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, article New Statesman, ‘The Politics of Bollocks’; viz 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
There is no War on Terrorism. It is the Great Game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all. John Pilger
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
These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as ‘the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’. International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, ‘if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves’.
That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had ‘universal jurisdiction’ statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against ‘ourselves’, or ‘our’ allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the West, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity ...
Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions related to Blair’s wars. Spain’s celebrated Judge Baltasar Garzon, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinean military junta, has called for George W Bush, Blair and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq – ‘one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history: a devastating attack on the rule of law’ that had left the UN ‘in tatters’. He said, ‘There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay’ ...
Today, the unreported ‘good news’ is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R L Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: ‘Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter ... I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete’.
Blair, too, is safe – but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing ‘an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges’, according to international law authority Richard Falk, who cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. Currently, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for Blair’s prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E W Thomas wrote: ‘My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate’ ...
These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a ‘prayer breakfast’ with President Obama, the yes-we-can-man now launching more war. ‘We pray,’ said Blair, ‘that in acting we do God’s work and follow God’s will.’ To decent people such pronouncements about Blair’s ‘faith’ represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation on the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part – or, like Alistair Campbell, his ‘communications director’, offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some – might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: ‘Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, four million refugees, countless maiming and traumas’.
These are indeed extraordinary times. John Pilger, article New Statesman ‘Fake Faith & Epic Crimes’; viz website
The training, the assaults on the population, have been going on for over a decade here in the United States, and the death toll is climbing. What’s happened to our Special Forces? What types of cowards have they been twisted into, that they go out and attack American citizens, wooden churches full of men, women and children, and then slough it off as if – oh well; they are a just a bunch of cult members? Whatever happened to live and let live? And whatever happened to the Federal Law barring troops from assaulting civilians? Alex Jones, 9/11 The Road to Tyranny, 2002
In the next two hours you will see hardcore documentation, evidence that is irrefutable, that America is turning into a nightmarish police state. Cameras on the street corners, mass checkpoints on our major interstate highways, warrantless searches. But worst of all you’ll see America’s military being perverted, being turned into an instrument of control, not an instrument of defense. I have footage, and you’re going to see it of marines engaged in mock gun confiscations, kicking in doors, setting up concentration camps, and working with foreign troops from China, Russia, Britain, Australia. It’s incredible, my friends, and you’ve got to face up to it. I’ve got to face up to it. And we’ve got to take action. Alex Jones, Police State: 2000, 1999
The Clinton Administration, supposed liberals, allotted over two billion plus dollars for 1999 alone for nationwide Nazi behaviour. But not just the socialists in the Democratic Party. Oh no. The Republicans and the Supreme Court have been backing warrantless searches. ibid.
The result: the military out serving search warrants in seventy-seven Texas countries ... The military are running check-points random on the nation’s highways ... All of the key indicators of a nation in massive decline are being manifested before our eyes. Alex Jones, Police State II: The Takeover, 2000
The Project for a New American Century founded in 1997 was run by Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Wolfowitz and of course Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And the Project for the New American Century called for a New World Order in its writings that can be viewed at their website. They said there needed to be a Pearl Harbor Event to speed up the New World Order. And to get the American people behind a national draft. And behind a war of aggression against sixty-two countries. A war that Bush has said will last generations. Alex Jones, Police State III: Total Enslavement, 2003
Saddam Hussein wasn’t a threat but that he provided a convenient pretext to get the oil in Iraq ... It was also about setting the precedent for the New World Order to invade sovereign nations. ibid.
We are ten years into the biggest hoax in human history – the threat of terrorism. Alex Jones, New World Order: Blueprint of Madmen, paranoia sketch, 2012
The system itself is actually engaging in terrorism. ibid.