boiling oil, for the murder of
some poor damsel who has not yet turned up missing. Surely someone should pay for such a
heinous crime, especially if it ever happens. Why wait until it's too late_ Light the
fires now!
American foreign policy has, for generations, supported and subsidized this ludicrous
brand of quick and dirty justice for the victims of third world despots. The monster of
our own making has finally crawled home to club us with our own nasty weapons. It is hard
to argue that we deserve better.
We have allowed our rulers to act without principles or mercy around the globe. How can we
now expect those same rulers to respect our human rights_ Why should they even pretend_
What makes us so different from other victims of U.S. arrogance_ With a wave of the
emperor's hand and a reading of the royal decree we have just been alienated from our
"inalienable rights."
The Bush administration has finally spun a story sufficiently horrifying to push the
stories of its security scandals and bureaucratic blunders off of the front pages. This
will silence the critics for as long as His Majesty chooses to keep Mr. Muhajir in the
public spotlight, dangling at the end of a rope, twisting in the wind.
I think I need another dose of that cold medicine. My throat suddenly feels constricted.
[George Lewandowski is the Content Director for YellowTimes.org. He lives in the United
States.]
George Lewandowski encourages your comments: glewandowski@YellowTimes.org <>
YellowTimes.org encourages its material to be reproduced, reprinted, or broadcast provided
that any such reproduction must identify the original source, . Internet web links to are appreciated.
The following article reveals the mind boggling hypocrisy of the US administration, who are willing to bomb Iraq for precisely a pretext that they themselves don't live up to.
Chemical coup d'etat
The US wants to depose the diplomat who could take away its pretext for war with Iraq
by
George Monbiot
THE GUARDIAN
Tuesday April 16, 2002
On Sunday, the US government will launch an international coup. It has been planned for a
month. It will be executed quietly, and most of us won't know what is happening until it's
too late. It is seeking to overthrow 60 years of multilateralism in favour of a global
regime built on force.
The coup begins with its attempt, in five days' time, to unseat the man in charge of
ridding the world of chemical weapons. If it succeeds, this will be the first time that
the head of a multilateral agency will have been deposed in this manner. Every other
international body will then become vulnerable to attack. The coup will also shut down the
peaceful options for dealing with the chemical weapons Iraq may possess, helping to ensure
that war then becomes the only means of destroying them.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) enforces the chemical
weapons convention. It inspects labs and factories and arsenals and oversees the
destruction of the weapons they contain. Its director-general is a workaholic Brazilian
diplomat called Jose Bustani. He has, arguably, done more in the past five years to
promote world peace than anyone else on earth. His inspectors have overseen the
destruction of 2 million chemical weapons and two-thirds of the world's chemical weapon
facilities. He has so successfully cajoled reluctant nations that the number of
signatories to the convention has risen from 87 to 145 in the past five years: the fastest
growth rate of any multilateral body in recent times.
In May 2000, as a tribute to his extraordinary record, Bustani was re-elected unanimously
by the member states for a second five-year term, even though he had yet to complete his
first one. Last year Colin Powell wrote to him to thank him for his "very
impressive" work. But now everything has changed. The man celebrated for his
achievements has been denounced as an enemy of the people.
In January, with no prior warning or explanation, the US state department asked the
Brazilian government to recall him, on the grounds that it did not like his
"management style". This request directly contravenes the chemical weapons
convention, which states "the director-general ... shall not seek or receive
instructions from any government". Brazil refused. In March the US government accused
Bustani of "financial mismanagement", "demoralisation" of his staff,
"bias" and "ill-considered initiatives". It warned that if he wanted
to avoid damage to his reputation, he must resign.
Again, the US was trampling the convention, which insists that member states shall
"not seek to influence" the staff. He refused to go. On March 19th the US
proposed a vote of no confidence in Bustani. It lost. So it then did something
unprecedented in the history of multi lateral diplomacy. It called a "special
session" of the member states to oust him. The session begins on Sunday. And this
time the US is likely to get what it wants.
Since losing the vote last month, the United States, which is supposed to be the
organisation's biggest donor, has been twisting the arms of weaker nations, refusing to
pay its dues unless they support it, with the result that the OPCW could go under. Last
week Bustani told me, "the Europeans are so afraid that the US will abandon the
convention that they are prepared to sacrifice my post to keep it on board". His last
hope is that the United Kingdom, whose record of support for the organisation has so far
been exemplary, will make a stand. The meeting on Sunday will present Tony Blair's
government with one of the clearest choices it has yet faced between multilateralism and
the "special relationship".
The US has not sought to substantiate the charges it has made against Bustani. The OPCW is
certainly suffering from a financial crisis, but that is largely because the US
unilaterally capped its budget and then failed to pay what it owed. The organisation's
accounts have just been audited and found to be perfectly sound. Staff morale is higher
than any organisation as underfunded as the OPCW could reasonably expect. Bustani's real
crimes are contained in the last two charges, of "bias" and "ill-considered
initiatives".
The charge of bias arises precisely because the OPCW is not biased. It has sought to
examine facilities in the United States with the same rigour with which it examines
facilities anywhere else. But, just like Iraq, the US has refused to accept weapons
inspectors from countries it regards as hostile to its interests, and has told those who
have been allowed in which parts of a site they may and may not inspect. It has also
passed special legislation permitting the president to block unannounced inspections, and
banning inspectors from removing samples of its chemicals.
"Ill-considered initiatives" is code for the attempts Bustani has made, in line
with his mandate, to persuade Saddam Hussein to sign the chemical weapons convention. If
Iraq agrees, it will then be subject to the same inspections - both routine and
unannounced - as any other member state (with the exception, of course, of the United
States). Bustani has so far been unsuccessful, but only because, he believes, he has not
yet received the backing of the UN security council, with the result that Saddam knows he
would have little to gain from signing.
Bustani has suggested that if the security council were to support the OPCW's bid to
persuade Iraq to sign, this would provide the US with an alternative to war. It is hard to
see why Saddam Hussein would accept weapons inspectors from Unmovic - the organisation
backed by the security council - after its predecessor, Unscom, was found to be stuffed
with spies planted by the US government. It is much easier to see why he might accept
inspectors from an organisation which has remained scrupulously even-handed. Indeed, when
Unscom was thrown out of Iraq in 1998, the OPCW was allowed in to complete the destruction
of the weapons it had found. Bustani has to go because he has proposed the solution to a
problem the US does not want solved.
"What the Americans are doing," Bustani says, "is a coup d'etat. They are
using brute force to amend the convention and unseat the director-general." As the
chemical weapons convention has no provisions permitting these measures, the US is simply
ripping up the rules. If it wins, then the OPCW, like Unscom, will be fatally compromised.
Success for the United States on Sunday would threaten the independence of every
multilateral body.
This is, then, one of those rare occasions on which our government could make a massive
difference to the way the world is run. It could choose to support its closest ally,
wrecking multilateralism and shutting down the alternatives to war. Or it could defy the
United States in defence of world peace and international law. It will take that
principled stand only if we, the people from whom it draws its' power, make so much noise
that it must listen. We have
five days in which to stop the US from bullying its way to war.
It is a terrible indictment that Bustani was indeed removed from his post 5 days later. Delegates at the conference described US arm twisting as "...unbelievable...". The US State Department described Bustani's departure as "....an essential first step in restoring stability and sound management to this very important organisation." Within days the US administration began to hint that attacking Iraq would not be dependent on whether they accepted the new weapons inspection teams or not. By June 2002 this had become official policy. (See the next two articles for details.)
Ten days prior to Bustani's sacking US pressure on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change led to the removal of its' director general.
AMERICA FORCES OUT UN ARMS DIRECTOR JOSE BUSTANI
THE TIMES (LONDON, UK)
23rd April 2002
The embattled director-general of the world body
monitoring chemical weapons, was dismissed yesterday when most of the member states
supported an American move to oust him.
Forty-eight of the 145 members of the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW) voted to dismiss Senhor Bustani, the first head of the organisation, who was re-
elected for a further four years last May. Only seven countries supported him; a
further 43 abstained.
A stormy two-day meeting in The Hague heard lengthy accusations against him by the
Americans, although the US delegate was booed when he failed to produce the promised
evidence. After the vote a devastated Senhor Bustani stormed out of the
conference hall, threw his hands in the air and said he had lost his job.
The Americans accused the Brazilian head of the OPCW of a "habit of refusing to
consult with member states" and cited his proposed new anti-terrorism measures after
September 11, which were not first cleared with the US.
The State Department called his management disastrous and blamed him for not resigning
after losing a vote of confidence last month. It accused him of threatening inspections in
five unspecified countries for political ends.
Senhor Bustani gave an impassioned defence of his tenure. He called the US accusations
against him false and said that the meeting would decide "whether genuine
multiculturalism will survive, or whether it will be replaced by unilateralism in a
multilateral disguise". He added: "I refuse to resign under pressure from a
small handful of member states." He said before the vote that his dismissal would be
illegal because "the convention does not allow for such a dismissal".
America called the special session of the OPCW to force him out and was supported by
Britain, Germany and all European Union and Nato countries, with most of Eastern Europe
and several former Soviet states.
Those supporting him were Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Belarus, Mexico and his own country,
Brazil. Most of Africa, Asia and Latin America abstained.
The United States had co-sponsored Senhor Bustani for re-election, but the change of
Administration in Washington led to a swift reappraisal. The Bush Administration,
determined not to be bound by multilateral agreements, has resented the restrictions of
the Chemical Weapons Convention. It was particularly angered by Senhor Bustani's moves to
woo Iraq, which Washington hardliners believe will make any military attack on Baghdad
more difficult.
Senhor Bustani accused the White House of trying to push him out because of his
independence from Washington. He said that he had been blamed for seeking Iraq's
membership of the Chemical Weapons Convention, even though that was in full accordance
with the United Nations Security Council decision.
American officials have briefed intensively but anonymously against Senhor Bustani. One
said that his lapses "are not legal crimes; nonetheless they are severe mismanagement
policies, which significantly impede the effectiveness of the organisation".
Several EU countries said privately they feared that unless they voted with the United
States, America, which pays more than a fifth of the budget, would walk out of the UN
body. The US has paid only half this year's dues and the OPCW is deeply in debt.
A senior member of the OPCW said after the vote that the American arm-twisting was clearly
horrendous. He said: "We are now living in a completely different world."
INSPECTION OR NO, U.S. URGES A CHANGE IN IRAQ
The United States still believes Iraq needs new leadership, regardless of whether
President Saddam Hussein allows UN arms inspectors back into the country, Secretary of
State Colin Powell said Sunday.
Iraq has been in discussions with the United Nations about resuming inspections suspended
in December 1998. Inspectors went into Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, spending
seven years looking for weapons of mass destruction.
"U.S. policy is that, regardless of what the inspectors do, the people of Iraq and
the people of the region would be better off with a different regime in Baghdad,"
Powell said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" TV program. "The United States
reserves its option to do whatever it believes might be appropriate to see if there can be
a regime change."
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said last week he hoped the Iraqi government would make a
decision on the inspectors at the next round of meetings, expected within a month.
Meanwhile, after failing to win support for an oil embargo against the United States and
other allies of Israel, the Iraqi cabinet voted Sunday to resume oil exports beginning
midnight on Tuesday, Iraqi TV reported.
In a broadcast statement, the cabinet said its April 8 decision to suspend oil exports for
30 days "did not find a response from Arab oil-producing brothers to take similar
measures so that it would succeed."
This fascinating piece below did the rounds of activist groups. Reading between the lines you realise that the valiant 'fredom fighters' that Reagan is describing are none ofther than the guerilla armies sponsored and trained by the US, amongst whose numbers was a certain Osama bin Laden.
From the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library:
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1983/32183d.htm
Proclamation 5034 - Afghanistan Day
March 21, 1983
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
The tragedy of Afghanistan continues as the valiant and courageous Afghan freedom fighters
persevere in standing up against the brutal power of the Soviet invasion and
occupation. The Afghan people are struggling to reclaim their freedom, which was taken
from them when the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in December of 1979.
In this three-year period the Soviet Union has been unable to subjugate Afghanistan. The
Soviet forces are pitted against an extraordinary people who, in their determination to
preserve the character of their ancient land, have organized an effective and still
spreading country-wide resistance. The resistance of the Afghan freedom fighters is an
example to all the world of the invincibility of the ideals we in this country hold most
dear, the ideals of freedom and independence.
We must also recognize that the sacrifices required to maintain this resistance are very
high. Millions have gone into exile as refugees. We will probably never know the numbers
of people killed and maimed, poisoned and gased, of the homes that have been destroyed,
and of the lives that have been shattered and stricken with grief.
It is, therefore, incumbent upon us as Americans to reflect on the events in Afghanistan,
to think about the agony which these brave people bear, and to maintain our condemnation
of the continuing Soviet occupation. Our observance again this year of Afghanistan Day on
March 21, the Afghan New Year, will
recall for all the world America's unflagging sympathy for a determined people, its
support for their refugees and commitment to achieving a political settlement for
Afghanistan which will free that country from tyranny's yoke.
The Congress, by Senate Joint Resolution 65, has designated March 21, 1983 as
"Afghanistan Day'' and has requested the President to issue a proclamation in
observance of that day.
Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby
designate March 21, 1983 as Afghanistan Day.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-first day of March, in the
year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-three, and of the Independence of the United
States of America the two hundred and seventh.
Ronald Reagan
Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 3:10 p.m., March 24, 1983
Note: The proclamation was not issued in the form of a White House press release.
THE ROGUE STATE
JOHN PILGER ON AMERICA'S BID TO CONTROL THE WORLD
The Mirror
2nd July 2002
FOR 101 days, Royal Marines have been engaged in a farcical operation as mercenaries of
the United States whose lawlessness now qualifies it as the world's leading rogue state.
Shooting at shadows, and the occasional tribesman, blowing up mounds of dirt and
displaying "captured" arms for the media, all have been part of the Marines'
humiliating role in Afghanistan - a role foisted upon them by the Blair government, whose
deference to and collusion with the Bush gang has become a parody of the imperial
courtier.
Gang is not an exaggeration. The word, in my dictionary, means "a group of people
working together for criminal, disreputable ends". That describes accurately George W
Bush and those who write his speeches and make his decisions and who, since their rise to
power, have undermined the very basis of international law.
In Afghanistan, their record is beyond question. The killing on Monday of some 40 guests
at a wedding was not a "blunder", but the direct result of a policy of shoot and
bomb first and find out later, as announced by George W Bush in the weeks following
September 11.
The capacity of the American military machine to smash impoverished countries was never in
dispute - conditional, that is, on the absence of American ground troops and their
substitution by "allied" forces, like the Royal Marines. (During the heyday of
the British Empire, Indian and other colonial troops were used in a similar role, although
the British, unlike the Americans, were also prepared to sacrifice their own soldiers).
Since last October, Afghan leaders have reported American aircraft destroying villages
"too small to be marked on any map", with "more than 300 people
killed" in one night. In a family of 40, only a small boy and his grandmother
survived, reported Richard Lloyd Parry of the Independent.
Out of sight of the television cameras, "at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US
bombs between October 7 and December 10...an average of 62 innocent deaths a day",
according to a study carried out at the University of New Hampshire in the US. This is now
estimated to have passed 5,000 civilian deaths: almost double the number killed on
September 11.
There is no evidence that a single leader of al-Qaeda has been captured or, to anyone's
knowledge, killed. Neither has the leader of the Taliban. The change in Afghanistan is
minimal compared with the murderous feudalism that ruled during the 1990s, and before the
Taliban came to power.
For all the cosmetic changes in Kabul, the capital, women still dare not go unveiled.
"The Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days," quipped
the new American-installed regime's Minister of Justice. "We will only hang the body
for a short time, say fifteen minutes, after a public execution."
Describing this as a "triumph of good over evil", as Bush has said, with an echo
from Blair, is like lauding the superiority of the German war machine in 1940 as a
vindication of Nazism.
Not only the Marines but the British public ought to feel duped. Both Washington and
Whitehall knew long ago al-Qaeda was finished in Afghanistan. Apart from the element of
revenge, for home gratification, the Americans have set out to reassert the control of
their favourite warlords: people responsible for
thousands of deaths in their stricken country.
In October, the US planned to install a regime dominated by members of the Pashtun tribe,
who, they predicted, would desert the Taliban. But the split in the Taliban never
happened, and the Americans have since changed tack and tried to put together a
"coalition" of Tajik and Uzbek warlords. The current "interim
president", Hamid Karzai, although a Pashtun, has neither a tribal nor military
powerbase. He is simply America's man.
The presence of the Royal Marines, leading the so-called "International Security
Assistance Force", is for reasons straight out of the nineteenth century. At the
Americans' bidding, the Marines were meant to keep the favoured warlords from each other's
throats until the region could be "stabilised" for American
oil and other strategic interests.
Potential vast energy sources in Central Asia have become critical for the deeply troubled
US economy, and for the Bush administration, which is dominated by oil industry interests,
notably the Bush family itself. An investigation by the Hong Kong-based Asia Times in
January found that the US was frantically developing "a network of multiple Chtmlian
pipelines".
The disgraced Enron Corporation, one of Bush's biggest campaign backers, conducted a
feasibility study for a $2.5billion oil pipeline being built across the Chtmlian Sea. Top
current and former American officials, including Vice President Cheney, "have all
closed major deals directly and indirectly on behalf of
the oil companies", says the Asia Times.
If there was a map of American military bases established in the region to fight "the
war on terrorism" what would be immediately striking is that it would follow almost
exactly the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.
Blair and the voluble Geoffrey Hoon have, of course, offered none of this vital
information to the British people, let alone to the British soldiers sent to play
America's imperial game. Fortunately, the troops suffered only gastric flu. The Afghan
people have not been as lucky.
Any doubt about the systematic murderous way the US military has operated in Afghanistan
is dispelled by a report in the American press in May of children gunned down in wheat
fields and as they slept. For four hours, American helicopter gunships saturated the
fields and a village with bullets and rockets, before landing to disgorge US troops who
shot survivors and detained other "suspects".
In fact, the area was renowned for its opposition to the Taliban and the governor of
Oruzgan province confirmed that those murdered "were ordinary people. There were no
al-Qaeda or Taliban here."
In recent months, the American rogue state has torn up the Kyoto treaty, which would
decrease global warming and the probability of environmental disaster. It has threatened
to use nuclear weapons in "pre-emptive strikes" (a threat echoed by Hoon). It
has tried to sabotage the setting up of an international criminal court, understandably,
because its generals and leading politicians might be summoned as defendants.
It has further undermined the authority of the United Nations by allowing Israel to block
a UN committee's investigation of the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp at
Jenin; and it has ordered the Palestinians to get rid of their elected leader in favour of
an American stooge.
It ignored the World Food Summit in Italy; and at summit conferences in Canada and
Indonesia, it has blocked genuine aid, such as clean water and electricity, to the most
deprived people on earth. Proposals to increase American food subsidies by 80 per cent are
designed to secure American domination of the world foodgrains market.
("When we get up from the breakfast table every morning," said the chief
executive of the Cargill corporation, the world's biggest food company, "much of what
we have eaten - cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on - has passed through the lands of
my company." Cargill's goal is to double in size every five to seven years).
There is a desperate edge to most of America's rogue actions. The Christian "free
market" fundamentalists running Washington are worried. The US current account
deficit is running at a record $34billion. Foreign purchases of the huge US debt are
falling rapidly. The US stockmarket is heavily over-valued, and the dollar is uncertain.
AS one commentator has put it, the "Bush doctrine" looks like "one last
attempt to order the world entirely around the requirements of US monopoly capital, before
it can long hope to do so".
This means controlling the oil and fossil fuel riches in Central Asia. It means attacking
Iraq, installing a replacement Saddam Hussein and taking over the world's second largest
source of oil. It means surrounding a new economic challenger, China, with bases, and
intimidating the leaders of its principal
economic rival, Europe, by undermining NATO, and setting off a trade war.
I have just visited the United States, and it is clear many people there are worried. And
many dare not say so. Their views are seldom reported in the American mainstream media,
which is self-censored and controlled, perhaps as never before.
Instead, the air is thick with the views of the likes of Charles Krauthammer, of the
Washington Post. "Unilateralism is the key to our success," he wrote, in
describing the world of the next fifty years: a world without protection from nuclear
attack or environmental damage for the citizens of any country except the United States; a
world where "democracy" means nothing if its benefits are at odds with American
"interests"; a world in which to express dissent against these
"interests" brands one a terrorist and justifies surveillance and repression.
There is only one way such rogue power can be resisted. It is by speaking out and
urgently. If our government won't, we must.
*John Pilger's new book, 'The New Rulers of the World', is published by Verso.
The following article actually appeared on September 10th 1999. Little did its' author know what was coming 2 years and a day later.......
Comments On the Occasion of the Forthcoming APEC
Summit
by
Noam Chomsky
Sept 10th 1999
Znet
There are many topics of major long-term significance that should be addressed at the APEC
conference, but one is of consuming importance and overwhelming urgency. We all know
exactly what it is, and why it must be placed at the forefront of concern -- and more
important, instant action. This conference provides an opportunity -- there may not be
many more -- to terminate the tragedy that is once again reaching shocking proportions in
East Timor. The Indonesian military forces who invaded East Timor 24 years ago, and have
been slaughtering and terrorizing its inhabitants ever since, are right now, as I write,
in the process of sadistically destroying what remains: the population, the cities and
villages. What they are planning, we cannot be sure: a Carthaginian solution is not out of
the question.
The tragedy of East Timor has been one of the most awesome of this terrible century. It is
also of particular moral significance for us, for the simplest and most obvious of
reasons. Western complicity has been direct and decisive. The expected corollary also
holds: unlike the crimes of official enemies, these can be ended by means that have always
been readily available, and still are.
The current wave of terror and destruction began early this year, under the pretense that
the atrocities were the work of "uncontrolled militias." It was quickly revealed
that these were paramilitary forces armed, organized, and directed by the Indonesian army,
who also participated directly in their "criminal activities," as these have
just been described by Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, still maintaining the
shameful pretense that the "military institution" that is directing the crimes
is seeking to stop them.
The Indonesian military forces are commonly described as "rogue elements." That
is hardly accurate. Most prominent among them are Kopassus units sent
to East Timor to carry out the actions for which they are famed, and dreaded. They have
"the job of managing the militias, many observers believe," veteran Asia
correspondent David Jenkins reported as the terror was mounting. Kopassus is the
"crack special forces unit" modeled on the U.S. Green Berets that had "been
training regularly with US and Australian forces until their behaviour became too much of
an embarrassment for their foreign friends." These forces are "legendary for
their cruelty," observes Benedict Anderson, one of the leading Indonesia scholars. In
East Timor, Anderson continues, "Kopassus became the pioneer and exemplar for every
kind of atrocity," including systematic rapes, tortures and executions, and
organization of hooded gangsters.
Jenkins wrote that Kopassus officers, trained in the United States, adopted the tactics of
the US Phoenix program in South Vietnam, which killed tens of thousands of peasants and
much of the indigenous South Vietnamese leadership, as well as "the tactics employed
by the Contras" in Nicaragua, following lessons taught by their CIA mentors that it
should be unnecessary to review. The state terrorists were "not simply going after
the most radical pro-independence people but going after the moderates, the people who
have influence in their community." "It's Phoenix," a well-placed source in
Jakarta reported: the aim is "to terrorise everyone" -- the NGOs, the Red Cross,
the UN, the journalists.
All of this was well before the referendum and the atrocities conducted in its' immediate
aftermath. As to these, there is good reason to heed the judgment of a high-ranking
Western official in Dili. "Make no mistake," he reported: "this is being
directed from Jakarta. This is not a situation where a few gangs of rag-tag militia are
out of control. As everybody here knows, it has been a military operation from start to
finish."
The official was speaking from the UN compound in which the UN observers, the last few
reporters, and thousands of terrified Timorese finally took refuge, besieged by
Indonesia's paramilitary agents. At that time, a few days ago, the UN estimated that
violent expulsions had perhaps reached 200,000 people, about a quarter of the population,
with unknown numbers killed and physical destruction running to billions of dollars. At
best, it would take decades to rebuild the territory's basic infrastructure, they
concluded. And the army may well have still more far-reaching goals.
In the months before the August 30 referendum, the horror story continued. Citing
diplomatic, church, and militia sources, Australian journalists reported in July
"that hundreds of modern assault rifles, grenades and mortars are being stockpiled,
ready for use if the autonomy [within Indonesia] option is rejected at the ballot
box." They warned that the army-run militias might be planning a violent takeover of
much of the territory if, despite the terror, the popular will would be expressed. All of
this was well understood by the "foreign friends," who also knew how to bring
the terror to an end, but preferred to delay, hesitate, and keep to evasive and ambiguous
reactions that the Indonesian Generals could easily interpret as a "green light"
to carry out their grim work.
In a display of extraordinary courage and heroism, virtually the entire population made
their way to the ballot-boxes, many emerging from hiding to do so. Braving brutal
intimidation and terror, they voted overwhelming in favor of the right of
self-determination that had long ago been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council
and the World Court.
Immediately, the Indonesian occupying forces reacted as had been predicted by observers on
the scene. The weapons that had been stockpiled, and the
forces that had been mobilized, conducted a well-planned operation. They proceeded to
drive out anyone who might bring the terrible story to the outside world and cut off
communications, while massacring, expelling tens of thousands of people to an unknown
fate, burning and destroying, murdering priests and nuns, and no one knows how many other
hapless victims. The capital city of Dili has been virtually destroyed. In the
countryside, where the army can rampage undetected, one can only guess what has taken
place.
Even before the latest outrages, highly credible Church sources had reported 3-5000 killed
in 1999, well beyond the scale of atrocities in Kosovo prior to the NATO bombings. The
scale might even reach the level of Rwanda if the "foreign friends" keep to
timid expressions of disapproval while insisting that internal security in East Timor
"is the responsibility of the Government of Indonesia, and we don't want to take that
responsibility away from them" -- the official position of the State Department a few
days before the August 30 referendum.
It would have been far less hypocritical to have said, early this year, that internal
security in Kosovo "is the responsibility of the Government of Yugoslavia, and we
don't want to take that responsibility away from them." Indonesia's crimes in East
Timor have been vastly greater, even just this year, not to speak of their actions during
the years of aggression and terror; Western-backed, we should never allow ourselves to
forget. That aside, Indonesia has no claim whatsoever to the territory it invaded and
occupied, apart from the claim based on support by the Great Powers.
The "foreign friends" also understand that direct intervention in the occupied
territory, however justified, might not even be necessary. If the United States were to
take a clear, unambiguous, and public stand, informing the Indonesian Generals that this
game is over, that might very well suffice. The same has been true for the past
quarter-century, as the US provided critical military and diplomatic support for the
invasion and atrocities. These were directed by General Suharto, compiling yet another
chapter in his gruesome record, always with Western support, and often acclaim. He was
once again praised by the Clinton Administration. He is "our kind of guy," the
Administration declared as he visited Washington shortly before he fell from grace by
losing control and dragging his feet on IMF orders.
If changing the former green light to a new red light does not suffice, Washington and its
allies have ample means at their disposal: termination of arms sales to the killers;
initiation of war crimes trials against the army leadership -- not an insignificant
threat; cutting the economic support funds that are, incidentally, not without their
ambiguities; putting a hold on Western energy corporations and multinationals, along with
other investment and commercial activities. There is also no reason to shy away from
peacekeeping forces to replace the occupying terrorist army, if that proves necessary.
Indonesia has no authority to "invite" foreign intervention, as President
Clinton urged, any more than Saddam Hussein had authority to invite foreign intervention
in Kuwait, or Nazi Germany in France in 1944 for that matter. If dispatch of peacekeeping
forces is disguised by such prettified terminology, it is of no great importance, as long
as we do not succumb to illusions that prevent us from understanding what has happened,
and what it portends.
What the U.S. and its allies are doing, we scarcely know. The New York Times reports that
the Defense Department is "taking the lead in dealing with the crisis,...hoping to
make use of longstanding ties between the Pentagon and the Indonesian military." The
nature of these ties over many decades is no secret. Important light on the current stage
is provided by Alan Nairn, who survived the Dili massacre in 1991 and barely escaped with
his life in Dili again a few days ago. In another stunning investigative achievement,
Nairn has just revealed that immediately after the vicious massacre of dozens of refugees
seeking shelter in a church in Liquica, U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Dennis Blair
assured Indonesian Army chief General Wiranto of US support and assistance, proposing a
new U.S. training mission.
On September 8, the Pacific Command announced that Admiral Blair is once again being sent
to Indonesia to convey U.S. concerns. On the same day, Secretary of Defense William Cohen
reported that a week before the referendum in August, the US was carrying out joint
operations with the Indonesian army -- "a U.S.-Indonesian training exercise focused
on humanitarian and disaster relief activities," the wire services reported. The fact
that Cohen could say this without shame leaves one numb with amazement. The training
exercise was put to use within days -- in the standard way, as all but the voluntarily
blind must surely understand after many years of the same tales, the same outcomes.
Every slight move comes with an implicit retraction. On the eve of the APEC meeting, on
September 9, Clinton announced the termination of military ties; but without cutting off
arms sales, and while declaring East Timor to be "still a part of Indonesia,"
which it is not and has never been The decision was delivered to General Wiranto by
Admiral Blair. It takes no unusual cynicism to watch the current secret interactions with
a skeptical eye.
Skepticism is only heightened by the historical record: to mention one recent case,
Clinton's evasion of congressional restrictions barring U.S. training of Indonesian
military officers after the Dili massacre. The earlier record is far worse from the first
days of the U.S.-authorized invasion. While the U.S. publicly condemned the aggression,
Washington secretly supported it with a new flow of arms, which was increased by the
Carter Administration as the slaughter reached near-genocidal levels in 1978. It was then
that highly credible Church and other sources in East Timor attempted to make public the
estimates of 200,000 deaths that came to be accepted years later, after constantly denial.
Every student in the West, every citizen with even a minimal concern for international
affairs, should know by heart the frank and honest description of the opening days of the
invasion by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then America's U.N. Ambassador. The Security
Council ordered the invaders to withdraw at once, but without effect. In his memoirs,
published as the terror peaked 20 years ago, Moynihan explained the reasons: "The
United States wished things to turn out as they did," and he dutifully "worked
to bring this about," rendering the UN "utterly ineffective in whatever measures
it undertook." As for how "things turned out," Moynihan comments that
within a few months 60,000 Timorese had been killed, "almost the proportion of
casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War." End of
story, though not in the real world.
So matters have continued since, not just in the United States. England has a particularly
ugly record, as do Australia, France, and all too many others. That fact alone confers on
them enormous responsibility to act, not only to end the atrocities, but to provide
reparations as at least some miserable gesture of compensation for their crimes.
The reasons for the Western stance are very clear. They are currently stated with brutal
frankness. "The dilemma is that Indonesia matters and East Timor
doesn't," a Western diplomat in Jakarta bluntly observed a few days ago. It is no
"dilemma," he might have added, but rather standard operating procedure.
Explaining why the U.S. refuses to take a stand, New York Times Asia specialists Elizabeth
Becker and Philip Shenon report that the Clinton
Administration "has made the calculation that the United States must put its
relationship with Indonesia, a mineral-rich nation of more than 200 million
people, ahead of its concern over the political fate of East Timor, a tiny impoverished
territory of 800,000 people that is seeking independence." Their fate as human beings
apparently does not even reach the radar screen, for these calculations. The Washington
Post quotes Douglas Paal, president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center, reporting the facts
of life: "Timor is a speed bump on the road to dealing with Jakarta, and we've got to
get over it safely. Indonesia is such a big place and so central to the stability of the
region."
Even without secret Pentagon assurances, Indonesian Generals can surely read these
statements and draw the conclusion that they will be granted leeway to work their will.
The analogy to Kosovo has repeatedly been drawn in the past days. It is singularly
inappropriate, in many crucial respects. A closer analogy would be to Iraq-Kuwait, though
this radically understates the scale of the atrocities and the culpability of the United
States and its allies. There is still time, though very little time, to prevent a hideous
consummation of one of the most appalling tragedies of the terrible century that is
winding to a horrifying, wrenching close.
US writer Gore Vidal has launched a blistering attack on George W Bush and his War on Terror.
The outspoken 76-year-old said America provoked the September 11 attacks with its own
military intervention in countries around the world.
Staunch democrat Gore, a former White House aide to John F Kennedy, insisted the US should
stop meddling in other people's affairs.
In an interview with LA Weekly reporter MARC COOPER he claimed Bush's attack on
Afghanistan was motivated by oil, not revenge. Here's his views:
LA WEEKLY: Are you arguing that the 3,000 killed on September 11 somehow deserved their
fate_
GORE VIDAL: I don't think we, the American people, deserved what happened. Nor do we
deserve the sort of governments we have had over the past 40 years. Our governments have
brought this upon us by their actions all over the world. I have a list in my new book
that gives the reader some idea how busy we have been. Unfortunately, we only get
disinformation from The New York Times and other official places. Americans have no idea
of the extent of their government's mischief. The number of military strikes we have made
unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250. These are major strikes
from Panama to Iran. It isn't even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile,
as that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks.
Americans are either not told about these things or are told we attacked them
because...well...Noriega is the centre of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of
him. So we kill some Panamanians in the process. Actually we killed quite a few. We
brought in our Air Force. Panama didn't have an air force. But it looked good to have our
Air Force there, busy, blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their leader, Noriega, a
former CIA man who worked loyally for the US. We arrest him. Try him in an American court
that has no jurisdiction over him and lock him up - nobody knows why. And that was
supposed to end the drug trade because he had been demonised by The New York Times and the
rest of the imperial press. (The government) plays off (Americans') relative innocence, or
ignorance to be more precise. This is probably why geography has not really been taught
since World War II - to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up.
Because Enron wants to blow them up. Or Unocal, the great pipeline company, wants a war
going some place.
And people in the countries who are recipients of our bombs get angry. The Af-ghans had
nothing to do with what happened to our country on September 11. But Saudi Arabia did. It
seems Osama is involved, but we don't really know.
I mean, when we went into Afghanistan to take over the place and blow it up, our
commanding general was asked how long it was going to take to find bin Laden. The general
looked surprised and said, well, that's not why we are here. Oh no_ So what was all this
about_ It was about the Taliban being very, very bad people and that they treated women
very badly, you see. They're not really into women's rights, and we here are very strong
on women's rights, and we should be with Bush on that one because he's taking those burlap
sacks off of women's heads. Well, that's not what it was about. What it was really about
is that this is an imperial grab for energy resources. Until now, the Persian Gulf has
been our main source for imported oil. We went there, to Afghanistan, not to get Osama and
vengeance. We went partly because the Taliban - who we had installed during the Russian
occupation - were getting too flaky and because Unocal, the California corporation, had
made a deal with the Taliban for a pipeline to get the Chtmlian-area oil - the richest oil
reserve on Earth. They wanted to get that oil by pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan
and from there to ship it off to China, which would be enormously profitable.
Whichever big company could cash in would make a fortune. And you'll see that all these
companies go back to Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld or someone else on the Gas and Oil Junta,
which, along with the Pentagon, governs the United States. We had planned to occupy
Afghanistan in October, and Osama, or whoever hit us in September, launched a pre-emptory
strike. They knew we were coming. This was a warning to throw us off guard.
LA WEEKLY: Still, even if one reads the chart of military interventions in your book and
concludes that, indeed, the US government is a "source of evil" can't you
conceive there might be other forces of evil as well_ Can't you imagine forces of
religious obscurantism, for example, that act independently of us and might do bad things
to us, because they are evil_
VIDAL: Oh yes. But you picked the wrong group. You picked one of the richest families in
the world - the bin Ladens. They are close to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, which has
conned us into acting as their bodyguard against their own people - who are even more
fundamentalist than they are. So we are dealing with a powerful entity if it is Osama.
What isn't true is that people like him just come out of the blue. The average American
thinks we just give away billions in foreign aid, when we are the lowest in foreign aid
among developed countries. Most of what we give goes to Israel and Egypt. I was in
Guatemala when the CIA was preparing its attack on the Arbenz government (in 1954).
Arbenz, who was a democratically elected president, mildly socialist.
His state had no revenues. Its biggest income maker was United Fruit Company. So Arbenz
put the tiniest of taxes on bananas and Henry Cabot Lodge said in the Senate the
Communists have taken over Guatemala and we must act. He got to Eisenhower, who sent in
the CIA, and they overthrew the government. We installed a military dictator and there's
been nothing but bloodshed ever since. Now, if I were a Guatemalan and I had the means to
drop something on somebody in Washington I would be tempted to do it. Especially if I had
lost my family and seen my country blown to bits because United Fruit didn't want to pay
taxes. Now, that's the way we operate. And that's why we got to be so hated.
LA WEEKLY: You've spent decades bemoaning the erosion of civil liberties and the
conversion of the US from a republic into what you call an empire. Have the after effects
of September 11, things like the USA Patriot Bill, pushed us further down the road or are
they, in fact, some sort of historic turning point_
VIDAL: The second law of thermodynamics always rules: Everything is always running
down. And so is our Bill of Rights. The current junta in charge of our affairs, one not
legally elected but put in charge of us by the Supreme Court in the interests of the oil,
gas and defence lobbies, have used Oklahoma City and now September 11 to further erode
things. And when it comes to Oklahoma and Tim McVeigh, well, he had his reasons as well to
carry out his deed.
Millions agree with his general reasoning, though no-one agrees with the value of blowing
up children. But the American people instinctively know when the government goes off the
rails like it did at Waco and Ruby Ridge. No-one has been elected president in the past 50
years unless he ran against the federal government. So, the government should get through
its head that it is hated not only by foreigners whose countries we have wrecked, but also
by Americans whose lives have been wrecked. The Patriot movement was based on folks run
off their family farms. We have millions of disaffected Americans who do not like the way
the place is run and see no place where they can prosper.
LA WEEKLY: And yet Americans seem quite susceptible to a sort of jingoistic
"enemy-of-the-month club" coming out of Washington. You say millions of
Americans hate the government. But something like 75 per cent say they support George W.
Bush, especially on the issue of the war.
VIDAL: I hope you don't believe those figures. Don't you know how the polls are
rigged_ It's simple. After 9/11 the country was shocked and terrified. (Bush) does a war
dance and talks about evil axis and all the countries he's going to go after. And how long
it is going to take, he says with a happy smile, because it means billions for the
Pentagon and for his oil friends. And it means curtailing our liberties, so this is very
thrilling for him. He's out there bombing Afghanistan. Well, he might as well have been
bombing Denmark. Denmark had nothing to do with 9/11. And neither did Afghanistan. So the
question is still asked, are you standing tall with the president_ Standing with him as he
defends us_ Eventually, they will figure it out.
LA WEEKLY: They being who_ The American people_
VIDAL: Yeah, the American people. They are asked these quick questions. Do you
approve of him_ Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, he blew up all those funny-sounding cities
over there. That doesn't mean they like him. Mark my words. He will leave office the most
unpopular president in history. The junta has done too much wreckage. They were
suspiciously ready with the Patriot Act as soon as we were hit. Which means they have
already got their police state.
LA WEEKLY: Let's pick away at one of your favourite bones, the American media. Some
say they have done a better-than-usual job since 9/11. But I suspect you're not buying
that_
VIDAL: No, I don't buy it. Part of the year I live in Italy. And I find out more
about what's going on in the Middle East by reading the British, the French, even the
Italian press. Everything here is slanted. I mean, to watch Bush doing his war dance in
Congress...about "evil doers" and this "axis of evil" - Iran, Iraq and
North Korea. I thought, he doesn't even know what the word axis means.
LA WEEKLY: What about George W. Bush, the man_
VIDAL: You mean George W. Bush, the cheerleader. That's the only thing he ever did
of some note. He had some involvement with a baseball team...
LA WEEKLY: He owned it...
VIDAL: Yeah, bought with other people' s money. Oil people's money. So he's never
really worked and shows little capacity for learning.
LA WEEKLY: Should the US just pack up its military from everywhere and go home_
VIDAL: Yes. With no exceptions. We are not the world's policeman. We cannot even
police the United States.
Gore Vidal's latest book is entitled: 'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We
Got To Be So Hated.'
THE COUNTER-TERRORIST
by LAWRENCE WRIGHT
from
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE
January 20th 2002
John O'Neill was an F.B.I. agent with an obsession: the growing threat of Al Qaeda.
The legend of John P. O'Neill, who lost his life at the World Trade Center on September 11th, begins with a story by Richard A. Clarke, the national coördinator for counter-terrorism in the White House from the first Bush Administration until last year. On a Sunday morning in February, 1995, Clarke went to his office to review intelligence cables that had come in over the weekend. One of the cables reported that Ramzi Yousef, the suspected mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, two years earlier, had been spotted in Pakistan. Clarke immediately called the F.B.I. A man whose voice was unfamiliar to him answered the phone. "O'Neill," he growled.
"Who are you_" Clarke said.
"I'm John O'Neill," the man replied. "Who the hell are you_"
O'Neill had just been appointed chief of the F.B.I.'s counter-terrorism section, in Washington. He was forty-two years old, and had been transferred from the bureau's Chicago office. After driving all night, he had gone directly to headquarters that Sunday morning without dropping off his bags. When he heard Clarke's report about Yousef, O'Neill entered the F.B.I.'s Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC) and telephoned Thomas Pickard, the head of the bureau's National Security Division in New York. Pickard then called Mary Jo White, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who had indicted Yousef in the bombing case.
One of O'Neill's new responsibilities was to put together a team to bring the suspect home. It was composed of agents who were working on the case, a State Department representative, a medical doctor, a hostage-rescue team, and a fingerprint expert whose job was to make sure that the suspect was, in fact, Ramzi Yousef. Under ordinary circumstances, the host country would be asked to detain the suspect until extradition paperwork had been signed and the F.B.I. could place the man in custody. There was no time for that. Yousef was reportedly preparing to board a bus for Peshawar. Unless he was apprehended, he would soon cross the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, where he would be out of reach. There was only one F.B.I. agent in Pakistan at the time, along with several agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department's diplomatic-security bureau. "Our Ambassador had to get in his car and go ripping across town to get the head of the local military intelligence," Clarke recalled. "The chief gave him his own personal aides, and this ragtag bunch of American law-enforcement officials and a couple of Pakistani soldiers set off to catch Yousef before he got on the bus." O'Neill, working around the clock for the next three days, coordinated the entire effort. At 10 A.M. Pakistan time, on Tuesday, February 7th, SIOC was informed that the World Trade Center bomber was in custody.
During the next six years, O'Neill became the bureau's most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists as they struck against American interests around the world. Brash, ambitious, often full of himself, O'Neill had a confrontational personality that brought him powerful enemies. Even so, he was too valuable to ignore. He was the point man in the investigation of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and Yemen. At a time when the Clinton Administration was struggling to decide how to respond to the terrorist threat, O'Neill, along with others in the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., realized that Al Qaeda was relentless and resourceful and that its ultimate target was America itself. In the last days of his life, after he had taken a new job as the chief of security for the World Trade Center, he was warning friends, "We're due."
"I am the F.B.I.," John O'Neill liked to boast. He had wanted to work for the bureau since boyhood, when he watched Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., as the buttoned-down Inspector Lewis Erskine in the TV series "The F.B.I." O'Neill was born in 1952 and brought up in Atlantic City, where his mother drove a cab for a small taxi business that she and his father owned. After graduating from Holy Spirit High School, he got a job as a fingerprint clerk with the F.B.I. During his first semester in college, he married his high-school sweetheart, Christine, and when he was twenty their son, John P. O'Neill, Jr., was born. O'Neill put himself through a master's program in forensics at George Washington University by serving as a tour guide at the F.B.I. headquarters. In 1976, he became a full-time agent in the bureau's office in Baltimore; ten years later, he returned to headquarters and served as an inspector. In 1991, he was named assistant special agent in charge in the Chicago office. In 1994, he received the additional assignment of supervising VAPCON, a national investigation into violence against abortion providers. The following year, he transferred to headquarters to become the counter-terrorism chief.
John Lipka, an agent who met O'Neill during the VAPCON probe, marvelled at his ability to move so easily from investigating organized crime and official corruption to the thornier field of counter-terrorism. "He was a very quick study," Lipka told me. "I'd been working terrorism since '86, but he'd walk out of the Hoover building, flag a cab, and I'd brief him on the way to the White House. Then he'd give a presentation, and I'd be shocked that he grhtmled everything I had been working on for weeks."
O'Neill entered the bureau in the J. Edgar Hoover era, and throughout his career he had something of the old-time G-man about him. He talked tough, in a New Jersey accent that many loved to imitate. He was darkly handsome, with black eyes and slicked-back hair. In a culture that favors discreet anonymity, he cut a memorable figure. He favored fine cigars and Chivas Regal and water with a twist, and carried a nine-millimetre automatic strapped to his ankle. His manner was bluff and dominating, but he was always immaculately, even fussily, dressed. One of his colleagues in Washington took note of O'Neill's "night-club wardrobe"—black double-breasted suits, semitransparent black socks, and ballet-slipper shoes. "He had very delicate feet and hands, and, with his polished fingernails, he made quite an impression."
In Washington, O'Neill became part of a close-knit group of counter-terrorism experts which formed around Richard Clarke. In the web of federal agencies concerned with terrorism, Clarke was the spider. Everything that touched the web eventually came to his attention. The members of this inner circle, which was known as the Counter-terrorism Security Group (C.S.G.), were drawn mainly from the C.I.A., the National Security Council, and the upper tiers of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the State Department. They met every week in the White House Situation Room. "John could lead a discussion at that level," R. P. Eddy, who was an N.S.C. director at the time, told me. "He was not just the guy you turned to for a situation report. He was the guy who would say the thing that everybody in the room wishes he had said."
In July of 1996, when T.W.A. Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island, there was widespread speculation in the C.S.G. that it had been shot down by a shoulder-fired missile from the shore. Dozens of witnesses reported having seen an ascending flare that culminated in an explosion. According to Clarke, O'Neill, working with the Defense Department, determined the height of the aircraft and its distance from shore at the time of the explosion, and demonstrated that it was out of the range of a Stinger missile. He proposed that the flare could have been caused by the ignition of leaking fuel from the aircraft, and he persuaded the C.I.A. to do a video simulation of this scenario, which proved to be strikingly similar to the witnesses' accounts. It is now generally agreed that mechanical failure, not terrorism, caused the explosion of T.W.A. Flight 800.
Clarke immediately spotted in O'Neill an obsessiveness about the dangers of terrorism which mirrored his own. "John had the same problems with the bureaucracy that I had," Clarke told me. "Prior to September 11th, a lot of people who were working full time on terrorism thought it was no more than a nuisance. They didn't understand that Al Qaeda was enormously powerful and insidious and that it was not going to stop until it really hurt us. John and some other senior officials knew that. The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn't understand."
Osama bin Laden had been linked to terrorism since the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. His name had turned up on a list of donors to an Islamic charity that helped finance the bombing, and defendants in the case referred to a "Sheikh Osama" in a recorded conversation. "We started looking at who was involved in these events, and it seemed like an odd group of people getting together," Clarke recalled. "They clearly had money. We'd see C.I.A. reports that referred to 'financier Osama bin Laden,' and we'd ask ourselves, 'Who the hell is he_' The more we drilled down, the more we realized that he was not just a financier—he was the leader. John said, 'We've got to get this guy. He's building a network. Everything leads back to him.' Gradually, the C.I.A. came along with us."
O'Neill worked with Clarke to establish clear lines of responsibility among the intelligence agencies, and in 1995 their efforts resulted in a Presidential directive giving the F.B.I. the lead authority both in investigating and in preventing acts of terrorism wherever Americans or American interests were threatened. After the April, 1995, bombing in Oklahoma City, O'Neill formed a separate section for domestic terrorism, but he concentrated on redesigning and expanding the foreign-terrorism branch. He organized a swap of deputies between his office and the C.I.A.'s counter-terrorism center, despite resistance from both agencies.
"John told me that if you put the resources and talents of the C.I.A.'s counter-terrorism center and the F.B.I.'s counter-terrorism section together on any issue, we can solve it—but we need both," Lipka recalled. In January, 1996, O'Neill helped create a C.I.A. station, code-named Alex, with a single-minded purpose. "Its mission was not just tracking down bin Laden but focussing on his infrastructure, his capabilities, where he got his funding, where were his bases of operation and his training centers," Lipka said. "Many of the same things we are doing now, that station was already doing then."
The coöperation that O'Neill achieved between the bureau and the C.I.A. was all the more remarkable because opinions about him were sharply polarized. O'Neill could be brutal, not only with underlings but also with superiors when they failed to meet his expectations. An agent in the Chicago office who felt his disapproval told me, "He was smarter than everybody else, and he would use that fine mind to absolutely humiliate people."
In Washington, there was one terrorist-related crisis after another. "We worked a bomb a month," Lipka recalled. Often, O'Neill would break for dinner and be back in the office at ten. "Most people couldn't keep up with his passion and intensity," Lipka said. "He was able to identify those people who shared his work ethic, and then he tasked the living shit out of them, with E-mails and status briefings and phones and pagers going off all the time, to the point that I asked him, 'When do you sleep_' " O'Neill began acquiring nicknames that testified to his relentlessness, among them the Count, the Prince of Darkness, and Satan.
But many in the bureau who disliked O'Neill eventually became devoted followers. He went to extraordinary lengths to help when they faced health problems or financial difficulty. "He was our Elvis—you knew when he was in the house," Kevin Giblin, the F.B.I.'s head of terrorist warning, recalled.
O'Neill's tenure in the F.B.I. coincided with the internationalization of crime and law enforcement. Prior to his appointment as the bureau's counter-terrorism chief, the F.B.I. had limited its involvement to operations in which Americans had been killed. "O'Neill came in with a much more global approach," Lipka told me. One of his innovations was to catalogue all the explosives used by terrorists worldwide. "He thought, When a bomb goes off in the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, even though no Americans were killed, why don't we offer our assistance, so that we can put that information on a global forensic database," Lipka said. Since 1984, the F.B.I. had had the authority to investigate crimes against Americans abroad, but that mandate had been handicapped by a lack of coöperation with foreign police agencies. O'Neill made a habit of entertaining every foreign cop or intelligence agent who entered his orbit. He called it his "night job."
"John's approach to law enforcement was that of the old Irish ward boss to governance: you collect friendships and debts and obligations, because you never know when you're going to need them," Clarke told me. He was constantly on the phone, doing favors, massaging contacts. By the time he died, he had become one of the best-known policemen in the world. "You'd be in Moscow at some bilateral exchange," Giblin recalled, "and you'd see three or four men approach and say, in broken English, 'Do you know John O'Neill_' "
The need to improve relationships with foreign police agencies became apparent in November, 1995, when five Americans and two Indians died in the bombing of an American-run military-training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The F.B.I. sent over a small squad to investigate, but the agents had scarcely arrived when the Saudis arrested four suspects and beheaded them, foreclosing any opportunity to learn who was behind the operation.
In the spring of 1996, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who had supported a plot by Al Qaeda against American soldiers in Somalia four years earlier, arrived at the American Embassy in Asmara, Eritrea. The C.I.A. debriefed him for six months, then turned him over to the F.B.I., which put him in the witness-protection program. Fadl provided the first extensive road map of the bin Laden terrorist empire. "Fadl was a gold mine," an intelligence source who was present during some of the interviews told me. "He described the network, bin Laden's companies, his farms, his operations in the ports." Fadl also talked about bin Laden's desire to attack Americans, including his ambition to obtain uranium. The news was widely circulated among members of the intelligence community, including O'Neill, and yet the State Department refused to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization.
On June 25, 1996, O'Neill arranged a retreat for F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents at the bureau's training center in Quantico, Virginia. "We had hot dogs and hamburgers, and John let the C.I.A. guys on the firing range, because they never get to shoot," Giblin recalled. "Then everyone's beeper went off." Another explosion in Saudi Arabia, at the Khobar Towers, a military-housing complex in Dhahran, had killed nineteen American soldiers and injured more than five hundred other people, including Saudis. O'Neill assembled a team of nearly a hundred agents, support personnel, and members of various police agencies. The next day, they were on an Air Force transport plane to Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, they were joined by O'Neill and the F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh.
It was evening when the two men arrived in Dhahran. The disaster site was a vast crater illuminated by lights on high stanchions; nearby lay charred automobiles and upended Humvees. Looming above the debris were the ruins of the housing complex. This was the largest bomb that the F.B.I. had ever investigated, even more powerful than the explosives that had killed a hundred and sixty-eight people in Oklahoma City in 1995. O'Neill walked through the rubble, greeting exhausted agents who were sifting the sand for evidence. Under a tarp nearby, investigators were gradually reconstructing fragments of the truck that had carried the bomb.
In the Khobar Towers case, neither the Saudis nor the State Department seemed eager to pursue a trail of evidence that pointed to Iranian terrorists as the likeliest perpetrators. The Clinton Administration did not relish the prospect of military retaliation against a country that seemed to be moderating its anti-Western policies, and, according to Clarke, the Saudis impeded the F.B.I. investigation because they were worried about the American response. "They were afraid that we would have to bomb Iran," I was told by a Clinton Administration official, who added that that would have been a likely course of action.
Freeh was initially optimistic that the Saudis would coöperate, but O'Neill became increasingly frustrated, and eventually a rift seems to have developed between the two men. "John started telling Louis things Louis didn't want to hear," Clarke said. "John told me that, after one of the many trips he and Freeh took to the Mideast to get better coöperation from the Saudis, they boarded the Gulfstream to come home and Freeh says, 'Wasn't that a great trip_ I think they're really going to help us.' And John says, 'You've got to be kidding. They didn't give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.' For the next twelve hours, Freeh didn't say another word to him."
Freeh denies that this conversation took place. "Of course, John and I discussed the results of every trip at that time," he wrote to me in an E-mail. "However, John never made that statement to me. . . . John and I had an excellent relationship based on trust and friendship."
O'Neill longed to get out of Washington so that he could "go operational," as he told John Lipka, and supervise cases again. In January, 1997, he became special agent in charge of the National Security Division in New York, the bureau's largest and most prestigious field office. When he arrived, he dumped four boxes of Rolodex cards on the desk of his new secretary, Lorraine di Taranto. Then he handed her a list of everyone he wanted to meet—"the mayor, the police commissioner, the deputy police commissioners, the heads of the federal agencies, religious and ethnic leaders," di Taranto recalled. Within six months, O'Neill had met everyone on the list.
"Everybody knew John," R. P. Eddy, who left Washington in 1999 for a job at the United Nations, told me. "You would walk into Elaine's or Bruno's with him, and everyone from the owner to the waiters to the guy who cleaned the floor would look up. And the amazing thing is they would all have a private discussion with him at some point. The waitress wanted tickets to a Michael Jackson concert. One of the wait staff was applying for a job with the bureau, and John would be helping him with that. After a night of this, I remember saying, 'John, you've got this town wired.' And he said, 'What's the point of being sheriff if you can't act like one_' "
O'Neill was soon on intimate terms with movie stars, politicians, and journalists—what some of his detractors called "the Elaine's crowd." In the spring of 1998, one of O'Neill's New York friends, a producer at ABC News named Christopher Isham, arranged an interview for a network reporter, John Miller, with Osama bin Laden. Miller's narration contained information to the effect that one of bin Laden's aides was coöperating with the F.B.I. The leak of that detail created, in Isham's words, "a firestorm in the bureau." O'Neill, because of his friendship with Isham and Miller, was suspected of providing the information, and an internal investigation was launched. The matter died down after the newsmen denied that O'Neill was their informant and volunteered to take polygraphs.
In New York, O'Neill created a special Al Qaeda desk, and when the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania occurred, in August, 1998, he was sure that bin Laden was behind them. "He was pissed, he was beside himself," Robert M. Blitzer, who was head of the F.B.I.'s domestic-terrorism section at the time, remembered. "He was calling me every day. He wanted control of that investigation." O'Neill persuaded Freeh to let the New York office handle the case, and he eventually dispatched nearly five hundred investigators to Africa. Mary Jo White, whose prosecuting team subsequently convicted five defendants in the case, told me, "John O'Neill, in the investigation of the bombings of our embassies in East Africa, created the template for successful investigations of international terrorism around the world."
The counter-terrorist community was stunned by the level of coordination required to pull off the simultaneous bombings. Even more troubling was the escalation of violence against civilians. According to Steven Simon, then a terrorist expert at the N.S.C., as many as five American embassies had been targeted—luck and better intelligence had saved the others. It was discouraging to learn that, nearly a year before, a member of Al Qaeda had walked into the American Embassy in Nairobi and told the C.I.A. of the bombing plot. The agency had dismissed this intelligence as unreliable. "The guy was a bullshit artist, completely off the map," an intelligence source said. But his warnings about the impending attacks proved accurate.
Moreover, key members of the Al Qaeda cell that planned the operation had been living in one of the most difficult places in the Western world to gain intelligence: the United States. The F.B.I. is constrained from spying on American citizens and visitors without probable cause. Lacking evidence that potential conspirators were actively committing a crime, the bureau could do little to gather information on the domestic front. O'Neill felt that his hands were tied. "John was never satisfied," one of his friends in the bureau recalled. "He said we were fighting a war, but we were not able to fight back. He thought we never had the tools in place to do the job."
O'Neill never presumed that killing bin Laden alone would be sufficient. In speeches, he identified five tools to combat terrorism: diplomacy, military action, covert operations, economic sanctions, and law enforcement. So far, the tool that had worked most effectively against Al Qaeda was the last one—the slow, difficult work of gathering evidence, getting indictments, hunting down the perpetrators, and gaining convictions.
O'Neill was worried that terrorists had established a beachhead in America. In a June, 1997, speech in Chicago, he warned, "Almost all of the groups today, if they chose to, have the ability to strike us here in the United States." He was particularly concerned that, as the millennium approached, Al Qaeda would seize the moment to dramatize its war with America. The intelligence to support that hypothesis was frustratingly absent, however.
On December 14, 1999, a border guard in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, who then bolted from his car. He was captured as he tried to hijack another automobile. In the trunk of his car were four timers, more than a hundred pounds of urea, and fourteen pounds of sulfate—the makings of an Oklahoma City-type bomb. It turned out that Ressam's target was Los Angeles International Airport. The following day, Jordanian authorities arrested thirteen suspected terrorists who were believed to be planning to blow up a Radisson Hotel in Amman and a number of tourist sites frequented by Westerners. The Jordanians also discovered an Al Qaeda training manual on CD-ROM.
What followed was, according to Clarke, the most comprehensive investigation ever conducted before September 11th. O'Neill's job was to supervise the operation in New York. Authorities had found several phone numbers on Ressam when he was arrested. There was also a name, Ghani, which belonged to Abdel Ghani Meskini, an Algerian, who lived in Brooklyn and who had travelled to Seattle to meet with Ressam. O'Neill oversaw the stakeout of Meskini's residence and spent much of his time in the Brooklyn command post. "I doubt he slept the whole month," David N. Kelley, an assistant United States Attorney and chief of organized crime and terrorism for the Southern District, recalled. A wiretap picked up a call that Meskini had made to Algeria in which he spoke about Ressam and a suspected terrorist in Montreal. On December 30th, O'Neill arrested Meskini on conspiracy charges and a number of other suspected terrorists on immigration violations. (Meskini and Ressam eventually became coöperating witnesses and are both assisting the F.B.I.'s investigation of the September 11th attacks.)
O'Neill was proud of the efforts of the F.B.I. and the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force to avert catastrophe. On New Year's Eve, he and his friend Joseph Dunne, then the Chief of Department for the New York City Police, went to Times Square, which they believed was a highly likely target. At midnight, O'Neill called friends at SIOC and boasted that he was standing directly under the giant crystal ball.
After the millennium roundup, O'Neill suspected that Al Qaeda had sleeper cells buried in America. "He started pulling the strings in Jordan and in Canada, and in the end they all led back to the United States," Clarke said. "There was a general disbelief in the F.B.I. that Al Qaeda had much of a presence here. It just hadn't sunk through to the organization, beyond O'Neill and Dale Watson"—the assistant director of the counter-terrorism division. Clarke's discussions with O'Neill and Watson over the next few months led to a strategic plan called the Millennium After-Action Review, which specified a number of policy changes designed to root out Al Qaeda cells in the United States. They included increasing the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country; assigning more agents from the Internal Revenue Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to monitor the flow of money and personnel; and creating a streamlined process for analyzing information obtained from wiretaps.
Many in the F.B.I. point to the millennium investigation as one of the bureau's great recent successes. A year earlier, O'Neill had been passed over when the position of assistant director in charge of national security became available. When the post of chief of the New York office opened up, in early 2000, O'Neill lobbied fiercely for it. The job went to Barry Mawn, a former special agent in charge of the Boston office. As it happened, the two men met at a seminar just after the decision was announced. "I got a knock on the door, and there was John holding two beers," Mawn recalled. O'Neill promised complete loyalty in return for Mawn's support of his work on counter-terrorism. "It turns out that supporting him was a full-time job," Mawn said.
O'Neill had many detractors and very few defenders left in Washington. Despite occasional disagreements, Louis Freeh had always supported O'Neill, but Freeh had announced that he would retire in June, 2001. A friend of O'Neill's, Jerry Hauer, of the New York-based security firm Kroll, told me that Thomas Pickard, who had become the bureau's deputy director in 1999, was "an institutional roadblock." Hauer added, "It was very clear to John that Pickard was never going to let him get promoted." Others felt that O'Neill was his own worst enemy. "He was always trying to leverage himself to the next job," Dale Watson said. John Lipka, who considers himself a close friend of O'Neill, attributes some of O'Neill's problems to his flamboyant image. "The bureau doesn't like high-profile people," he said. "It's a very conservative culture."
The World Trade Center had become a symbol of America's success in fighting terrorism, and in September, 2000, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force celebrated its twentieth anniversary in the Windows on the World restaurant. The event was attended by representatives of seventeen law-enforcement agencies, including agents from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., New York City and Port Authority policemen, United States marshals, and members of the Secret Service. Mary Jo White praised the task force for a "close to absolutely perfect record of successful investigations and convictions." White had served eight years as the United States Attorney for the Southern District, and she had convicted twenty-five Islamic terrorists, including Yousef, six other World Trade Center bombers, the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, and nine of Rahman's followers, who had planned to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations headquarters, and the F.B.I. offices.
O'Neill seemed at ease that night. Few of his colleagues knew of a troubling incident that had occurred two months earlier at an F.B.I. pre-retirement conference in Orlando. During a meeting, O'Neill had been paged. He left the room to return the call, and when he came back, a few minutes later, the other agents had broken for lunch. His briefcase, which contained classified material, was missing. O'Neill immediately called the local police, and they found the briefcase a couple of hours later, in another hotel. A Montblanc pen had been stolen, along with a silver cigar cutter and a lighter. The papers were intact; fingerprint analysis soon established that they had not been touched.
"He phoned me and said, 'I gotta tell you something,' " Barry Mawn recalled. O'Neill told Mawn that the briefcase contained some classified E-mails and one highly sensitive document, the Annual Field Office Report, which is an overview of every counter-terrorist and counter-espionage case in New York. Mawn reported the incident to Neil Gallagher, the bureau's assistant director in charge of national security. "John understood the seriousness of what he had done, and if he were alive today he'd tell you he made a stupid mistake," Gallagher told me. Even though none of the information had been compromised, the Justice Department ordered a criminal inquiry.
Mawn said that, as O'Neill's supervisor, he would have recommended an oral reprimand or, at worst, a letter of censure. Despite their competition for the top job in New York, Mawn had become one of O'Neill's staunchest defenders. "He demanded perfection, which was a large part of why the New York office is so terrific," Mawn said. "But underneath his manner, deep down, he was very insecure."
On October 12, 2000, a small boat filled with C4 explosives motored alongside a U.S. destroyer, the Cole, which was fuelling up off the coast of Yemen. Two men aboard the small craft waved at the larger vessel, then blew themselves to pieces. Seventeen American sailors died, and thirty-nine others were seriously wounded.
O'Neill knew that Yemen was going to be an extremely difficult place in which to conduct an investigation. In 1992, bin Laden's network had bombed a hotel in Aden, hoping to kill a number of American soldiers. The country was filled with spies and with jihadis and was reeling from a 1994 civil war. "Yemen is a country of eighteen million citizens and 50 million machine guns," O'Neill reported. On the day the investigators arrived in Yemen, O'Neill warned them, "This may be the most hostile environment the F.B.I. has ever operated in."
The American Ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, saw things differently. In her eyes, Yemen was the poor and guileless cousin of the swaggering petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Unlike other countries in the region, it was a constitutional democracy—however fragile—in which women were allowed to vote. Bodine had had extensive experience in Arab countries. During the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, she had been the deputy chief of mission in Kuwait City, and she had stayed through the hundred-and-thirty-seven-day siege of the American Embassy by Iraqi troops until all the Americans were evacuated.
Bodine, who is on assignment from the State Department as diplomat-in-residence at the University of California at Santa Barbara, contends that she and O'Neill had agreed that he would bring in a team of no more than fifty. She was furious when three hundred investigators, support staff, and marines arrived, many carrying automatic weapons. "Try to imagine if a military plane from another country landed in Des Moines, and three hundred heavily armed people took over," she told me recently. Bodine recalled that she pleaded with O'Neill to consider the delicate diplomatic environment he was entering. She quoted him as responding, "We don't care about the environment. We're just here to investigate a crime."
"There was the F.B.I. way, and that was it," she said to me. "O'Neill wasn't unique. He was simply extreme." According to Michael Sheehan, who was the State Department's coördinator for counter-terrorism at the time, such conflicts between ambassadors and the bureau are not unusual, given their differing perspectives; however, Bodine had been given clear instructions from the outset of the investigation. "I drafted a cable under [then Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright's signature saying that there were three guiding principles," Sheehan said. "The highest priorities were the immediate safety of American personnel and the investigation of the attack. No. 3 was maintaining a relationship with the government of Yemen— but only to support those objectives."
O'Neill's investigators were billeted three or four to a room in an Aden hotel. "Forty-five F.B.I. personnel slept on mats on the ballroom floor," he later reported. He set up a command post on the eighth floor, which was surrounded by sandbags and protected by a company of fifty marines.
O'Neill spent much of his time coaxing the Yemeni authorities to coöperate. To build a case that would hold up in American courts, he wanted his agents present during interrogations by local authorities, in part to insure that none of the suspects were tortured. He also wanted to gather eyewitness testimony from residents who had seen the explosion. Both the Yemeni authorities and Bodine resisted these requests. "You want a bunch of six-foot-two Irish-Americans to go door-to-door_" Bodine remembers saying to O'Neill. "And, excuse me, but how many of your guys speak Arabic_"
There were only half a dozen Arabic speakers in the F.B.I. contingent, and even O'Neill acknowledged that their competence was sometimes in question. On one occasion, he complained to a Yemeni intelligence officer, "Getting information out of you is like pulling teeth." When his comment was translated, the Yemeni's eyes widened. The translator had told him, "If you don't give me the information I want, I'm going to pull out your teeth."
When O'Neill expressed his frustration to Washington, President Clinton sent a note to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It had little effect. According to agents on the scene, O'Neill's people were never given the authority they needed for a proper investigation. Much of their time was spent on board the Cole, interviewing sailors, or lounging around the sweltering hotel. Some of O'Neill's requests for evidence mystified the Yemenis. They couldn't understand, for instance, why he was demanding a hat worn by one of the conspirators, which O'Neill wanted to examine for DNA evidence. Even the harbor sludge, which contained residue from the bomb, was off limits until the bureau paid the Yemeni government a million dollars to dredge it.
There were so many perceived threats that the agents often slept in their clothes and with their guns at their sides. Bodine thought that much of this fear was overblown. "They were deeply suspicious of everyone, including the hotel staff," she told me. She assured O'Neill that gunfire outside the hotel was probably not directed at the investigators but was simply the noise of wedding celebrations. Still, she added that, for the investigators' own safety, she wanted to lower the bureau's profile by reducing the number of agents and stripping them of heavy weapons. Upon receiving a bomb threat, the investigators evacuated the hotel and moved to an American vessel, the U.S.S. Duluth. After that, they had to request permission just to come ashore.
Relations between Bodine and O'Neill deteriorated to the point that Barry Mawn flew to Yemen to assess the situation. "She represented that John was insulting, and not getting along well with the Yemenis," he recalled. Mawn talked to members of the F.B.I. team and American military officers, and he observed O'Neill's interactions with Yemeni authorities. He told O'Neill that he was doing "an outstanding job." On Mawn's return, he reported favorably on O'Neill to Freeh, adding that Bodine was his "only detractor."
An ambassador, however, has authority over which Americans are allowed to stay in a foreign country. A month after the investigation began, Assistant Director Dale Watson told the Washington Post, "Sustained cooperation" with the Yemenis "has enabled the F.B.I. to further reduce its in-country presence. . . . The F.B.I. will soon be able to bring home the F.B.I.'s senior on-scene commander, John O'Neill." It appeared to be a very public surrender. The same day, the Yemeni Prime Minister told the Post that no link had been discovered between the Cole bombers and Al Qaeda.
The statement was premature, to say the least. In fact, it is possible that some of the planning for the Cole bombing and the September 11th attacks took place simultaneously. It is now believed that at least two of the suspected conspirators in the Cole bombing had attended a meeting of alleged bin Laden associates in Malaysia, in January, 2000. Under C.I.A. pressure, Malaysian authorities had conducted a surveillance of the gathering, turning up a number of faces but, in the absence of wiretaps, nothing of what was said. "It didn't seem like much at the time," a Clinton Administration official told me. "None of the faces showed up in our own files." Early last year, the F.B.I. targeted the men who were present at the Malaysia meeting as potential terrorists. Two of them were subsequently identified as hijackers in the September 11th attacks.
After two months in Yemen, O'Neill came home feeling that he was fighting the counter-terrorism battle without support from his own government. He had made some progress in gaining access to evidence, but so far the investigation had been a failure. Concerned about continuing threats against the remaining F.B.I. investigators, he tried to return in January of 2001. Bodine denied his application to reënter the country. She refuses to discuss that decision. "Too much is being made of John O'Neill's being in Yemen or not," she told me. "John O'Neill did not discover Al Qaeda. He did not discover Osama bin Laden. So the idea that John or his people or the F.B.I. were somehow barred from doing their job is insulting to the U.S. government, which was working on Al Qaeda before John ever showed up. This is all my embassy did for ten months. The fact that not every single thing John O'Neill asked for was appropriate or possible does not mean that we did not support the investigation."
After O'Neill's departure, the remaining agents, feeling increasingly vulnerable, retreated to the American Embassy in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. In June, the Yemeni authorities arrested eight men who they said were part of a plot to blow up the Embassy. New threats against the F.B.I. followed, and Freeh, acting upon O'Neill's recommendation, withdrew the team entirely. Its members were, he told me, "the highest target during this period." Bodine calls the pullout "unconscionable." In her opinion, there was never a specific, credible threat against the bureau. The American Embassy, Bodine points out, stayed open. But within days American military forces in the Middle East were put on top alert.
Few people in the bureau knew that O'Neill had a wife and two children (John, Jr., and his younger sister, Carol) in New Jersey, who did not join him when he moved to Chicago, in 1991. In his New York office, the most prominent pictures were not family photographs but French Impressionist prints. On his coffee table was a book about tulips, and his office was always filled with flowers. He was a terrific dancer, and he boasted that he had been on "American Bandstand" when he was a teen-ager. Some women found him irresistibly sexy. Others thought him a cad.
Shortly after he arrived in Chicago, O'Neill met Valerie James, a fashion sales director, who was divorced and was raising two children. Four years later, when he transferred to headquarters, in Washington, he also began seeing Anna DiBattista, who worked for a travel agency. Then, when he moved to New York, Valerie James joined him. In 1999, DiBattista moved to New York to take a new job, complicating his life considerably. His friends in Chicago and New York knew Valerie, and his friends in Washington knew Anna. If his friends happened to see him in the company of the "wrong" woman, he pledged them to secrecy.
On holidays, O'Neill went home to New Jersey to visit his parents and to see his children. Only John P. O'Neill, Jr., who is a computer expert for the credit-card company M.B.N.A., in Wilmington, Delaware, agreed to speak to me about his father. His remarks were guarded. He described a close relationship—"We talked a few times a week"—but there are parts of his father's past that he refuses to discuss. "My father liked to keep his private life private," he said.
Both James and DiBattista remember how O'Neill would beg for forgiveness and then promise better times. James told me, "He'd say, 'I just want to be loved, just love me,' but you couldn't really trust him, so he never got the love he asked for."
The stress of O'Neill's tangled personal life began to affect his professional behavior. One night, he left his Palm Pilot in Yankee Stadium; it was filled with his police contacts all around the world. On another occasion, he left his cell phone in a cab. In the summer of 1999, he and James were driving to the Jersey shore when his Buick broke down near the Meadowlands. As it happened, his bureau car was parked nearby, at a secret office location, and O'Neill switched cars. One of the most frequently violated rules in the bureau is the use of an official vehicle for personal reasons, and O'Neill's infraction might have been overlooked had he not let James enter the building to use the bathroom. "I had no idea what it was," she told me. Still, when the F.B.I. learned about the violation, apparently from an agent who had been caught using the site as an auto-repair shop, O'Neill was reprimanded and docked fifteen days' pay. He regarded the bureau's action as part of a pattern. "The last two years of his life, he got very paranoid," James told me. "He was convinced there were people out to get him."
In March, 2001, Richard Clarke asked the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, for a job change; he wanted to concentrate on computer security. "I was told, 'You've got to recommend somebody similar to be your replacement,' " Clarke recalled. "I said, 'Well, there's only one person who would fit that bill.' " For months, Clarke tried to persuade O'Neill to become a candidate as his successor.
O'Neill had always harbored two htmlirations—to become a deputy director of the bureau in Washington or to take over the New York office. Freeh was retiring in June, so there were likely to be some vacancies at the top, but the investigation into the briefcase incident would likely block any promotion in the bureau. O'Neill viewed Clarke's job as, in many ways, a perfect fit for him. But he was financially pressed, and Clarke's job paid no more than he was making at the F.B.I. Throughout the summer, O'Neill refused to commit himself to Clarke's offer. He talked about it with a number of friends but became alarmed when he thought that headquarters might hear of it. "He called me in a worked-up state," Clarke recalled. "He said that people in the C.I.A. and elsewhere know you are considering recommending me for your job. You have to tell them it's not true." Clarke dutifully called a friend in the agency, even though O'Neill still wanted to be a candidate for the position.
In July, O'Neill heard of a job opening in the private sector which would pay more than twice his government salary—that of chief of security for the World Trade Center. Although the Justice Department dropped its inquiry into the briefcase incident, the bureau was conducting an internal investigation of its own. O'Neill was aware that the Times was preparing a story about the affair, and he learned that the reporters also knew about the incident in New Jersey involving James and had classified information that probably came from the bureau's investigative files.The leak seemed to be timed to destroy O'Neill's chance of being confirmed for the N.S.C. job. He decided to retire.
O'Neill suspected that the source of the information was either Tom Pickard or Dale Watson. The antagonism between him and Pickard was well known. "I've got a pretty good Irish temper and so did John," Pickard, who retired last November, told me. But he insisted that their differences were professional, not personal. The leak was "somebody being pretty vicious to John," but Pickard maintained that he did not do it. "I'd take a polygraph to it," he said. Watson told me, "If you're asking me who leaks F.B.I. information, I have no idea. I know I don't, and I know that Tom Pickard doesn't, and I know that the director doesn't." For all the talk about polygraphs, the bureau ruled out an investigation into the source of the leak, despite an official request by Barry Mawn, in New York.
Meanwhile, intelligence had been streaming in concerning a likely Al Qaeda attack. "It all came together in the third week in June," Clarke said. "The C.I.A.'s view was that a major terrorist attack was coming in the next several weeks." On July 5th, Clarke summoned all the domestic security agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, the Coast Guard, Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the F.B.I.—and told them to increase their security in light of an impending attack.
On August 19th, the Times ran an article about the briefcase incident and O'Neill's forthcoming retirement, which was to take place three days later. There was a little gathering for coffee as he packed up his office.
When O'Neill told ABC's Isham of his decision to work at the Trade Center, Isham had said jokingly, "At least they're not going to bomb it again." O'Neill had replied, "They'll probably try to finish the job." On the day he started at the Trade Center—August 23rd—the C.I.A. sent a cable to the F.B.I. saying that two suspected Al Qaeda terrorists were already in the country. The bureau tried to track them down, but the addresses they had given when they entered the country proved to be false, and the men were never located.
When he was growing up in Atlantic City, O'Neill was an altar boy at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church. On September 28th, a week after his body was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center, a thousand mourners gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O'Neill into the war against terrorism long before it became a rallying cry for the nation. The hierarchy of the F.B.I. attended, including the now retired director Louis Freeh. Richard Clarke, who says that he had not shed a tear since September 11th, suddenly broke down when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by.
O'Neill's last weeks had been happy ones. The moment he left the F.B.I., his spirits had lifted. He talked about getting a new Mercedes to replace his old Buick. He told Anna that they could now afford to get married. On the last Saturday night of his life, he attended a wedding with Valerie, and they danced nearly every number. He told a friend within Valerie's hearing, "I'm gonna get her a ring."
On September 10th, O'Neill called Robert Tucker, a friend and security-company executive, and arranged to get together that evening to talk about security issues at the Trade Center. Tucker met O'Neill in the lobby of the north tower, and the two men rode the elevator up to O'Neill's new office, on the thirty-fourth floor. "He was incredibly proud of what he was doing," Tucker told me. Then they went to a bar at the top of the tower for a drink. Afterward, they headed uptown to Elaine's, where they were joined by their friend Jerry Hauer. Around midnight, the three men dropped in on the China Club, a night spot in midtown. "John made the statement that he thought something big was going to happen," Hauer recalled.
Valerie James waited up for O'Neill. He didn't come in until 2:30 A.M. "The next morning, I was frosty," she recalled. "He came into my bathroom and put his arms around me. He said, 'Please forgive me.' " He offered to drive her to work, and dropped her off at eight-thirteen in the flower district, where she had an appointment, and headed to the Trade Center.
At 8:46 A.M., when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower, John P. O'Neill, Jr., was on a train to New York, to install some computer equipment and visit his father's new office. From the window of the train he saw smoke coming from the Trade Center. He called his father on his cell phone. "He said he was O.K. He was on his way out to assess the damage," John, Jr., recalled.
Valerie James was arranging flowers in her office when "the phones started ringing off the hook." A second airliner had just hit the south tower. "At nine-seventeen, John calls," James remembered. He said, "Honey, I want you to know I'm O.K. My God, Val, it's terrible. There are body parts everywhere. Are you crying_" he asked. She was. Then he said, "Val, I think my employers are dead. I can't lose this job."
"They're going to need you more than ever," she told him.
At nine-twenty-five, Anna DiBattista, who was driving to Philadelphia on business, received a call from O'Neill. "The connection was good at the beginning," she recalled. "He was safe and outside. He said he was O.K. I said, 'Are you sure you're out of the building_' He told me he loved me. I knew he was going to go back in."
Wesley Wong, an F.B.I. agent who had known O'Neill for more than twenty years, raced over to the north tower to help set up a command center. "John arrived on the scene," Wong recalled. "He asked me if there was any information I could divulge. I knew he was now basically an outsider. One of the questions he asked was 'Is it true the Pentagon has been hit_' I said, 'Gee, John, I don't know. Let me try to find out.' At one point, he was on his cell phone and he was having trouble with the reception and started walking away. I said, 'I'll catch up with you later.' "
Wong last saw O'Neill walking toward the tunnel leading to the second tower.
When peace broke out
by Malcolm Brown
The Observer
23rd December 2001
British and German soldiers
made history in 1914 when they stopped shooting and started to sing carols and play
football together. Malcolm Brown on one of the most heartening Christmas stories of modern
times.
The facts almost beggar belief. At the first Christmas of a hideous war, Germans and
British sang carols to each other, lit each other's cigarettes in no man's land, exchanged
souvenirs, took group photographs, even played football. Some sort of accommodation with
the enemy, from cheerful waves and shouted greetings to full-scale fraternisation, took
place over two-thirds of the 30 miles of the western front held by the British
Expeditionary Force.
Far from denouncing the event, the press celebrated it with a spate of approving
headlines. Leader writers mused thoughtfully about it. Most national and many local
newspapers carried letters from soldiers who had taken part in it. In an early example of
instant history, none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saluted it in a book published in
1915 as "one human episode among all the atrocities which have stained the memory of
the war".
And then, to all intents, the story was forgotten. It disappeared under the gas clouds of
Ypres and the colossal casualty lists of the Somme and Passchendaele. Thus, looking back
on that stunning Christmas from the 1920s, a former infantryman who had shared the
camaraderie across the lines could write:
"Men who joined us later were inclined to disbelieve us when we spoke of the
incident, and no wonder, for as the months rolled by, we who were actually there could
hardly realise that it had happened, except for the fact that every little detail stood
out well in our memory."
"Every little detail" - the devil is often said to be in the detail, but not in
this story. On Christmas Eve at Plugstreet Wood, Germans put Christmas trees on the
parapet of their front-line trench and sang 'Stille Nacht' (Silent Night), then largely
unfamiliar to British ears but instantly acknowledged as a carol of extraordinary beauty.
[When] moved to respond the territorials opposite struck up with 'O Come, All Ye
Faithful', they heard the Germans joining in with the Latin words 'Adeste Fideles.'
Recalling the event many years later, one former soldier commented: "I thought this a
most extraordinary thing - two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of the
war."
A memorable joint burial service between the trenches on Christmas morning offers another
uplifting detail. The prayers and readings were spoken first in English by a battalion
chaplain and then in German by a young divinity student. "It was an extraordinary and
most wonderful sight," wrote one witness. "The Germans formed up on one side,
the English on the other, the officers standing in front, every head bared. I think it was
a sight one will never see again."
To deal decently with the dead was one powerful motive for establishing a truce. The
Christmas spirit provided another. "It doesn't seem right to be killing each other at
Xmas time," a Tommy noted in his diary. Officers as well as men succumbed to the
festive mood. Thus the commanding officer of a guards battalion strode out to join a mixed
group of British and Germans and with the cry "Well, my lads, a Merry Christmas to
you! This is damned comic, isn't it_" handed round a bottle of best rum which, one
participant recorded, was "polished off before you could say knife".
Other lubricants assisted the event. Near Armentières the premises and product of
a brewery had fallen to the enemy. On Christmas morning, after calling out "Don't
shoot", a party of Germans rolled a barrel of best Belgian beer into no-man's-land
and indulged in a seasonal booze-up with the British, who in this particular case were
Welsh. No nonconformist conscience inhibited these celebrations.
Details which seem almost ludicrous enrich the story. A British Tommy met his German
barber from High Holborn in London and had a short-back-and-sides between the lines. A
German who had raided an abandoned house strutted about wearing a blouse, skirt and top
hat and sporting an umbrella. After a bout of between-the-lines photography, one officer
wrote in a letter home that another truce had been fixed for new year's day "as the
Germans want to see how the photos come out".
"Footer", a favourite recreation then as now on both sides, was an inevitable
part of the occasion, but there was not one England v Germany fixture as such, rather a
scatter of impromptu games or kickabouts, sometimes using a tin can or a rolled-up sandbag
as a ball. Here and there a genuine leather ball was produced and a more serious contest
attempted. A German lieutenant wrote of one such effort: "We marked the goals with
our caps. Teams were quickly established for a match on the frozen mud, and the Fritzes
beat the Tommies 3-2".
Not everybody approved. One officer, ordered to prepare a more usable pitch by filling in
shell holes, angrily refused to comply. This must surely be a very early case of a failure
to create a level playing field. The proposed match did not take place.
Some Frenchwomen, hearing of the goings-on at the front, spat at members of one battalion
next time they were in town. The medical officer of a non-trucing unit, furious at the
unsoldierly behaviour of a neighbouring battalion, approvingly reported "a bit of a
scrap" between his men and theirs. He wrote home: "We aren't here to pal up with
the enemy."
Yet the general reaction was one of amazed acceptance of a happening that delighted far
more than it dismayed. Letters home confirm the incredible nature of the occasion.
"It would have made a good chapter in Dickens's Christmas Carol," wrote one
soldier. "Just you think," mused another, "that while you were eating your
turkey I was out talking with the men I had been trying to kill a few hours before! It was
astounding."
The truce was not organised, nor, as it might be assumed, contagious, with units catching
the spark from their neighbours. Rather, it was the spontaneous product of a mass of local
initiatives. Thus peaceful areas were interlaced with "business as usual" zones
where hostilities continued. This could have unhappy results. One sergeant crossing no
man's land to offer cigarettes to a friendly German regiment was shot by a sniper from a
regiment not observing a ceasefire. He was officially described as "killed in
action", his "action" being the distinctly unmilitary one of attempting to
carry Woodbines to the enemy. The Germans sent across an apology.
Curious as it might seem, the truce produced no courts-martial. Some generals and local
commanders huffed, but most senior officers took a relaxed view. A "rest from
bullets", as one of their number put it, allowed the troops to work above ground
while improving their often inadequate trenches. Both sides appreciated the opportunity.
At one point some Tommies, admiring the better progress made by the enemy opposite, went
over and asked if they could borrow some of their tools; the Germans complied.
One famous participant who responded to the mood of the occasion was the cartoonist Bruce
Bairnsfather, creator of the archetypal British Tommy "Ole Bill", who took part
as a front-line subaltern. He later wrote: "There was not an atom of hatred on either
side that day, and yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to
beat them relaxed. It was just like the interval between the rounds of a friendly boxing
match."
For clearly the war had to go on. Yet in some areas there was no instant rush to resume
hostilities. A guards CO noted in his diary on December 28: "I don't think that they
want to start more than we do as it only means a few of each side being hit and does not
affect the end of the war." A subaltern wrote on the 30th: "At about lunchtime a
message came down the line to say that the Germans had sent across to say that their
general was coming along in the afternoon, so we had better keep down, as they might have
to do a little shooting to make things look right! And this is war!"
By early 1915, however, it became clear that the interlude was, or soon would be, over.
The Manchester Guardian spoke the necessary words in an article of January 7: "'But
they went back into their trenches,' a perfectly enlightened and quite inhuman observer
from another planet would perhaps say, 'and are now hard at it again, slaying and being
slain.' Evidently their glimpses of the wiser and better way were interesting but of no
very great practical importance. To which, of course, we might reply with great reason
that there was very much to be done yet - that Belgium must be freed from the hideous yoke
that has been thrust upon her, that Germany must be taught that culture cannot be carried
by the sword."
And after that the story went underground for many years. The play and film Oh! What A
Lovely War revived it - to some disbelief - in the 60s. Paul McCartney made a popular
video of it to accompany his moving song The Pipes of Peace in 1984. Before that in 1981 I
directed a BBC documentary on the subject, under the title Peace in No Man's Land. The
book followed three years later. In 1993 an illustrated children's version of the event by
Michael Foreman called War Game won a national prize.
Now at every Christmas personal accounts of the truce are regularly read from pulpits, on
television, on radio. This year sees the publication of a new history under the title
Silent Night, the author being the distinguished American historian, Stanley Weintraub. At
a time when the world is yet again at war, this strange event of 1914 - with its message
of common humanity and goodwill between enemies - has a special relevance. Far from losing
its attraction, it is a story that seems to gain in resonance and potency as the years go
by.
Malcolm Brown, is a historian at the Imperial War Museum, and a former BBC TV producer.
Christmas Truce, by Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton is published by Pan Books.
Silent Night, by Stanley Weintraub, is published by Simon and Schuster.
FIRE THIS TIME INDEX WORLD AFTER 9-11 INDEX