Published on Monday, October 29, 2001 in the Mirror newspaper/UK
http://www.johnpilger.com/

Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror

by John Pilger, Former Mirror chief foreign correspondent

The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a
single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or
killed in Afghanistan.

Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by
the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of
dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital,
Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.

Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing
of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children -
seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.

And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about
these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that
have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode
lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them.

If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is
it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries,
such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face
blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name.

None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani.
Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany
and the United States. The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use
were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the
Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them
was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.

The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996,
Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way
to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company,
Unocal.

With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut
of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the
Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.

A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did."
He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there
would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution
of women. "We can live with that," he said.

Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the
administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry.
Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the
Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and
enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs
for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the
Americans hope to control it.

So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to
"moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation"
to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of
achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of
great power.

The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than
mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the
extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for
terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he
is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so
uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could
last 50 years". The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure
on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian
sub-continent.

Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete
politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves
would not say boo to a Taliban goose.

In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the
"morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective
moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of
innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the
killing of innocent people anywhere else.

By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of
the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and
"blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash
a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office
and Downing Street.

If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain
out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair",
selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted
tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full
backing of the Blair government. Britain's biggest arms customer is the
medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious
fanaticism of the Taliban.

If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would
do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of
the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger. He would
do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal
occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war,
as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member.

He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in
reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq
for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under
the age of five.

That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the
World Trade Center.

There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to
Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft
already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news.
This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since
World War Two.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma"
in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse,"
said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The
cost to the British taxpayer? #800 million so far.

According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per
cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose
husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was
a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his
children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open
valley; there were no military targets nearby.

"I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of
her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral
with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.

The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth
that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media.

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the
Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims -
victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in
or near their countries.

There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS
would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists,
ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on
earth.

There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless,
with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies
violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in
both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make
their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind
of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political
courage.

The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the
World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our
government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect
of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and
nursing further grievances against us.

"It is not the way to go...not in our son's name."

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************