What is The War on Terror?

With the recent terror alerts and arrests staged for the sensationalist press, President Bush has told us, “We are a nation in danger.” Is this really true? What is the “War on Terror”?

Last week, Dick Meyer bravely said on CBS News, “ Israel is in danger. Palestinians are in danger. Iraq is in danger. Sudan is in danger. Colombia is in danger. America is not in danger. And America is not at war. What happened in Afghanistan and Iraq was war. We should have stuck to that old-fashioned use of the word war….
Perhaps it was necessary to use the rhetoric of war after 9/11 to marshal an adequate and swift response to the newly real threat. Perhaps. We've had wars on crime, a war on drugs and even a war on poverty… But war, and even war rhetoric, can rationalize unwise and uncharacteristic choices at home, restricted civil liberties, plundered treasury, over-reaching bureaucracy, fear mongering, and misplaced secrecy.”
So here in the US we are being sold a new sort of war, an indefinite war, a political tool, and an excitement for the masses. And the government and the media elites get away with it partly by their use of language. They lump together all so-called “Islamist terrorism”. That is, al Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah are all categorized together – and Ansar al Islam and even Saddam Hussein thrown into the mix! The neo-con cabal has convinced the powers that be that this terrorism is worse than others, that it constitutes a worldwide threat, a coordinated enemy resistance. Step by step, they create what they fear.

And the tabloids oblige them. This week a Pakistani woman crossing the Mexican border illegally to see her children was represented as a terrorist threat by the unholy warriors in the government and the media. In Albany, a sting operation apparently entrapped two Pakistani men into some sort of plot. The next day one of them, an asylee from Saddam’s Iraq, was “linked” to Ansar Al Islam—the Daily News headline screamed, “Osama in New York”. And another former detainee’s name was thrown into the reporting simply because he was also from Albany, despite his FBI clearance after a long ordeal. This hysteria may continue.

Yes there may be a threat. But unlike Bush and his Bible belt public, we now have to walk past men with machine guns on the way to work. And the alerts, however detailed, seem to be based on some pretty sketchy information. Yes they are torturing these informants to get the material, but it is not clear that they know what they are doing. Indeed, an al-Qaeda mole was apparently outed by the New York Times and the US government last week, forcing a number of hasty arrests in London, and disturbing our allies at “the nakedly political use made of recent intelligence breakthroughs both in the US and in Pakistan”, according to the Independent.

In Britain, the Joint Committee on Human Rights expressed deep concern.. It complained it had never been shown intelligence information that would "enable us to be satisfied of the existence of a public emergency threatening the life of the nation". Yet because new laws allow the indefinite detention of foreign nationals without trial, the Government was forced to opt out of its international human rights obligations. The committee pointed to recent Metropolitan Police figures revealing a steep increase in the numbers of Asians being detained under stop-and-search powers. Committee member Lord Judd told BBC, "That is a worrying situation in terms of the confidence of Islamic citizens in Britain that they are not all under suspicion,"

Sound familiar? We are all under suspicion. But surely we must trust the government to keep us safe? If only! Even the cautious New York Times observed last Friday, “It is astonishing, and frightening, that the Bush administration is now pushing to strip the teeth from a proposed new treaty aimed at expanding the current international bans on the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. With talks on the new treaty set to begin later this year, the administration suddenly announced last week that it would insist that no provisions for inspections or verification be included.” So apparently Mr. A. Q. Khan and his North Korean friends are back in business? And who else?

This government simply does not care for international law at all. And this is especially bad news for human rights. How many are being held in secret detention in Guantanamo and elsewhere? With the release of detainees, even more information about bizarre treatment is leaking out. Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has admitted he authorized keeping a detainee off the official rolls. In a somewhat similar case, Amnesty International has just placed disappeared Mr. Saifullah Paracha on its urgent appeals—please take time to visit the cageprisoners.com website or: http://web.amnesty.org/appeals/index/afg-010704-wwa-eng. Who else will disappear, and what other human rights will we lose, in the name of the “War” on Terror?