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The Anti-Empire Report
Some things you need to know before the world ends
by William Blum
 "They told us this was one of the world's worst terrorists, and he got the sentence of a drunken driver," said Ben Wizner, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to David Hicks, a 31-year-old Australian who in a plea bargain with a US military court will serve nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That's after five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba without being charged with a crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a slap in the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from telling his story (a slap -- mon Dieu! -- in the face of free enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life), to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court).
"If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn't hide behind a gag order," said Wizner.)[1]
Like so many other "terrorists" held by the United States in
recent years, Hicks had been "sold" to the American military for a
bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that once they
offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies that almost
anyone was fair game.
Other "terrorists" have been turned in as reprisals for all sorts of personal hatreds and feuds.
Many
others -- abroad and in the United States -- have been incarcerated by
the United States simply for working for, or merely contributing money
to, charitable organizations with alleged or real ties to a "terrorist
organization", as determined by a list kept by the State Department, a
list conspicuously political.
It was recently disclosed that
an Iraqi resident of Britain is being released from Guantánamo after
four years. His crime? He refused to work as an informer for the CIA
and MI5, the British security service. His business partner is still
being held in Guantánamo, for the same crime.[2]
Finally,
there are those many other poor souls who have been picked up simply
for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Most of these guys
weren't fighting. They were running," General Martin Lucenti, former
deputy commander of Guantánamo, has pointed out.[3]
Thousands
of people thrown into hell on earth for no earthly good reason. The
world media has been overflowing with their individual tales of horror
and sadness for five very long years. Said Guantánamo's former
commander, General Jay Hood: "Sometimes we just didn't get the right
folks."[4] Not that the torture they were put through would be
justified if they were in fact "the right folks".
Hicks was
taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a convert to Islam
and like many others from many countries had gone to Afghanistan for
religious reasons, had wound up on the side of the Taliban in the civil
war that had been going on since the early 1990s, and had received
military training at a Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on
calling such camps "terrorist training camps", or "anti-American
terrorist training camps", or "al-Qaeda terrorist training camps".
Almost every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy,
which Washington wants to stigmatize, is charged with being associated
with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and
meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American
imperialism while being a member of al Qaeda and retaliating against
American imperialism while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al
Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, as if there
are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a
potluck on the first Monday of each month.
It should be noted
that for nearly half a century much of southern Florida has been one
big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists. None of their groups --
which have carried out many hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the
US as well as abroad, including bombing a passenger airplane in flight
-- are on the State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua
in the 1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former
CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified: "I believe it is irrefutable
that a number of the Contras' actions have to be characterized as
terrorism, as State-supported terrorism."[5] The same applies to
groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties to al Qaeda, including
Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but which have allied themselves
with Washington's agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now
we learn of US support for a Pakistani group, called Jundullah and led
by a Taliban, which has taken responsibility for the recent kidnapings
and deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in
cross-border attacks.[6] Do not hold your breath waiting for the name
Jundallah to appear on the State Department list of terrorist
organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic militias being
supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist bombing and assassination
attacks in Iran.[7]
The same political selectivity applies to
many of the groups which are on the list, particularly those opposed to
American or Israeli policies.
Amid growing pressure from their
home countries and international human rights advocates, scores of
Guantánamo detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three
years.
Now, a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at
this 21st century Devil's Island says this policy undermines
Washington's own claims about the threat posed by many of the prison
camp's residents. The report, based on US government case files for
Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years, shows inmates
being systematically freed from custody within weeks of their return.
In half the cases studied, the detainees had been turned over to US
forces by Pakistani police or troops in return for financial rewards.
Many others were accused of terrorism connections in part because their
Arab nicknames matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda
members, documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press
found that 84 percent of released detainees -- 205 out of 245
individuals whose cases could be tracked -- were set free after being
released to the custody of their native countries.
"There are
certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are also other cases
where it's hard to understand why the people are still there," said
Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who has visited the detention camp
three times. "We were struggling to find some rationality, something to
comfort us that it wasn't just random. But we didn't find it."
The
report states that many of the US attempts to link the detainees to
terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors describe as
circumstantial and "highly questionable", such as the travel routes the
detainees had followed in flying commercially from one Middle East
country to another. American officials have associated certain travel
routes with al Qaeda, when in fact, says the report, the routes
"involve ordinary connecting flights in major international airports."
With regard to accusations based on similar names, the report states:
"This accusation appears to be based upon little more than similarities
in the transliterations of a detainee's name and a name found on one of
the hard drives."
Raut said he was most struck by the high
percentage of Saudi detainees who had been captured and turned over by
Pakistani forces. In effect, he said, for at least half of the group in
the study, the United States "had no first-hand knowledge of their
activities" in Afghanistan before their capture and imprisonment.[8]
When
Michael Scheuer, former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama bin
Laden unit, was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from
custody in Pakistan, he said: "We absolutely got the wrong people."[9]
Never
mind. They were all treated equally. All thrown into solitary
confinement. Shackled, blindfolded, excruciating physical contortions
for long periods, denied medicine. Sensory deprivation, sleep
deprivation. And two dozen other methods of torture which American
officials do not call torture. (If you torture these officials, they
might admit that it "torture lite".)
"The idea is to build an
antiterrorist global environment," a senior American defense official
said in 2003, "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like
slave-trading, completely discredited."[10]
When will the
dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and
invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking
or threatening the US, become completely discredited? When will the use
of depleted uranium and cluster bombs and CIA torture renditions become
things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald
Rumsfeld will be too embarrassed to defend?
Australian/British
journalist John Pilger has noted that in George Orwell's 1984 "three
slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and
ignorance is strength. Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses
meaning. The war is terrorism."
Throwing the earth on the mercy of the market
Al
Gore appeared before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on
global warming on March 21. The star of "An Inconvenient Truth" was
told by Cong. Joe Barton of Texas: "You're not just off a little --
you're totally wrong." In the afternoon Gore testified before the
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, during which the former
vice president was told by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma: "You've been
so extreme in some of your expressions that you're losing some of your
own people."[11]
These members of Congress know the facts of
economic life in the United States. Fighting global warming is a threat
to the principal human generator of it -- corporations -- who avail
themselves of the best congress members money can buy to keep
government regulations as weak as can be.
Does Al Gore know
the same facts of American economic life? Of course, but you would have
a hard time discerning that from his film. It's as cowardly in dealing
with the corporations as Gore was in fighting the theft of the 2000
election. In the film's hour and a half, the words "corporations" or
"profit" are not heard. The closest he comes to ascribing a link
between the rape of the environment and the incessant corporate drive
to optimize profits is a single passing mention of American automakers'
reluctance to increase car gas mileage. He discusses the link between
tobacco and lung cancer, as an example of how we have to "connect the
dots" on environmental issues, with no mention of the tobacco
corporations or their gross and deliberate deception of the American
people. He states at another point that we must choose the environment
over the economy, without any elucidation at all. Otherwise, the film's
message is that it's up to the individual to change his habits, to
campaign for renewable energy, and to write his congress member about
this or that. In summary, the basic problem, he tells us, is that we're
lacking "political will".
It would be most interesting if Al
Gore were the president to see how tough he'd get with the
corporations, which every day, around the clock, are faced with
choices: one method of operation available being the least harmful to
the environment, another method being the least harmful to the bottom
line. Of course, Gore was vice-president for eight years and was in a
fantastic and enviable position to pressure the corporations to mend
their ways and Congress to enact tougher regulations; as well as to
educate the public on more than their own bad habits. But what exactly
did he do? Can any readers enlighten me as to what extent the man used
his position and his power then in a manner consistent with the image
and the word of his new film?
But could Gore be elected
without corporate money? And how much of that money would reach his
pocket if he advocated (choke, gasp!) free government-paid public
transportation -- rail, bus, ferry, etc.? That would give birth to a
breathtaking -- or rather, breath enhancing -- reduction in automobile
pollution; easily paid for by ceasing America's imperialist wars.
Microsoft and the National Security Agency
I
have long felt that the American media's gravest shortcoming is its
errors of omission, rather than its errors of commission. It's what
they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or
out-and-out lies. In January the Washington Post reported that
Microsoft had announced that its new operating system, Vista, was being
brought to us with the assistance of the National Security Agency. The
NSA said it helped to protect the operating system from worms, Trojan
horses and other insidious computer attackers. "Our intention is to
help everyone with security," said the NSA's chief of vulnerability
analysis and operations group. The spy agency, which provided its
service free, said it was Microsoft's idea to acknowledge NSA's role,
although the software giant declined to be specific about NSA's
contributions to Vista.[12]
What the Post -- and most likely
the entirety of mainstream American media -- do not remind us of is
what came out in 1999 and 2000, although it's all over the Internet.
In
September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell
revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special "keys"
into Windows operating systems, beginning with Windows 95. An American
computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina,
had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the
smoking gun -- Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the
debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it.
Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called "KEY". The
other was called "NSAKEY". Fernandez presented his finding at a
conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance.
The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their
software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it
had been put there without users' knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA's
"back door" in the world's most commonly used operating system makes it
"orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your
computer."[13]
In February 2000, it was disclosed that the
Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French
Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted
that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software.
According to the DAS report, "it would seem that the creation of
Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and
that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by
the same administration." The report stated that there had been a
"strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about
the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft, and by the presence of
NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams." Microsoft
categorically denied all the charges and the French Defense Ministry
said that it did not necessarily stand by the report, which was written
by "outside experts".[14]
In case the above disturbs your
image of Bill Gates and his buddies as a bunch of long-haired, liberal,
peacenik computer geeks, and the company as one of the
non-military-oriented halfway decent corporations, the DAS report
states that the Pentagon at the time was Microsoft's biggest client in
the world. The Israeli military has also been an important client. In
2002, the company erected enormous billboards in Israel which bore the
Microsoft logo under the text "From the depth of our heart -- thanks to
The Israeli Defense Forces", with the Israeli national flag in the
background.[15]
The Myth of the Good War
Readers of
this report will be aware that one of the points I try very hard to
convey is that the reason so many Americans support US atrocities
abroad is that they're convinced that no matter how bad things may
look, the government means well. American leaders may make mistakes,
they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause
more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are
honorable. Of that most Americans are certain. And one of the
foundation stones for this edifice of patriotic faith is the Second
World War, an historical saga that all Americans are taught about from
childhood on. We all know what its real name is: "The Good War".
Which
leads me to recommend a book, "The Myth of the Good War", by Jacques
Pauwels, published in 2002. It's very well done, well argued and
documented, an easy read. I particularly like the sections dealing with
the closing months of the European campaign, during which the United
States and Great Britain contemplated stabbing their Soviet ally in the
back with maneuvers like a separate peace with Germany, using German
troops to fight the Russians, and sabotaging legal attempts by various
Communist Parties and other elements of the European left to share in
(highly earned) political power after the war. This last was of course
very effectively realized. Stalin learned enough about these schemes to
at least partially explain his post-war suspicious manner toward his
"allies". In the West we called it "paranoia".[16]
NOTES
[1] Seattle Times, March 31, 2007
[2] Washington Post, March 30, 2007, p.11
[3] Financial Times (London), Oct 4, 2004
[4] Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2005
[5] Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, April 16, 1985
[6] ABC News, April 3, 2007
[7] Sunday Telegraph (London), February 25, 2007
[8] Washington Post, March 18, 2007
[9] Richard Ackland, "Innocence ignored at Guantanamo", Sydney Morning Herald, February 24, 2006.
[10] New York Times, January 17, 2003, p.10
[11] Washington Post, March 22, 2007, p.2
[12] Washington Post, January 9, 2007. p.D1
[13]
Duncan Campbell's article of September 3, 1999 can be found on the
website of TechWeb: http://www.techweb.com/wire/29110640
[14] Agence France Presse, February 18 and 21, 2000
[15] To see one of the billboards: www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0022.html
[16] http://www.alys.be/pauwels/2publi_the_myth.htm
Available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch editions
William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.
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