- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi
regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of
the Taliban.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- That's more deaths of infants every month than the number
killed in the World Trade Center.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "It is not the way to go...not in our son's name."
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