Another media-generated radical Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. The Imam, who communicated with Fort Hood shooting suspect Maj. Nidal Hasan and called him a hero, was once arrested in Yemen on suspicion of involvement with al-Qaida.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
The Pentagon’s war on terror — does it make people in the U.S. safer?
PART 3
By Joyce Chediac
Published Feb 7, 2010 7:28 PM
Some 2,752 people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, in the airplane attacks in the U.S. Their deaths have been marked and mourned. Today just the words “World Trade Center,” “9/11” and “al-Qaida” bring to mind attacks on civilians and fear of other such attacks.
Washington has recently invoked these civilian deaths and a need to “protect American lives” to justify drone and cruise missile attacks in Yemen. A closer look, however, reveals that the U.S. government is using the 9/11 deaths as a pretext to kill civilians abroad. Pentagon attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen have killed tens of thousands of civilians.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, U.S. drones target homes and neighborhoods. Every time the Pentagon or its clients announce that drone-launched cruise missiles killed a “terrorist leader,” the cruise missiles likely killed the entire family, any visiting relatives and any close neighbors of the alleged leader.
Is the U.S. really hitting “al-Qaida operatives”?
Neither the Obama administration nor the Pentagon expresses sympathy for these civilian deaths. In the name of eliminating “al-Qaida operatives,” the Pentagon is attacking whole communities.
The U.S. media report that 30 Afghan civilians were killed the week of Jan. 11 alone. In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, cruise missiles have annihilated wedding parties. In 2009, the civilian toll in Afghanistan was the highest since the U.S. occupied that country in 2001.
Investigative journalist Allan Nairn, interviewed Jan. 6 on WBAI Radio’s “Democracy Now!” explained that the U.S. had implemented the “El Salvador Option” in Iraq. This meant copying the death squads Washington set up in Central America in the 1980s under Gen. Stanley McCrystal’s direction. This killing of local leaders is flippantly called “man hunting,” said Nairn.
The bombing of the CIA office in Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30 revealed that the CIA there was involved in assassinating local leaders. Gen. McCrystal now runs the Afghanistan war.
On Dec. 27, U.S. forces in Afghanistan’s Ghazi Khan Village dragged from their beds, handcuffed, then executed eight people they called “terrorists,” who turned out to be school children between the ages of 11 and 17. Their schoolmaster confirmed the youths’ identities and ages.
Mass outrage over the massacre sparked protests, including one of school children in Kabul demanding that the U.S. get out. The Afghans charged the international occupation forces with valuing Afghan lives less than the lives of the occupation troops.
In Yemen, a Dec. 17 attack which the pro-U.S. government claimed “killed 34 al-Qaida militants and foiled a terror plot,” really killed at least 49 civilians, including 23 children and 17 women, according to local officials. The regime also attacked a meeting planning a protest against the massacre. (Counterpunch, Jan. 15-17)
After the Dec. 30 bombing of the CIA office in Afghanistan, the Pentagon drastically increased drone attacks on villages in Pakistan, surely killing more families and hitting more wedding parties.
Killing civilians, it seems, was part of the Pentagon’s plan right from the beginning. According to Nairn, a feasibility study done by the Pentagon before the 2003 invasion of Iraq showed that of the 22 attacks planned the first day, approximately 30 civilians would be killed in each attack. The study referred to the civilian deaths as “bug splat.” This study was presented to Gen. Tommy Franks, who said to go ahead, do them all.
Some 660 civilian deaths were anticipated in the first day of the Iraq war alone. This “bug splat” was a quarter of the 9/11 casualties, on the war’s first day.
Occupation leads to suicide bombings
How would you feel if your family was murdered, their deaths treated as bug splat? What would you do? Wouldn’t you be angry?
Washington and the Pentagon know full well that their wars will fuel resistance. They have heard it from their own think tanks and academics. Robert Pates of the University of Chicago, a leading bourgeois expert on suicide bombings and a political conservative, called suicide bombings “a consequence of occupation.”
The Rand Corporation, a major ruling-class think tank, said in a 2008 report, “U.S. policymakers should end the use of the phrase ‘war on terrorism’ since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al-Qaida.”
If there is no “battlefield solution” to terrorism, who gains from the $1.05 trillion spent so far on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Who benefits from the $700 billion slated this year for the military, with $75 billion specifically earmarked for “the war on terrorism”?
These U.S. wars are not about protecting people in the U.S. They are about getting new sources of profits for the oil companies and Wall Street corporations. U.S. oil companies want Iraqi oil, the huge untapped reserves in Yemen, and to run a pipeline through strategic Afghanistan from the vast oil wealth in the former Soviet Asian republics.
Meanwhile, the mercenary company Blackwell, along with Bechtel, Halliburton and General Electric, to name a few, have reaped billions of dollars in profits from contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More than 5,000 U.S troops, sons and daughters of the working class, have died in Iraq and Afghanistan securing profits and strategic advantage for the corporations. Are they “bug splat” too?
Do Pentagon actions make workers safer at home?
Tens of millions of people in the U.S. are consumed with fear — fear of home foreclosures, of long-term unemployment and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children. People are afraid to get sick because they have no health insurance, or the insurance they pay for might not cover their illness or medications.
The banks finance the Pentagon’s military adventures abroad, and get their cut from corporate war profiteers. The banks gambled on real estate and left millions of working-class households in ruin. Now that the government has bailed them out, the same banks refuse to let workers renegotiate their mortgages, while they give themselves big fat bonuses.
The jobs, homes, savings, health care and retirement funds that have been lost were not taken away by Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, al-Qaida in Yemen, or by Iran, Syria, Hamas or Hezbollah. They are not our enemy.
The greed of these banks and corporations has caused many, many times more death and misery than any so-called threat from al-Qaida.
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