Robert Fisk: The double standards, dubious morality
and duplicity of this fight against terror
Meanwhile, we are ploughing on to war in Iraq, which
has oil, but avoiding war in Korea, which does not
have oil
04 January 2003

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=366199

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 Château 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.


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