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FROM: http://www.independent.co.uk/
Robert Fisk: The Double
Standards, Dubious Morality And Duplicity Of This Fight Against Terror
Meanwhile, we are ploughing
on to war in Iraq, which has oil, but avoiding war in Korea, which does
not have oil
04 January 2003
I think I'm getting the
picture. North Korea breaks all its nuclear agreements with the United
States, throws out UN inspectors and sets off to make a bomb a year,
and President Bush says it's "a diplomatic
issue".
Iraq
hands over a 12,000-page account of its weapons production
and allows UN inspectors to roam all over the country,
and - after they've found not a jam-jar of dangerous chemicals
in 230 raids -
President Bush announces that Iraq is a threat to America,
has not disarmed and may have to be invaded.
So that's it, then.
How,
readers keep asking me in the most eloquent of letters, does
he get away with it? Indeed, how
does Tony Blair get away with it? Not long ago in the House
of Commons, our dear Prime Minister was announcing in his usual schoolmasterly
tones - the ones used on particularly inattentive or dim boys in class
- that Saddam's factories of mass destruction were "up [pause]
and running [pause] now." But the Dear Leader in Pyongyang does
have factories that are "up [pause] and running [pause] now".
And Tony Blair is silent.
Why do we tolerate
this? Why do Americans?
Over the past few days, there has been just the smallest of hints that
the American media - the biggest and most culpable
backer of the White House's campaign of mendacity - has been,
ever so timidly, asking a few questions.
Months after The Independent
first began to draw its readers' attention to Donald
Rumsfeld's chummy personal visits to Saddam in Baghdad at
the height of Iraq's use of poison gas against Iran in 1983, The Washington
Post has at last decided to tell its own readers a bit of what was going
on. The reporter Michael Dobbs includes the usual weasel clauses ("opinions
differ among Middle East experts... whether Washington could have done
more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons
of mass destruction"), but the thrust is there: we created the
monster and Mr Rumsfeld played his part in doing so.
But no
American - or British - newspaper has dared to investigate
another, almost equally dangerous, relationship that the
present US administration is forging behind our backs: with the military-supported
regime in Algeria. For 10 years now, one of the world's dirtiest
wars has been fought out in this country, supposedly between "Islamists"
and "security forces", in which almost
200,000 people - mostly civilians - have been killed.
But over the past five
years there has been growing evidence that elements of those
same security forces were involved in some of the bloodiest massacres,
including the throat-cutting of babies.
The Independent has published
the most detailed reports of Algerian police torture and of the extrajudicial
executions of women as well as men. Yet the
US, as part of its obscene "war on terror", has cosied up
to the Algerian regime. It is helping to re-arm Algeria's
army and promised more assistance. William
Burns, the US Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, announced
that Washington "has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight
terrorism".
And of course, he's right.
The Algerian security forces can instruct the Americans on how to make
a male or female prisoner believe that they are going to suffocate.
The method - US personnel can find
the experts in this particular torture technique working in the basement
of the Château Neuf police station in central Algiers - is
to cover the trussed-up victim's mouth with a rag and then soak it with
cleaning fluid. The prisoner slowly suffocates.
There's also, of course,
the usual nail-pulling and the usual wires
attached to penises and vaginas and - I'll always remember
the eye-witness description - the rape of an
old woman in a police station, from which she emerged, covered in blood,
urging other prisoners to resist.
Some of the
witnesses to these abominations were Algerian police officers who
had sought sanctuary in London. But
rest assured, Mr Burns is right, America has much to learn from the
Algerians. Already, for example - don't
ask why this never reached the newspapers - the Algerian
army chief of staff has been warmly welcomed
at Nato's southern command headquarters at Naples.
And the Americans are
learning. A national security official attached to the CIA divulged
last month that when it came to prisoners, "our guys may kick them
around a little in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath (sic)."
Another US "national
security" official announced that "pain
control in wounded patients is a very subjective thing".
But let's be fair. The Americans may have learnt
this wickedness from the Algerians. They could just as well
have learned it from the Taliban.
Meanwhile,
inside the US, the profiling of Muslims goes on apace.
On 17 November, thousands of Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Afghans,
Bahrainis, Eritreans, Lebanese, Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, Somalis,
Tunisians, Yemenis and Emiratis turned up at federal offices to be finger-printed.
The New York Times - the most chicken of all the American papers in
covering the post-9/11 story - revealed (only in paragraph five of its
report, of course) that "over the past
week, agency officials... have handcuffed and detained hundreds of men
who showed up to be finger-printed. In some cases the men
had expired student or work visas; in other cases, the men could not
provide adequate documentation of their immigration status."
In Los Angeles, the cops
ran out of plastic handcuffs as they herded men off to the lockup. Of
the 1,000 men arrested without trial or charges after 11 September,
many were native-born Americans.
Indeed, many Americans
don't even know what the chilling acronym
of the "US Patriot Act"
even stands for. "Patriot" is not
a reference to patriotism.
The name stands for the
"United and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism
Act".
America's $200m (£125m)
"Total Awareness Programme"
will permit the US government to monitor citizens'
e-mail and internet activity and collect data on the movement of all
Americans.
And although we
have not been told about this by our journalists, the US
administration is now pestering European governments
for the contents of their own citizens' data files.
The most recent - and
most preposterous - of these claims came in a US demand for
access to the computer records of
the French national airline, Air France,
so that it could "profile" thousands
of its passengers.
All
this is beyond the wildest dreams of Saddam and the Dear Leader Kim.
The new rules even worm
their way into academia. Take the friendly little university of Purdue
in Indiana, where I lectured a few weeks ago. With federal funds, it's
now setting up an "Institute for Homeland Security", whose
18 "experts" will include executives from Boeing and Hewlett-Packard
and US Defence and State Department officials, to
organise "research programmes" around "critical mission
areas".
What, I wonder, are these
areas to be? Surely nothing to do with injustice
in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict or the presence of thousands
of US troops on Arab lands.
After all, it was Richard
Perle, the most sinister of George Bush's pro-Israeli advisers, who
stated last year that "terrorism
must be decontextualised".
Meanwhile, we are - on
that very basis - ploughing on to war in Iraq,
which has oil, but avoiding war in Korea, which does not have oil.
And our
leaders are getting away with it. In doing so,
we are threatening the innocent,
torturing our prisoners
and "learning" from men who should be in the dock for war
crimes.
This, then, is our true memorial
to the men and women so cruelly murdered
in the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.
FROM: http://www.independent.co.uk/
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