Chi sono i criminali di guerra? J. Pilger dal Mirror

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

War on terror Prison fury: the betrayal
by John Pilger   The Mirror (UK) 1 March 2002
Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG),  globalresearch.ca ,  4  March
2002

  Our politicians have run a concentration camp where emaciated men are held
and interrogated in breach of international law. Their actions are, in
effect, no different from fascists or terrorists

The conditions in which prisoners are being held brutally and illegally in
an American concentration camp on Cuba go to the heart of the "war on
terrorism", and mark the Blair government for its betrayal of the basic
rights of British citizens to the interests of a foreign power.

Shafiq Rasul, from Tipton, near Birmingham, is one of five Britons being
held without charge and in contravention of every international convention
at Camp X -Ray.

A man well over 6ft in height, with a thin frame and a normal weight of less
than 11st, he has lost 3st and is described by his brother as "seriously
emaciated". His family believes they glimpsed him on television, on February
21, shackled to a stretcher.

In this state, he was interrogated by agents of the British security
service, MI5 - which itself contravenes the Geneva Convention on
prisoners-of-war. At the same time, the Foreign Office claims it does not
know the circumstances of the five men's arrests. This brings to mind the
evidence of a British official, Mark Higson, at the arms-to-Iraq scandal
inquiry in 1994. Higson described a "culture of lying" pervading the Foreign
Office. All 194 prisoners on Cuba, it is now becoming clear, have committed
no crime. That is true of all but a handful of the 400 captured in
Afghanistan many of whom do not belong to al-Qaeda. In three months of
investigation by an army of FBI and other police officers, not a shred of
evidence has been produced linking them to the attacks of September 11 or
identifying them as "terrorists fighting America".

Yet, in the House of Commons, ministers have defamed them as "among the most
dangerous men in the world", echoing almost word for word the statements of
Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence.

This is the man who has admitted setting up an office in the Pentagon with
the sole function of lying to foreign governments and foreign media about
the "war on terrorism".

Acting for the family of Shafiq Rasul is Gareth Peirce, the solicitor and
fighter against miscarriages of justice who was portrayed in the film In The
Name Of The Father.

She says: "Given that (Shafiq) was so clearly emaciated, it means that we
are letting loose our agents on to those detainees for the purpose of
interrogating them in wholly unsafe circumstances and acting parasitically
on the backs of wholly unlawful detentions by the Americans."

Another British solicitor and human rights campaigner, Louise Christian,
represents 22-year-old Feroz Abassi. She is threatening the British
Government with legal action for collaborating with the US in Feroz's
"illegal interrogation". She has been told by the government solicitor to
delay her application for a judicial review by the High Court because Tony
Blair and his ministers have yet to decide what to do.

IN other words, they are asking the Americans how they should act on the
human rights of British citizens against whom there is clearly no case.
Recently, an Algerian pilot, Lotfi Raissi, was released from Belmarsh prison
after five months on remand and without any terrorism charge being laid
against him.

The bogus reasons for the "war on terrorism" are unravelling by the day, as
is Blair's complicity with its crimes of violence in Afghanistan and denial
of rights. The original purpose of Camp X-Ray was as a piece of grotesque
theatre for the ever-manipulated American public.

In releasing deliberately provocative photographs of cowed men in chains,
the Bush regime believed it could distract public opinion from the debacle
of its "war" in Afghanistan, in which its war machine failed to capture or
kill Osama bin Laden or a single senior member of al-Qaeda. Even the Taliban
leader Mullah Omar got away. All they got was the Taliban's ambassador to
Pakistan, a relatively minor functionary.

The price of this American disaster for the people of Afghanistan was,
according to a recent study at the University of New Hampshire, at least
5,000 civilian lives.

For all the posed photographs of American troops against desert landscapes,
hardly any of them have seen combat. Instead, impoverished people in dusty
villages are killed from the sky. Not even the cost of an American B52
bomber has reached the Afghan people in aid - in spite of "pledges" by
America and Europe and the "we-shall-never-desert-Afghanistan-again"
windbaggery of Blair.

In spite of a public relations drive to prove that the American-installed
regime in Kabul is radically different from that of the Taliban, the main
changes are a return to a bloody civil war and feudalism and the renewal of
the heroin trade. As for the human rights of the long-suffering population,
the new government will, like the Taliban, impose sharia Islamic law on its
people. Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif says that public executions and amputations
will continue, but there will be one variation: "For example, the Taliban
used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang
the body for a short time, say 15 minutes." Judge Zarif made clear that the
ultimate penalty would remain in force for adulterers, both male and female.
They would still be stoned to death, "but we will use only small stones".

This is the regime whose leaders have a bodyguard of British soldiers. And
still the Americans bomb - while famine sweeps the north and west of
Afghanistan in the wake of the American attacks. On February 12, a World
Vision Health and Nutrition Team reported from the North West that "numerous
groups of women and children are scavenging the valley fields for weeds,
roots and grass to eat".

The French aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres says that more and more
people are becoming malnourished. "The food system is not working," said a
nurse, Jenny Andersson. "Although the World Food Programme has been
providing food for more than 300,000 people, it simply isn't reaching the
people that need it."

NONE of these horrors has been addressed by the American or British
governments, the principal partners in the Washington-bribed "coalition"
claiming responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster, which Jack Straw calls
"our vindication".

It is not surprising that, even as ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic
stands trial in The Hague, the Americans are pressing for an end to war
crimes trials altogether. This means that the Bush administration is afraid
that the process might slip out of its control and become a permanent
fixture, encouraging the setting up of an International Criminal Court,
which Washington opposes.

It fears that such a body might act truly judicially and order the arrest of
"our" war criminals - that is, American and British politicians and
officials who have ordered, or aided and abetted the bombing to death of
thousands of innocent men, women and children and have run or collaborated
in the running of a concentration camp like that in which emaciated men who
are held and interrogated in breach of international law.

In his play Ashes To Ashes, Harold Pinter uses the images of Nazism and the
Holocaust, while interpreting them as a warning that the totalitarian
actions of western politicians seeking dominance over other human beings are
no different, in principle and effect, from those of fascists - and
terrorists.

The reality behind the Prime Minister's pretensions as a "war leader" become
clearer every day.


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Copyright  John Pilger ,The Daily Mirror 2002. Reprinted for Fair use only.


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The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PIL203A.html






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