Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror

by John Pilger, Former Mirror chief foreign correspondent The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan. Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees. Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden. And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them. If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name. None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States. The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians. The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal. With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan. A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said. Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it. So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power. The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a

target for terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years". The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo to a Taliban goose. In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else. By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office and Downing Street.

GRIEF: A father weeps over his dead son after the bombs blunder in Kabul If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government. Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of the Taliban. If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger. He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member. He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million

children under the age of five. That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World Trade Center. There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War Two. The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? 800 million so far. According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley; there were no military targets nearby. "I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney. The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media. Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries. There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth. There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage. The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. "It is not the way to go...not in our son's name." EX-MIRRORMAN John Pilger is an award-winning journalist and film-maker, best known for revealing to the world the genocide in Cambodia. Pilger has covered conflict worldwide, reporting from across the Middle East, Asia and South Africa and often questioning the West's involvement.

A dispatch from Cambodia in September 1979 - where Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime left 1.7million people executed or dead from starvation - produced a memorable Daily Mirror shock edition. He worked for the paper between 1963 and 1986 as a reporter, sub-editor, feature writer and chief foreign correspondent. Pilger, 62, has also filmed more than 15 hard-hitting documentaries, most of which highlight the injustices of recent wars. His latest investigation, titled The New Rulers of the World and addressing the problem of globalisation, was released in July to great acclaim. Australian Pilger, who has a son and daughter, began his career in Sydney, then became Reuters' Middle East correspondent. He worked for Granada's World in Action, BBC TV and radio, and ABC News. Pilger has a double-figure tally of awards, including Journalist of the Year in 1967 and 1979, International Reporter of the Year in 1970 and Campaigning Journalist of 1979. He was a winner two years running of the UN Media Peace Prize and in 1991 collected an Emmy for his documentary-making. www.johnpilger.com Copyright 2001 The Mirror/UK ###

Harnessing Asias growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests. Hillary Clinton Frances military intervention into Mali may at first glance appear to have little to do with the U.S. pivot to Asia. But as a French mission supposedly meant to bolster a U.N. sanctioned and Africanled intervention has gone from a question of weeks tothe total re-conquest of Mali, what may have begun as a French affair has now become a Western intervention. And this in turn has drawn wider strategic interests into the conflict. Strategic interests, it is becoming clearer, shaped by the imperatives of the U.S. Asia pivot. Widening Intervention The geopolitical posturing over the crisis in Mali, coming as Frances intervention fans out across the region, is no more evident than in the public statements coming from both London and Washington. As British Prime Minister David Cameron declared, the crisis in Mali will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months. Backing up such bluster, Britain has reportedly joined France in dispatching special commando teams to Mali, in addition to surveillance drones. In Washington, the talk of a long war to be waged across the entire Sahel region of Africa has also begun. As one U.S. official speaking on the Western intervention into Mali warned Monday, It is going to take a long time and time means that it could take several years. Such remarks mirror those made by outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This is going to be a very serious, ongoing threat because if you look at the size of northern Mali, if you look at the topography its not only desert, its caves, Clintonremarked. Sounds reminiscent. We are in for a struggle. But it is a necessary struggle. We cannot permit northern Mali to become a safe haven. According to the Los Angeles Times, the safe haven refrain is also pulsating through the corridors of the Pentagon. Some top Pentagon officials and military officers warn that without more aggressive U.S. action, the Times reports, Mali could become a haven for extremists, akin to Afghanistan before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And as the American public is prepped for the opening of a new front in the unending war on terror, U.S. intervention accelerates. As the Washington Post reports, the U.S. is now offering aerial refueling to French warplanes, along with planes to transport soldiers from other African nations. U.S. intelligence officials, meanwhile, have reportedly begun drawing up plans to provide data to help French warplanes locate and attack militant targets. This, as Pentagon hawks continue to push for the use of drone strikes. In fact, the New York Times reports the U.S. has begun preparing plans to establish a drone base in northwest Africa to increase unarmed surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups. The paper, which notes the bases likely location to be in Niger, reports the Pentagon has not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens. As one American official told the Times, the decision to establish a permanent drone base in northern Africa is directly related to the Mali mission, but it could also give Africom [the U.S. Militarys Africa Command] a more enduring presence. The very notion, though, of an al-Qaeda threat in northern Mali so dire as to require Western intervention and a permanent U.S. presence is anything but well-defined. As Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy, notes: its by no means clear what threat alQaeda in the Islamic Maghrebposes to the United States. Indeed, the very notion of al-Qaeda in Mali posing a threat to the West is predicated on the oft-repeated safe haven refrain. That is, the belief that without foreign intervention al-Qaeda will use northern Mali as a staging ground to launch attacks within Western countries. But, as Stephen Walt questions, is there any real evidence that the extremists in Mali are plotting to attack France, the United States, or anyone else? Even if they were, is there good evidence that they have the will and the skill to carry out such activities, or that the consequences of a successful attack would be greater than the costs of French (and other) efforts to root them out? And is it possible that intervention in Mali might actually focus the extremists attention on the intervenors, instead of the central government? The answer to the latter question appears quite clear in the wake of the bloody hostage crisis in neighboring Algeria. Although, as French President Franois Hollande claimed, the retaliation for the French intervention merely provided further evidence that my decision to intervene in Mali was justified.

Interventions, we see, are predicated upon a rather self-fulfilling logic. For in a seemingly endless loop, interventions inevitably seem to create additional problems and crises that are then posited as both justifying the initial intervention, as well yet further interventions. In short, intervention begets intervention. The Useful Menace But while Western leaders dig deep to reassure themselves of the justness of their latest intervention, doubts are nonetheless increasing over the competence of the Malian army. As the New York Times reports, despite extensive U.S. training, the Malian army has proven to be a weak, dysfunctional force that is as much a cause of Malis crisis as a potential part of the solution. The Western hope in Mali, then, as the Economist argues, is to kill as many as possible of the most fanatical jihadists, and to garrison the northern towns with soldiers from Mali and its neighbours, before the insurgents can regroup or bring in recruits. With such hope one understands the talk of a struggle to be measured in decades. Indeed, even the head of the U.S. Africa Command, General Carter Ham, has acknowledged the limitations the West faces in Mali. Realistically, Ham recently remarked, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption, so that al-Qaida is no longer able to control territory [there] as they do today. But as U.S. officials talk up the al-Qaeda threat in Mali, one cant help but recall the assertion made by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta back in 2011. As Panetta then declared, the U.S. was within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda. Yet, after the Wests support of Islamists fighters in Libya and Syria, that handy al-Qaeda specter has evidently been roused sufficiently to haunt the Western mind once more. Of course, despite all the public claims to the contrary, defeating al-Qaeda has never really been a genuine pursuit of the U.S. anyway. After all, a vanquished al-Qaeda would really denote something of a strategic setback for Washington. It would deprive the U.S. a source of proxy war foot soldiers, while also leaving Washington struggling to justify its global garrisoning. In the end then, the al-Qaeda menace that gift that keeps on giving is simply too useful to defeat. Containing China One needs look no further than the intervention into Mali to see the al-Qaeda threat bearing fruit for the West. All the attention on combating al-Qaeda in northern Mali has provided the perfect cover for the U.S. and its junior Western partners to pursue their grand strategy of containment against China. And with China increasingly out competing Western interests throughout Africa, one understands the sudden neo-colonial urge in the West. According to Razia Khan, the regional head of research for Africa at Standard Chartered Bank, bilateral trade between Africa and China is nearing $200 billion annually, having grown at an average rate of 33.6 percent per year over the past decade. Whats more, in the

coming years Africa stands to become Chinas largest trade partner, surpassing both the EU and the U.S. None of this has been lost on Washington. As the presumptive next U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, noted during his Senate confirmation hearing, the U.S. is knowingly playing from behind. Now with respect to China and Africa, China is all over Africa I mean, all over Africa. And theyre buying up long-term contracts on minerals, on you name it, Kerry commented. And therere some places where were not in the game, folks. And I hate to say it. And we got to get in. In a 2010 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, Johnnie Carson, U.S. assistant secretary for African Affairs, echoed Kerrys concerns. In fact, Carson went so far as to classify China as a very aggressive and pernicious economic competitor with no morals. Such U.S. sneering over growing Chinese investments in Africa were aired publicly during Secretary of State Clintons visit through African back in August. As Clinton, in a clear jab at China declared on her trip, Unlike other countries, America will stand up for democracy and universal human rights even when it might be easier to look the other way and keep the resources flowing. (The rights violations of the U.S.-trained Malian army puts just the latest lie to such righteous declarations.) In response to Clintons jab, Chinas state-run Xinhua news agency shot back that Clintons trip was aimed at least partly at discrediting Chinas engagement with the continent and curbing Chinas influence there. And it is with such a fear of U.S. containment in mind that Beijing has come to interpret Frances intervention into Mali as a gateway for further Western interventions. As He Wenping of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warns, French forces involvement in Mali will provide the case for legalization of a new interventionism in Africa. And indeed it will, just as the Wests Libyan romp, costing China $20 billion in investments, helped set the stage for the current intervention into Mali. For in order for the U.S. to harness Asias (read Chinas) growth and dynamism and thus cement Americas Pacific Century the U.S. must come to also harness the growth and dynamism of Africa. The U.S. containment of China, then, requires a pivot of sorts to Africa. Only the African pivot appears set to fall under the banner of that ever-malleable war on terror. Ben Schreiner is a freelance writer based atbnschreiner@gmail.com or via his website. in Wisconsin. He may be reached

It is the iron law of "progressive" movements that having achieved their goals, they refuse to fade away. Rather than disbanding upon completion of their mission, these movements, now fully institutionalized, keep chugging along, and the farther they go, the more they resemble their sworn enemies, the rationale for their existence. The labor movement that arose as a desperate defense against unbridled exploitation has degenerated into a stultifying, mafia-style monopoly whose grip on any business

dooms that business to slow strangulation. The civil rights movement emerged to fight discrimination. But as its baton passed from Martin Luther King, Jr. to the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the movement's main motto transmogrified from equality -- i.e., abolition of white privilege -- into affirmative action -- i.e., establishment of black privilege. And equality has come to be denigrated by the new self-appointed civil rights elite as a particularly insidious form of racial discrimination. Feminism born of a legitimate earning for equal rights and dignity has turned into a female supremacy movement implacably hostile to the "patriarchy" -i.e., the traditional social structure. The gay rights movement, too, has been transforming itself before our very eyes. Once a movement fighting against persecution and discrimination, which is the reason why its initial demands enjoyed wide public support, it has gone from one triumph to another and won the war. Today, the issue is moot. But the gay movement has not declared victory and gone home. Central to achieving their goal is bending society to their will and forcing it to acquiesce to their agenda. That's where same-sex marriage comes in. It's no mystery why it commands considerable support. After all, what can be more "American" than the idea of granting equality to a formerly persecuted group that has done nothing untoward other than being different in its sexual proclivities? Sort of like being discriminated because of the color of one's skin (even though many black leaders, jealously guarding their highly lucrative victimhood, take strong exception to equating gay liberation with the civil rights struggle). So recognition of gay unions as legitimate marriages seems to be an eminently innocuous idea. But appearances can be deceptive. Few things are more destructive than gay marriage, a poison pill devised to corrode the very core of a healthy society -- the institution of marriage. Not a single society in the long history of mankind has ever attempted to substitute homosexual relationships for traditional marriage. Even in places where homosexuality was viewed as normal, openly practiced, and even encouraged (as in Sparta, where carnal relationship was regarded as forging an extra bond between warriors), marriage was sacrosanct and never called into question. Marriage has always been universally understood as a biological, social, and economic arrangement to bring into the world and rear the young, thus perpetuating the species. Indeed, humans took their cue from wild nature, where heterosexual family is virtually the sole organizing principle of life. The rare exceptions only prove the rule, as do stable childless marriages held together by considerations of economic necessity or social convenience. Indeed, so central is marriage to human existence that it forms the basic building block and prototype of any society. The many forms of social organization are but permutations of the basic

familial pattern; the clan, the tribe and the state are merely an extended family writ large. Don't believe revolutionaries when they hold forth about their intention of building paradise on earth. Actually, they would be unable to build anything even if they wanted to. Their talk about the bright future is mere lip service, because in reality, any revolution is exclusively about destruction, with very little thought given to what will happen afterward ("we'll cross that bridge when we come to it"). But how do you go about destroying society? Where do you direct the blow so it will do the most damage? In his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx provided the answer: destroy the traditional family. True to the teachings of their prophet, socialist revolutionaries have placed the destruction of matrimony high on their list of priorities. Social upheavals have always opened the floodgates of debauchery and pornography. The socialist revolution brings about a breakdown of social conventions, with "sexual liberation" regarded as part of the overall drive for freedom. But while the rabble yearns to throw off the yoke of moral strictures to give vent to its animal passions, the revolutionary leaders see moral decay as a means of undermining the bulwark of the social structure -- the family. Radical movements are merely battalions of the revolutionary army, each charged with a particular subversive task. Undoubtedly, the overwhelming majority of rankand-file gays are well-meaning people who have sincerely bought into the myth peddled by their leaders that the marriage license is the ultimate token of recognition of their normalcy. They know not what they are doing. But the wizards behind the curtain know better, and there shouldn't be any illusions about their intentions: they want nothing less than to bring down the capitalist system, and they view their movement as a battering ram to shatter its principal bastion, America. Bringing down the traditional family is a crucial step in that direction. But why is gay marriage inimical to the traditional matrimony? How does society suffer if it gives legal sanction to the cohabitation of gay couples and bestows upon them the rights traditionally granted to spouses? In short, an approach based on individual rights is a bum steer. Legalization of same-sex marriage compromises the institution of marriage and thus undermines the family built on the foundation of marriage. It has been known since the dawn of history that a family unit consisting of a man and a woman is the best nurturing environment for the children. According to the research center Child Trends, "[r]esearch confirms that children develop best in families formed by both biological parents in a low-conflict marriage." Even the bestintentioned gay couples raising children shortchange their wards. But the most militant gay leaders are not well-meaning. Just as the radical leftists started out on

their Great March through the Institutions with schools and colleges as their primary targets ("We'll get you through your children," the radical leftist and gay poet Allen Ginsberg warned his erstwhile friend Norman Podhoretz), gay militants have children in their cross-hairs. A nationwide organization, The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, openly acknowledges that its objective is to promote a positive view of homosexuality among pre-teen and teenage students. Aside from the tremendous damage same-sex marriage does to the well-being and normal development of children, by offering an alternative to a bedrock institution, gay marriage calls into question all traditional values. There is a strong correlation between the rise of homosexual marriage and the weakening of traditional matrimony. David Blankenhorn observes, "The deep logic of same-sex marriage is clearly consistent with what scholars call deinstitutionalization -- the overturning or weakening of all of the customary forms of marriage, and the dramatic shrinking of marriage's public meaning and institutional authority. Does deinstitutionalization necessarily require gay marriage? Apparently not. For decades heterosexuals have been doing a fine job on that front all by themselves. But gay marriage clearly presupposes and reinforces deinstitutionalization." Marx's loyal cohort Friedrich Engels, in his influential work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the States, disclosed the game plan in a single, succinct proposition: change the concept of matrimony, and the traditional family will cease to exist. And once the family is gone, society will fall apart. Knock out the cornerstone, and the whole edifice will crumble, which is precisely the ultimate goal of the revolutionary movement.
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