Very interesting article, BUT I also wanted to add along the same lines
that a significant and highly publicised double standard was when
Emmanuel Noriega also suddenly became a U.S enemy after being on their
payroll for years.
A good reference to most of these highlights could be best understood by
reading some of Noam Choamsky's writings.
Best Regards,
Ablie Njie- Lekbi
Atlanta
Jungle Sunrise
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Sent by: The Gambia Subject: Re: Interesting article by John Pilger.
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02/13/02 10:51 AM
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Lamin Jeng wrote:
"I agree Mr. Jow. By any means necessary!"
Whilst there are many on this list who are alarmed by the content of John
Pilger's article, it seems that some have completely missed the main gist
of his arguement. In my opinion, the article in no way tries to justify
terrorism or questions the justifcation of fighting terrorism. I strongly
believe that his main bone of contention is the double standards of the US
and the extend to which they are prepared to go to justify the war on
terrorism. I would just like to single out a few alarming issues raised in
the article and give my own opinion at the end it. Some of the issues he
raised:
1. 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.
2. The threat of "terrorism", some of it real, most of it invented, is the
new Red Scare.
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.
3. 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.
4. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to
"think the unthinkable".
5. 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."
6. 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.
7. Brzezinski (a former National Security Adviser to ex- president Jimmy
Carter) 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
$4billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban
means "student").
8. 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.
10. 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.
-----------------------------end of quote---------------------------
The following are some of the issues that I consider very pertinent after
reading John Pilger's article.
1. From the article one can safely conclude that the US have no moral right
to wage war against Afghanistan for refusing to hand over Osama Bin Laden
to them while harbouring other people's worst terrorists. The double
standard of the British is also quite clear here.
2. The US, by training and arming gullible Islamic millitants and immorally
using religion to further their main aim of bringing down the former USSR,
"Operation Cyclone", they are equally guilty in what has happened the world
over from fanatical so-called Islamic militants.
3. The huge military spending cannot be justified as the right response to
the terrorist threat. This huge amount of money being wasted could have
been better used to fight poverty and win America more friends who would be
willing to die for them.
4. Whereas thousands of innocent Afghanis have died in this war against
Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group, there isn't much evidence that
their key objective of capturing him dead or alive has been achieved.
5. If a "Dovish" Jimmy Carter can and was willingly to use up to $500
million to fan up religious hatred in the former USSR, with all its
potential consequencies for everyone the world over, can one imagine what a
"Hawkish" Bush is capable of doing?
6. While there is total justification to go after all who were involved in
the dastardly acts against the US, it is also important to question the
full motives of the US and the way they want to solve this menace.
Have a good day, Gassa.
There is a time in the life of every problem when it is big enough to see,
yet small enough to solve. -Mike- Levitt-
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: Click Here
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