- 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 Chteau 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.
-
- http://argument.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=366199&hos
t=6&dir=140
|
