The United States militarist plutocracy wrangled in recent weeks over
assigning more than 500
billion of worth-less-and-less foreign creditors' US dollars to
its imperialist war machine. The corporate media tried to foment vain
interest in what terms the plutocrats may end up negotiating among
themselves for that budget's approval. To confirm the essential
obscenity of the
US government and the rubber-stamp-with-vaudeville US legislature,
their injustice system has just set free a terrorist - Luis Posada
Carriles - despite a formal request from Venezuela that Posada Carriles
be extradited for bombing an airliner, killing over 70 civilians.
Inherently inhuman, since it is deliberately operated to prioritize
corporate profit, the US political system is geared to generate
indiscriminate slaughter and death. Serious counting of people absent
by death stopped long ago. Most-favoured-genocides, like Darfur, get a
reckoning. US generated slaughter does not. Hence the Bush regime's
dismissal of the
authoritative
Lancet report on Iraq's lost hundreds of thousands. In Diyala this week
a US helicopter killed at least six school children in a strike on a
primary school. Might be more, might be fewer - the US authorities
could hardly care less. Remember Colin Powell's reply to a request for
a total figure
of Iraqi casualties during Desert Storm, "It's really not a
number I'm terribly interested in."
Powell's role in the destruction of Iraq is a bit-part in the wider
drama of corporate imperialism's drive to remake
colonialism under the guise of globalization. The main coercive
components
of that drive are gross trade inequities along with heavily conditioned
debt
and
"aid", accompanied by constant psychological warfare in the corporate
media. When the
standard components fail to generate sufficient power, covert
action or outright aggression are used. Imperialist terror constantly
shadows globalization, purposefully shaping and baiting enemies by way
of self-justifying propaganda. Corporate media
news manufacture and its atomization of information are among the most
pernicious and insidious of the strategies involved.
The systemic terror inflicted on countries like Iraq, Haiti,
Afghanistan, Palestine and
Somalia is a continuation of unfinished colonial business. The
terror system is active within countries too. From Mexico to Egypt to
the Philippines to the imperial centres themselves, authorities keen to
collaborate in the globalization
project replicate imperialist terror strategies on a local rather than
a global scale. Even the bitty, piecemeal clues thrown out by the
corporate
news machine make clear the depth and breadth of the challenge to
humanity presented by the United States and its European and Pacific
allies.
Depleted Uranium - horror by stealth
The deliberate degradation of Iraq's health system via years of UN
sanctions and subsequent maladministration under military occupation is
news in the sense that
it provides headlines like "Infant mortality in Iraq
soars as young pay the price for war" in the Independent of May 8th.
Perhaps a more complete contextual report
is the World Socialist Web Site article of May 9th "Iraqi
infant mortality soars by 150 percent—a damning revelation of US war
crimes". Both help complete part of the overall picture's foreground
but omit the horrific detail and controversy around depleted
uranium-provoked cancers and genetic deformations.
Naturally, the US and British governments deny and where possible
censor the steadily accumulating evidence of the horrific effects of
their criminally reckless use of depleted uranium munitions in
the two
Gulf Wars. It is certain these munitions have not only
irreversibly
damaged the health of many hundreds of US and collaborating troops and
mercenaries as well as many
thousands of Iraqi military and civilians. They have also condemned
future generations of the affected multitude to cancer and deformation.
Despite its neutral and heavily technical emphasis, the Wikipedia entry
on depleted uranium makes two very pertinent points.
Firstly, "DU is considered both a toxic and radioactive hazard that
requires long term storage as low level nuclear waste. DU is relatively
expensive to store but relatively inexpensive to produce or obtain.
Generally the only real costs are those associated with conversion of
uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to metal. DU is extremely dense, 67% denser
than lead, only slightly less than tungsten and gold, and just 16% less
dense than osmium or iridium, the densest naturally occurring
substances known. Its low cost makes it attractive for a variety of
industrial and military uses."
Thus, DU poison costs a lot of money to store safely. Cheaper than
tungsten and other
expensive metals for
producing effective armour piercing shells, DU weapons manufacture
solves two problems at once. It camouflages the dispersal of nuclear
waste and increases shareholder profits all round by removing high
storage costs and converting the poisonous trash into expensive
munitions. As so well-signalled by incidents
like the Bhopal Union Carbide chemical plant disaster and innumerable
other cases,
human health has next to no
place in the corporate profit equation. Costs of any health care for
people suffering the effects of DU radiation exposure can be postponed
through decades of obfuscation and denial and finally defrayed onto
national governments. Arms corporations ultimately externalize
potential health and legal
costs by passing them on to forever-deceived taxpayers.
A second point in the non-commital Wikipedia article, here in relation
to the link between DU, cancer and genetic defects is, "In general, the
prevailing scientific view on the matter is that such
data, and other scarce data available, do not conclusively prove a
poisoning effect of depleted uranium; but that the possibility exists
and cannot be ruled out either, and so a precautionary principle would
suggest to suspend the use of such weapons." But the war criminals who
launched their illegal aggression against Iraq in March 2003 explicitly
and deliberately trashed all international norms by appealing to their
factitious, bogus "war on terror". With them or against them, human
life counts for little or nothing. Witness the Walter Reed hospital
scandal and the generally despicable treatment of war veterans. If they
treat their own side so callously, what can Iraqis expect? Iraqis bear
witness to and suffer the terrifying answer day after day.
Figures from the Spanish group Research Collective on Radioactive
Weapons (1) suggest that now in Iraq as many as 20 babies in every
4000 are born eyeless. This source argues that the figure in a normal
population should be 1 in
every 50 million. The article notes, "In Iraq, they call doomed
pregnancies "bellies of
jelly". With reason, since from 1991 unformed lumps of meat have been
born with deformations never seen before." The article cites a report
from Al-Jazeera reckoning that since 1991 the incidence of cancer in
Iraq has increased
tenfold and birth defects fivefold, "due to the use of uranium weapons".
Cover-up
The response of the US and British authorities has been to repress
awkward testimony about the facts of their deployment and use
of DU armaments. The same article quoted above notes the case of Riyadh
Lafta, an internationally recognised Iraqi epidemiologist highly
critical of DU munitions and their use. Riyadh Lafta " tried
fruitlessly for six
months to get a visa to travel to Seattle to give a conference in
Washington. The British government then refused him a 4-hour transit
visa from the Middle East to Canada, where he was invited for another
conference."
Back in 1999, four years before the second Gulf War, Felicity Arbuthnot
(2) reported the case of Professor Asaf Durakovic "He is one of the
world's leading experts on radiation, and sees a familiar pattern. 'Any
doctor who becomes involved in this subject is pressurized, fired;
records and samples go missing...' " Durakovic wrote of his concerns
about DU munitions to President
Clinton in 1997. "Shortly
afterwards his senior position at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at
the Veterans' Administration Authority in Wilmington, Delaware, was
terminated." Arbuthnot goes on to note how at the same time in Britain,
Iraq war
veterans Ray Bristow and Colin Purcell Lee, returning from research in
Iraq, "arrived home 'to find we had been called traitors by a senior
Cabinet Minister' and that their homes had been raided by Ministry of
Defence Police."
Craig Etchison of Global Research argues "I suspect the
military-industrial complex will stonewall admitting the effects of DU
for as long as possible to avoid accepting responsibility, not to
mention liability, for their reckless actions. When John Hanchette, a
founding editor of USA Today tried to publish stories about DU, he
received a phone call from the Pentagon asking him to desist. He was
later replaced at USA Today. The World Health Organization's chief
expert on radiation and health had his report on DU suppressed. "(3)
DU and terror - Colin Powell again
The criminal use of poisons and chemicals against civilian populations
by imperial powers is long-standing. For
the United States the use of Agent Orange in South East Asia is perhaps
the
most well-known precedent. From 1962 to 1971 the US government applied
over 20 million gallons of chemical poisons in Vietnam. (4) With its
use of DU and other poisonous weapons in Iraq, the United States is
following colonialist precedents like those of Britain's chemical
warfare
in Iraq in 1919 and Spain's chemical warfare campaign in Morocco in the
1920s or Italy's use of poison gas during its attack on Ethiopia in
1935.
The connection between the use of chemical weapons and DU munitions and
the deployment of US terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles and his kind
runs through US policies of the last few decades. These policies form a
seamless web interweaving hypocritical State Department diplomacy,
sadistic war crimes and terror to achieve policy goals. The biographies
of
individuals like Colin Powell embody the connections. As an
investigating army Major, Powell tried to cover up the My Lai massacre.
Later as assistant to President Reagan's Secretary for Defence Caspar
Weinberger, Powell supported the Iran-Contra transactions to fund the
illegal terrorist war against Nicaragua. A key member of the regional
team in Central America organizing that war was Luis Posada Carriles
based at the time in El Salvador.
Powell was an enthusiastic supporter of the criminal terror war against
Nicaragua, condemned as unlawful by the International Court of Justice
in 1986. No surprise then that while Secretary of State his assistant
was an even more sinister figure, Richard Armitage. The biography of
Armitage takes in enforcement of the Phoenix assassination and torture
programme in Vietnam, strong allegations of drugs-dealing in Burma and
Thailand, dirty war activities in Iran to
assassinate opponents of the Shah and a leading role in the Iran-Contra
terrorist transactions. By using drugs to finance their terror
activities US government functionaries are following another
time-honoured colonialist tradition since both Britain and France in
their time
exploited the opium trade to further regional policy aims.
US narcotics-US terror : inseparable twins
Relentlessly sinister individual political continuities abound between
the
Vietnam and Reagan eras and the campaigns against Iraq. Another
notorious figure is John Negroponte, who assisted Henry
Kissinger during the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam war. Like
Powell and Armitage, he too
facilitated Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua as well as
overseeing the dirty war in Honduras via local US government proxy
General Alvarez Martinez in the early 1980s. After helping facilitate
death squads in Iraq while US ambassador there, Negroponte is now
working alongside another hangover from the Reagan era,
Condoleezza Rice, former protégé of Reaganaut
corporate-grandee-diplomat George
Schulz.
Now Negroponte and US government drugs functionary John Walters are
accusing Venezuela of failing to cooperate adequately in the
bogus US "war on drugs"(6). The view of the Venezuelan government is
refreshingly frank: " The government discounted that Venezuela might
permit activities by the US authorities in the country to fight drugs
trafficking...Interior Minister Pedro Carreño declared that "the
United States with its Drugs Enforcement Agency monopolizes drugs
shipments like a cartel". Carreño, leaving a ceremony at the
National Pantheon told reporters that when Venezuela agreed to suspend
work with the DEA it was because "they were making large transfers of
drugs using the cover of handovers under surveillance " and did not
carry out "arrests of citizens, the dismantling of a single
cartel........We were able to determine that we were clearly in the
presence of a new cartel." (7)
This exchange on drugs between US government officials and the
Venezuelan authorities takes place at the same time that the US
government is deliberately refusing to move against Luis Posada
Carriles, a self-confessed terrorist, also connected to narcotics,
faced with a request for extradition from the Venezuelan authorities.
In neighbouring Colombia, the US government has consistently provided
billions of dollars to support the narco-terror regime of President
Alvaro Uribe, irrevocably tainted by current revelations of its links
to and dependence on drugs-dealing paramilitaries. In April this year,
reports emerged of US and British government complicity in the opium
trade in Afghanistan to the tune of over US$120 billion. (8)
ALBA - gainsaying false gods
In Britain, the US government's most faithful ally, the Foreign Office
has dropped the "war on terror" motif. (9) It no longer serves a useful
purpose. The global majority see clearly that terror - "do what we
want, or else" - is self-evidently
a fundamental policy of the United States and its European and Pacific
allies in their drive to secure the trade and economic outcomes they
need to sustain their neo-colonial power and privilege. The
overweening determination of the global elite to ensure that corporate
needs take
priority over the needs of the world's impoverished majority springs
from their worship of inhuman greed and from deep-seated
racism.
The governments that front for that global elite are responsible for
millions of needless deaths
through criminal military aggression both directly, as in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and indirectly, as
in Lebanon or Somalia where they have supported proxy military
enforcers.
At the same time they wage a relentlessly strident propaganda
war against countries like Cuba and Venezuela. Why? Because Venezuela
and Cuba are responsible for saving and enhancing millions of lives
through their promotion of health, education and broad cooperation
initiatives via the ALBA - Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas -
trade and cooperation treaty, now incorporating over 60 million people
in South and Central America and the Caribbean.
ALBA shows up the United States government and its European and Pacific
allies as
agents of sterility, deformation and destruction. Their
political and economic systems based on global exploitation of
humanity's impoverished majority offer little to the rest of the world
except extremes of injustice. The case of Posada
Carriles marks their unremitting espousal of terror. The continuing
genocide against the Palestinians is emblematic of their hypocrisy. The
destruction of Iraq, its people and society, embodies their sadism.
Through their fetish for poisonous technology of mass destruction, they
feed their
monstrous corporate capitalist god not just with live
innocents, but with thousands of victims from generations yet unborn.
By insisting on international legal norms in the case of Posada
Carriles and the related case of the five Cuban anti-terrorists
imprisoned by the US injustice system, Venezuela and Cuba have exposed
the United States government as a promoter of terrorism. By
prioritizing the
social dimension of their economic relations, the ALBA countries are
effectively demonstrating the inefficiency and inhumanity of global
corporate capitalism. Venezuela has abandoned the World Bank and the
IMF. Bolivia and Nicaragua have joined Venezuela in rejecting the
Centre for the International Settlement of Investment Disputes as an
impartial arbiter. Ecuador, Bolivia Brazil and Paraguay have now thrown
their weight behind Venezuela and Argentina's
proposal for Bancosur as a regional development alternative to the US
and European dominated financial system.
These moves are as important as the diverse campaigns of resistance in
Iraq,
Palestine, Haiti, Colombia and Mexico or Iran's insistence on it's
right to
develop
peaceful nuclear power. Determined support for these varieties of
resistance is probably humanity's best and only chance to counteract
the
twin strategic strands of globalization and military terror used by the
United
States government and its allies. The changing of the governmental
guard in London
and Paris simply shuffles faces among the same old murderous caste of
corporate capitalism's high priests. But the script has alternative
endings now, rewritten by the former sacrificial victims. "Weighed in
the balance and found wanting" - the writing on the wall for the US
government and its allies is getting clearer, much slower than their
victims need, but perhaps much faster than we think.
Notes
1. "Balance de la situación sanitaria en Iraq. Censura de las
cifras de muertos y del aumento de cánceres y malformaciones por
las armas radiactivas." Alfredo Embid, Colectivo de
Investigación sobre las Armas Radiactivas in Rebelion, May 6th
2007
2. "Poisoned legacy - Felicity Arbuthnot investigates the
worldwide spread of cancers and deformities since the Gulf War."
New Internationalist, Issue 316 - September 1999.
3. "Depleted Uranium: Pernicious Killer Keeps on Killing", Dr.
Craig Etchison, Global Research, February 20, 2007
4. "Vietnamese Agent Orange Victims Sue Dow and Monsanto in US
Court", Ngoc Nguyen and Aaron Glantz, Asia Times, May 16,
2006 (from ZNet)
5. "España empleó en los años veinte armas
químicas contra los hombres de Abdelkrim", Ignacio Cembrero,
from El País, published in WebIslam 18th February 2002
(http://www.webislam.com/numeros/2002/161/noticias/España_armasquimicas.htm)
6. "Negroponte condemns Venezuela on drugs" BOGOTA, May. 10 (UPI) -- "
Venezuela does not do enough to combat drug trafficking through the
country, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte says.
Negroponte -- in Colombia as part of a four-nation tour of the region
-- said Wednesday Colombia is concerned about the amount of cocaine
allegedly transported through Venezuela."
7. "El gobierno de Hugo Chávez acusó a la DEA de ser un
nuevo cartel." Associated Press, 8/5/2007
8. "Heroin is "Good for Your Health": Occupation Forces support Afghan
Narcotics Trade. Multibillion dollar earnings for organized crime and
Western financial Institutions", Prof. Michel Chossudovsky,
Global Research, April 29, 2007
9. " Benn criticises 'war on terror' ", BBC News, 16 April 2007