Further evidence of systemic police brutality and provocation emerged last week at the trial of three anti-poverty activists charged with riot offences in connection with a June 2000 demonstration at the Ontario legislature in Queen’s Park, Toronto. The trial, which represents a major government attack on the right to protest, has been under way in Toronto for more than three months.
Politicians and public health officials in Toronto and across Canada—from the city’s mayor to the federal health minister—have denounced the World Health Organization (WHO) for advising against travel to the city because of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). Words such as “disbelief,” “dismay,” “overreaction,” “gross misrepresentation” and “irresponsible” have been hurled against the UN’s health monitoring agency.
Even as the Bush administration claims to be bringing democracy and political liberty to Iraq, it is spearheading a deepening assault on basic democratic rights at all levels in the United States.
American troops opened fire on anti-US protesters in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, killing at least 10. Hours earlier, 20,000 people marched through the southern city of Nasiriyah to oppose Washington’s plans to install a puppet government. In Baghdad, the US military tried to prevent journalists from reporting on the third straight day of anti-US demonstrations.
Having served unofficially as a propaganda arm of the White House and Pentagon before and during the war on Iraq, the major US media networks, with the exception of CNN, have agreed to make their function official. In the name of providing Iraq’s people with a taste of a “free press,” ABC, CBS, Fox and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) have decided to provide content for a Pentagon-controlled television service in Iraq.
Journalists’ organizations have demanded investigations into two incidents in which US military forces killed three journalists in Baghdad on April 8, including Al-Jazeera correspondent Tariq Ayoub, and seriously wounded several others. The attacks came amid broadcasts showing some of the mounting slaughter being conducted by US troops throughout the Iraqi capital.
The longer the Iraq war continues, the more Orwellian the language and the more sinister the methods adopted by the Bush administration and its allies. While President Bush and his officials depict Iraqis resisting the US-led invasion as “terrorists” and “death squads,” CIA and Special Forces assassination squads are at work in Iraq, seeking to eliminate Iraqi leaders and other opponents of the US occupation of the country.
Cluster weapons are packed with small bombs, or bomblets, known as submunitions, designed specifically to cause the greatest possible number of human casualties. They can be bombs dropped from high-flying B-52s or low-flying jet fighters. They can also be guided missiles fired from hundreds of kilometers away, artillery canisters lobbed from a distance or shells fired from tanks at closer range.
“Weapons of mass destruction” have truly been unleashed in Iraq: new-generation cluster munitions are being used by US and British forces to massacre and terrorise the Iraqi population. Not a single Iraqi bio-chemical weapon has been witnessed, but the “liberators” have already resorted to weapons notorious for their vast and indiscriminate destruction of human life.
Confronting mass resistance by Iraq’s people, US forces have begun rounding Iraqi civilians on the flimsiest of pretexts. More than 300 men and women in civilian clothes have already been detained, and on April 1 the Pentagon issued far-reaching guidelines authorizing troops to arrest civilians who “interfere with mission accomplishment” and hold them for up to 30 days. President Bush also authorized soldiers to use teargas in Iraq—this a likely preparation for subduing civilian unrest.
The US and British governments, and most Western media pundits, have tried to explain the determined resistance of the Iraqi people to the US-led assault by referring to the first Bush administration’s 1991 betrayal of the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Once Iraqis are confident that the Allies are serious about occupying the country, the argument goes, they will rise up and welcome them as liberators.
Among the many official lies exposed in the first two weeks of the invasion of Iraq is the claim that the US was motivated by the need to cleanse Iraq of “weapons of mass destruction.”
Last Friday, for the second time in two days, US missiles hit a busy market street in a working class district of Baghdad, killing and wounding scores of innocent civilians—the same slum dwellers that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had claimed would rise up to overthrow the Iraqi regime as soon as the war began.
Media commentators, legal experts and human rights organizations internationally have rightly accused the Bush administration of brazen hypocrisy in threatening to indict Iraqi leaders as war criminals for displaying American prisoners of war on state television.
Wednesday’s atrocity in a Baghdad working class neighborhood has cast a grisly light on the real character of the US-British invasion. The final death toll from two US missiles that tore apart the Abu Taleb Street market in the suburb of Al Shaab is expected to approach 30.
Over recent days, photographs and footage of captured and killed United States soldiers have been seen by millions of people around the world, but not published by the major American newspapers or broadcast by TV networks. The blackout imposed on the American public, at the direct behest of the Bush administration, has highlighted two fundamental developments.
While the major US media outlets have readily complied with Pentagon requests not to show footage and pictures of captured or dead American soldiers, one US-based web site has been shut down by its Internet provider, VortechHosting.com, for showing the images.
The tragic death of veteran British ITV News correspondent Terry Lloyd, who was killed by American troops last Saturday on the southern Iraq warfront, raises disturbing questions about how far the Bush and Blair governments will go to suppress independent reporting of the US-led invasion.
The US-led coalition’s war against Iraq is illegal, declared 31 Canadian professors of international law at 15 law faculties in an open letter issued Wednesday, just before US President Bush announced that the war had commenced.
The more the circumstances surrounding the murder of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American student killed by an Israeli military bulldozer March 16, become known, the clearer it is that the Israeli government bears direct political and legal responsibility, and that the Bush administration is its political accomplice in her death.
