War Is Terrorism
By William Blum
04/06/07 "ICH" -- -- "They told us this was one of the
world's worst terrorists, and he got the sentence of a drunken
driver," said Ben Wizner, an attorney for the American Civil
Liberties Union, referring to David Hicks, a 31-year-old
Australian who in a plea bargain with a US military court will
serve nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That's after
five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba without being charged with a
crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal,
Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a slap in
the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from
telling his story (a slap -- mon Dieu! -- in the face of free
enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future
US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the
US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life),
to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a
requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US
court).
"If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it
wouldn't hide behind a gag order," said Wizner.)[1]
Like so many other "terrorists" held by the United States in
recent years, Hicks had been "sold" to the American military for
a bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that once
they offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies that
almost anyone was fair game.
Other "terrorists" have been turned in as reprisals for all
sorts of personal hatreds and feuds.
Many others -- abroad and in the United States -- have been
incarcerated by the United States simply for working for, or
merely contributing money to, charitable organizations with
alleged or real ties to a "terrorist organization", as
determined by a list kept by the State Department, a list
conspicuously political.
It was recently disclosed that an Iraqi resident of Britain is
being released from Guantánamo after four years. His crime? He
refused to work as an informer for the CIA and MI5, the British
security service. His business partner is still being held in
Guantánamo, for the same crime.[2]
Finally, there are those many other poor souls who have been
picked up simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running,"
General Martin Lucenti, former deputy commander of Guantánamo,
has pointed out.[3]
Thousands of people thrown into hell on earth for no earthly
good reason. The world media has been overflowing with their
individual tales of horror and sadness for five very long years.
Said Guantánamo's former commander, General Jay Hood: "Sometimes
we just didn't get the right folks."[4] Not that the torture
they were put through would be justified if they were in fact
"the right folks".
Hicks was taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a
convert to Islam and like many others from many countries had
gone to Afghanistan for religious reasons, had wound up on the
side of the Taliban in the civil war that had been going on
since the early 1990s, and had received military training at a
Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on calling such
camps "terrorist training camps", or "anti-American terrorist
training camps", or "al-Qaeda terrorist training camps". Almost
every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy,
which Washington wants to stigmatize, is charged with being
associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a
precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating
against American imperialism while being a member of al Qaeda
and retaliating against American imperialism while NOT being a
member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to
fit into your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that
put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first
Monday of each month.
It should be noted that for nearly half a century much of
southern Florida has been one big training camp for anti-Castro
terrorists. None of their groups -- which have carried out many
hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad,
including bombing a passenger airplane in flight -- are on the
State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua in the
1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former
CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified: "I believe it is
irrefutable that a number of the Contras' actions have to be
characterized as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism."[5]
The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties
to al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but
which have allied themselves with Washington's agenda in the
former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now we learn of US support
for a Pakistani group, called Jundullah and led by a Taliban,
which has taken responsibility for the recent kidnapings and
deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials
in cross-border attacks.[6] Do not hold your breath waiting for
the name Jundallah to appear on the State Department list of
terrorist organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic
militias being supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist
bombing and assassination attacks in Iran.[7]
The same political selectivity applies to many of the groups
which are on the list, particularly those opposed to American or
Israeli policies.
Amid growing pressure from their home countries and
international human rights advocates, scores of Guantánamo
detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three years.
Now, a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at
this 21st century Devil's Island says this policy undermines
Washington's own claims about the threat posed by many of the
prison camp's residents. The report, based on US government case
files for Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years,
shows inmates being systematically freed from custody within
weeks of their return. In half the cases studied, the detainees
had been turned over to US forces by Pakistani police or troops
in return for financial rewards. Many others were accused of
terrorism connections in part because their Arab nicknames
matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda members,
documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press
found that 84 percent of released detainees -- 205 out of 245
individuals whose cases could be tracked -- were set free after
being released to the custody of their native countries.
"There are certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are
also other cases where it's hard to understand why the people
are still there," said Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who
has visited the detention camp three times. "We were struggling
to find some rationality, something to comfort us that it wasn't
just random. But we didn't find it."
The report states that many of the US attempts to link the
detainees to terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors
describe as circumstantial and "highly questionable", such as
the travel routes the detainees had followed in flying
commercially from one Middle East country to another. American
officials have associated certain travel routes with al Qaeda,
when in fact, says the report, the routes "involve ordinary
connecting flights in major international airports." With regard
to accusations based on similar names, the report states: "This
accusation appears to be based upon little more than
similarities in the transliterations of a detainee's name and a
name found on one of the hard drives."
Raut said he was most struck by the high percentage of Saudi
detainees who had been captured and turned over by Pakistani
forces. In effect, he said, for at least half of the group in
the study, the United States "had no first-hand knowledge of
their activities" in Afghanistan before their capture and
imprisonment.[8]
When Michael Scheuer, former CIA officer who headed the Agency's
Osama bin Laden unit, was told that the largest group in
Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he said: "We
absolutely got the wrong people."[9]
Never mind. They were all treated equally. All thrown into
solitary confinement. Shackled, blindfolded, excruciating
physical contortions for long periods, denied medicine. Sensory
deprivation, sleep deprivation. And two dozen other methods of
torture which American officials do not call torture. (If you
torture these officials, they might admit that it "torture lite".)
"The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment," a
senior American defense official said in 2003, "so that in 20 to
30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely
discredited."[10]
When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the
United States, and invading and occupying their country, without
their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely
discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium and cluster
bombs and CIA torture renditions become things that even men
like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will be
too embarrassed to defend?
Australian/British journalist John Pilger has noted that in
George Orwell's 1984 "three slogans dominate society: war is
peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today's
slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is
terrorism."
William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and
CIA Interventions Since World War 2, Rogue State: A Guide to the
World's Only Superpower, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir,
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire.
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased,
at www.killinghope.org
Notes:-
[1] Seattle Times, March 31, 2007
[2] Washington Post, March 30, 2007, p.11
[3] Financial Times (London), Oct 4, 2004
[4] Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2005
[5] Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Western
Hemisphere Affairs, April 16, 1985
[6] ABC News, April 3, 2007
[7] Sunday Telegraph (London), February 25, 2007
[8] Washington Post, March 18, 2007
[9] Richard Ackland, "Innocence ignored at Guantanamo",
Sydney Morning Herald, February 24, 2006.
[10] New York Times, January 17, 2003, p.10
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