- 4 days ago
John Pilger dissects the truth and lies in the 'war on terror'. Award-winning journalist John Pilger investigates the discrepancies between American and British claims for the 'war on terror' and the facts on the ground as he finds them in Afghanistan and Washington, DC.
In 2001, as the bombs began to drop, George W. Bush promised Afghanistan "the generosity of America and its allies". Now, the familiar old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism is renewing its grip and military skirmishes continue routinely. In "liberated" Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one woman, "in many ways worse than the Taliban".
In Washington, Pilger conducts a series of remarkable interviews with William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and leading Administration officials such as Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
These people, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century, were dismissed as 'the crazies' by the first Bush Administration in the early 90s when they first presented their ideas for pre-emptive strikes and world domination.
In 2001, as the bombs began to drop, George W. Bush promised Afghanistan "the generosity of America and its allies". Now, the familiar old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism is renewing its grip and military skirmishes continue routinely. In "liberated" Afghanistan, America has its military base and pipeline access, while the people have the warlords who are, says one woman, "in many ways worse than the Taliban".
In Washington, Pilger conducts a series of remarkable interviews with William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and leading Administration officials such as Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.
These people, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century, were dismissed as 'the crazies' by the first Bush Administration in the early 90s when they first presented their ideas for pre-emptive strikes and world domination.
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00:00A world away in New York.
00:25This is Rita Lazar and her brother Abe.
00:30Abe was killed in the Twin Towers on September the 11th.
00:34He might have saved himself, but chose to help a disabled friend.
00:39My view does not look out on the World Trade Center,
00:44but I'm on the 15th floor in Lower Manhattan,
00:47and I ran across the hall to my friend's apartment,
00:51and her windows looked out on the World Trade Center,
00:57and I got there in time to see the second plane hit the second building.
01:03And strangely enough, it was only then that I said,
01:06Oh my God, my brother's in that building.
01:10Danny, my son's best friend, called and said,
01:14Can I come over? And we said, Sure.
01:17And he said, Did you watch the President's speech?
01:19And we said, No.
01:21And he said, He mentioned your brother.
01:24And I looked at him and I said, What are you talking about?
01:28And then I thought, Gee, there must have been a lot of people
01:32who stayed behind with their friends in wheelchairs.
01:36You know, you don't think that it's your own brother.
01:40It's just... You don't think that.
01:44But it was my brother.
01:46And immediately, immediately, I knew that my country
01:51was going to use my brother's death to justify killing innocent people
01:56in Afghanistan and wherever else they would look.
02:01Rita decided to go to Afghanistan to comfort the victims of the American bombing.
02:08She met Arafa and took her to the American Embassy in Kabul
02:12to seek compensation for the killing of her family.
02:16I'll tell you about Arafa.
02:18She had taken a translated description of what had happened to her and her family
02:25to the American Embassy to ask for help
02:29and had been turned away and told, Go away, you're a beggar.
02:37The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies.
02:42As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies
02:47to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan.
02:51The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people.
02:56Such a friend that out of $10 billion spent in Afghanistan in the last two years,
03:03the majority has been spent on the military.
03:06Of all the great humanitarian disasters, few countries have been helped less than Afghanistan.
03:14Only 3% of all international aid has been for reconstruction.
03:27Such a friend that the United States has yet to clear these unexploded cluster bombs
03:32it dropped in the centre of Kabul where children play in the lethal rubble.
03:51And children are supposed to learn in this devastation.
03:57The Afghan government gets less than 20% of the aid that is delivered.
04:14Omar Zakawal is a government official in Kabul.
04:18Well, 20% is about $300 million.
04:24$300 million? You're meant to rebuild the country, basically, with $300 million.
04:29Oh, no. The government does not have its own resources for the ordinary budget.
04:39There $300 million becomes salaries and electricity and those. No. Those are not for reconstruction.
04:49Well, it sounds like you're left with almost nothing.
04:52The government has no money for reconstruction. Period.
04:56The water in this typical Afghan village may look clean, but it's contaminated.
05:09And most of the children suffer from preventable diseases.
05:13Since the overthrow of the Taliban, little has changed.
05:18For these people, life is just as dangerous.
05:22I found the population of two villagers living destitute in the rubble of this shoe factory in Kabul.
05:39They'd fled attacks by warlords who'd robbed them and kidnapped their wives and daughters.
05:45I've spent much of my life in places of upheaval, but I've rarely seen such a bombed and blasted and ruined city as Kabul.
06:04Most of the damage was done not by the Taliban, but by the Afghan warlords backed and trained and funded by America for more than 20 years.
06:15The same warlords who have been effectively put back into power by George Bush.
06:21While Afghanistan's liberation from the Taliban was welcomed here and brought certain freedoms, such as the opening of schools and the playing of music,
06:31for many people, another kind of terror replaced it, one barely acknowledged in the West.
06:38And not only has the government in Kabul no power and no money, the President, Hamid Karzai, dares not leave his office without his 42 bodyguards from the US Special Forces.
06:53Real power is held by these men, warlords, whose record of repression and brutality is little different from the Taliban.
07:03Many Afghans regard them as no better.
07:08For four years from 1992, they fought each other for control of Kabul, killing 50,000 innocent people and smashing the city to rubble.
07:18By any definition, the warlords are terrorists, bribed by the Americans with a fortune in cash and truckloads of arms.
07:39Today, they control the government in Kabul and have re-established the opium trade,
07:44from which comes most of the heroine reaching the streets of Britain.
07:50Now Human Rights Watch has broken the silence, documenting atrocities committed by gunmen and warlords,
07:57who have essentially hijacked the country.
08:01Once again, the victims are often women.
08:04Today, women are free and are part of Afghanistan's new government.
08:10And we welcome the new Minister of Women's Affairs, Dr. Seema Sumar.
08:15Dr. Seema Sumar is a symbol of Afghan resistance and humanity.
08:20She defied the Taliban and ran clinics for women.
08:25In 2001, she and another woman were appointed to the new government as the face of liberation.
08:32But no sooner had the applause in Washington died away than she was forced out.
08:38The warlords were not tolerating such an outspoken voice of freedom for women.
08:43Today, Dr. Seema Sumar lives in constant fear of her life, with bodyguards with her night and day.
08:52No one understands more the plight of Afghan women.
08:56It's not much change for them.
08:59They're still, the majority doesn't have access to health care.
09:03They don't have access to education.
09:05They don't have access to job opportunity.
09:07The liberation of women in Afghanistan is mostly a sham, and their plight is desperate.
09:15Since the overthrow of the Taliban, Human Rights Watch has documented kidnapping and the mass rape of women, girls and boys.
09:24Girl schools have been burned down.
09:27In the western city of Herat, women can be arrested if they drive.
09:33And if they are caught with an unrelated man, even a taxi driver, they may be subjected to a chastity test.
09:42This is Marina, a member of an extraordinary organization called the Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan,
09:49which has protected and educated women and documented their repression.
09:54We had to meet in secret.
09:58The veil was necessary to cover her identity.
10:01We don't believe that there is much difference between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance,
10:06or the commanders who are now in power in different parts of Afghanistan.
10:10Because the origin is the same.
10:12They believe in the same thing.
10:13Their nature is the same.
10:15They are the two pieces of the same coin.
10:17Women don't feel secure.
10:19The police are generally not functioning properly.
10:22Courts are not generally functioning properly.
10:26You have places where you have real deep fear of commanders and of armed groups.
10:32You have cases where women get taken by armed groups.
10:36Where people become imprisoned in private jails.
10:39You have reports that men and women who are walking down the street get picked up, almost at random,
10:45to check whether or not they're married, to verify that they haven't been having illegal sexual intercourse.
10:53Just a month back, these commanders raped women and a group of 35 women jumped into the river along with their children and they died just to save themselves from being raped again.
11:06The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor.
11:19From the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain regions of Afghanistan.
11:24They too are our cause.
11:27To a growing number of people around the world, America's war on terror is about hypocrisy and double standards.
11:44About terrorists classified as good and bad depending on their usefulness to the great game of power politics.
11:54For years, Osama bin Laden was not only regarded in Washington and London as a good terrorist.
12:01He was virtually our creation.
12:03One of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War was America's role in supporting Afghan warlords known as the Mujahideen.
12:13The official story is that America backed these fundamentalists in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
12:22But that's not true.
12:23It was six months before the Soviet invasion, in July of that year, that President Jimmy Carter authorised $500 million to help set up the Mujahideen, a terrorist organisation.
12:37The American people were completely unaware that their government, together with the British Secret Service MI6, had begun training and funding Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden.
12:49Out of this came the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and September the 11th.
13:02Soon after the Taliban came to power in 1996, the administration of Bill Clinton backed a secret plan for a pipeline through Afghanistan from Central Asia, which has vast reserves of oil and gas.
13:16The Taliban were offered a generous cut in the deal and secretly invited to Washington and Texas.
13:25They were treated royally, taken shopping and flown to tourist attractions like the NASA Space Center and Mount Rushmore.
13:34Their tour was so secret that no television news covered it.
13:39Most Americans knew nothing.
13:41By the time George W. Bush came to power, the link between Al Qaeda and the Taliban was an embarrassment, and September the 11th gave Bush an opportunity to get rid of them.
13:56Today, Afghanistan is run by a regime installed by the Americans, and the pipeline deal is going ahead.
14:03September the 11th also presented an opportunity to an influential group, who even by Republican Party standards were extreme.
14:17Ray McGovern is a former senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and a personal friend of George Bush Sr., the President's father.
14:29The same people who are running U.S. policy now are people that the President's father kept at arm's length.
14:38They were referred to in the circles in which I moved when I was briefing at the top intelligence and policy levels, they were referred to as the crazies.
14:50The crazies. The crazies, I mean, you talk about the crazies, everyone knew who they were. Richard Pearl, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, those folks.
15:00The crazies also include Donald Rumsfeld, seen here in Baghdad in 1986, warmly greeting Saddam Hussein, who was then being armed to the teeth by America and Britain.
15:11This is one of their blueprints, published in 2000 by the extreme right-wing group Project for a New American Century.
15:21The U.S. military will fight multiple simultaneous wars as the cavalry on the New American Frontier.
15:30The principal author is William Crystal.
15:34The problem with America is not that we go around marauding around the world imposing ourselves.
15:39The problem with America in the last 10, 15 years since the end of the Cold War, really in the last 60 years, is that we've been too slow to get involved in conflicts.
15:49Outside America, people have worried about the United States conducting an unprovoked attack on a country, a sovereign country.
15:59Are they? Are they? Yes, they are.
16:01Really? They're worried we're going to attack Britain, France, Germany, any democracy?
16:05No, no, because...
16:06Any decent regime?
16:07No, well, the United States doesn't usually attack strong countries.
16:11Do we attack decent countries?
16:12No, I said strong countries.
16:14Well, I was asking decent countries.
16:15I don't know what you would call...
16:16Are people really worried the U.S. is going to go, a decent, law-abiding country, and the U.S. is going to come in and say,
16:20we don't like the look of you, we're going to depose you? Is that something the U.S. has done quite often?
16:24How many countries has the U.S. attacked in the last 15 years?
16:28Well, since World War II, there have been 72 interventions by the United States.
16:33Oh, is that right?
16:34Yes.
16:35That's ludicrous.
16:36Well, it's not ludicrous, it's true.
16:38These are some of the countries where the United States, directly and indirectly,
16:43has overthrown governments, manipulated elections, and attacked popular movements since 1945.
16:51Bush's War on Terror is just another brand name replacing the Red Menace as justification for a systematic aggression.
17:01This is well documented, yet it remains a kind of secret history, seldom reported in the West as a war of terror.
17:10Take just one decade, the 1970s.
17:18September the 11th, 1973, is not an anniversary many of us remember.
17:24On that day, the United States helped engineer the overthrow of the democratic government of Chile.
17:31More than 30,000 people were killed, including the elected president, Salvador Allende.
17:39In Southeast Asia, American bombers killed hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Laos.
17:46In Vietnam, the United States sprayed a chemical poison called Agent Orange, a weapon of mass destruction.
17:55Today, its effects still cause death and birth deformities.
18:01In Indonesia and East Timor, America's backing of the dictatorship of General Suharto led to as many as a million deaths.
18:11The U.S. government multiplied its aid to Indonesia as the slaughter in East Timor was occurring.
18:21Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
18:24You know, the United States ranks pretty high, unfortunately, in supporting leaders and governments that brutalize their own people.
18:37Last year, the Bush administration released its national security strategy.
18:42Behind the jargon of the war on terror is a new message that America intends to stand alone and dominate by threat of force.
18:51It reminds you, I think, of the days of the 50s when children were told to go under their desks because an atomic bomb might hit them or something.
18:58I mean, it's just ludicrous what's going on.
19:00And the whole twist of dragging Iraq into the war of terrorism, the axes of evil, all of this fundamental sort of rubbish, you might say,
19:09is part of the political games that have been played by Bush given the opportunity that 9-11 presented to him and his regime and the survival thereof and the future thereof for the next election in 2004.
19:22Today, the United States has 152 military bases around the world.
19:28These include bases at major sources of energy established under cover of the war on terror.
19:36The U.S. military calls this full-spectrum dominance.
19:41We don't really give a damn what anybody thinks.
19:44We rub everyone's face in it.
19:45We're Americans and you're not.
19:47And we're really, we're talking the Roman Empire here.
19:49I mean, we'll do anything we want to do, anywhere we want to do it.
19:53And you're either with us or against us.
19:56And multilateral institutions like the U.N. are incidental and irrelevant to the powers that be.
20:03That is the image we're sending to the world.
20:05That is what much of the world feels about this country right this minute.
20:09We cannot accept and we will not accept states that harbor, finance, train or equip the agents of terror.
20:21Those nations that violate this principle will be regarded as hostile regimes.
20:29How ironic are Bush's words because thousands of known terrorists are to be found in the United States living beyond the law.
20:38Last year, Amnesty International confirmed the presence of thousands of torturers given safe haven in the United States.
20:50The report listed notorious names from Latin America, many of them trained here at the School of Americas in the state of Georgia, where American officers used manuals like this to teach the black arts of terror and repression.
21:06Most Americans are completely unaware of this.
21:10You know, you looked at the Truth Commission report in El Salvador, who was responsible for the massacres.
21:16A very high percentage of them were trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia.
21:22And not just in El Salvador, in Panama, in Honduras, in Guatemala.
21:28You go, as I have, you go and meet with the high command of the military in Central America, and you see on their walls diplomas from the School of Americas and other U.S. institutions.
21:43So when people talk about terrorism, it's always over there. It's not the terrorists that the United States have supported.
21:52We have done more throughout our history, and since World War II in particular, I think to create conditions in which individuals can be free around the world than any other country in history.
22:06In Afghanistan, Colonel Rod Davis is helping to spread that message of individual freedom.
22:16Good morning. I'm Colonel Rod Davis. I'm the Director of Public Affairs for CJTF 180.
22:21That's the coalition military force stationed here in Afghanistan, specifically at Bagram Air Base.
22:29This morning, what we're going to do is take you on a tour of Bagram Air Base, and we're going to tour numerous facilities, the airfield itself.
22:36This is Bagram Air Base near Kabul. It's here that al-Qaeda suspects are interrogated and disappear, and where there have been allegations of torture, many of them end up in Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
22:53What happens, Colonel, to innocent people who are swept up in this? People who have come through your detention facility here at Bagram, but there really isn't a case to be made against them, and they've kind of disappeared.
23:10Well, let's talk about what you refer to as the detention facility. We'll hold right there and allow you to get some images.
23:17How would you describe it if it's not a detention facility?
23:22Tell you what, we'll talk about that. Let's pull off to the side here and let you take a few images.
23:28This is it over here, is it? Well, we'll let you know.
23:31Okay.
23:37What I can assure you and your public of is this.
23:41That anyone that's under custody, any of the holding locations, they're attended to medically.
23:48Medical care is provided.
23:51They're fed.
23:54They're looked after.
23:55There's no abuse or torture that goes on inside of any of these holding facilities.
24:02Well, there have been allegations of torture, haven't there?
24:07Particularly, there's a military pathologist who actually described the death in custody of a man here.
24:15I think his name was Delaware, who she described it as homicide, murder.
24:22You know that case.
24:23I'm aware of the allegation.
24:26And what I'll say to you is I think anyone who's fair would have to say that Americans in particular, but certainly members of the coalition, aren't known for committing atrocities.
24:40That's not something that's part of our history.
24:43It's not the way we do business.
24:45It's not the way we treat people.
24:48If you were arrested in the United States by a foreign army and brought to a holding facility, wouldn't you expect to have certain basic rights, that is, access to lawyers, access to people outside, not just simply to literally disappear?
25:06Well, you talked about status before, and as I said, it's rather complicated.
25:13And I guess there's some type of continuum or spectrum, if you will, you know, probably prisoners of war off to the far left or right, depending on your perspective, and something less than that to the far other end.
25:25Other end.
25:28We're somewhere on that spectrum.
25:31Yeah.
25:33Somewhere on that spectrum is this man.
25:36Wazir Muhammad is a Kabul taxi driver who disappeared into Bagram in April last year.
25:42He's now in Guantanamo Bay.
25:45He's not been charged with anything.
25:46His crime was to inquire after a friend, another taxi driver, who was arrested and who has since been released.
25:56What makes this case so appalling is that this man is recognised by the present government as having resisted the Taliban.
26:06This is his brother, Taj Muhammad, a nurse.
26:09This is where he is now, Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners are shackled, trussed, and kept in cages eight feet by seven feet for up to 24 hours a day.
26:31The light is always on.
26:34Children and old men have been incarcerated.
26:38Amnesty International calls it a black hole, a violation of the most basic human rights.
26:47There are nine British citizens here, including this man, Shafiq Rasul from the West Midlands,
26:54who was effectively kidnapped by the Americans two weeks after he'd arrived in Pakistan, where he has relatives.
27:03That was almost two years ago.
27:06Since then his family has pleaded for help from the British government, but still he's been charged with nothing.
27:24These are the oil fields of the Middle East, the greatest prize of all.
27:29Iraq is the world's second biggest oil producer, and its conquest gives America a vast base from which to dominate the Middle East.
27:39It's been a conquest achieved at any price, including truth.
27:43It was serious dishonesty, the result of which includes the fact that thousands of Iraqis have died.
27:54Hundreds of soldiers from our own countries have tragically died.
28:00Andrew Wilkie is the only serving Western intelligence officer to break cover and expose what he believes to be the truth about the invasion of Iraq.
28:09Working in the top secret Office of National Assessments in Canberra, he saw intelligence shared by America, Britain and Australia.
28:20We were sold this war on the basis of Iraq possessing a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction,
28:32which was never found and won't be found because there was no massive arsenal of weapons.
28:37We were also promised a need for a war on the basis of active cooperation between Iraq and Al-Qaeda,
28:46and the fact that it was just a matter of time before some of these weapons from this massive arsenal were passed to this terrorist group.
28:54Always a ridiculous proposition and always completely at odds with my experience in the intelligence community that there was no hard intelligence to establish that there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
29:07You know, I never saw any evidence that would link it, and thus far there's been no evidence produced that would suggest that Saddam was behind Al-Qaeda.
29:18Al-Qaeda, in fact, my experience in the time I served would suggest the opposite, that Saddam was the least likely person to want anything to do with Al-Qaeda.
29:27The only reason to have gone to war was to deal with a threat so imminent and so dangerous that war, as a last resort, was the only means available.
29:40As I weighed the evidence, as I watched the debate emerge, as I reflected on my own experiences, as I listened to the discussions from the Pentagon and inside the White House,
29:49as I checked with sources in Congress and people who were current on the intelligence, that simply wasn't the case.
29:55Isn't there a problem for us in the West of honesty about the reason for going to war in Iraq, and that was weapons of mass destruction?
30:06I don't think that was a lie. We went to war in large part because of the concern that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the Saddam Hussein regime,
30:18a regime that used such weapons, in particular nerve gas...
30:22And was supplied by the United States and Britain with these weapons of mass destruction.
30:26No, I don't believe that's accurate.
30:28Well, yes they were. Most of the weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein weren't built by him.
30:34The machine tools and the ingredients for his biological weapons, they all came from other countries, many of them from this country and Britain.
30:44I don't think that's right. I really think that the...
30:46It's on the record in the Library of Congress.
30:49I think the premise of your question is wrong.
30:53Mr. Fyfe had only to look up this Congressional record of a US Senate inquiry in 1992.
31:00It shows that the US government approved the sale of biological weapons to Saddam Hussein,
31:07the suppliers with this company in Maryland, and Porton Down in Britain.
31:14If you really want to know the truth about the state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the invasion,
31:21listen to Colin Powell in February 2001.
31:24He states clearly that there was no threat from Saddam Hussein.
31:29He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.
31:34He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.
31:38And this is Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, in July of the same year, saying the same thing, putting the lie to their own propaganda.
31:49We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.
31:56And that, many believe, was the truth. A truth that was covered up and conveniently forgotten after September the 11th,
32:04when Bush and Blair decided to attack Iraq.
32:09They found no weapons of mass destruction, no links with Al-Qaeda, no nuclear weapons, no 45-minute threat.
32:17So was it all a charade?
32:24Uh, it was 95% charade, charade.
32:29A charade indeed. The invasion had been planned long ago.
32:34In July last year, Condoleezza Rice told another Bush official,
32:39that decision has been made, don't waste your breath.
32:44This is not what Bush told the American people.
32:47It's this that makes the inquiry in London by Lord Hutton look like a dramatic diversion,
32:54its narrow terms preventing a far-reaching investigation,
32:58not only into the loss of one life,
33:01but thousands of lives of innocent people in Iraq,
33:05the victims of an unprovoked war.
33:18It's now reliably estimated that up to 10,000 civilians may have died in the attack on Iraq.
33:26Joe Wilding, a human rights observer in Baghdad during the bombing,
33:30saw the suffering.
33:32I and a few other observers were being taken around the hospital by one of the doctors,
33:37and he was introducing us to some civilian casualties from the previous day.
33:41And he was called away to the emergency room.
33:44So he took us with him, and as we walked in, there was a woman,
33:47probably in her mid-30s, just screaming over and over,
33:50we're farmers, we're farmers.
33:52And she had a little boy in her arms.
33:54He was four, his name was Muhammad.
33:56And the whole right-hand side of his face was cut up by shrapnel.
34:00And then there were other women in there.
34:02There was a little girl, and she was just screaming every time anyone moved her,
34:06screaming when they took her into the x-ray room,
34:08screaming when they brought her out again.
34:10And the doctor pulled back the covers and showed us this huge gouge out of her thigh.
34:17And they were trying to clean it, and they didn't have enough anesthetics or painkillers or anything.
34:21So she was just screaming and screaming as they tried to clean this wound.
34:24All of them were just in so much pain.
34:26And then Fateha, the youngest of the daughters, was eight, and she was killed in the bombing.
34:31And Fatima was just stained with all their blood and just going from one to another, picking them up.
34:38Why is it wrong for dictators and terrorists to kill innocent civilians?
34:46And right or excusable for the United States to do exactly the same?
34:52Well, the United States doesn't do it, and if we did it, it would be as reprehensible as what the terrorists do.
35:00The United States doesn't kill innocent civilians?
35:04No, the United States does not target civilians.
35:09Those of us on the outside who look at September the 11th, where 3,000 people died in that tragedy,
35:16but then look at the thousands who have died since, wonder about double standards here.
35:21Would you address that?
35:23I think that the numbers that you're talking about are questionable.
35:30So let's leave aside your numbers.
35:33Why are they questionable?
35:35I mean, I don't accept your assertion that we've killed thousands of innocent people.
35:42But let me get to the...
35:44There's a lot of studies and an examination of facts on the ground that suggest indeed thousands.
35:53I mean, in Iraq at the moment, there are studies that are talking about 10,000.
35:58But I don't want to get into numbers, but certainly thousands seems a fair figure.
36:03I don't know that that's true, and I don't accept the assertion.
36:09If you ask an American student how many people died in Vietnam, he'll tell you 58,000.
36:14Because they've dismissed the 2, 3, maybe 4 million Vietnamese who were killed by the United States and its allies in that war.
36:21So this is an ongoing issue.
36:23Mr. Powell, Colin Powell, General Colin Powell, I think was quoted as having said,
36:27he's not interested in civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
36:30It's not his concern.
36:31And that's the attitude, I think, with Iraq.
36:33Whether it's 5,000 or 10,000, it's really not an issue.
36:36Well, I think Americans, like most people, are mostly concerned about their own countrymen.
36:40I don't know how many Iraqi civilians were killed, but I can assure you that the number is the absolute minimal that it's possible in modern warfare.
36:49One of the stunning things about the quick coalition victory was how little damage was done to Iraqi infrastructure
36:56and how low Iraqi casualties were.
36:59And I think that's...
37:00Well, that's quite high if it's 10,000 civilians.
37:02Well, I think it's quite low if you look at the size of the military operation that was undertaken.
37:08It's practically an inevitability in war that there are going to be innocent people who get hurt,
37:17no matter how much care a professional military, a properly behaved military, puts into avoiding damage to non-combatants and to civilian infrastructure.
37:32Mr. Feith, that sounds fine, sitting here in Washington.
37:36But in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which is my most recent experience, that's not how it looks at all.
37:44May I interrupt for a moment? I apologize, sir.
37:46May I just stop tape, please, for one moment?
37:49Thank you very much. Let me know when you stopped tape.
37:51Excuse me.
37:52I'm sorry, I'm doing this purpose, please, sir.
37:55Have we stopped tape?
37:56It's very serious.
37:57I was not under the impression, sir...
37:59Mr. Feith's minder, an army colonel, suddenly stopped the interview as I had pursued the question of civilian deaths.
38:07I agree.
38:09Over at the State Department, Under Secretary John Bolton concluded his interview with his own insight into my line of questions.
38:17One of our major objectives today is to put the government of Iraq back in the hands of Iraqi people so that they can enjoy the benefits of their country's resources,
38:27and so that American soldiers can come home as soon as possible.
38:30Okay.
38:31Thank you, Mr. Bolton.
38:32Okay.
38:33Appreciate it.
38:34Are you a Labour Party member?
38:36Well, Labour Party, they're the conservatives in our country.
38:38So you're a Communist Party member?
38:40The American media played a vital role in the invasion and the deception.
38:47Instead of challenging the propaganda, it echoed and amplified it.
38:52Well, I believe if the media had been more aggressive and more tenacious towards getting the truth,
39:00there's a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq.
39:03It's pretty clear to me.
39:05But there is a fear and paranoia by journalists who realize they can't always report everything they know and that their editors will not.
39:14Their job in the middle of the Iraq war, it was not to show some of the foibles and the deceit of the White House.
39:25That was not your job.
39:26Your job was to be embedded, which is a wonderful word, which is obviously a metaphor for what's happened with the American media covering wars going back decades, ever since Vietnam.
39:39And if you study every conflict since, you'll see how the Pentagon and the political types have outmaneuvered the media.
39:46And the media has allowed it to happen.
39:49They show up, they do what they're told, and they tell the story that certain people want them to tell.
39:54And that's what we call, quote unquote, news.
39:57I would go on television in the United States and Fox News and CNBC and the like,
40:06and I would talk about the importance of applying, you know, the Geneva Conventions and how, in fact, the Geneva Conventions protect everybody.
40:15They protect American soldiers just like they protect, you know, they protect the good guys just like they protect the bad guys.
40:21And I'm treated like, you know, like a traitor, like, like, like, you know, like I'm committing treason.
40:27We have a perpetual war which gives the incumbent sitting president over there in the Oval Office a 10 to 15 point bounce on all public opinion.
40:37He is a wartime president, even though actually we're not at war.
40:41There's something really weird here.
40:44The truth, fact is fiction, fiction is fact, war is peace, peace is war.
40:50What the hell's going on here?
40:52I mean, Mr. Bush is very cleverly manipulated the fear, the anxiety that 9-11 sprang upon the people of New York and ultimately the entire country.
41:02And every time he wants to jack up his ratings, he simply stirs up the fear pot by upgrading the level of impending danger without any specifics, of course.
41:13I think it's just it's a very ugly game that's being played on the Americans.
41:17There's something so similar between our administration and Al Qaeda in its certainty that God is on its side that is laughable.
41:34And that the American people should fall for this line hurts me more than I can tell you.
41:41Norman Mailer wrote the other day that he believed that America had entered a pre-fascist state.
41:52What's your view of that?
41:54Well, in a way, and I'm not saying this to be cynical, but I hope he's right because there are others that are saying we are already in a fascist sort of mode.
42:04If you say something often enough, the people will begin to believe it.
42:09And that strategy has been applied with, unfortunately, great success by this administration.
42:18Weapons of mass destruction, Al Qaeda, Iraq ties, other evidence being adduced to justify an unprovoked war.
42:29And so, yeah, I think we ought to all be worried about fascism.
42:33I think the rest of us should be extremely concerned.
42:36We've seen total disregard for the United Nations, United Nations Charter, and its fundamental concepts.
42:43We've seen rejection of international law and the respect for sovereignty of other countries.
42:50We've seen a pre-emptive strike against a sovereign state which is outrageous in concept and dangerous in consequence,
43:00and something we should all worry about.
43:02And every country that now is threatened by Mr. Bush, which is his habit, whether it's Iran or North Korea or Syria or Libya or others,
43:10it's an outrage that we should stand by and allow these countries to be threatened by a man so dangerous
43:17that he's willing to sacrifice American lives and worse, the lives of others,
43:22whether they're Iraqis or Afghanis and possibly Syrians and others, in some mad aggression.
43:29Aggression was at the core of the judgment at the Nuremberg trial of the German leadership following World War II.
43:36The judges decided that unprovoked aggression was the supreme international war crime
43:43which contained all the evils of other war crimes.
43:47Blair and Bush have found ways of justifying, of course, the wars, both against Afghanistan and against Iraq,
43:57in terms of particular circumstances or the violation of particular requirements.
44:04But it seems to me that these wars are indeed acts of aggression as defined at Nuremberg and in previous agreements.
44:19But in a sense, both Bush and Blair are guilty and could stand on the dock accused of waging aggressive war.
44:31The United Nations was founded so that we would never forget the crimes of great power.
44:36Are we now in danger of forgetting?
44:39Do we forget the lies that justified the conquest of Iraq and disguised America's plans to dominate all the world?
44:47Do we forget that the British government has announced, for the first time,
44:51that it's prepared to launch an attack with nuclear weapons, echoing yet again George Bush?
44:58And do we accept a distortion of intellect and morality that empties noble words like democracy and liberation of their true meaning,
45:08that says it's wrong for terrorists to kill innocent people, but right for governments to commit the same crimes in our name?
45:17The answer is that we need not accept any of this if we recognise that there are now two superpowers.
45:24One is the regime in Washington.
45:27The other is public opinion, now stirring all over the world, perhaps as never before.
45:33Make no mistake, it's an epic struggle.
45:36The alternative is not just the conquest of far away countries.
45:41It's the conquest of us, of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect.
45:48If we remain silent, victory over us is assured.
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