The contortion of intellect and morality that this triumphalism requires is not a new phenomenon. Putting aside the terminally naive, it mostly comes from those who like to play at war: who have seen nothing of bombing, as I have experienced it: cluster bombs, daisy cutters: the lot.
How appropriate that the last American missile to hit Kabul before the ‘liberators’ arrived should destroy the satellite transmitter of the Al-Jazeera television station, virtually the only reliable source of news in the region.
For weeks, American officials have been pressuring the government of Qatar, the Gulf state where Al-Jazeera is based, to silence its broadcasters, who have given a view of the ‘war against terrorism’ other than that based on the false premises of the Bush and Blair ‘crusade’.
The guilty secret is that the attack on Afghanistan was unnecessary. The ‘smoking gun’ of this entire episode is evidence of the British Government’s lies about the basis for the war.
According to Tony Blair, it was impossible to secure Osama bin Laden’s extradition from Afghanistan by means other than bombing.
Yet in late September and early October, leaders of Pakistan’s two Islamic parties negotiated bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the September 11 attacks. The deal was that he would be held under house arrest in Peshawar. According to reports in Pakistan (and the Daily Telegraph), this had both bin Laden’s approval and that of Mullah Omah, the Taliban leader.
The offer was that he would face an international tribunal, which would decide whether to try him or hand him over to America. Either way, he would have been out of Afghanistan, and a tentative justice would be seen to be in progress. It was vetoed by Pakistan’s president Musharraf who said he ‘could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety’.
But who really killed the deal?
The US Ambassador to Pakistan was notified in advance of the proposal and the mission to put it to the Taliban. Later, a US official said that ‘casting our objectives too narrowly’ risked ‘a premature collapse of the international effort if by some luck chance Mr bin Laden was captured’.
And yet the US and British governments insisted there was no alternative to bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban had ‘refused’ to hand over Osama bin Laden. What the Afghani people got instead was ‘American justice’ – imposed by a president who, as well as denouncing international agreements on nuclear weapons, biological weapons, torture and global warming, has refused to sign up for an international court to try war criminals: the one place where bin Laden might be put on trial.
When Tony Blair said this war was not an attack on Islam as such, he was correct.
Its aim, in the short term, was to satisfy a domestic audience then to accelerate American influence in a vital region where there has been a power vacuum since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China, whose oil needs are expected eventually to surpass even those of the US. That is why control of Central Asia and the Caspian basin oilfields is important as exploration gets under way.
There was, until the cluster bombing of innocents, a broad-based recognition that there had to be international action to combat the kind of terrorism that took thousands of lives in New York.
But these humane responses to September 11 were appropriated by an American administration, whose subsequent actions ought to have left all but the complicit and the politically blind in no doubt that it intended to reinforce its post-cold war assertion of global supremacy – an assertion that has a long, documented history.
The ‘war on terrorism’ gave Bush the pretext to pressure Congress into pushing through laws that erode much of the basis of American justice and democracy. Blair has followed behind with anti-terrorism laws of the very kind that failed to catch a single terrorist during the Irish war.
In this atmosphere of draconian controls and fear, in the US and Britain, mere explanation of the root causes of the attacks on America invites ludicrous accusations of ‘treachery’.
Above all, what this false victory has demonstrated is that, to those in power in Washington and London and those who speak for them, certain human lives have greater worth than others and that the killing of only one set of civilians is a crime. If we accept that, we beckon the repetition of atrocities on all sides, again and again. John Pilger, article November 2001, ‘The War of Lies Goes On’
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’
Freedom is being lost in Britain. The land of Magna Carta is now the land of secret gagging orders, secret trials and imprisonment. The government will soon know about every phone call, every email, every text message. Police can wilfully shoot to death an innocent man, lie and expect to get away with it. Whole communities now fear the state. The foreign secretary routinely covers up allegations of torture; the justice secretary routinely prevents the release of critical cabinet minutes taken when Iraq was illegally invaded. The litany is cursory; there is much more ...
Freedoms are being lost in Britain because of the rapid growth of the ‘national security state’. This form of militarism was imported from the United States by New Labour. Totalitarian in essence, it relies upon fear mongering to entrench the executive with venal legal mechanisms that progressively diminish democracy and justice. ‘Security’ is all, as is propaganda promoting rapacious colonial wars, even as honest mistakes. Take away this propaganda, and the wars are exposed for what they are, and fear evaporates. Take away the obeisance of many in Britain’s liberal elite to American power and you demote a profound colonial and crusader mentality that covers for epic criminals like Blair. Prosecute these criminals and change the system that breeds them and you have freedom. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘War Comes Homes to Britain’; viz also website
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 its 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 just 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.