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.

 

This is a revised extract from The New Rulers of the World , by John Pilger,  published  by  Verso.  To  order a copy, for £8 plus p&p (rrp £10), call the Observer Books Service on 0870 066 7989.

 

 

 

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