Coastal
Post Online
October
2001
Washington's Hydra
By Edward R. Miller
HYDRA: In Greek mythology, an enormous
poison-breathing serpent with nine heads which, when Hercules tried to club it
to death, sprouted two heads for each one knocked off.
The Twin Trade Towers and Pentagon assaults,
tragic as they were, in no way represent an act of war, though our
militarily-inclined administration is trying to sell this tragedy as such to
the American people with unwavering support from a compliant media. The
assaults were simply well-planned acts of revenge by a determined group against
a United States which has long felt free to visit even bloodier assaults on its
self-designated "Rogue States" around the world.
The immediate fall-out has been a series of
attacks on our own freedoms by a Congress which, with little or no intelligent
debate, has sharply reduced our ability to travel easily and is about to
infringe on the privacy of our personal communications both by phone, fax and
email. Add to this a mindless $40 billion assault on a non-existent budget
surplus, to support a knee-jerk military response by the largest military
machine in the world, against an unproved target. Add to this the corporate
welfare gift to the already well-insured Twin Towers owners. This $40 billion
will have to be subtracted from the so-called "Social Security
Surplus" our Republican President vowed not to touch. Thus seniors can bid
"adieu" to their hopes for much help in paying for their expensive
medications, and indigent Americans, including five million poor children, will
suffer.
Unless we plan a long
ground war in Afghanistan calling out the Reserves represents another useless
expense. Removing these working men and women for two years from their families
and jobs when we have 27,000 military on our payroll, sitting idle in Okinawa
and another 26,000 bothering the girls in South Korea is questionable.
Washington, in seeking immediate vengeance
rather than exploring and debating our government's obvious role in encouraging
this type of catastrophe, will only set the stage for a Hydra-like response.
Americans may remember that after an American serviceman was killed in a
nightclub in Berlin, President Reagan bombed Khadafy's headquarters in Libya.
Reagan's 60 jets killed 37 civilians including Khadafy's three-year-old
daughter. Libyans were eventually cleared of the disco explosion but the Pan Am
Flight 105 downing over Lockerbie followed.
President Bush's threatened jihad against Osama Ben Ladin who
our State Department and our multiple investigative services have so far been
unable to connect with the Twin Towers disaster, bespeaks the same
media-supported approach we employed against another discarded US-operative,
Manuel Noriega. President Clinton, after the bombing of two US embassies in
Africa on hearsay evidence, destroyed Africa's only source of affordable
medicines for sleeping sickness, malaria, Dengue Fever and filariasis as his
missiles blasted Sudan's only pharmaceutical plant in Khartum. No biological
weapons and no Ben Ladin involved.
Osama Ben Ladin, a millionaire and former Saudi Arabia citizen, was our
CIA employee and ardent cooperative during the Cold War years when the US,
along with the Saudis, armed the Afghanistan mujahadeen to drive the Soviets
out of their country. Like so many others whom our CIA has first used and then
discarded, Ben Ladin became disenchanted, disgusted and then intensely angry at
the US for its callous disregard for the lives and welfare of his fellow
mujahadeens, many of whom had suffered and died cooperating with the US to
protect their land.
In a
now-famous interview on May 28, 1998 in his mountain headquarters in
Afghanistan by ABC NEWS correspondent, John Miller, Osama Ben Ladin made these
comments: "Your situation with the Muslims in Palestine is shameful, if
there is any shame left in America... by testimony of relief workers in Iraq,
the American-led sanctions resulted in the death of over a million Iraqi
children. All of this was done in the name of American interests. We believe
that the biggest thieves in the world and the terrorists are the Americans. The
only way for us to fend off these assaults is to use similar means... It is a
punishment that fits the crime. Americans accuse our children in Palestine of
being terrorists... children who have no weapons and have not even reached
maturity. At the same time they defend a country with its airplanes and its
tanks, and the State of the Jews."
The United States used Osama Ben Ladin's mujahadeen fighters from
Afghanistan to help our fundamentalist Alija Izebegovic drive the Serbs out of
Bosnia-Herzegoveniz in the early 1990's and in Kosovo and Albania, today, Ben
Ladin's fundamentalists are fighting alongside our CIA-armed KLA in Macedonia.
A London Times article noted "some 100,000 Albanian passports had been
stolen during riots in that country," allowing the mujahadeen to
infiltrate widely throughout the Balkans. Ben Ladin, using his links throughout
the Muslim world has been building mosques and enlisting young converts in
Kosovo and Albania with monies funneled in from wealthy Saudis, Kuwaiti
businessmen, and even Iran.
Although Russia's Putin has given lip service to Washington's
"Anti-terrorist" campaign, there is concern in Moscow that the US'
threat to send ground troops into Afghanistan has less to do with Ben Ladin,
but is aimed at destabilizing Russia's three Muslim border states: Tajikstan,
Kyrgysuan, and Uzbekistan, which also share borders with Afghanistan. An oil
pipeline from the Caspian Basin and Uzbekistan, running through the US-friendly
Azerbaijan and Georgia into Turkey would threaten Russia's political and
economic interests in this oil and mineral rich area. According to Yahoo World
News 19 September, "Moscow this week sent a top security envoy and army
chief-of-staff on a diplomatic tour aimed at keeping the three Republics... in
line."
William Blum, writer
and former Foreign Service Officer for our State Department (he left the
Department in 1967 in opposition to our involvement Vietnam) in an introduction
to his recent book "Rogue State," Blum writes: "A decade after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving countries and peoples from
one danger or another.
"The
scorecard reads as follows: from 1945 to the end of the century, the United
States attempted to overthrow more than 40 governments, and to crush more than
30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In
the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and
condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair... As I write this
in Washington, DC, in April 1999, the United States is busy saving Yugoslavia.
Bombing a modern, sophisticated society back to a pre-industrial age. The Great
American Public, in its infinite wisdom, is convinced that its government is
motivated by "humanitarian" impulses." (Wm. Blum)
Americans seem oblivious to the actions
taken by their Government around the world until some event such as the
Lockerbie bombing or the Twin Towers catastrophe awakens us. We read in our
paper that our planes, along with those of Britain, again are bombing Iraq, but
it doesn't register that the Iraqis have for eleven long years been striving
against unbelievable odds to just survive as their children still drink the US
mandated sewage-contaminated water and die of diseases not seen in America
since the 1800's. Since the Gulf War, we have killed over 1.6 million of them.
We may note on page 15 that the US will continue its embargoes of Libya,
Pakistan, Sudan, Cuba, and Iran, but it doesn't seem to bother us that these
trade restrictions lower the standard of living of these peoples, add misery to
their lives, reduce their life expectancy, and damage the futures of their
children, while creating hostility towards America.
Each year, as if naming the heads of a
HYDRA, our government designates certain countries as "terrorist" or
rogue states. By such official christening, we guarantee that the people of
these countries will undergo whatever sufferings our State Department or
military deems appropriate, to punish a leader or government out of step with
Washington.
In Iraq, illegal
overflights with weekly bombing interfere with Saddam Hussein rebuilding his
shattered country. In Iran, though President Katami has made repeated gestures
of friendship toward Washington, our Zionist lobby pressures Congress to
sustain an embargo which keeps US business from competing with European firms
in billion dollar contracts. As for North Korea, our 30,000 some troops in the
South stand idle while Washington secretly interferes with every effort the two
Koreas make to settle their differences. The US has broken its promise to
replace North Korea's ancient atomic reactors with modern equipment since
promises to "rogue States" mean nothing in Washington.
Palestinians are murdered daily in their
bombed-out villages by an Israel which, equipped with compliant America's
weapons, is more violent and repressive under Sharon's administration than that
Nazi State from which the Jews once fled. The list goes on. Syria, Libya,
Indonesia, and the Balkan countries just to mention a few, continue to suffer
in one way or another from America's economic imperialism.
Just which man or group in a country we
mistreat will develop enough anger to mount a savage response against us we
will never know until it happens, but be assured that no expensive airport
"security measures," no increased CIA or FBI intrusion in our
personal communications, no satellite surveillance, no expansion of our police,
uncover forces, or our military will keep us safe. Such measures will only
infringe on our privates lives, add a tax burden which cheats our poor, while
making active participation in our democracy less attractive and more difficult
for all Americans.
Rather than
amassing our military to savage the population of some small impoverished
country, best we pause and examine our day to day performance as we engage the
other inhabitants on this small planet. We Americans need to take time from our
busy lives to participate more in government, contact our representatives more
often, actively protest each time we sense something amiss, and regain control
of an America that will enjoy a great future only if we change our selfish
ways.