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The Globalization of Terror — Peddlers of the Old, New Democracy
Part 2
by keith harmon snow
Members of the U.S. Green Party have been detained and denied routine airline flights within the U.S. Websites have been dismantled. The Cheneys and Liebermans and their American Council of Trustees and Alumni have blacklisted academics. An executive order illegally promulgated in the U.S. on November 13 created military courts to try "terrorists" with "classified" evidence.
Some of us know what this means.
Recall that writer and Nobel Prize nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa was extrajudicially executed (he was hung five times, so inept were the executioners) after petroleum warlords in Nigeria—in the pay of Shell Oil—framed him and tried him by special military tribunal. His crime? Truth. Liberty. Freedom. And the pursuit of happiness.
Military decrees and tribunals prevail in all the Western-sponsored dictatorships in Africa—U.S. client states all—enabling the constant supply of raw materials to feed the earth-crunching machines of waste and war. Now we can all sleep better under the watchful gaze of the Office of Homeland Security (U.S.) and the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (India). In Nigeria they have the State Law and Order Restoration Decree, and in Burma the State Law and Order Restoration Council. (Oh, pardon me, that’s Myanmar, not Burma—criminal enterprises, like multinational corporations, learned long ago that changing their name is yet another Orwellian method of deception.) Nigeria barters massacres for oil; Burma barters massacres for diamonds and gold for Bill Clinton’s old friends. But repression is the new, old currency. And the people’s choice is to be hung or jailed.
Torture, says the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, is merely another "tool" in our "toolbox" for the globalization of terror. We will use it at home, and abroad. Thousands of innocent people were detained after September 11. Hundreds remain in detention. Have these people already been tortured?
Someone please tell the freedom fighters and the agents of torture that the Bush gang blocked FBI investigations into the bin Laden network prior to September 11. Please tell them that George Bush, Sr. works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlysle Group, a secretive international consulting firm that buys and sells defense contractors. Tell them that the Bush-bin Laden gang has made a heap of money on the World Trade Center attacks and the Afghan annihilation.
(Yes, yes. Of course. Osama bin Laden is an outcast. The black sheep of the family. Has nothing to do with those bin Ladens. And neither does Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni have anything to do with the criminal enterprises of his half-brother, General Salim Saleh. And neither does University of Massachusetts President William "Billy" Bulger have any relationship to Boston’s black sheep and F.B.I. "Most-Wanted" James "Whitey" Bulger. No matter …)
Torture is not a new tool in the war chest of the United States. For those asleep to the clandestine war at home, the U.S. National Security apparatus has always persecuted its detractors—American citizens defined as "terrorists" for asserting their supposed rights to freedom of speech, clean water and air, equal rights and freedoms. Recall, after all, that Washington, DC was founded on the invasion of the Chesapeake and the genocide of the Algonquian nations. "Democracy" was born on the hope and promise of tobacco, and the inhuman brutalities of plantation slavery on the African people.
The National Security Agency and the FBI neutralized the civil rights movement in the United States: thousands of Native- and African-Americans were persecuted, hunted or destroyed under secret operations targeting non-violent citizen groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. Their crimes? Feeding, clothing and housing the people. Legislative and judicial discrimination against women and African-Americans persists. Meanwhile, right-wing, fascist, paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the School of the Americas—both terrorist organizations by any reasonable standard—persist and prosper. And then there is the National Rifle Association.
Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Patrice Lumumba, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Salvadore Allende, Thomas Sankara, Kwameh Nkrumah—people who stood up for something, who put their beliefs into action. Like emerging solar technology (which was intentionally destroyed under Jimmy Carter and Ronny Reagan) or a normal, uncorrupted file in some virus-infected operating system, these people were deleted. That is a short list.
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