Bush and Blair, 'terrorists'
From Harold Pinter Sir: Freedom, democracy and liberation. These terms, as enunciated by Bush and Blair, essentially mean death, destruction and chaos.
Tony Blair describes the insurgents as terrorists. There is clearly a body of foreign nationals which has entered Iraq since the invasion and which is committing terrorist atrocities. But the heart of the insurgency is widespread Iraqi resistance to a brutal and savage military occupation. Cutting off somebody's head is a barbaric act. But so is the dropping of cluster bombs on totally innocent people and tearing them apart.
At least 20,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq and many thousands more mutilated for life. We don't see the corpses or the mutilated children on television.
The US invasion of Iraq was not only totally unjustified, illegal and illegitimate, it was a criminal act of immense proportions and one which will have profound consequences throughout the world.
But the invasion was also quite consistent with declared American foreign policy. American foreign policy now aims at 'Full Spectrum Dominance' — that is the US administration's term, not mine. Full spectrum dominance means control of air, sea, land and space. It also, of course, means control of the world's resources.
The United States has over 700 military installations in 132 countries, including this one. These bases are not there by accident or for 'humanitarian reasons'. They are there to keep a stranglehold on the world and they will do it by any means at their disposal.
The disclosures of torture in Iraq should come as no surprise to anybody. The Americans have been exporting torture for years. They have been teaching torture techniques to military representatives of various dictatorships at Fort Benning in Georgia for a very long time. Fort Ben ning was called the School of Americas but was actually known as the 'School of Torture'. They practise it themselves at home, in the vast gulag of prisons across the United States where over two million people are held in custody, the majority black. Restraint chairs, where convicts arc strapped and left naked in their own urine and excrement for days, the use of gas and stun guns, the random brutality, the systematic rape and abuse of young men and women — all of these things and more are an affront to human dignity and are common practice. So torture in Iraq, at Bagram in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay are simply par for the course. That is the nature of the beast.
But the US is not finding things so easy, and the less easy it finds things the more dangerous it becomes. Nevertheless, there is a growing resistance worldwide to this arrogant, brutal, complacent, destructive force, a force which holds the concept of international law and the United Nations in contempt, and whose only vocabulary is bombs and death.
The United States possesses more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world put together. It is at this moment developing new nuclear systems which it is prepared to use at the drop of a hat. It is totally indifferent to the deaths of others and will murder anyone who gets in its way. It is the most feared, most powerful and most detested nation the world has ever known.
The invasion of Iraq was an act of state terrorism, So it is Bush and Blair who are in fact the terrorists. I believe they must be arraigned at the International Criminal Court of Justice and tried as war criminals.
Harold Pinter
London W8
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