[Imc] This war is a fraud

Wed Oct 31 02:56:31 UTC 2001

A Forward from Dave Johnson....

>From: "david johnson" <unionyes at ameritech.net>
>To: "Pauline Bartolone" <alice_redqueen at hotmail.com>, "independent media 
>center" <imc at listsgrogroo.com>
>Subject: Fw: [gangbox] Fw: [workersdemocracy] This war is a fraud
>Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 07:28:08 -0600
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: George G <georgeg at micronetix.net>
>To: Marxist-Leninist List <marxist-leninist-list at lists.econ.utah.edu>;
>Gangbox Group <gangbox at yahoogroups.com>
>Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 6:20 AM
>Subject: [gangbox] Fw: [workersdemocracy] This war is a fraud
>
>
>Dear all,
>
>It is interesting that the capitalist press in Britain is much more honest
>than the ones in the U.S.
>
>In solidarity/Fraternally,
>George
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Des
>To: workersdemocracy at yahoogroups.com
>Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 4:45 AM
>Subject: [workersdemocracy] This war is a fraud
>
>
>10/28/01
>
>THIS WAR IS A FRAUD
>
>WAR ON TERROR: THE OTHER VICTIMS: The irresponsibility of this conflict is
>breathtaking. It is not about terrorism. As Blair and Bush stoop to the
>level of the criminal outrage in New York, British forces are little
>more than mercenaries for the hidden agenda of U.S. imperial ambitions
>
>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? £800million 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."
>
>
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