Who is the terrorist?

-- Srilata Swaminathan
Countries that USA has bombed since the end of World War II:
China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-99
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999

Our hearts will always go out to the innocents who are victims of global and other power struggles, be they the five thousand who died in the World Trade Centre explosions on September 11 in New York or the 50,000 who were killed with American connivance on exactly the same date, but 28 years earlier, when the CIA helped General Pinochet overthrow and assassinate a democratically elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, and his supporters. Or the 5 million who were killed in Indonesia, with American collusion, because they were considered communists. Or the half a million innocent babies and small children who have died in Iraq because of US imposed sanctions on that hapless nation. Or the 17,500 civilians killed in US/Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Or the more than five thousand who died in Bhopal because of the greed, indifference and callousness shown by an American multinational company. The list is endless.

In fact, the United States has been bombing one or another country ever since the Second World War and Middle Eastern countries continuously since 1983. Millions of innocent civilians have lost their lives in the wars that the US launched on Korea (4 million dead, 100 Koreans for every American killed) and Vietnam. US warships and planes, without even any official declaration of war by the US on these countries, have constantly attacked Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Iran, the Sudan and Afghanistan. Iraq has had to face 12 years of ruthless military operations conducted by the United States. In all these brutal attacks of aggression the US and other western

countries neither knew nor cared how many innocent civilians were killed. In fact, just one day before the attack on the World Trade Centres both US and Britain had bombed sites in Iraq in order to enforce their unilaterally declared no-fly zones. Civilians died in that attack but no international news media covered it, no one counted body bags, no anxious relatives were interviewed, no-one mourned, no candles were lit……….

There is an all out war going on in Columbia right now where the US is pouring in billions of dollars to bomb village after village. Ask the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Grenada, Guatemala, Panama about the genocide in their countries financed and aided by the US. Ask the people of Korea and Vietnam what the US was doing fighting a war on their soil and the millions bombed, napalmed, agent oranged? What have the innocent men, women and children of Palestine done to deserve over 40 years of killing, bombing and homelessness? Had Korea or Vietnam or Palestine attacked America to deserve the years of war that the US fought on their lands?

Osama bin Laden is the latest hate-man but who trained and set him up? Who trained and paid for the setting up of the Taliban? Who gave Saddam his chemical weapons? Who was behind the dreaded Savak of Iran that tortured and killed thousands under the dictator Shah of Iran? Who propped up killer dictators like Pappa Doc, Marcos, Suharto, Pinochet and many others? Who created and supported these Frankensteins? The answer to each question is the same – the United States of America! But as long as bin Laden and the Taliban were terrorising the Russians or Indians or their own women it was OK. As long as Saddam was using the chemicals on US’s enemy, Iran, it was OK. As long as the dictators were torturing and exterminating every critic of capitalism it was OK!

And this is the policy that the US calls ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and wants the rest of the world to accept. Listen to the words of that spokesperson of US-style freedom and democracy, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who had this to say to the Serbian people during the US bombing campaign in 1999: “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, road and war-related factory has to be hit. … … We will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 (In 1389, Ottoman Turks defeated the Serbs at the battle of Kosovo- Ed.).”

It is also time to ask who is the beneficiary of all the wars, the suppression and terror that has been unleashed on innocent people in various parts of the globe? Is it a coincidence that the US is the main arms trader in the world today and that the sale of arms licences issued by the US State Department for weapons, spare parts and arms manufacturing assistance has risen to 55 billion U.S. dollars in the year 2000 making that a one hundred percent increase since 1998? According to the latest reports obtained by the Arms Trade Oversight Project the US exports arms to over 140 countries. The report also shows that in the year 2000 the U.S. government approved licenses worth tens of millions of dollars and sold 53 million dollars worth of pistols, 8 million dollars worth of

non-military rifles and 18 million dollars worth of ammunition to every country in South America. Combined with the Pentagon’s 12.1 billion dollars in foreign military sales, this boosted the U.S. arms sales to 67 billion dollars last year! With what total arrogance has the US given itself the right to kill, maim and bully the rest of the world? How have they been so blinded by their own conceit that, after all these acts of terrorism, they can dare to label themselves ‘the good’ and others ‘the evil’? How come each American life is so prized and so precious while an African, Asian or Latin American one is held so cheap and so totally expendable? What superiority allows the US and its minions to inflict policies that destroy the ecology of whole countries, destroy our industry and agriculture, pollute our earth, seas and skies and render millions of our innocent women, men and children homeless, unemployed or refugees? Why has not the western media spent the same amount of time covering loss of innocent lives, death and destruction wrought by US terrorism that its has given to the destruction of the two WTC towers, to its survivors and to the anxious relatives?

It is not surprising that this arrogance, this racial superiority has finally lost the US its place in the UN Human Rights Committee and forced it to run away from the criticisms levelled against it at Durban Conference on Racism. Some years ago the former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger confessed, with unexpected insight and surprising humility during the Balkan War: “We’ve presented to the rest of the world a vision of the bully on the block who pushes a button, people out there die, we don’t pay anything except the cost of a missile ... that’s going to haunt us in terms of trying to deal with the rest of the world in the years ahead.” Yet, it comes as no surprise, that this same eager beaver US official now says that the US, after Tuesday’s blasts, should retaliate by dropping bombs immediately on any country that might have been involved destruction of the World Trade Centre! In retaliation for Pearl Harbour how many thousands of innocent people in Nagasaki (40,000 innocent civilians killed) and Hiroshima (80,000) did the

US vaporise? Ronald Reagan bombed Libya as an act of vengeance, Clinton bombed civilians in Sudan as an act of retaliation. Who will they bomb now? What horrific vengeance will they extract now? Will they wait for definite, irrefutable proof or will anyone of their enemies be a good enough scapegoat because the world’s greatest terrorist state has finally been given a taste of its own medicine? How many more countless innocent people will be sacrificed in order to assuage the American lust for blood, in order to appease the US super ego