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-- Rajan Hoole
Below we publish the excerpts of the summary of an upcoming book by UTHR(J) activist Rajan Hoole. To read the entire summary click here.
We too easily forgot the destructiveness of the new breed of conservatives who had been guiding the West from Washington and London. Their economics of greed, of which the energy giant Enron became a notable symbol, had exhausted immediate limits by bringing about domestic ruin and the debasement of labour. Their bloated symbols of power and wealth, a miracle of deregulation, could no longer be sustained without militarily asserting a controlling interest over foreign economies and resources. The early 1990s saw the tragic break up of Yugoslavia, which could have been prevented by decisive support for the democratic forces. (The Dismantling of Yugoslavia, Catherine Samary, Le Monde Diplomatique, Nov.1998.) Having partially completed the CIA-assigned task of managing Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) moved to foment an Islamic insurgency in Indian administered Kashmir. Having failed otherwise to gain an economic foothold in war-ravaged Iraq, the US under President George Bush Sr., as circumstantial factors suggest, prepared the ground for provoking an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and in turn to punish Iraq under UN sanction. That Gulf War I in 1991 was about longer-term goals than the 'liberation of Kuwait' is seen from the deliberate contrivance of death and disease among civilians through USAF and RAF bombing of Iraq's sewage and water treatment capacity, as declassified DIA documents reveal (Felicity Arbuthnot, Sunday Herald, 17 Sept.2000). This was the era of contrived wars and heroics of gigantic military force against selected poorly matched opponents. The ends however proved elusive. Gulf War I failed to open up Iraq. Irritated by stagnation, the conservative think-tank the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) predicted, in the run up to the 2000 presidential election, that it would take "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor" for, in effect, the public to sanction the military pursuit of unfinished business in the Middle East. (Nightline, 5 Mar.2003.) The new political mood of the Western elite was both arrogant and overconfident that they could shape the world to their convenience. They had little use for democracy and human rights that were once good slogans against the Soviet Union. What they sought was not an equitable order, but rather protégé's like Israel and the Pakistani ISI to police their interests. This is the context in which Norway emerged as a peace broker. After 45 years of enforced vagrancy, the Palestinian leadership signed the Norway-brokered Oslo Accords before President Clinton in September 1993. These did not commit Israel to the minimal rights of Palestinian refugees spelt out in UN resolutions, or even to at least stop building settlements. The fundamental issues were postponed. 86 days later, on 8th December 1993, the Clinton Administration used the Accords as a pretext to join Israel (2 against 127) in refusing to ratify UN resolution 194, which was in fact authored by the US. The UN resolution of 1948 committed the UN to facilitate the 'resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation'. The approach of the Accords omitted such 'contentious' provisions. The Palestinians had been sold out. When a people driven against the wall is forced to seek respite, the others become even more obliged to safeguard their rights, especially the US as the 'honest broker'. The present US government (New York Times, 23 Aug.2004) is going further in approving certain Israeli settlements. We are confronted here with a culture that regards human rights and democracy dispensable in Third World situations, as opposed to stability in a repressive order conforming to Western patronage. Those who care about these fundamental values in the Third World are today confronted with a solid wall of Western arrogance that is hard to penetrate. The gap between activists in the West who supported Third World struggles for democracy and dignity, and their governments, has become alarmingly blurred. A clear case of how grotesque things can get is the Western backed peace process in Sri Lanka. There was a legitimate struggle for Tamil rights two decades ago and any rationale for violence had run its course by the signing of the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord. In the LTTE's subsequent struggle for fascist control, there was never any question of its giving up child conscription, terrorising the people or murder of political opponents. Norway came in as peace broker, backed by the EU, the US and Japan, and forged an accord, which took no account of the LTTE's character. To the LTTE the accord only meant licence and access to pursue its criminal repression with greater thoroughness. Western governments, NGOs and UN agencies, in general, toed a uniform line of appeasing the LTTE and took its delegations on grand world tours. Their protests against the LTTE's abuses, when significant at all, came after the worst and all too predictable damage had been accomplished, and moreover with their connivance. All that is left of the Sri Lankan peace process is increased child abduction for breeding cheap suicide material, and the dreaded beat of the LTTE's unarmed democratic opponents cut down mafia style. For them, neither the West nor the Sri Lankan government will take any responsibility. The weak are today friendless. Something the spirit of the times mockingly calls 'peace making' has supplanted human rights. The West led by the US won the Cold War against the Soviet Union on their terms, placing them tantalisingly within hegemonic reach over Eurasia - which Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski described as a geopolitical chessboard commanding 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Millions of Third World lives were sacrificed for this elusive gain. It was a Pyrrhic victory, which was adverse not just to the Soviet Union, but grievously debased the two oldest of modern democracies. The US and British leaders, and their media, lied to their people to keep up the myth of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction for 12 years, which they then used as a pretext for inhuman collective punishment and a callous war. (Paul-Marie de la Groce, Le Monde Diplomatique, Dec.1997, gives a French view.) In the US, party ideologues longing for Pearl Harbours were so desperate that they stole the 2000 presidential election - in sharp contrast to a number of Third World countries that enforce clean electoral processes. So bankrupt have democratic traditions become in the US and Britain that the opposition and civil society had largely been co-opted. The British Labour Party has almost completely lost its identity. Consequently, there is little pressure on the leaders who lied and killed to be accountable. Indeed, so oblivious is the US presidential campaign to real issues that the thousands of people killed in two Third World countries by US ammunition and explosives do not receive any mention. There were opportunities to resolve the geopolitical conflict between the West and the Soviet Bloc with far less damage to everyone concerned. Soon after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko wrote to Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "It is my hope that the process of reducing international tension beginning with the signing of the Moscow Treaty, which was highly valued by the late President, will be continued and will do honour to the memory of the deceased." Gromyko's was a plea for sanity that was spurned by Kennedy's successor and greed had its way. Two events separated by 38 years show how deep the disease lies. September 11th and the Kennedy Assassination Among the most traumatising events of recent American history are the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22nd November 1963, and the crashing of passenger aircraft into Twin Towers, New York, on 11th September 2001. Both are ramifications of America's imperial legacy. The consequences of both were ultimately repressive at home and abroad and marked a rightward shift in American politics. The second is an instance of terrorism as a subculture, which was spawned by America's implicit endorsement of Israeli policy after the Kennedy assassination, and denying the Palestinians any hope of living with dignity in what was their home. Both tragedies though officially investigated by leading Americans, left the people cynically withdrawn, despairing of ever being told the truth. At the centre of both stands the CIA, an inscrutable imperial institution, whose influence steadily increased after the Kennedy assassination, and from 1980 became a key component of the parallel state. We state at the outset that in probing the Kennedy assassination or September 11th, it would be misleading to finger individuals as having planned one thing or the other. Plausible explanations can be found from the CIA's structure and its ideological character, as a body vested with advancing America's imperial interests. Ideology determines institutional notions of desirable outcomes, which drive the actions of individual division heads. These persons in turn communicate with others or share information strictly on a 'need to know' basis. In turn it becomes convenient for others, especially the political sponsors of individuals within the CIA, not to ask awkward questions; which, if answered, may impose a moral burden on them. For example an FBI summary on statements of Colonel Sheffield Edwards, CIA's Director of Security, sent to Attorney General Robert Kennedy on 22nd May 1961 contains the following: 'Colonel Edwards said that since this is "dirty business", he could not afford to have knowledge of the actions of Maheu and Giancana in pursuit of any mission for CIA'. The business in question was the assassination of Fidel Castro. Those of a rightwing political persuasion can simply rest content, without troubling their conscience, that the organisation would pursue their goals. When the public cries for answers, the CIA, like parallel organisations of other nation states, has standard reasons for obfuscation - need to protect national interest, security of personnel and informants etc. For a President to contemplate taking the CIA apart to satisfy public demands for an inquiry, is like burning the flag. One marvels at how easily Kennedy's move for rapprochement with the Soviet Union was reversed, followed by a new spate of CIA-driven bloodletting in South-East Asia. Many crucial questions about September 11th and Osama bin Laden are unlikely to be answered for a long time. But we stand to understand them better in the light of much painstaking inquiry that resulted from the declassification of documents related to the Kennedy assassination and investigation. A striking parallel between the Kennedy saga and September 11th is the fate of two players who received disproportionate publicity and media opprobrium - Lee Harvey Oswald in the first and Sheikh Saeed in the second. Both were quickly silenced. Saeed, the ISI and CIA Saeed's name came into short-lived prominence six weeks after September 11th when a money transfer by him to the chief hijacker Mohammed Atta became public, besides the intelligence that Saeed acted on the advice of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence chief Mahmoud Ahmad. (Times of India, 9 Oct.2001; Amir Mir, editor of Weekly Independent, Lahore, in rediff.com, 18 Jul.2002.) Ahmad, reputedly a CIA confidante, was quietly retired, while the US authorities did not go beyond very low-key formal measures to secure Saeed's extradition. In January 2002 Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal was abducted in Karachi, where the Police discovered upon tracing telephone calls and e-mails that Saeed had lured Pearl to his kidnappers. Saeed surrendered to the Punjab Police through an ISI patron. Pearl's throat was ritually slit and a video was sent out. Although Pearl's murder was widely attributed to Islamic extremist groups, his reporting did not hurt such groups, but rather the government of President Musharraf, whose claimed crackdown on Islamic groups was exposed as a sham. Indeed, there was little reason to expect rival Islamic groups closely monitored by the ISI would jointly plan the abduction of Pearl and move him about between them. An uneasy President Musharraf, who accused Pearl of having played 'intelligence games', made the mistake of trying to dismiss Saeed as an Indian agent and blame India of Pearl's murder (Washington Post, 9 Feb.2002). The British educated Saeed who opted for fame as an Islamic radical was cut to the quick. He talked freely to his police interrogators so as to place himself as a true Islamic radical as opposed to Musharraf and his generals who were playing to America's tune. The Punjab Police, who had their own problems with the Army rulers, passed the information onto the media (e.g. The News 15 Feb.2002). Musharraf ordered the interrogations stopped. After a sham trial Saeed was condemned to death for the murder of Pearl in July 2002. The US and British governments showed their vested interest by praising the Government of Pakistan for 'its leadership in the war against terror'. Predictably, Saeed's appeal hearing continues to be delayed, while further arrests have rendered his conviction unsustainable (Massoud Ansari, Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2004). Saeed, however, sits on death row. No one can talk to him, nor would he inconvenience Britain or America by being extradited. Putting together what is known about Saeed, the ISI used his enthusiasm, status and valued communication skills to infiltrate him into radical Islamic groups; and his youthful vanity kept them informed. Saeed perhaps did not understand the mixed motivations of the ISI men, whose power ultimately flowed from the US government and the CIA. There is no reason to suppose that ISI Chief General Ahmad was unfaithful to the CIA or that his asking Saeed to send money to an Al Qaida operative in the West was for any purpose other than infiltration. The ISI role is an arrangement going back to Operation Cyclone, where from 1979 the US with Britain sponsored Islamic extremism to undermine the Soviet Union's influence in Afghanistan and foment dissension in its oil-rich southern republics. It was here that Osama Bin Laden began his career. Not only did the ISI treat Bin Laden's medical ailments, but in the run up to September 11th arranged press briefings where Al Qaida spokesmen incriminated themselves in a manner that seemed pointless. Where imperial aims mattered, the US rulers did not shrink from creating facts on the ground, however disingenuously. One was the alleged link between Iraq and the Al Qaida. We will now briefly sketch the background to the Kennedy assassination. Bay of Pigs and Moves for Rapprochement with the Soviet Union The 1961 fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion by US-supported Cuban exiles to topple the new communist government in Cuba led to events with grave long-term repercussions. It was the norm in those times for the CIA to overthrow governments in Latin America, which threatened the interests of US corporations through measures such as land reform (e.g. Guatemala, 1954). Castro had challenged that order and deprived the Mafia of Havana as the capital of crime. The stakes for his overthrow were high. Many of those who had invested heavily in the overthrow of Castro blamed Kennedy and his refusal to send in the US forces for the Bay of Pigs debacle. US defence officials who were livid with Castro reactivated moves originated by the Eisenhower administration to assassinate him. The Kennedys (President John and Attorney General Robert) were dangerously ambivalent on assassination at least until late 1962. Robert had launched a determined campaign to eliminate the Mafia, while the CIA and FBI were shielding the top mafia bosses as ostensible assets for eliminating Castro. Whence this explosive combination of mafia bosses and CIA men, along with their backers, who all hated the Kennedys, were brought together under Operation Mongoose at CIA Miami Station. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 resulted from Cuba seeking Soviet backing against a US invasion. Both Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stepped down from the brink, to the dismay of the hawks on both sides, and raised hopes of wide-ranging issues of conflict, from Cuba to Vietnam, being resolved peaceably. Rapprochement, and a demonstration of its benefits, became key to the political survival of both leaders. It was at this juncture that President Kennedy was assassinated and a 24-year-old ex-marine Lee Harvey Oswald was detained. Soon, the CIA-supported Cuban Student Directorate identified Oswald as a pro-Castro activist and accusations pointing to the Soviet Union and Cuba were widely publicised. . The Impotence of Power The system had become Augean stables, so costly to challenge, that most Americans decided to pretend that nothing had changed and carry on. In reality the system and those who wielded power were trapped in this legacy and by costly alliances that exercised a stranglehold on American rulers. An event early in Clinton's presidency reveals how much real authority he possessed. In 1993 Clinton named Admiral Bobby Ray Inman Rtd. as his defence secretary. Inman's long experience in intelligence and the USS Liberty affair had made him deeply sceptical of Israel as a faithful ally of the US. Scenting danger, the Israeli establishment, America's Israel lobby and the media they controlled went into the attack ridiculing and discrediting Inman. Inman stood down. It looked as though Israel had secured a veto on cabinet appointments in the US. While bowing to Israel to further dispossess Palestinians, Clinton made up with televised macho gestures in continuing Bush's policy of killing Iraqi children by deprivation to bring Iraq to its knees. UN sanctions on Iraq based on largely non-existent weapons of mass destruction were in reality a US demand for complete surrender. Iraq was given no way out. When in 1997 under pressure from France and Russia Clinton tried to be a little reasonable in giving Iraq some room to manoeuvre, the pro-Israel media and the Republican Right subjected Clinton to a withering attack, calling him in effect an Arab stooge. A year later, in December 1998, after arm-twisting the UN, Clinton ordered the utterly cruel and pointless bombing of Iraq that went on for four years, until his successor upgraded it into a full blown invasion. Thanks to the greed of the oil lobby and America's liaison with Israel, the Middle East was further poisoned during the Clinton years. After eight years of Clinton's lame presidency, the skulking ghosts of the Reagan-Bush era, which no one dared to exorcise, came to haunt America with a vengeance. The October Surprise this time was the large numbers of Democrat Black voters, made felons by discriminatory drug laws, being arbitrarily taken off voters' lists. Even so the Florida vote was in the balance and the Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount. It soon became clear that the recount would reverse the result in favour of the Democratic candidate Al Gore. The Republican campaign led by former Secretary Baker appealed to the US Supreme Court. The latter, being packed with Republicans over the years, stopped the recount. Bush Jr. was installed in White House by of all ironies, a Supreme Court coup. The next time the Democrats go to the Florida Supreme Court they would have harder luck. On 10th July 2002, Florida Governor Jeb Bush appointed Raoul Cantero to its bench. Cantero is a grand son of former Cuban dictator Batista, who on Miami Radio called Cubana airline bomber Orlando Bosch 'a great Cuban patriot'. Bosch had incidentally received a presidential pardon from Bush Sr.. The political career of Jeb Bush too is part of the old corrupting legacy of CIA Miami Station, and all of this in the family ironically intertwined with the war on terrorism. Iraq to September 11th Deregulation, Leveraged Buyouts and the S&L failures while enriching a small group of Americans resulted in huge job losses and a decline in production and real wealth creation in the US. The US's position as an economic power, the strength of the dollar and capacity for further enrichment of its elite came to depend even more on US control of the world's financial institutions, and its acquiring a controlling interest in natural resources in other parts of the world. Having their base in Texas, Bush Sr. and Secretary Baker had a particular focus on Oil. The Reagan-Bush presidency cultivated President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and aided him in his war against Iran, which by 1989 left Iraq hugely indebted. By this time the collapse of communist rule in the Soviet Union was also imminent, and US dominance over the oil wealth of Central Asia, the Caspian Basin and the Middle East became a real possibility. Afghanistan became important as a route for oil and gas pipelines. Bush and Baker hoped that Iraq's financial difficulties, over which it received no help from other US-allied Gulf oil producers, would force it to accept an American interest in its oil wealth. That however did not materialise. In due course, Kuwait, a servile US ally provoked Iraqi by drilling for oil in a contested oil field in their common border. Saddam Hussein, who had suppressed the Iraqi population with Western complicity for many years, received some signals from the US, which appeared a green light to invade Kuwait and to extend his oppressive rule. Saddam invaded Kuwait on 2nd August 1990. The US quickly moved to use the invasion as the pretext for the UN-sanctioned, US-led attack on Iraq, closing the doors to a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal. In the one-sided war of January 1991, Iraq was deliberately bombed back to the 'pre-industrial age'. A pointer to the viciousness of the operation was the systematic Anglo-American bombing aimed at the degradation of Iraq's water and sewage-treatment capacity. (Thomas J. Nagy, The Secret Behind Sanctions: How the US Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply, The Progressive Magazine, Sept.2001.) This illegal action, underpinned by sanctions, was calculated to bring death and disease to Iraq's civilian population, a large proportion of whom had become refugees. The war was not about the 'liberation of Kuwait'. However, instead of surrendering Iraq to the US, Saddam ordered the destruction of most of his weapons of mass destruction so as not to give the US pretext for further interference. The US instead made the sanctions more punitive, insisting that these weapons were hidden and saw to it that UN inspection teams did not report Iraq free of such weapons. Meanwhile, through the 1990s James Baker and US oil companies set about establishing a US interest in the oil fields of former Soviet Central Asian and Caspian regions. These oil interests close to the Republican Party became increasingly impatient with Clinton's reluctance to place US forces on the ground to clinch their aims. There was a clear and ugly note of desperation in the lengths to which these oil interests went to ensure that their man, Bush Jr., took over the US presidency in 2000. Recent events reveal the US as a vulnerable superpower, fatally destructive, and unable to change course and work for a more equitable order in Palestine and the Middle East. The strength of the US was that it was a resource-rich country with robust democratic institutions. However criminal practices countenanced overseas in pursuit of oppressive ends, and the alliances they involved, had far reaching domestic repercussions. One was the growth of a parallel state in the 1970s, whose greed and recklessness grievously debased American democracy. This political culture will tend to screen out all but weak leaders, who, if not corrupt themselves, would lack the grit it takes to reverse the decline. An exceptional man was Congressman Henry Gonzalez, whose unchallenged integrity enabled him to resist pressures and doggedly pursue the BNL scandal (Iraq-gate) that went to the top of American power. The establishment has its way of ridiculing such persons, place obstacles in their search for information and sidelining them as eccentrics. It would take a much deeper crisis, where there can be no escape into complacency, to bring forward persons of such calibre in sufficient numbers. Apologists for US interventions cite democracy as one of the benefits. The reality is that the interventions are governed by elite interests, the oil and arms lobbies, the Israel lobby and former intelligence men in politics, who make up the parallel state. Take for example Egypt, a poor country that is the second largest recipient of US aid. During 2003, it received $1.3 billion in military aid and only $615 million for social programmes (Council for Foreign Relations). The main thrust of the interests that make up the parallel state in the US is to create parallel states after their own image, as they did in Chile before and after the 1973 Pinochet coup. In Pakistan they established the ISI. Nowhere did these interventions achieve viable results. Cuba, Vietnam and Chile were failures. Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq spurred militant Islamic opposition to the US. Yet, these helped the parallel state in the US to strengthen its extra-constitutional power at the expense of the American people by playing up security fears, although economic objectives proved elusive. The networks it has built up require movement and can ill-afford a crisis of stagnation. The parallel state must therefore push for military interventions. Thus the need for intervention in Iraq to finish in 2003 what it failed to achieve in 1991, and the desperation of the Republican interests in the Project for the New American Century to install their man in White House by hook or by crook. Ultimately, the politics of the era, which led to the loss of dignity of labour at home and economic subjugation abroad, made might is right the norm for global relations. The battle for human rights and international law is in the retreat. It is a world in which one is more likely to earn respect and get one's way by showing total contempt for human rights. The weak must stand and resist, friendless, alone.
Chapter 1: Tragedy & Triumphalism: The New Information Order Chapter 2: Laying the Myth of Weapons of Mass Destruction Chapter 3: A Disastrous War Against Truth: The Burning of Baghdad Chapter 4: Economic Choices, Iraq Policy and the Woes of a Superpower Chapter 5: Cronyism and the Political-Economy of Untrammelled Profits Chapter 6: Corporate Greed, Domestic Ruin and the Rationale for Conquest Chapter 7: The Kennedy Assassination and Cover-Up: A Hidden Watershed Chapter 8 Making of the Parallel State and the Legacy of October Surprise Chapter 9: Iran-Contra and the Crimes that Bind Chapter 10: Israel and the Art of Parasitic Imperialism Chapter 11: The BCCI: Honour Among Thieves and the Conquest of Oil Chapter 12: The BNL Scandal and the Texan Agenda Chapter 13: Baker's Trail Chapter 14: Cocaine and Democracy Chapter 15: September 11th: Conflicting Strands & Disinformation that Speaks Chapter 16: Leads from the Saeed Case and Pearl Murder Revelations
The Broken Palmyra, 1990, an inside account of the Tamil Liberation Struggle in the context of the Indian intervention, co-authored with colleagues at the University of Jaffna K. Sritharan, Daya Somasundaram and the late Dr. (Mrs.) Rajani Thiranagama. The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence and Murder, UTHR (Jaffna),
2001, the book traces the links between landmark events in post-independence
Sri Lanka. |