The Globalization of Terror:

Organized Crime and the Peddlers of the Old, New Democracy

 

 

by keith harmon snow

 

 

 

 

 

New Delhi, December 2001:

 

On November 26th, a surveillance helicopter dispatched from the destroyer U.S.S. John Gray -- docked for R & R in Chennai harbor -- invaded Indian airspace without clearance. Days later, the Indian government newly subordinated its land and people to the whims of the U.S. Navy and Air Force. The new military agreement, U.S. Admiral Dennis Blair has assured, will buy AmericaÕs newest ally in war a plethora of hope and promise. This is the fiction sold by the United States government. In reality, the pact signals a new darkness for India, and another portentous knell in the wake-up call for the world.

 

The House of India in is turmoil. India, for example, has a reputation for free market prostitution. Hundreds of thousands and possibly over a million females are employed in Indian brothels. Thousands of Nepalese, Tibetan, Bhutanese and Burmese children Ð girls as young as nine Ð have been lured or abducted into sexual slavery in India. The trade is booming. Nepalese and Indian officials sanction trafficking in females: Police are amongst the brothelsÕ leading patrons.

 

Respected for its Ònon-alignedÓ status throughout the Gulf War, the government of India has again underscored its propensity to barter people, water and land -- its very soul -- for money. There are the deals for nuclear weapons and nuclear wastes. The trysts with the multinational corporations Ð the Coca-Colas and NestlŽÕs and Shell Oil Companies. The dubious bargains with the peddlers of Òfree-tradeÓ -- the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization.

 

But money cannot be eaten.[1]

 

Through the social and environmental debts and debits of mega-dams, mega-loans  and militarization Ð progress as prescribed by western predatory capitalism -- India has further mortgaged its way into deplorable poverty, class and race discrimination, sexual slavery, natural resource exhaustion, agricultural decline and domestic war.

 

Now India prostitutes itself to the globalization of terror and the peddlers of the old, new Òdemocracy.Ó India sides with terrorists -- legitimizes state terrorism peddled by the West -- and prepares to manufacture its own: Yet another commodity for export. Dotting the streets of Delhi however, the black and red adverts for ABB Ð the secretive Swiss-based multinational Asea Brown Baveri Ð are obvious signs that India has for some time been sleeping with the enemy. Indeed, some of us know this.

 

We know that U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has a sordid history as an ABB director, that he is peddling our rights and freedoms for personal profits. We know that Condoleeza Rice is as tight with Chevron as Ronald is with McDonaldÕs. We know that Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham Ð U.S. secretaries of Commerce and Energy Ð are greasing the skids for oil and gas and nuclear fallout. We understand the implications of the Bechtels and the Carlysles and the GEs having revolving doors into the U.S. ÒgovernmentÓ and back. Are we seriously expected to believe that these people and companies are serving American interests?

 

For her pact with the new U.S. Coalition of Terror, India is promised combined Òhumanitarian airlifts,Ó combined Òspecial operations training,Ó Òsmall unit ground and sea exercises,Ó and Ð the most laughable reward of all Ð the promise of Òincreased security in the region.Ó

 

Well, some of us, at least, know what that means.

 

Afghanistan has been unconventionally nuked: It is just a matter of time before we learn, as happened in Iraq, that uranium-cased ammunitions, or other ÒsmartÓ radioactive toys, were used; that civilian water systems were intentionally contaminated. (Some expert analysts in the U.S. believe that the Pentagon has used small-scale nuclear warheads in Afghanistan.) PakistanÕs economy is reeling. PakistanÕs people are divided. Pakistan and India have squared off for war.

 

The U.S. is goading Israel to finish the job once and for all and the terrorists running the Israeli government are respectfully excited. American patriots are dispensing Anthrax at home, feeding the frenzy of American vengeance. Argentina is awash in the blood of discontent and corruption. More than half the world is at war and the tentacles of the newly prosecuted western terror stretch from the Philippines to Nepal, from Columbia to the Congo, from Maine to San Francisco.

 

The PentagonÕs program for India was recently revealed in its master plan for the region. Updates in missiles and planes; heavy artillery; commands, communications, and controls. A plethora of war toys imagined at the University of Massachusetts, M.I.T., Dartmouth and Stanford. Technogadgets and retrofits and miss-fits and spare parts and replacement parts and everything needed to separate innocent people from their body parts.

 

And with the indiscriminate precision of an American cluster bomb, the PentagonÕs new deal in India triggered an immediate attack on the Indian parliament: eleven people dead and new cause for India to prosecute war on its own soil: so much for Òincreased securityÓ in India.

 

To understand the menace of Òincreased security in the regionÓ, one needs only examine WashingtonÕs ÒPlan Columbia.Ó Millions of U.S. taxpayerÕs dollars used to defoliate and sterilize the land and the animals and the people of Columbia. U.S. sponsored paramilitary death squads. Assassinations, tortures and massacres -- and U.S. government agents, addicted to violence, dealing cocaine, shooting up the Gulf of Mexico.

 

One needs only examine the clandestine gunrunning and state-organized crime on the killing fields of Africa. War-as-cover for private profit is U.S. foreign policy: Meanwhile private mercenary firms -- staffed by former U.S. Generals [2] -- are dealing diamonds and gold out of Africa. What besides total, brutal war and egregious  loss of innocent life do Angola, Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan have in common? Diamonds from each accrue to the dons of the Bush-Clinton-Bush gangs.[3]

 

ÒIncreased security in the regionÓ brought us the war in the Balkans, Bosnia, Sarajevo, where most everyone killed died under a barrage of American propaganda which has left even the left in the United States fighting amongst themselves about what really happened and who the propagandists and terrorists really are.

 

What happened? Divide and conquer: Yugoslavia  was selectively dismembered under the pressure of outside powers, mainly the U.S. and Germany, which led to terrible wars of secession and the perpetuation of widespread death and despair. The widespread misery gave new purpose and license to Nato, the new international police force.

 

The new brokers of the U.S. Coalition of Terror are selling the ÒsecurityÓ of a red-light district, an internment camp or a minefield. The threat is real, but unseen, and it is deadly: one is never safe. From these criminal enterprises we can get some inkling of the hope and promise in store for the world and its discontents. The Emperor is as naked as a snake, and thrice as lethal. Some of us know this.

 

Elements in the United States government, and the corporate shadow warriors behind it, are the leading purveyors of global terror. Not that this is anything new. The hydra has certainly molted however, shed its old skin and boldly emerged from its hole. September 11 has ushered in a new era. Indeed, the Emperor need no longer so carefully mask his gruesome intent, for a majority of the people Ð the angry, horrified, wounded American people and their sympathetic brethren Ð now openly clamor for the annihilation of the enemy Ð an elusive, scurrilous foe defined by classified documents and the credos of globalization.

 

But not all Americans support our ÒgovernmentÓ and its corporate allies and their new Coalition of Terror. Language is a tool we are stuck with, and we know not what else but ÒgovernmentÓ to call it. But it was stolen from us. George Bush was never freely elected (as suppressed election evidence reveals). These people have hijacked the state, wrecked the environment, and even the village idiot can see -- if he is not already blind from the toxic discharge of multinational corporate sludge and lethal gases regulated by the EPA. These people now openly practice policies previously pursued only in the corridors of darkness, in their corporate boardrooms, in their elite menÕs clubs, in the tombs of their mindless thoughts.

 

Citizens have been detained. FBI and Secret Service agents are harassing and threatening US citizens for posters and art exhibits deemed Òun-AmericanÓ by random fellow citizens. Web sites have been dismantled. The Cheneys and Liebermans and their American Council of Trustees and Alumi have blacklisted academics. An Executive Order illegally promulgated in the U.S. on November 13th created military courts to try ÒterroristsÓ with ÒclassifiedÓ evidence. [4]

 

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 Ð 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 Ð U.S. client states all Ð 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, thatÕs Myanmar Ð 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 ClintonÕs old friends. But repression is the new, old currency. And the peopleÕs choice is hung or jailed.[5]

 

Torture, says the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), is merely another ÒtoolÓ in our ÒtoolboxÓ 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 F.B.I. 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 Afghannihilation.

 

(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 ÒBillyÓ Bulger have any relationship to BostonÕs black sheep and F.B.I. ÒMost-WantedÓ James ÒWhiteyÓ Bulger. Funny how Whitey Bulger canÕt be found by the F.B.I..? Why shouldnÕt we believe that Osama Bin LadenÕs escape is part of the plan? More grist for the terror millÉ No matterÉ)

 

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 ÒterroristsÓ for asserting their supposed rights to freedom of speech, basic civil rights, clean water and air, basic human needs. Recall, after all, that Washington D.C. was founded on the invasion of the Chesapeake and the genocide of the Algonquian nations. ÒDemocracyÓ was born on the hope and promise of tobacco and the inhuman brutalities of plantation slavery on people of color.

 

The National Security Agency and the F.B.I. 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. [6] Their crimes? Feeding, clothing and housing the people. Legislative and judicial discrimination against women, gays, immigrants and African-Americans persists. Meanwhile, right wing, fascist, paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the School of the Americas Ð both terrorist organizations by any reasonable standard Ð persist and prosper. And then there is the National Rifle Association.

 

Malcolm X, the KennedyÕs, Martin Luther King, Patrice Lumumba, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Salvadore Allende, Thomas Sankara, Kwameh Nkrumah Ð people who stood up for something, put their beliefs into action. Like emerging solar technology Ð intentionally destroyed under Jimmy Carter and Ronny ÒradioactiveÓ Reagan Ð or a normal, uncorrupted file in some virus-infected operating system, these people were deleted. That is a short list.

 

On December 2, 2001, in Brattleboro, Vermont, lifetime peace activist and social worker Robert Woodword died in a ÒbizarreÓ and ÒunfortunateÓ incident after frantically begging a Unitarian Universalist church congregation for sanctuary from the CIA, FBI and police. Having at one point allegedly waved a four-inch penknife at his eye Ð threatening to take his own life -- Woodward was shot seven times by police. Police asked no questions. Police did not use their nightsticks. Well, some of us have learned that Òprotection of the public,Ó sorry to say, means protection from the police. WoodwardÕs death, scary to say, rings all the bells of political assassination. 

 

Some of us know these things, and we are as sure as goats are goats. But in the free market of global terror, where pigs are horses, girls are boys, and war is peace, [7] who will convince the people that they have been so undemocratically duped by decades of corporate propaganda? Who will show them that the perception managers [8] have mismanaged their rights and freedoms? Who will tell them that Edward Neys, a director of Burson-Marsteller, WashingtonÕs most powerful and secretive public relations firm, is also a director of the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation? Would the people even listen? Would they care?

 

Burson-Marsteller is a billion-dollar company that covers for organized crime. They covered for the Nigerian oil barons and Shell Oil during the Biafran War. They covered for Babcock & Wilcox and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor melted down and irradiated the American landscape. They massaged the public and managed their perceptions as the Exxon Valdez supertanker greased the Alaskan wilderness with black crude.

 

Burson-Marsteller has run public relations campaigns to shield extensive, state-orchestrated terror by the ÒgovernmentsÓ of Argentina, Indonesia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. (Remember that Lee Kuan Yew, long-time dictator of Singapore, is a director on the board of J.P. Morgan.) That is a short list. Burson-Marsteller hyped the show for the Earth Summit in Rio. The people of India, not to be forgotten, might appreciate the news that Burson-Marsteller covered for Union Carbide after the gas massacre in Bhopal (1984).

 

When the World Trade destruction site was blocked to firefighters determined to rescue and evacuate victims, the principals of power and profit insured that some $200 million in gold and silver buried beneath the rubble was immediately recovered. Who will tell the people that this was the gold from CanadaÕs Bank of Nova Scotia? That Barrick Gold Corporation is a Canadian company? That BarrickÕs directors include former Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney, former U.S. Senator Howard Baker, and former U.S. President and C.I.A. director George Bush Sr.?

 

Now, would that be the gold that Barrick pillaged from the people of Chile -- after the C.I.A. coup that overthrew the Allende Government? Or from the people of Indonesia -- where East Timor was invaded and hundreds of thousands of peopleÕs lives destroyed under the pro-U.S. Suharto Regime? (This to deny their autonomous aspirations and to insure deep-sea access for U.S. submarines primed for nuclear war and pooping nuclear waste.) Is that the gold from Tanzania where the company buried people alive? Is that the gold from the Kilo Moto gold mines Barrick controls in eastern Congo?

 

These are the questions we would like the American journalists in the Washington briefing rooms to ask the charismatic Donald Rumsfeld. Instead they grovel and drool, for the most banal, condescending abuse, censoring themselves beyond the absurd. They run with the pack, fight over scraps, and prostitute themselves for their paychecks and perks and the great American ream. And as Donald RumsfeldÕs ratings soar, the Pentagon proclaims the peopleÕs love for a new brand of leader Ð the Secretary of War -- who is Òdead honest.Ó This is what the American people hunger for. A leader who is Òdead honest.Ó

 

Honestly, when we hear that the ÒMaoistÓ resistance in Nepal blows up a Coca-Cola plant, or people in south India burn a Coke plant down, some of us rejoice. We recall that one of the American directors of Coke is also a director of Elf Aquitaine, that Elf is about oil, secret weapons deals, the ruthless and unaccountable French-trained ÒCobraÓ militias in Central African Republic -- about raw materials and ruthless dictators and Uzebecki warlords. Sounds pretty un-American.

 

We know that U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney was president of Halliburton Corporation as late as 2000. Halliburton and subsidiary Brown & Root count among their trophies some of the most prized contracts in the globalization of terror. Brown & Root operated in Rwanda to consolidate the power of the U.S.-supported Rwandan Patriotic Front and its leader and now President of Rwanda Paul Kagame Ð who was trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. With U.S. covert forces and their psych-ops and intelligence and counter-insurgency training -- acronyms all for lethal, unaccountable force and unmitigated loss of life -- Halliburton underwrote the two subsequent U.S.-supported invasions of Zaire/Congo (1996/1998). And, since 1998, over 3 million people have died in Congo. Dead honest.

 

Now there are 2000 U.S. Special Forces, and additional U.S. troops of the 10th Mountain Division, stationed at a former Soviet military base in Karshi, Uzebekistan. One neednÕt turn over too many stones to expose the Halliburton snakes behind the bulldozers and cement paving the runways of AsiaÕs mountain fiefdoms.

 

The Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) is in the business of manufacturing terrorism. In drugs-for-guns rackets the C.I.A. dumped ÒcrackÓ cocaine on U.S. inner city neighborhoods to fund terror in Central America. Torture was institutionalized in Zaire under C.I.A.-operative Mobutu Sese Seko and for the next 34 years special torture centers -- like the OAU-6 in Kinshasa Ð proliferated. Never has the New York Times revealed this. They certainly know. Countless Ð countless -- innocent human beings were eliminated under Mobutu. Countless millions currently suffer.

 

Hundreds of students Ð possibly over 1000 -- were massacred (circa 1992) when MobutuÕs elite shock troops Ð the Special Presidential Division -- invaded the University of Lumumbashi in Zaire. Maybe twenty students Ð maybe twenty -- were killed in the well-known Tianamen Square incident. The C.I.A., the Israeli Mossad, the French Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage (S.D.E.C.E.), the British MI-6, the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS) Ð they all export torture, and they have trained shock troops the world over in raw terror as a medium of social control.

 

Q: Why have ruthless and inhuman dictators in Gabon, Togo, Cameroon, Kenya and Zimbabwe prospered for decades? Why -- when they massacre and torture and enslave their citizens -- do they continue to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank?

 

A: Return-on-Investment: R.O.I.: simple neoliberal economics. The Return-on-Investments are the decapitations, dismemberments, disappearances practiced on innocent men, women and children. All the while the raw materials accrue to the ABBs, the Bechtels, the Mitsubishis, the Union Carbides, the Royal/Dutch Shells and the GE/Enron juggernauts. And the media corporations respond with information whiteouts. Whole countries dismissed and ignored.

 

Amero-European multinational corporations are pulling the strings to ensure their cheap and unfettered access to oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds, rubber and timber. In Lake Albert and in the heart of CongoÕs forests multinationals are sinking wells for petroleum and natural gas. Shell, Exxon, Chevron, Mobil, Agip, Total-Fina control the oil fields off AfricaÕs western oil coasts.

 

Texaco is entrenched in the Angola and Congo conflicts. Texaco director Charles H. Price is a director of the New York Times Company. Ditto for CitizenÕs Energy International, a firm controlled by the family of Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and by N.Y.-based Lehman Brothers Holdings. Lehman BrotherÕs director John F. Akers is a director of the New York Times Company. Phelps Dodge Corporation has mined Zimbabwe for years and through Zimbabwe is entrenched in the profitable bloodletting in Congo. Long-time Phelps Dodge executive George B. Munroe is a New York Times Company director. The First Boston (bank) interests of George L. Shinn Ð a New York Times Company director Ð certainly influenced and slanted New York Times coverage of Zaire/Congo (1996, 1998) relief operations in which First Boston had a financial interest.

 

On the ground in Congo Ð when U.S. Special Operations paramilitary forces (read: terrorists) perpetrated massacres of innocent Congolese civilians -- in 1965 and 1966 was soldier Cyrus Vance, later Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter. Perhaps itÕs no surprise to learn Ð since U.S. covert forces have continued to perpetuate violence in Central Africa Ð that Cyrus Vance is one of the directors of the New York Times Company.

 

If Samantha Powers (ÒBystanders To Genocide,Ó Atlantic Monthly, September 2001) interviewed 50 ÒexpertsÓ to uphold the now conventional wisdom that Òthe U.S. did not intervene in Rwanda because we did not know what was going on at the time,Ó then she interviewed the wrong people. The Atlantic Monthly, in any case, has an extended business relationship -- beyond advertising -- with Shell Oil Company. And then there is Philip Gourevitch and his pal Paul Kagame and the narrow realities of the New Yorker.

 

Torture and assassinations and massacres of civilians and POWs are not new. This is the status quo. This is business as usual. What is new is the brazen admission that these practices are going to be used. New is the American peopleÕs brazen acceptance of these. There is even applause in many quarters. Terror is the new currency, openly traded, like the stocks of ABB, the Morgan Banks and the Carlysle Group. New are the open promises and the promised methods Ð newly advertised -- and the overt manifestations of fascism. God Bless America? God help us.

 

Human Rights Watch is the latest recruit for the new Coalition of Terror. In a press release documenting massacres of Afghan civilians by U.S. bombers and aircraft fire, Human Rights Watch -- uncritical of terror, Incorporated -- merely Òreiterated its call to the U.S.-led alliance to ensure that it is taking adequate precautions to avoid civilian casualties.Ó [9] War, in other words, and no matter the private interests behind it, is fine. Please limit the casualties. Funded by multinational corporations (disguised as foundations and humanitarian organizations) and compromised by American patriotism and perhaps stifled by the specter of being castigated as un-American, Human Rights Watch has, thankfully, clarified its limited agenda and mission. Human rights wronged again.

 

The Geneva Convention has become equally, openly irrelevant. Best tell Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that his recent remark, Òcountries refusing to implement UN resolutions should be called perpetrators of state terrorism,Ó directed at India, is an indictment of the United States. Indeed, PakistanÕs partner in crime -- the U.S. -- perpetually stalls, ignores, neutralizes and dismantles United NationsÕ structures and treaties ostensibly designed to defend human dignity, liberty, truth and the environment. For their unfailing service to terrorists -- see Kofi Annan on Rwanda for a single example -- the United Nations team is graced with a Nobel Prize for Peace.

 

War, indeed, is peace.

 

The United Nations, said spokesman Fred Eckhard, is not in a position to accept Taliban prisoners. IsnÕt that the truth! It is an outrageous scandal. But it is also business as usual. And so hundreds of POWs were slaughtered at Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif. British journalists have reported that C.I.A. operative Johnny Michael ÒMikeÓ Spann, the first American ÒofficiallyÓ killed in Afghanistan (even death is officiated in this global terror war, but only the death of Americans) was no innocent victim of a prison uprising: Seems he was torturing prisoners. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

 

ÒHe was a brave American hero,Ó said C.I.A. Director George Tenet, Òbringing freedom to a distant people, while defending freedom for all of us here at home.Ó Disguised as an American speaking Afghan in Afghani clothing, one can only imagine what horrible methods of torture Johnny Spann was using in the interests of my American freedoms. Ditto for the mysterious C.I.A. operative ÒDaveÓ who shot his way out of the history books and into obscurity.

 

Lying through his teeth, Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld called the reports of some 600 prisoners killed unsubstantiated and sensational. ÒThey are lying through their teeth,Ó he said. Turns out that Northern Alliance soldiers ripped out gold teeth from dead prisoners with steel bars. Anyway, Rumsfeld admitted, when pressed again, Òthis is war. People end up shooting. Things happen.Ó

 

A brilliant thesis. Things happen. People murdered in skyscrapers. People murdered in hijacked planes. People murdered with their hands tied behind their backs. People murdered unarmed. People shot in the head at close range. Red Cross camps and rural villages with no military significance bombed: terrified women and children running for their lives strafed by high-tech warplanes with nothing better to do. Children lacerated by explosive yellow bombs mistaken for tinned and plasticated food. Women raped by U.S. coalition forces. People maimed and exploded by landmines: more tools in the toolbox of terror. Millions of people exposed to disease and despair and starvation. People tortured. And our American soldier boys in Afghanistan, victims all, killed by ÒfriendlyÓ fire.

 

Asea Brown Baveri Corporation is in the business of infrastructure: Energy, transportation, communications, construction. So Donald Rumsfeld orders the bombing of Afghanistan. His old friends, the democracy loving boys at ABB meet in secret to plot AfghanistanÕs post-destruction reconstruction. USAID, UNICEF, CARE and the rest of the billion dollar misery industry prepare to mobilize Ð with their upwardly-mobile salaries and their shiny, new Sport Utility Vehicles and their humanitarian inhumanity.

 

The evidence is clear. Love begets love. Violence begets violence. Singers sing. Teachers teach. Lovers make love. Soldiers fight, and warriors make war. Military men know only fighting. The gun is their answer to every problem. While warriors rule our world, our world will know only war.

 

Things happen, says Citizen Rumsfeld. And the Washington press pool laughs. And the American people go shopping. And the peddlers of democracy smile in their knowing way, ever plotting to increase their exports and liquidate the discontents in the global marketplace of terror, which, like prostitution, is the worldÕs oldest, newest commodity. [

 

 

 

keith harmon snow is a journalist and photographer. In 2000 he spent seven months researching the conflicts in Angola, Congo, Rwanda and Sudan. In 2001 he presented on a special congressional panel convened by U.S. Congressional Representative Cynthia McKinney to explore the role of US covert forces and private interests in Africa. Keith has lectured at colleges and universities on neocolonialism, private profit, and genocide in Africa, and on the political economy of the western mass media. In December of 2000 he gave a lecture at Delhi University in India.

 

  

 

 

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[1] Chief SeattleÕs address to the United States government (circa 1890?).

[2] Military Professional Resources Incorporated.

[3] See Genocide & Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, by Wayne Madsen (Mellen Press, 1999).

[4] As of December 17, some 77 legal scholars at Yale University have challenged the Bush Administration on this.

[5] Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria; Aung Sun Su Kyi remains under house arrest in Burma.

[6] E.g., see Agents of Repression, Ward Churchill and Jim Van der Wall.

[7] From the essay by Arundhati Roy in War Is Peace (Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, et al. 2001).

[8] Contemporary think-tanks, public relations and intelligence experts today call propaganda Òperception management.Ó

[9] Human Rights Watch: Afghanistan: New Civilian Deaths Due to U.S. Bombers, October 29, 2001.