> John Walker Lindh, the American who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan,
> entered a guilty plea as part of an agreement with U.S. prosecutors that
> could keep him in prison for 20 years. In exchange, federal prosecutors
> agreed to drop other charges that could have kept him behind bars for life.
> "I provided services as a soldier to the Taliban last year," he said in
> court. "I plead guilty."
>
> http://www.cnn.com/index.aol.html
Rule of law? You guys just make it up as you go along. Ivan

Bush to unveil Homeland Security strategy
President Bush today will unveil the first-ever National Strategy for
Homeland Security, which will include plans to detect chemical, biological
and nuclear weapons in the United States. CNN obtained a draft of the plan,
which lists a variety of domestic terrorist threats and ways to prevent,
preempt or respond to them.
FULL STORY

> > http://www.cnn.com/index.aol.html
> Rule of law? You guys just make it up as you go along. Ivan

http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,754972,00.html

The great charade
As the West prepares for an assault on Iraq, John Pilger argues that 'war on
terror' is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist … America
itself

John Pilger
Sunday July 14, 2002
The Observer

It is 10 months since 11 September, and still the great charade plays on.
Having appropriated our shocked response to that momentous day, the rulers
of the world have since ground our language into a paean of cliches and lies
about the 'war on terrorism' - when the most enduring menace, and source of
terror, is them.

The fanatics who attacked America came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. No bombs
fell on these American protectorates. Instead, more than 5,000 civilians
have been bombed to death in stricken Afghanistan, the latest a wedding
party of 40 people, mostly women and children. Not a single al-Qaeda leader
of importance has been caught.

Following this 'stunning victory', hundreds of prisoners were shipped to an
American concentration camp in Cuba, where they have been held against all
the conventions of war and international law. No evidence of their alleged
crimes has been produced, and the FBI confirms only one is a genuine
suspect. In the United States, more than 1,000 people of Muslim background
have 'disappeared'; none has been charged. Under the draconian Patriot Act,
the FBI's new powers include the authority to go into libraries and ask who
is reading what.

Meanwhile, the Blair government has made fools of the British Army by
insisting they pursue warring tribesmen: exactly what squaddies in putties
and pith helmets did over a century ago when Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India,
described Afghanistan as one of the 'pieces on a chessboard upon which is
being played out a great game for the domination of the world'.

There is no war on terrorism; it is the great game speeded up. The
difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite
dangers for us all.

Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel
Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in
Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the
22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a
nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the
dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda
orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do
with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all.
The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's
second greatest source of oil.

The drum-beaters rarely mention this truth, and the people of Iraq. Everyone
is Saddam Hussein, the demon of demons. Four years ago, the Pentagon warned
President Clinton that an all-out attack on Iraq might kill 'at least'
10,000 civilians: that, too, is unmentionable. In a sustained propaganda
campaign to justify this outrage, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic
have been used as channels, 'conduits', for a stream of rumours and lies.
These have ranged from false claims about an Iraqi connection with the
anthrax attacks in America to a discredited link between the leader of the
11 September hijacks and Iraqi intelligence. When the attack comes, these
consorting journalists will share responsibility for the crime.

It was Tony Blair who served notice that imperialism's return journey to
respectability was under way. Hark, the Christian gentleman-bomber's vision
of a better world for 'the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the
ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern
Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan.' Hark,
his 'abiding' concern for the 'human rights of the suffering women of
Afghanistan' as he colluded with Bush who, as the New York Times reported,
'demanded the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and
other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population'. Hark his compassion
for the 'dispossessed' in the 'slums of Gaza', where Israeli gunships,
manufactured with vital British parts, fire their missiles into crowded
civilian areas.

As Frank Furedi reminds us in The New Ideology of Imperialism , it is not
long ago 'that the moral claims of imperialism were seldom questioned in the
West. Imperialism and the global expansion of the western powers were
represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human
civilisation.' The quest went wrong when it was clear that fascism was
imperialism, too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best
Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed. Today, the preferred
euphemism is 'civilisation'; or if an adjective is required, 'cultural'.

From Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an ally of crypto-fascists,
to impeccably liberal commentators, the new imperialists share a concept
whose true meaning relies on a xenophobic or racist comparison with those
who are deemed uncivilised, culturally inferior and might challenge the
'values' of the West. Watch the 'debates' on Newsnight. The question is how
best 'we' can deal with the problem of 'them'.

For much of the western media, especially those commentators in thrall to
and neutered by the supercult of America, the most salient truths remain
taboos. Professor Richard Falk, of Cornell university, put it succinctly
some years ago. Western foreign policy, he wrote, is propagated in the media
'through a self righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images
of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a
campaign of unrestricted violence'.

Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as
both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only
state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international
terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution
calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.

'In the war against terrorism,' said Bush from his bunker following 11
September, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no
matter how long it takes.'

Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given
training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They
include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted
international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public,
thanks to the freest media on earth.

There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed
by the President's brother, Jeb Bush. In his book Rogue State , former
senior State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial
of three anti-Castro terrorists, who hijacked a plane to Miami at
knifepoint. 'Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to
testify against the men,' he wrote, 'the defence simply told the jurors the
man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before
acquitting the defendants.'

General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the
1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death
squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper
Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his
torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by
the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the
United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the
Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the
United States.

Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with
the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia.
Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and
some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence
agents in the black arts of terrorism.

In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who
had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had
been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran
Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996,
the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training
manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of
witnesses' relatives.

In recent months, the Bush regime has torn up the Kyoto treaty, which would
ease global warming, to which the United States is the greatest contributor.
It has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in 'pre-emptive' strikes (a
threat echoed by Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon). It has tried to abort the
birth of an international criminal court. It has further undermined the
United Nations by blocking a UN investigation of the Israeli assault on a
Palestinian refugee camp; and it has ordered the Palestinians to replace
their elected leader with an American stooge. At summit conferences in
Canada and Indonesia, Bush's people have blocked hundreds of millions of
dollars going to the most deprived people on earth, those without clean
water and electricity.

These facts will no doubt beckon the inane slur of 'anti-Americanism'. This
is the imperial prerogative: the last refuge of those whose contortion of
intellect and morality demands a loyalty oath. As Noam Chomsky has pointed
out, the Nazis silenced argument and criticism with 'anti German' slurs. Of
course, the United States is not Germany; it is the home of some of
history's greatest civil rights movements, such as the epic movement in the
1960s and 1970s.

I was in the US last week and glimpsed that other America, the one rarely
seen among the media and Hollywood stereotypes, and what was clear was that
it was stirring again. The other day, in an open letter to their compatriots
and the world, almost 100 of America's most distinguished names in art,
literature and education wrote this:

'Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their
government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of
repression. We believe that questioning, criticism and dissent must be
valued and protected. Such rights are always contested and must be fought
for. We, too, watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. But
the mourning had barely begun when our leaders launched a spirit of revenge.
The government now openly prepares to wage war on Iraq - a country that has
no connection with September 11.

'We say this to the world. Too many times in history people have waited
until it was too late to resist. We draw on the inspiration of those who
fought slavery and all those other great causes of freedom that began with
dissent. We call on all like-minded people around the world to join us.'

It is time we joined them.