Simply by proclaiming a national emergency on Friday, President Bush activated some 500 dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law. Washington Times, report Frank J Murray 18th September 2001
The terrorism that never speaks its name, because it’s our terrorism. John Pilger, Breaking the Silence, ITV 2003
To a growing number of people around the world, America’s War On Terror is about hypocrisy and double standards, about terrorists who are classified as good and bad, depending on their usefulness to the great game of power politics. For years, Osama bin Laden was not only regarded in Washington and London as a good terrorist, he was virtually our creation. ibid.
By the time George W Bush came to power, the link between Al Qaeda and the Taliban was an embarrassment ... The United States doesn’t usually attack strong countries ... Since World War Two there have been seventy-two interventions by the United States. ibid.
Do we forget the lies that justify the conquest of Iraq, and disguise America’s plans to dominate all the world? Do we forget that the British government has announced for the first time that it’s prepared to launch an attack with nuclear weapons, echoing yet again George Bush? And do we accept the distortion of intellect and morality ... that says it’s wrong for a terrorist to kill innocent people but right for governments to commit the same crimes in our name? ... Public opinion now stirring all over the world perhaps as never before. Make no mistake it’s an epic struggle. The alternative is not now just the conquest of far-away counties, it’s the conquest of us, of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured. ibid.
Far from ‘deconstructing [sic] the war on terror’, Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W Bush’s first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama’s wars – with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as ‘the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism’, 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama’s bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.
Far from ‘shutting down the CIA’s secret prison network’, Obama’s executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, ‘current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role’. A semantic sleight of hand is that ‘long term prisons’ are changed to ‘short term prisons’; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America’s numerous ‘covert actions’ will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.
Bush’s open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld’s extraordinary personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America’s ‘secret army’ of subversive military and intelligence operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of ‘harsh interrogation’, which will be kept secret.
Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive orders put an end to Bush’s assault on constitutional and international law. He has retained Bush’s ‘right’ to imprison anyone, without trial or charges. No ‘ghost prisoners’ are being released or are due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush’s totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand Americans’ library and bookshop records. The man of ‘change’, is changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington. John Pilger, The Politics of Bollocks, article New Statesman; viz also website
More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth. John Pilger
How appropriate that John Negroponte is Bush’s ambassador at the United Nations. This week he delivered America’s threat to the world that it may ‘require’ to attack more and more countries. As US ambassador to Honduras during the early 1980s, Negroponte oversaw American funding of the regime’s death squads, known as Battalion 316 that wiped out the democratic opposition, while the CIA ran its Contra war of terror against neighbouring Nicaragua. Murdering teachers and slitting the throats of midwives were a speciality. John Pilger, article New Statesman magazine
In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not ‘persons’, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of ‘defence’, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.
All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, ‘the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel’ and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.
In Afghanistan, the US ‘strategy’ of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the ‘Taliban’) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing ‘a real threat’ to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as ‘anti-nuclear’. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.
Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain ‘for the next 15 to 20 years’. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘Obama’s 100 days – The Mad Men Did Well’
The most reliable estimate done by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health with Iraqis – an extraordinary survey, a meticulous and conscientious and quite courageous in the way it was carried out and peer reviewed - probably leads us to almost a million people ... The majority of terrorists is our terrorists ... I don’t think there is a War on Terror. I think that’s a propaganda notion. John Pilger, interview The Decline and Fall of America
This is a death squad in action in El Salvador. Actually, it’s the National Police, many of whom were trained at the School of the Americas. Here, on the step of San Salvador Cathedral, they’re gunning down mourners who were attending the funeral of Archbishop Romero, who was murdered as he said mass on March 23rd 1980. John Pilger, The War on Democracy, ITV 2007
Delete Vietnam and write in El Salvador and the stories seem almost identical. Like the politicians then, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, the politicians now, Haig and Reagan, see the world in the same arrogant simplistic terms, speaking of dominoes as if nations are mere blocks of wood, not societies riven with their own differences and animosities. Today as before, honest men pay with their careers. The American ambassador to El Salvador Robert White has said that the war in that country is caused by social injustice, and the real terrorists are the regime backed by Mr Reagan and Mr Haig, and backed of course by the British government. John Pilger, Heroes! ITV 1981
The problem with America is not that we go … around the world imposing ourselves, the problem with America in the last ten to fifteen years since the end of the Cold War, certainly in the last six years, is that we’re too slow to get involved in conflicts. William Kristol, editor The Weekly Standard
The United States does not target civilians. I think the number of civilians you’re talking about is questionable. I don’t accept your assertion that we’ve killed thousands of innocent people. Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense, interview John Pilger
The struggle between Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s vision for how America comes to terms with its wars is waged every day in the hearts and minds of these cadets. The American Future: A History by Simon Schama, BBC 2008
For a while the flag-draped coffins from Iraq and Afghanistan were hidden from the American people. ibid.
This is terrorism of the most worst kind. Brought on you by our own government ... Are We the People still in charge of this nation? Stan Jones, Montana senate debate