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September / October 2003
Bush's Vietnam
by John Pilger
America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 are
unravelling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no
authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has
not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging.
Regardless of showcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains
desperate. The token women in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous Sima Samar, has
been forced out of government and is now inconstant fear of her life, with an
armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate.
Murder rape and child abuse are committed with impunity by private armies of
America's "friends," the warlords whom Washington has bribed with
millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability.
"We are in a combat zone the moment we leave base," an American
colonel told me at Bagram airbase, near Kabul. "We are shot at every day,
several times a day." when I said that surely he had come to liberate and
protect the people, he belly-laughed.
American troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort US officials
at high speed in armoured vans with blackened windows and military vehicles,
mounted with machine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast Bagram base was
considered too insecure for the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during his
recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans that they
"accidentally" shot dead four government soldiers in the centre of
Kabul, igniting the second major street protest against their presence in a
week.
On the day I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport, killing
four German soldiers, members of the International Security Force [ISAF]. The
German's bus was lifted into the air: human flesh lay on the roadside. When
British soldiers arrived to "seal off" the area, they were watched by
a silent crowd, squinting into the heat and dust, across a divide as wide as
that which separated British troops from Afghans in the 19th century, and the
French from Algerians and Americans from Vietnamese.
Two open secrets
In Iraq, scene of the second "great victory", there are two open
secrets. The first is that the "terrorists" now besieging the American
occupation force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly
supported by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed
their enforced "liberation".
The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of the true scale of the
Anglo-American killing, pointing to the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always
denied. Comparisons with Vietnam have been made so often over the years that I
hesitate to draw another. However, the similarities are striking: for example,
the return of expressions such as "sucked into a quagmire." This
suggests, once again, that the Americans are victims, not invaders: the approved
Hollywood version when a rapacious adventure goes wrong.
Since Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled almost six months ago, more Americans
have been killed than during the war. Many have been killed and wounded in
classic guerrilla attacks on roadblocks and checkpoints, which may number as
many as a dozen a day.
The Americans call the guerrillas "Saddam loyalists" and "Ba'athist
fighters." In the same way they used to dismiss the Vietnamese as
"communists." Recently in Falluja, in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, it
was clearly not the presence of Ba'athists or Saddamists, but the brutal
behaviour of the occupiers, who fired point-blank at a crowd, that inspired the
resistance.
The American tanks gunning down a family of shepherds is reminiscent of the
gunning down of a shepherd, his family and sheep by "coalition"
aircraft in a "no-fly zone" four years ago, whose aftermath I filmed
and which evoked, for me, the murderous games American aircraft used to play in
Vietnam, gunning down farmers in their fields, children on their buffaloes.
On 12 June, a large American force attacked a "terrorist base" north
of Baghdad and left more than 100 dead, according to a US spokesman. The term
"terrorist" is important, because it implies that the likes of al-Qaeda
are attacking the liberators, and so the connection between Iraq and September
11 is made, which in pre-war propaganda was never made.
More than 400 prisoners were taken in this operation. This majority have
reportedly joined thousands of Iraqis in a "holding facility" at
Baghdad airport: a concentration camp along the lines of Bagram, from where
people are shipped to Guantanamo Bay.
In Afghanistan, the Americans pick up drivers and send them into oblivion, via
Bagram. Like Pinochet's boys in Chile, they are making their perceived enemies
"disappear."
Search and destroy
"Search and destroy'" the scorched-earth tactic from Vietnam is
back.
In the arid south-eastern plains of Afghanistan, the village of Niaz Qala no
longer stands. American airborne troops swept down before dawn on 30 December
2001 and slaughtered, among others, a wedding party. Villagers said that women
and children ran towards a dried pond, seeking protection from gunfire, and were
shot as they ran. After two hours, the aircraft and the attackers left.
According to a United Nations investigation, 52 people were killed, including 25
children. "We identified it as a military target," says the Pentagon,
echoing its initial response to the My Lai massacre 35 years ago.
The targeting of civilians has long been a journalistic taboo in the west.
Accredited monsters did that, never "us". The civilian death toll of
the 1991 Gulf War was wildly underestimated.
Almost a year latter, a comprehensive study by the Medical Education Trust in
London estimated that more than 200,000 Iraqis had died during and immediately
after the war, as a direct or indirect consequence of attacks on civilian
infrastructure. The report was all but ignored. The June, Iraq Body Count, a
group of American and British researchers, estimated that up to 10,000 civilians
may have been killed in Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the attack on Baghdad
alone. And this is likely to be an extremely conservative figure.
Hidden effect
In Afghanistan, there has been similar carnage. In May last year, Jonathan
Steele extrapolated all the available field evidence of the human cost of the US
bombing and concluded that as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives
as an indirect consequence of the bombing, many of them drought victims denied
relief.
This "hidden "effect is hardly new. A recent study at Columbia
University in New York has found that the spraying of Agent Orange and other
herbicides on Vietnam was up to four times as great as previously estimated.
Agent Orange contained dioxin, one of the deadliest poisons known.
In what they first called Operation Hades, then changed to the friendlier
Operation Ranch Hand, the Americans in Vietnam destroyed, in some 10,000
"missions" to spray Agent Orange, almost over half the forests of
southern Vietnam, and countless human lives. It was the most insidious and
perhaps the most devastating use of a chemical weapon of mass destruction ever.
Today Vietnamese children continue to be born with a range of deformities, or
they are stillborn, or the foetuses are aborted.
The use of uranium-tipped munitions evokes the catastrophe of Agent Orange. In
the first Gulf War, the Americans and British used 350 tonnes of depleted
uranium. According to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, quoting an
international study, 50 tonnes of DU, if inhaled or ingested, would cause
500,000 deaths.
Most of the victims are civilians in southern Iraq. It is estimated that 2,000
tonnes were used during the latest attack.
In a remarkable series of reports for the Christian Science Monitor, the
investigative reporter Scott Peterson has described radiated bullets in the
streets of Baghdad and radiation-contaminated tanks, where children play without
warning. Belatedly, a few signs in Arabic have appeared: "Danger - Get away
from this area". At the same time, in Afghanistan, the Uranium Medical
Research Centre, based in Canada, has made two field studies, with the results
described as "shocking." "Without exception," it reported,
"at every bomb site investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of
the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination
by uranium."
An official map distributed to non-government agencies in Iraq shows that the
American and British military have plastered urban areas with cluster bombs,
many of which will have failed to detonate on impact. These usually lie
unnoticed until children pick them up, then they explode.
In the centre of Kabul, I found two ragged notices warning people that the
rubble of their homes and streets contained unexploded cluster bombs "made
in USA". Who reads them? Small children? The day I watched children
skipping through what might have been an urban minefield, I saw Tony Blair on
CNN in the lobby of my hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a child into his
arms, in a school that had been painted for his visit, and where lunch had been
prepared in his honour, in a city where basic services such as education, food
and water remains in shambles under the British occupation.
It was in Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill and dying
because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs under an
embargo enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now he was here - shirt open,
with that fixed grin, a man of the troops if not the people - lifting a toddler
into his arms for he cameras.
When I returned to London, I read "After Lunch," by Harold Pinter,
from a collection of his called War.
And after noon the well-dressed creatures come to sniff among the dead
And have their lunch
And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck the swollen avocados from the dust
And stir the minestrone with stray bones
And after lunch
They loll and lounge about
Decanting claret in convenient skulls
John Pilger is a renowned journalist, documentary filmmaker, war
correspondent and ZNet Commentator.
Depleted Uranium must be banned
A forum on banning Depleted Uranium [DU] Munitions, held in Brisbane recently
attracted a crowd of 500 people.
A panel of four guest speakers included visiting expert on DU and its effects on
military and civilian personnel, Professor Douglass Rokke, who was also a Major
in the US Army and chief Nuclear Health Physicist for the Department of Defense.
Professor Rokke became an outspoken critic of his country's use of DU ammunition
after he was ordered to take charge of the clean up of US military hardware hit
with DU friendly fire during the 1991Gulf conflict.
When he and his men first saw the devastation all they could say was, "Oh
my God" at the shock of discovering almost everything they were assigned to
clean up was highly radioactive, and consequentially, they all began getting
sick with heavy metal and radiation poisoning.
"Nobody had prepared for the health and environmental consequences of using
DU,"
said Dr Rokke. "24 hours after beginning the job we started getting rashes
and breathing problems."
But the real problems did not necessarily come from radiation but from heavy
metal poisoning as fine particles of uranium settled in the lungs, liver and
kidneys causing cancers and other serious medical conditions to occur.
"Within nine months the cancers started to appear and within two years
members of my team started dieing," he said, with thousands of other
American soldiers and Iraqi citizens, all dieing from DU related causes.
Doug Rokke said that many army medics and doctors would not treat casualties of
DU because they did not know how to deal with the contamination.
Before 1991 and during Gulf War1 American soldiers were not told of the dangers
of using this weapon even though the Department of Defense [DoD] had been
warned, through their own experiments and research, that the medical and
environmental damage DU would cause was extreme.
"We were told to lie in our reports," said Professor Rokke, speaking
of what was known as the Los Alamos Memorandum. "It was a directive which
came from the Pentagon, stating they know there are serious health and
environmental issues with using DU, which is why you must lie in your reports to
sustain the use of uranium munitions," he said.
Contamination from a DU missile strike can spread up to forty meters in any
direction, to be breathed in by soldiers and civilians alike.
Dr. Rokke's expert advice to the DoD clearly stated that anyone who goes within
fifty meters of a contaminated vehicle must have full protective gear, which was
clearly not the case for many soldiers, who climbed over the vehicles to get
photos taken or to take bits of them home as souvenirs.
"It took 100 experts three months to process 24 tanks and fighting vehicles
for shipment back to the states. What was left, both tanks and the dead -
America's finest sons and daughters - were too heavily contaminated to be
cleaned up and a deep hole was dug and the whole lot were pushed in and
buried," said an angry Doug Rokke.
The 24 vehicles were to the Defense Consolidation, a purpose built facility in
Barnwell South Carolina, the only one of its kind in the world, where it took
another three years to clean up the Abrahams tanks and Bradley fighting
vehicles.
"No nation has the right to take radioactive waste and spread it across
another nation to cause damage to the health and environment of that
region," said Professor Rokke during his impassioned speech.
In closing he asked the audience to join him in the struggle to get uranium
munitions banned from the planet saying any individual who uses DU in combat be
held liable for war crimes.
Source; Social Justice Monitor
British Ministers approved Iraqi nerve gas plant
David Leigh and John Hooper
A chemical plant that the US says was a key component in Iraq's chemical
warfare arsenal was secretly built by Britain in 1985 behind the backs of the
US.
Documents show that ministers knew that the 14 million pounds [sterling] plant,
Falluja 2 was likely to be used for mustard and nerve gas production. Senior
officials recorded in writing that there was a "strong possibility"
that the chlorine plant was intended by the Iraqis to make mustard gas. At the
time Saddam Hussein was known to be gassing Iranian troops in the Iran-Iraq war.
But ministers in the then government secretly gave insurance guarantees to the
British company involved, Udhe Ltd.
Paul Channon, then Margaret Thatcher's trade minister, concealed the existence
of the chlorine plant contract from the US administration, which was pressing
for controls on such exports. He also instructed the export credit guarantee
department [ECGD] to keep details of the deal secret from the public.
The papers show that Mr Channon rejected a plea from a Foreign Office minister,
Richard Luce, that the deal would ruin Britain's image in the world if the news
got out: "I consider it essential everything possible be done to oppose the
proposed sale and to deny the company concerned ECGD cover." The Ministry
of Defence also weighed in, warning that it could be used to make chemical
weapons. But Mr Channon, in line with Mrs Thatcher's policy of propping up the
dictator, said: "A ban would do our other trade prospects in Iraq no
good."
British taxpayers had to write a 300,000-pound compensation cheque to a
German-owned company after final checks on the plant, completed in May 1990,
were interrupted by the outbreak of the Gulf War.
The Falluja 2 chlorine plant, 80km outside Baghdad, had been pinpointed by the
US as an example of a factory rebuilt by Saddam Hussein to regain his chemical
warfare capability. It featured in the dossier of reasons why the world should
go to war against Iraq, presented to the UN Security Council in February by the
US Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
Satellite pictures of Falluja 2 identifying it as a chemicals weapons site were
earlier published by the CIA, and a report by Britain's joint intelligence
committee, also focused on Falluja 2 as a rebuilt plant "formerly
associated with the chemical warfare program."
Source: Guardian Weekly
Return to Palestine
by Jane Howarth
I recently visited Palestine to see my friends and to collect material for a
program I do on Community Radio 3CR in Melbourne. My last visit had been in
2000. I was appalled by what I saw, and I will detail some of my experiences.
I entered the Gaza Strip from Egypt via the Raffa crossing point. After a series
of interrogations by Israeli security and questions such as "do you have
many Arab friends?" I finally got into a taxi and headed for the first
checkpoint.
I was lucky I had to wait only an hour and a half. It was days end and others in
the queue had waited since dawn for the Israelis to open the checkpoint.
Checkpoints are another bane of life. The Israelis decide when, and if, the
checkpoints will open, once open the time is limited. If you don't get through
that's it try again.
The Gaza Strip is 40kms long, 7kms wide and is home to 1.4 million people. It
has been cut into three sections by mounds of and concrete. Checkpoints and the
Israeli army prevent movement from the northern end to he southern end or to
Gaza city in the centre. People who used to go from Gaza city to Khan Younis in
the south to work are no longer able to do so. Those who want to go from one
area to another to visit family or friends, or attend to business or farms,
spend hours waiting at checkpoints. People often spend more than a day, in the
open in all weather and without toilet facilities. Families with babies, small
children, old people are all in the same predicament. I sat for five hours at a
checkpoint, on a summer's day, without shade. All around me decent caring people
who just wanted to get on with their lives were being subjected to inhumane
barbaric treatment. I felt deeply angry. Bit I also felt guilty. I could pack up
and leave, they could not.
The West Bank and Gaza Strip are separated by a concrete wall, razor wire and
checkpoints. A swarm of trigger-happy soldiers tanks and armoured personnel
carriers [APCs] check every non-settler wanting to pass. Since the end of May
the West Bank has been declared a "closed military zone," so it
impossible to enter from Gaza.
I spent my days talking to people and viewing the effects of Israel's war on a
civilian population. It is important to note that Israel is waging conventional
war, with all the trappings, armoured tanks and APCs, F16s and helicopter gun
ships, against civilians. The Palestinians are not militarised. Within the
Palestinian population area handful of young men with a few handguns. These
young men who see their families slaughtered, their homes and property
destroyed, are fighting for their rights against the overwhelming force of a
harsh, brutal military occupation. They have spent their whole lives knowing no
other way of life. Now they want an end to the occupation.
Jabalya
Jabalya refugee camp after an Israeli invasion highlights the disparity. In
Jabalya 97,000 people packed into half a kilometre sq. area. In the narrow
alleyways with barely a metre's wide between the rows of houses, tanks were used
to push down houses to widen the way for their entry.
In Jabalya, a beautiful young woman asked me if she could practice her English
on me. I was delighted to oblige. I asked her to show me where the Israelis
entered when they attacked the camp in March. The woman, a student at the
Islamic University which was closed because checkpoints and restrictions on
travel prevented staff getting to work, described what happened.
The Israelis entered after just midnight. This is their usual practice. They
wait until people are in bed, then pish in with the tanks and heavy armour
firing into homes. People whose homes were knocked down had no time to gather
their possessions before home and contents were destroyed. F16s and helicopter
gunship fired rockets from above. All this in a densely populated area.
In half an hour 19 Palestinians were dead and 50 injured. Soldiers entered homes
and arrested hundreds of men, knocked out walls between houses to allow them to
pass from house to house and ransacked and looted as they went. The young woman
told me that people, fearful for their children, were beaten and threatened if
they did not leave their homes when told to.
The army remained in the camp for several days taking over homes to use as
control centres and sniper positions with two or three floors one above the
other. The Israeli army, when it invades the towns and camps, ejects the
occupants from all or part of various dwellings. The home is then the army's
property for as long as they wish, while the rightful owners must find somewhere
to live. The army uses the facilities the home has to offer and if, or when they
leave, the home is usually returned in a filthy condition and looted.
Raffa camp, home to 85,000 people is invaded every week and every week homes are
demolished and people killed. But it is never reported. Last February, for the
first time, there was an outcry when 50 homes were destroyed in one night,
leaving 600 people homeless in a bitter cold wet winter. The army entered
without warning, ordered people out of their homes, refused to allow them to
take any of their belongings and then bulldozed homes and contents to rubble.
The fat of these people caused little concern.
When I was there I found many people, plus those made homeless since, living in
tents supplied by the UN. The tents were pitched on the bare sandy earth. People
not taken in by friends or relatives are living in unimaginable conditions.
The walls of the remaining houses in Raffa are damaged or pock marked with
bullet holes. A child told me they could not go into rooms at rear of their home
because Israeli snipers in a nearby house fired through the windows. The child
said, even at night it was unsafe. Yet to date not a single suicide bomber has
come from the Gaza Strip.
People have lived in the camps since being forced from their homes in 1948 and
1967. They have put time, money and effort into their homes. Many are
substantial, built of stone to house several families, others are flimsy, made
of besser blocks, but all are peoples homes but not their 'safe house'.
Attacks on the camps have become more frequent, extreme and systematic. The
total destruction is horrendous. It is part of a deliberate campaign by the
Israelis to destroy homes and property, to wreck the economy and to kill the
people. This, they believe, will force the people to leave their homeland or,
failing that, to accept 'peace' on Israel's terms.
Factories destroyed
The night I arrived in Gaza, two small factories had been destroyed that
afternoon. The army said they were "bomb making factories." This is
the usual refrain, never questioned by the media, which parrots the words of the
Israelis. I visited the scene of one of the so-called "bomb making"
factories. It was a small factory making wooden cabinets similar to the bedside
cabinet in my hotel room.
Workshops, businesses and factories, both large and small are being
systematically destroyed. Each time it a "bomb making" factory, or it
is making "weapons."
In Jabalya I went to a factory 'making weapons' destroyed by the Israelis. It
had made nuts and bolts and metal parts. The factories I saw employed about a
dozen men between them. They are now out of work. The equipment and the premises
were destroyed and there is no money to replace them.
Since my return to Jabalya, six small businesses were destroyed in one day. This
was a really heinous act. All were small enterprises entered into by out of work
men. Men who used to work in Israel but have been unable to work for the past
two years. One was a shop selling food another making children's clothes.
Families have pooled their meagre resources to help one another, then see it
bombed away in a few minutes.
I visited a Tent Protest Camp in Jabalya town. Hundreds of men were protesting
outside one of the ministries. They had been there for several weeks. I
circulated among them, listening to their stories. All were out of work. The men
used to work in Israel. They were owed money by Israel, had no prospect of work
in Gaza and no money to feed their families. Each story was the same, no money
and no food for the children. People were existing on one meal a day or eating
each alternate day.
Malnutrition among children is high and increasing as is anaemia. The economy
had begun to suffer prior to the Intifada. The long drawn out "peace"
process affected the economy. Since the uprising Israel has withheld millions of
dollars in taxes due to the Palestinian Authority.
My friends in Palestine have told me about the destruction of farmland and
crops. But the reality is far worse. Much of the land will take decades to
rehabilitate. It is a wasteland of deep furrows and mounds of earth.
Thousands of olive trees, many hundreds of years old, have been uprooted, as
have citrus trees and vines. Vegetables and green houses have been flattened and
destroyed.
Bulldozers put through the chicken coops killed chickens and destroyed the
roosts [chicken is the main source of protein for the Palestinians]. Even
beehives were destroyed.
In search of exact figures on trees destroyed I went to the Palestinian Centre
for Human Rights in Gaza, an affiliate of the International Commission of
Jurists [e-mail pchr@pchrgaza.org Web-pg www.pchrgaza.org]. They publish
detailed weekly reports of the number of homes destroyed and owners names, the
number of farms, crops trees and livestock, with details, the number and names
of those killed and wounded plus accounts of invasions and assassinations. The
reports are meticulous and comprehensive yet I have never seen reference to, or
use, these in journalists' reports.
The deliberate, systematic, continued stealing of Palestinian land for
settlement, for 'road widening' and for 'military' purposes is also shocking. I
was struck by the settlement expansion since my visit in 2000. The bulk of the
"settlers" come from the USA. Russian numbers have increased since
1989. I object to the term settler. It conjures up a vision of people settling
uninhabitated land. Whereas, every inch these people occupy has been stolen, by
force, in defiance of UN Resolutions and in contravention of international laws
and conventions.
Every police station in the Gaza strip has been bombed to rubble, even the small
point duty posts have been destroyed. The main compound, a large building in
Gaza city, is a heap of rubble. I walked around it thinking of all the money
provided by the Europeans for infrastructure. This heap of rubble was all that
was left of a sizeable part of it. I also thought of George W. berating Arafat
for 'not doing enough' to stop 'terrorism' when Sharon has systematically
destroyed every bit of infrastructure of the Palestinian Security forces. The
forces themselves have been targeted by snipers and helicopter gunships, hundreds have been killed and thousands imprisoned.
All the media attention is given to suicide bombings and to lingering scenes of
grieving Israelis, little is given to the killing of Palestinians. Yet the ratio
of deaths is almost 4 to1. Assassinations are reported as if this acceptable
practice. Yet those killed in this reprehensible manner are not. They are not
'terrorists', 'bomb makers' with 'blood on their hands,' they are the effective
community leaders, badly needed and sorely missed, the potential future leaders
to replace Arafat's old guard. The Israelis could easily arrest them, if they
chose to do so. They don't, they want them dead. This is part of Israel's'
policy.
One night, a friend walking me to my hotel, said, "I'll be forty soon, I
don't have anything to remember except learning to live with a military
occupation." I think about this and all I saw and heard. I think of the
hundreds of children deliberately killed, shot in the head or upper part of the
body, of children with one eye shot out, it takes a marksman to do this, and I
think to myself, "If I lived there, I, too, could be a suicide
bomber."
This is an edited version of Jane Howarth's report.
Jane Howarth is the convenor of Save the children of Iraq Fund.
Israel's Secret Weapon
Since its March 15 premier at the Human Rights Watch International Film
Festival in London, the BBC program Israel's Secret Weapon has been the focus of
a great deal of attention and controversy. Producer/director Giselle Portenier
and reporter Olenka Frenkiel put together a hard-hitting documentary about
Israel's nuclear and chemical weapons, with a sympathetic portrayal imprisoned
nuclear whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu. The show, which raises timely questions
about double standards in the world's treatment of Israel and Iraq regarding
weapons of mass destruction, hit the airwaves just days before the US and UK
attack on Iraq.
"The title of this report means that the answer to four questions it poses
will not surprise, but the opening is stark enough to shock: "Which country
in the Middle East has undeclared nuclear weapons?"…"Which country
has undeclared biological and chemical capabilities….no outside inspections…and
jailed its nuclear whistleblower for 18 years?"
"The whistleblower is of course, Vanunu, former physicist at Dimona, the
top-secret nuclear plant in Israel's Negev. Sworn to secrecy, Vanunu received a
warning after a minor breach, but decided to leave taking with him the only
known interior photograph of Israel's plutonium factory. The pictures were
offered to the London Sunday Times, his claims were substantiated and Vanunu was
smuggled into the newspaper offices to tell his story.
"When Vanunu's revelations were published in 1986, Mossad triggered a
classic honey trap with an American woman met in apparent innocence. She
suggested it would be safer if he flew with her to Rome. He did, but Mossad was
waiting; he was drugged, chained and taken by boat to Israel.
"Sentenced to 18 years for treason and espionage, Vanunu was held in
solitary confinement for 11 years and remains in jail.
"The program pinpoints where Israel assembles and stores the weapons of
mass destruction that make it the sixth strongest nuclear nation, tells of
nuclear submarines based at Haifa and how a Dutch investigation into a cargo
plane crash in Amsterdam revealed that Israel had been importing DNMP, a key
component in the manufacture of biological weapons.
"Was it tear gas, as claimed, or nerve gas - as suspected - that Israeli
troops used on Palestinians in Gaza in February 2001?"
Part of this article is from a review by Robin Oliver for the SMH.
If you missed this documentary on ABC TV please ring and ask if it can be
repeated.
Nuclear weapons lab
On August 6th 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb used in
war on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Days later, the city of Nagasaki was
bombed. Horrified by the death and desecration of life, the world has since
maintained a moral firewall against the use of nuclear weapons.
However, the Bush Administration is trying to overturn the ban on mini-nukes -
to move them from their historic role as a deterrent to weapons to be used in
battlefield scenarios.
The nation's primary weapons labs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [LLNL]
and Los Alamos National Laboratory [New Mexico], are managed by the University
of California and together they have designed every nuclear weapon in the US
arsenal.
"Taxpayers have a right to know that the Pentagon is quietly pursuing a
brave new world of more 'usable' nuclear bombs and warheads at the same time it
forcibly instructs other nations to abstain from developing weapons of mass
destruction," explained Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch of
New Mexico [NWNM [, a group that monitors DOE weapons laboratories.
Presently at LLNL in Livermore, California, research is underway to design and
develop the low-yield nuclear weapons Bush wants, including the Robust Nuclear
Earth Penetrator.
In addition to the increased nuclear weapons research at LLNL, there is
increased research of biowarfare agents. This is part of Livermore's new,
central role as a research facility for the Department of Homeland Security. The
Livermore lab. is slated to operate a biowarfare agent facility, which will
authorise aerosolising and genetically modifying deadly agents including live
strains of anthrax and plague.
Not only does the proposed biowarfare facility pose an obvious health,
environmental and security risk, but it also has been harshly criticised by a
broad range of scientists and policy analysts for its potentially devastating
impact on the global control of bioweapons, and on the treaty banning them.
The Livermore Lab has been a site for non-violent resistance for decades. When
the United Nations readmitted weapons inspectors to Iraq in November, many
activists gathered at Livermore nuclear weapons lab requesting a 'civilians'
weapons inspection and demanding global disarmament. As the Bush Administration
contemplates new potential targets to "disarm" it is time to demand
global disarmament - starting at home, starting at Livermore.
Source: Grandmothers for Peace International
Lines drawn in the sand
James Buchan
Gertrude Bell is as responsible as anybody for the rickety national state
first known as Mesopotamia, and now Iraq. Bell ensured that an Arab state was
founded from the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, but one,
which was too weak to be independent of Britain. "I had a well-spent
morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,"
she wrote to her father on December 4 1921.
Bell and her superior, British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, laid down
policies of state in Iraq that were taken up by Saddam's Ba'ath socialist party.
Those policies were to retain, if necessary by violence, the Kurdish mountains
as a buffer against Turkey and Russia; to promote Sunni Muslins and other
minorities over the Shia majority; to repress the Shia clergy in Najaf, Kerbela
and Kazimain, or expel them to Iran; to buy off the big landowners and tribal
elders; to stage disreputable plebiscites; and to deploy air power as a form of
political control. "Iraq can only be ruled by force," a senior Ba'ath
official told me in 1999. "Mesopotamia is not a civilised state," Bell
wrote to her father on December18 1920.
Gertrude Bell was born on July 14, 1868. In 1886 Bell went to Oxford, where she
was the first woman to win a first-class degree in history. She taught herself
Persian and travelled to Iran in 1892, where her uncle was the British
Ambassador.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, and the entry of the Ottoman Empire on the
side of Germany that November, Bell was swept up with T E Lawrence and other
archaeologist-spies into an intelligence operation in Cairo known as the Arab
Bureau. In Iraq an expeditionary force from India had surrendered to the Turks
at Kut al-Amara on the lower Tigris in 1916. Bell travelled to Basra where a new
army was assembling. When Baghdad fell to the reinforcements in 1917 she moved
to the capital and was eventually appointed Cox's, oriental secretary,
responsible for relations with the Arab population.
British policy in the Middle East was in utter confusion. While the government
of India wanted a new imperial possession at the head of the Persian Gulf,
London had made extravagant promises of freedom to persuade the Arabs to rise up
against the Turks. The compromise, which was bitterly resented in Iraq, was the
so-called League of Nations Mandate, granted to Britain in 1920.
Senior Indian officials argued that the religious and tribal divisions in Iraq
would forever undermine an Iraqi state. Bell believed passionately in Arab
independence and persuaded London that Iraq had enough able-bodied men to
provide an administrative facade. But she had two blind spots. She overestimated
the popularity of Cox and herself and she underestimated the force of religion
in Iraqi affairs and the Shia clergy "sitting in an atmosphere which reeks
of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it
- nor can they."
On June 27, 1920, Bell was writing: "In this flux, there is no doubt they
are turning to us." In fact the Shia tribes of the entire middle Euphrates
rose in revolt the next month. Hundreds of British soldiers and as many as 8,000
Iraqis were killed before it could be suppressed. The following spring Winston
Churchill called a conference in Cairo, where Bell - the only woman among the
delegates - had her way. The Hashemite Prince Faisal, a protégé of T E
Lawrence who had been ousted by the French in Syria, was acclaimed King of Iraq
in a referendum that would not have shamed the Ba'ath. The "yes" vote
was 96%. In place of a mandate an Anglo-Iraq treaty was railroaded through the
Iraqi parliament.
Thanks to crude oil, found at Kirkuk in 1927, the little monarchy survived
Turkish intrigue, Saudi aggression and repeated uprisings. But the collapse of
British power and prestige at Suez in 1956 marked the end of the road. Faisal 11
and the royal family were murdered in a republican coup on July14,1958.
The Iraq of Gertrude Bell had lasted 37 years, and the Ba'ath party took power
in 1968.
This is an abridged article by Jack Buchan
Source; Guardian Weekly.
Regional anti - war Council news
Peace flag
The Wollongong NOWAR people made a presentation of a Peace Flag to the Lord
Mayor of Wollongong, Alex Darling. It is hoped that the flag will be displayed
in the Council foyer and will indicate the Council's support for peace
throughout the world.
Doreen Borrow of the Australian Peace Committee and members of the NOWAR
presented the flag. In her presentation speech Doreen commended the role of
Council for their stand against war and said it was fitting that Australia's
first and only Peace City should play a leading role in promoting peace and
friendship throughout the region and also internationally.
Townsville
Townsville - Thuringowa Peace Group presented a petition, signed by over four
hundred citizens of the 'twin cities', to Townsville City Council, calling for a
statement of opposition to Australian involvement in the war against Iraq,
similar to statements made by the shire councils of Bowen and Herberton in
Northern Queensland. However Townsville Lord Mayor, Tony Mooney, rejected the
request on the grounds that such action was not appropriate for a local
authority and was without precedent. One of our representatives, Frank Costanzo,
was asked to research this issue and he found ample evidence of just this type
of precedent by this very council, prior to World War 11. At this time the
Council had even threatened to cut power to the local port [the Council owned
its own power house] in solidarity with the Waterside Workers; to prevent a
shipment of war materials to aggressor nations; namely Japan. In light of this
and other precedents researched by Frank, the Council has again been requested
to act on the wishes of its citizens. However a letter recently from the Mayor,
while concurring with our concerns; restated the Councils view of its lack of
jurisdiction and again pointed us in the direction of local Commonwealth
Parliament representatives.
Peter Malpas
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