The Double Standards,
Dubious Morality and Duplicity of this Fight Against Terror
by Robert Fisk
Dissident Voice
January 4, 2003
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 Chβteau 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.
Robert Fisk is an
award winning foreign correspondent for The Independent (UK), where this article first appeared. He is the
author of Pity Thy Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (The Nation Books,
2002 edition)