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CounterPunch
January
4, 2003
The Double Standards,
Dubious Morality and Duplicity of the Fight Against Terror
by ROBERT FISK
The Independent
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 Chateau 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 (lbs125m) "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.
Yesterday's
Features
Dr. Werther
Third
Reich Syndrome: George Will and the Collapse of Historical Knowledge
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Master Plan for the Internet
Robert Jensen
We
Won't Be Fighting for Freedom in Iraq
Krystal Kyer
Not
Another Draft!
M. Shahid Alam
Why
9-11 and Why Now?
Mark Weisbrot
Can the Courts Tackle Corporate Crime?
Alan Maass
Another Kick in the Teeth for the
Unemployed
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