amigo cabal

Time to Recognize State Terror

By John Pilger

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100204D.shtml

Friday 17 September 2004

The world is dividing into two hostile camps: Islam and "us." That is the
unerring message from Western governments, press, radio and television. For
Islam, read terrorists. It is reminiscent of the cold war, when the world
was divided between "Reds" and us, and even a strategy of annihilation was
permissible in our defense. We now know, or we ought to know, that so much
of that was a charade; released official files make clear the Soviet threat
was for public consumption only.

Every day now, as during the cold war, a one-way moral mirror is held up to
us as a true reflection of events. The new threat is given impetus with
every terrorist outrage, be it at Beslan or Jakarta. Seen in the one-way
mirror, our leaders make grievous mistakes, but their good intentions are
not in question. Tony Blair's "idealism" and "decency" are promoted by his
accredited mainstream detractors, as the concocted Greek tragedy of his
political demise opens on the media stage.

Having taken part in the killing of as many as 37,000 Iraqi civilians,
Blair's distractions, not his victims, are news: from his arcane rivalry
with treasurer Gordon Brown, his Tweedledee, to his damascene conversion to
the perils of global warming. On the atrocity at Beslan, Blair is allowed to
say, without irony or challenge, that "this international terrorism will not
prevail." These are the same words spoken by Mussolini soon after he had
bombed civilians in Abyssinia.

Heretics who look behind the one-way mirror and see the utter dishonesty of
all this, who identify Blair and his collaborators as war criminals in the
literal and legal sense and present evidence of his cynicism and immorality,
are few; but they have wide support among the public, whose awareness has
never been higher, in my experience. It is the British public's passionate
indifference, if not contempt for the political games of Blair/Brown and
their courts and its accelerating interest in the way the world really is,
that unnerves those with power.

Let's look at a few examples of the way the world is presented and the way
it really is. The occupation of Iraq is presented as "a mess": a blundering,
incompetent American military up against Islamic fanatics. In truth, the
occupation is a systematic, murderous assault on a civilian population by a
corrupt American officer class, given license by its superiors in
Washington.

Last May, the US Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to attack
the slums of Fallujah. They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far
greater than the total number of civilians killed by the "insurgents" during
the past year. The generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of
revenge for the killing of three American mercenaries. Sixty years earlier,
the SS Das Reich division killed 600 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane
as revenge for the kidnapping of a German officer by the resistance. Is
there a difference?

These days, the Americans routinely fire missiles into Fallujah and other
dense urban areas; they murder whole families. If the word terrorism has any
modern application, it is this industrial state terrorism. The British have
a different style. There are more than 40 known cases of Iraqis having died
at the hands of British soldiers; just one soldier has been charged. In the
current issue of the magazine The Journalist, Lee Gordon, a freelance


brutality."

Neither is the growing disaffection among British troops reported at home.
This is so worrying the Ministry of Defense that it has moved to placate the
family of 17-year-old soldier David McBride by taking him off the AWOL list
after he refused to fight in Iraq. Almost all the families of soldiers
killed in Iraq have denounced the occupation and Blair, all of which is
unprecedented.