[Peace-discuss] News notes, Feb. 03

[C. G. Estabrook]

	NOTES ON THE "WAR ON TERRORISM" THIS WEEK
	FOR AWARE MEETING 20020203

[These notes are followed by an article by British columnist John Pilger
on the general situation of the "War on Terrorism."  My apologies for not
getting this week's material out earlier.  --CGE]

	"Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without
individual responsibility." --Ambrose Bierce
	"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not
sufficient capital to form a corporation." --Clarence Darrow

MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 2002 

CAN'T PROTECT US FROM TERRORISTS, BUT HE CAN PROTECT US FROM MAMMARIES.
Fed up with having his picture taken during events in the Justice
Department's Great Hall in front of semi-nude statues, Attorney General
John Ashcroft has reportedly ordered massive draperies to conceal the
offending figures -- which have been displayed since the 1930s! The
draperies were installed last week at a cost of just over $8,000, reports
ABCNEWS.com's Beverley Lumpkin. At the center of the controversy: two
enormous and stylized but largely naked aluminum statues. The female
figure represents the Spirit of Justice; the male on the right is the
Majesty of Justice. The male is clad in only a cloth draped over his
essential parts; the female wears a sort of toga-style garment, but one
breast is entirely exposed. Last November, during a press conference
announcing new challenges of fighting terrorism, Ashcroft was photographed
with the naked breast right over his shoulder...

SIX AL-QAEDA FIGHTERS WHO HAD BARRICADED THEMSELVES INSIDE A HOSPITAL IN
THE SOUTHERN AFGHAN CITY OF KANDAHAR HAVE BEEN KILLED IN AN ATTACK BY US
AND AFGHAN FORCES, ACCORDING TO AFGHAN POLICE. The American special forces
and Afghan soldiers had been besieging the Mirwais Hospital compound since
about 0340 (2210GMT). Loud explosions and automatic gunfire rocked the
compound as they moved in. Afghan police commanders said that all six
gunmen - who were thought to be Arabs - had been killed. It was also
reported that six Afghan government soldiers were injured. "These Arabs
fought to the death," said Major Chris Miller of the US special forces.
"Up to the last minute, we told every man to surrender. But none of them
listened," he said. The major was wearing an "I Love New York" badge and a
New York Yankees baseball cap, as were almost all the Americans in the
assault. He called the operation "100% Afghan" and said that the Americans
acted only as advisers. However, reports from the scene said that US
special forces appeared to be in the thick of the action. Afghan
authorities said that a final ultimatum to surrender had been delivered
before dawn. When it was refused, Afghan and US forces attacked with
grenades and automatic weapons. "The Arabs saw them, and they started
firing," said Najabullah, an Afghan commander. He said the al-Qaeda men
also threw grenades. For several hours, the Americans and Afghans moved
into positions for the final assault. Soldiers crouched by walls and crept
along the ledge of the second-floor ward where the al-Qaeda men were holed
up. Soon after midday, the Americans shouted "stand clear" and moved in
with the Afghans, the Associated Press news agency reported. They threw as
many as 20 grenades and other explosives into the ward. Long bursts of
automatic gunfire followed, along with single shots from pistols.
Describing the final moment of the assult, Afghan commander Lali Saliki
said he shot the last living gunman after the gunman had groped for a gun.
The wounded fighters barricaded themselves inside one of the hospital's
wings when the Taleban fled Kandahar in December. They were in a group of
19 al-Qaeda members who were brought to the hospital for treatment shortly
before the city fell to opposition forces on 7 December. The less
seriously injured of the men vanished after the Taleban collapse, but nine
were left behind. They dug in, threatening to blow themselves up if anyone
other than a doctor approached. It is unclear how they managed to smuggle
pistols and grenades into the hospital. Two of the fighters were captured
- tricked by the only doctor the men trusted - and one killed himself with
a grenade during a failed attempt to escape earlier this month. Those
remaining, who were thought to be from Sudan or Yemen, took over four or
five rooms of the internal medicine ward. Two weeks ago, hospital
officials ordered staff to cut off the men's food and water in an attempt
to starve them out - but they were believed to have stockpiled supplies.
[BBC]

TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2002

Bush is "reconsidering" whether the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay should be
protected under the Geneva Convention. After a much publicized meeting
about the issue yesterday, the president said, "I will listen to all the
legalisms and announce my decision when I make it." The president
emphasized that nobody in Guantanamo (remember: Gitmo) will be given
prisoner of war status, but he said they'll still be well cared-for.
"We're in total agreement on how these prisoners--or detainees, excuse
me--ought to be treated" [sic]. The NYT adds to the impression that the
administration's original choice to not strictly follow the Geneva
Convention was made hastily: "The president's initial decision about the
captives was apparently made on advice from Attorney General John Ashcroft
who, a senior administration official said today, 'didn't think about the
world reaction.'" [NY TIMES]

Here's GWBush.com's translation of Bush's State of the Union address: "I
will be a two-term president, even if I have to start World War III." Axis
of Evil? That's about as ridiculous as the time Reagan said socialist
Nicaragua had the "largest standing army in the world and is only a
three-day march from the Texas border." Let's try to think rationally
about this new Axis of Evil which so threatens the Fatherland: * North
Korea is a starving mess that has already agreed--no, begged--to cease its
missile program in exchange for aid, and has agreed to international
inspection. (However, Bush jeopardized the agreement when he came into
office by saying off-the-cuff that he didn't trust the North Koreans to
uphold their end of the deal. Afterwards, his aides backtracked and Powell
had to fly all the way over there to clear things up.) * Iraq is a
defeated country which we already occupy. We have already decimated its
military, we have already dismantled its weapons programs. We patrol its
skies and regulate everything that goes in or out of the country. * And
then there's Iran! It was most incredible to see Iran pop up in the Axis
of Evil. Bush called it a country where "an unelected few repress the
Iranian people's hope for freedom." Actually, Iran has been having
democratic elections for some time. Last year's election saw an 83% voter
turnout (and yes, women have the right to vote). Candidates of varied
political stripes participated. Last year the winning presidential
candidate was a reformer who was opposed by powerful Islamic
fundamentalists. But he won with 77% of the vote. If you ask me, that's a
lot more democratic than certain super powers I could mention. The most
ironic thing about Bush's comments on Iran is that the results of Iran's
first post-WWII democratic elections were overturned by a U.S.-backed coup
that reinstalled the Shah and led directly to the Islamic revolution.
(Don't believe me? Read the account by the CIA official who pulled off the
coup.) Anyway, Bush is really starting to scare me. I think
Bush&Sons&Company, Inc., are so afraid of a repeat of '92 that they're
trying to make this war permanent. They've learned that people stop caring
about war when the war's over, so this war must not end--at least not
until after November 2004. Personally, I don't think the American people
will fall for it. What really saddens me though, is that the American
people will have to fight this battle all on their own. Neither the media
nor the Democrats will stand up to Bush's war hoax. I listened to the
State of the Union address on NPR, that bastion of radicalism, and during
the pre-game chatter they all kept saying "our nation at war" and "our
wartime president." It's the emperor's new clothes in reverse: Bush told
everyone around him "look at my new war" and everyone actually saw a war.
There is no war. There WAS no war. It was just a bombing mission. We do
that every couple of years somewhere in the world. Yugoslavia, Somalia,
Iraq (many times over since the Gulf War), Sudan, Haiti, Panama...help me
out here, folks, I know I'm forgetting a few. Is it different this time
because so many people were killed on Sept. 11? If so, then shouldn't we
be fighting a war against the people who did it, and might do it again?
What ever happened to "Osama Dead or Alive?" Whatever happened to Mullah
Omar? The sad fact is that this has nothing to do with them. Nor does this
have anything to do with Iran, Iraq or North Korea.

The president also announced, "We have found diagrams of American nuclear
power plants" in al-Qaida hideouts. The Los Angeles Times, which gives
this revelation its own front-page story, does a bit of quick legwork and
queries a spokesman from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He said that
the commission isn't aware of any specific threats. He also explained that
prior to Sept. 11, plans of nuke plants were online, so "acquiring a
diagram might not have been all that difficult." [SLATE]

William Safire, NY Times op-ed: "B-52's could take out Kim Jong Il's key
nuclear bomb-making sites" ... "I'll bet it was recently agreed in
Washington that Turkish tank brigades and U.S. Special Ops troops will
together thrust down to Baghdad" ... "It's not a pipe dream. It's the
action implicit in the Bush doctrine enunciated this week."

"The president's remarks, in his State of the Union address, were quite
clear and, for the most part, pushed U.S. foreign policy in the right
direction. Among other virtues, what Mr. Bush said about the three
countries has the advantage of being true." [WASH POST ED , SUNDAY]

"Bush expects to spend an extra $85 billion over the current budget this
fiscal year"... Bush called last night for his tax cut to become permanent
(rather than to expire in 10 years, as is currently legislated). [LA
TIMES]

USA Today does the applause addition: It counts 77 clapping interruptions.
USAT also runs four graphics across the top of the paper breaking out W.'s
big points. Unfortunately the graphics' headlines, which don't have any
quotes around them, read like a White House press release. One example,
"The economy: Getting people back to work." Everybody notes that Vice
President Cheney wasn't in a secure, undisclosed location; he was sitting
right behind the president. [SLATE] In a news analysis, the Post's Dana
Milbank says that last night the president was trying to "convert a
foreign military action into a domestic mobilization" ... House Minority
Leader Richard Gephardt, doing the Democrat's official response, said, "I
refuse to accept that while we stand shoulder to shoulder on the war, we
should stand toe to toe on the economy." [SLATE]

The papers report that Israel is considering blocking off Jerusalem from
the West Bank. The LAT says the plan, known as "Enveloping Jerusalem," is
to surround the city "with fences, roadblocks, ditches and foot patrols to
prevent more Palestinian suicide bombings" like the two that went off last
week. The paper say that under the plan, two East Jerusalem neighborhoods,
currently under Palestinian control, would be cut off from the rest of the
West Bank. According to the LAT, many Israelis were criticizing the
plan-some said it was too lenient, contending that it would amount to a
unilateral withdrawal from Palestinian territory. [SLATE]

Focusing on the sale of access to or influence on decision-makers masks a
much more profound influence of wealth on our political system. It is much
more instructive to consider the effects of money on elections than on
politicians. The biggest scandal here is not personal corruption -- it's
systemic corruption. It's how the very wealthy decide who gets to run for
office in the first place -- and then who wins. Through large
contributions, Enron, Andersen, and their executives helped put their
supporters into office. Recent reporting has brought to light one example
of Enron's successful control of elections. Brody Mullins in Congress
Daily has demonstrated that Kenneth Lay recruited Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee
to challenge former Rep. Craig Washington in 1994. Lay took issue with
Washington's vote against NAFTA and sought to replace him with someone
more sympathetic to his "free trade" principles. According to Mullins,
"Enron and its employees pumped $24,000 into Jackson Lee's campaign,
helping her raise nearly $600,000 -- three times as much as Washington
raised for his previous re-election." [ADAM LIOZ, U.S. PIRG]

WEDNESDAY JANUARY 30, 2002

30th Anniversary Of Bloody Sunday In Belfast, N. Ireland: British Army
Shoots 27 In Belfast, 5 In The Back; 13 Die.

Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, approved a plan yesterday for
security measures to seal off Jerusalem from the West Bank. The plan is
expected to include look-out towers, electronic cameras, trenches and more
military checkpoints. Proposals to fortify the entire metropolis -
including its occupied Arab eastern half - came as the city spent another
day on the highest alert. Mr Sharon - who campaigned for election last
year on a promise of providing security - met senior officials from the
Israeli police, army, intelligence services and City Hall to discuss the
plan, called "Enveloping Jerusalem". Events were watched closely by his
critics, who pointed out that Israel has been steadily strengthening its
political control of the city, and the long military blockade of the
occupied territories has, so far, failed to stop Palestinian attacks. Mr
Sharon appears to have rejected police proposals that the plan should
include building a wall to separate parts of east and west Jerusalem. He
refused on the grounds that it would be tantamount to the re-division of
the city - flying in the face of Israeli opinion that it should be their
unified capital. Mr Sharon said: "The plan must be treated as a whole,
covering the Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods alike."The Public Security
Minister, Uzi Landau, a hardline right-winger, said talk of walls dividing
the city was "simply nonsense". He said the plan was an effort to build a
barrier between Jerusalem and "the Arab congestion" around it. The idea of
separation has long been debated in Israel, despite the enormous cost and
impracticality of disentangling the Arab and Jewish populations - closely
entwined in some areas - and despite the 1.2 million Arabs with Israeli
citizenship, or ID papers, living inside Israel's pre-1967 borders.
[INDEPENDENT]

A new ABC/Washington Post poll finds that Republicans are 50% more likely
to be on the lookout for terrorists than Democrats and Independents. The
most vigilant demographic group is people with annual incomes of $100k or
more. [WASH POST]

THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 2002

"The State Department appeared to have had little warning about the [state
of the union] speech's content." The result is that State appeared to be a
bit out of sync yesterday, particularly when its spokesman insisted that
the United States was prepared to sit down with North Korea "anytime,
anywhere." [WALL ST JOURNAL] "South Korean officials fear that the State
of the Union address set back the cause [of reconciliation] months or
years," [NY TIMES]

AFGHANISTAN: heavy fighting's broken out between two Afghan militias in
the Paktia province, about 80 miles south of Kabul. "I'll send in heavy
armor," one warlord told the paper. "I'll send in multiple rocket
launchers, I'll fire, and fire, and fire, all night and all day, until I
bring this to a finish." Late reports say about 60 people have been
killed. The paper mentionS that the Pentagon says it's investigating
whether a U.S. military raid last week killed the wrong people. Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld defended the attack, saying, "As the American and
Afghan forces approached, they were shot at by the people in the compound,
which is something." [NY TIMES]

"The number of unemployed people rose 40 percent last year, to 8.3 million
in December from 5.9 million in January." [NY TIMES]

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 01, 2002

Bush's proposed $48 billion increase in the defense budget is good news
for defense contractors. The money will buy many Raytheon-manufactured
Tomahawk missiles and C-130J cargo planes from Lockheed Martin. Congress
isn't expected to object much to the spending increase. [WALL ST JOURNAL]

The LAT front announces that U.S.-Philippine joint military exercises have
begun after the countries resolved differences over how the mission would
work. It's officially considered a training event, as the Philippines'
constitution forbids foreign troops from operating in the nation, but
Americans will carry live ammunition as they hunt the Abu Sayyaf terrorist
group alongside Philippine forces. The WSJ reports that an American
military plane was slightly damaged by hostile fire during exercises in
the Philippines. Iraqi opposition forces want American military training
too, the NYT reports inside. The Iraqi opposition has renewed its request
for such training, hoping that Bush's declaration that Iraq is evil will
inspire the State Department to reconsider its belief that training the
opposition is not practical. [SLATE] The NYT mentioned Thursday that the
White House said it will start giving money again to Iraq's main
opposition group. The United States had cut off funding a few years ago,
citing mismanagement of money.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's lament that Israel didn't kill
Yasser Arafat when it had a chance to 20 years ago in Lebanon. [NY TIMES]

The NYT seems to have fun with a front-page analysis of how socially
competitive the New York version of the annual World Economic Forum
meeting is ... The "W.E.F. Smackdown" as the reporter calls this year's
gathering, has left the likes of George Soros and Heidi Klum among the
uninvited. [SLATE]

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 02, 2002

Bush administration's plans for increased military spending are to be
unveiled officially on Monday. The proposal will call for a $120 billion
increase in defense spending over the next five years, with the biggest
bump to come from purchasing weapons and other military supplies [i.e.,
not pay]. [NY TIMES] President Bush proposed a 12 percent increase in 2002
defense spending during his State of the Union address, and the NYT says
that on Monday he will propose an increase of around 30 percent through
2007. The proposal is not quite Reagan-sized-it's "slightly smaller" than
the 1981-1985 buildup, the largest peacetime increase in the country's
history. Democrats cited in the story say that Bush is likely to get the
most of the increases he asks for, but lawmakers in both parties are
balking at his proposal to create a $10 billion "contingency fund" that
the president could spend on military operations without congressional
approval. [SLATE]

There is growing dissent in the Israeli army ... an "elite group" of over
100 reservists have signed ads in Israeli newspapers saying that they will
no longer serve to protect settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The
army's chief of staff called the statements "an incitement to rebellion"
and recommended that the protesters be suspended from duty. [LA TIMES]

NBC has pulled promos for next week's episode of The West Wing, written in
December, that highlighted a plot line about a kidnapped American
journalist in the Congo. [NY TIMES]

After leaving Enron and paying a $315,000 settlement in a civil case
related to the embezzlement investigation, Mark Lay [Ken's son] has
decided to enroll in a Baptist seminary in Texas. "I think God impressed
on me that's where he wanted me," he said. [NY TIMES]

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2002

An internal report from Enron for its bankruptcy filing names CFO Andrew
Fastow as chief architect of the partnerships scheme that helped the
company hide $1 billion in losses during the 12-month period ending in
September, the WP reports in its lead ... That $1 billion is a new figure,
by the way. In November, the company said they'd lost only $586 million
over five years, an announcement that sent the stock tumbling. It closed
at 67 cents on Friday ... CEO Kenneth Lay appears before the Senate
Commerce Committee tomorrow [SLATE]

"While the meals have been opulent -sushi and cocktails at the Four
Seasons, followed by endless courses at Le Cirque 2000-for the chief
executives and prime ministers, economists and 'media leaders' gathered at
the World Economic Forum, the main dish is anxiety," [NYT on WEF]

	*	*	*

	The Colder War  
	by John Pilger
	The Mirror [UK]
	January 29, 2002 
 
LAST week, the US government announced that it was building the
biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of
which $50billion will pay for its "war on terrorism". There will be
special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for
"military operations" - invasions of other countries.

Of all the extraordinary news since September 11, this is the most
alarming. It is time to break our silence.

That is to say, it is time for other governments to break their silence,
especially the Blair government, whose complicity in the American rampage
in Afghanistan has not denied its understanding of the Bush
administration's true plans and ambitions.

The recent statements of British Ministers about the "vindication" of the
"outstanding success" in Afghanistan would be comical if the price of
their "success" had not been paid with the lives of more than 5,000
innocent Afghani civilians and the failure to catch Osama bin Laden and
anyone else of importance in the al-Qaeda network.

The Pentagon's release of deliberately provocative pictures of prisoners
at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant to conceal this failure from the American
public, who are being conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a
permanent war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged
the Cold War.

The threat of "terrorism", some of it real, most of it invented, is the
new Red Scare. The parallels are striking.

IN AMERICA in the 1950s, the Red Scare was used to justify the growth of
war industries, the suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of
dissenters. That is happening now.

Above all, the American industrial-complex has a new enemy with which to
justify its gargantuan appetite for public resources - the new military
budget is enough to end all primary causes of poverty in the world.

Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to
"think the unthinkable."

Vice President Dick Cheney, the voice of Bush, has said the US is
considering military or other action against "40 to 50 countries" and
warns that the new war may last 50 years or more. A Bush adviser, Richard
Perle, explained. "(There will be) no stages," he said.

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots
of them out there ... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and
we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever
diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs
about us years from now."

Their words evoke George Orwell's great prophetic work, Nineteen
Eighty-Four. In the novel, three slogans dominate society: war is peace,
freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is
terrorism. The next American attack is likely to be against Somalia, a
deeply impoverished country in the Horn of Africa.

Washington claims there are al-Qaeda terrorist cells there.

This is almost certainly a fiction spread by Somalia's overbearing
neighbour, Ethiopia, in order to ingratiate itself with Washington.
Certainly, there are vast oil fields off the coast of Somalia. For the
Americans, there is the added attraction of "settling a score".

In 1993, in the last days of George Bush Senior's presidency, 18 American
soldiers were killed in Somalia after the US Marines had invaded to
"restore hope", as they put it.

A current Hollywood movie, Black Hawk Down, glamorises and lies about this
episode. It leaves out the fact that the invading Americans left behind
between 7,000 and 10,000 Somalis killed.

Like the victims of American bombing in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and
Cambodia, and Vietnam and many other stricken countries, the Somalis are
unpeople, whose deaths have no political and media value in the West.

WHEN Bush Junior's heroic marines return in their Black Hawk gunships,
loaded with technology, looking for "terrorists", their victims will once
again be nameless. We can then expect the release of Black Hawk Down II.

Breaking our silence means not allowing the history of our lifetimes to be
written this way, with lies and the blood of innocent people. To
understand the lie of what Blair/Straw/Hoon [British Prime
Minister/Foreign Secretary/Defense Secretary] call the "outstanding
success" in Afghanistan, read the work of the original author of "Total
War", a man called Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's
National Security Adviser and is still a powerful force in Washington.

Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the
American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised
$500million to create an international terrorist movement that would
spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the Soviet
Union.

The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4
billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban
means "student").

Young zealots were sent to the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where
future members of al-Qaeda were taught "sabotage skills" - terrorism.

Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York, within
sight of the fated Twin Towers.

In Pakistan, they were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the
SAS [equivalent to CIA and Special Forces, respectively].

The result, quipped Brzezinski, was "a few stirred up Muslims" - meaning
the Taliban.

At that time, the late 1970s, the American goal was to overthrow
Afghanistan's first progressive, secular government, which had granted
equal rights to women, established health care and literacy programmes and
set out to break feudalism.

When the Taliban seized power in 1996, they hanged the former president
from a lamp-post in Kabul.

His body was still a public spectacle when Clinton administration
officials and oil company executives were entertaining Taliban leaders in
Washington and Houston, Texas. The Wall Street Journal declared: "The
Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they
were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the
export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources."

NO AMERICAN newspaper dares suggest that the prisoners in Camp X-Ray are
the product of this policy, nor that it was one of the factors that led to
the attacks of September 11.

Nor do they ask: who were the real winners of September 11?

The day the Wall Street stockmarket opened after the destruction of the
Twin Towers, the few companies showing increased value were the giant
military contractors Alliant Tech Systems, Northrop Gruman, Raytheon (a
contributor to New Labour) and Lockheed Martin.

As the US military's biggest supplier, Lockheed Martin's share value rose
by a staggering 30 per cent.

Within six weeks of September 11, the company (with its main plant in
Texas, George Bush's home state) had secured the biggest military order in
history: a $200billion contract to develop a new fighter aircraft. The
greatest taboo of all, which Orwell would surely recognise, is the record
of the United States as a terrorist state and haven for terrorists.

This truth is virtually unknown by the American public and makes a mockery
of Bush's (and Blair's) statements about "tracking down terrorists
wherever they are".

They don't have to look far.

Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, has
given refuge to terrorists who, like the September 11 gang, have hi-jacked
aircraft and boats with guns and knives. Most have never had criminal
charges brought against them.

Why? All of them are anti-Castro Cubans. Former Guatemalan Defence
Minister Gramajo Morales, who was accused of "devising and directing an
indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians", including the
torture of an American nun and the massacre of eight people from one
family, studied at Harvard University on a US government scholarship.

During the 1980s, thousands of people were murdered by death squads
connected to the army of El Salvador, whose former chief now lives
comfortably in Florida.

The former Haitian dictator, General Prosper Avril, liked to display the
bloodied victims of his torture on television.

When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US government, and
granted political asylum.

A leading member of the Chilean military during the reign of General
Pinochet, whose special responsibility was executions and torture, lives
in Miami.

The Iranian general who ran Iran's notorious prisons, is a wealthy exile
in the US.

One of Pol Pot's senior henchmen, who enticed Cambodian exiles back to
their certain death, lives in Mount Vernon, New York.

What all these people have in common, apart from their history of
terrorism, is that they either worked directly for the US government or
carried out the dirty work of US policies.

The al-Qaeda training camps are kindergartens compared with the world's
leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until
recently as the School of the Americas, its graduates include almost half
the cabinet ministers of the genocidal regimes in Guatemala, two thirds of
the El Salvadorean army officers who committed, according to the United
Nations, the worst atrocities of that country's civil war, and the head of
Pinochet's secret police, who ran Chile's concentration camps.

There is terrible irony at work here. The humane response of people all
over the world to the terrorism of September 11 has long been hijacked by
those running a rapacious great power with a history of terrorism second
to none. Global supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only
the politically blind believe otherwise.

The "widening gap between the world's "haves" and "have nots"', says a
remarkably candid document of the US Space Command, presents "new
challenges" to the world's superpower and which can only be met by "Full
Spectrum Dominance" - dominance of land, sea, air and space.

	[end]