The Terrorist War is a Propaganda War.

The United States of America has recently, in the wake of the September 11th attacks on the WTC and The Pentagon, symbols of its Imperialist power, outlined the new war as a war on terrorism.
What has followed is a propaganda war of the like and intensity that has not been witnessed since the Cold War. The propaganda war seeks to convince, by force of repetition and misrepresentation of the truth, all people to accept the crazy requisites of the USA and their loyal lapdog, the UK for the making of a world “peace” or “world order” that is enforced by a military and technological firepower without equal anywhere in the world.
Peace at the end of the barrel of a gun.

Anyone who is familiar with the scenario in Colombia will know that the USA supports a government there that has consistently, for the past forty years and more, violently oppressed its people.
Paramilitary groups continue from day to day to murder, rape and torture countless Colombian civilians in all walks of life. Just the other day we listened to the frightening account of a brave Colombian woman working for the Organizacion Feminina Popular in Barrancabermeja in the Magdelena Medio. This is an important geostrategic area of Colombia rich in oil and other minerals including gold, which despite (or because of?) that has a large instance of poverty, displacement and abuse of human rights to the point where people are living in constant fear, hungry in a land of plenty where their crops and jobs are destroyed and the fruits of their lands robbed by the Imperialist thieves in order that they should have more of what they have more than enough of, MONEY. The paramilitary activities are driven by the interests of multi-national companies concerned with securing and protecting land that is useful to them for the potential profits it contains. The rights and needs of a terrorised population are not important in this case but still there are people of immense courage who resist without weapons and try to give hope to their people.
She spoke of the terrible circumstances faced by popular organisations in that area where paramilitary groups are operating freely despite (or because of?) a large official military and police presence in the zone. In the face of constant threats and violent attacks her organisation have continued in their effort to educate, encourage and nurture community solidarity and self help projects in the defence of their human rights. She told us that, although Colombia is signed up to just about every human rights and international convention of a humanitarian nature and has enshrined in its constitution statutes that declare an interest in democracy and freedom up the point that Colombia is stated as being the oldest Latin American democracy, in reality none of this is worth the paper it is written on.

In Colombia the government does not defend or protect the democratic rights of its people, it defends the claims of a rich minority that operate in the pay of the USA.
Further more, the Colombian regime accuses and persecutes anybody exercising their human right to have an opinion other than the imposed viewpoint. Those people in whatever part are labelled as guerrillas; such is the paranoid schizophrenia of those in power.
The young lady who had travelled to England to speak to us said that international support and solidarity is very important for her people. The oppressors need to know that we are watching and that we know what they are doing. We need to put them in the spotlight.

Terrorism, the new excuse:
George W Bush’s assertment that “If you’re not for us you’re against us” is the psychotic rambling of someone who is only the mirror image of the Arab terrorist he is fighting against. In simple words it takes one to know one.
The USA are at pains to point out, however, that they are not fighting a war against Islam. They are right; it is a war that has been declared against the freedom of every human being on this planet to live, express and believe what they want to. It is a war that seeks to define freedom as being a certain way of life involving the consuming of large quantities of fast food, fizzy drinks such as Coca-Cola, mind numbing television programmes and the robbing and looting of the rest of the world so that a small percentage of the population can enjoy luxury whilst millions go hungry.
The Statue of Liberties should be renamed “The Statue of taking Liberties.”

The long term likely effects for the situation in Colombia are the shifting of the definition of the war as being a war on drugs to a war on terrorism despite the fact that up till now the guerrilla armies of Colombia have not taken their war for self determination outside their country.
Obviously the definition of terrorism is an arbitrary definition depending on whether you are serving or resisting the projects and ideologies of the USA.

No lover of freedom and real democracy anywhere would pretend that the Arab Fundamentalists of the Taleban etc are anything but fanatical thugs taking advantage of the suffering of their people in order to fortify their power and sadism. However, the fact that they were created and funded by the USA in the first place reveals an uncomfortable truth and that is that many groups of extremist and violent dictators have been encouraged and created by the USA when it is politically convenient to do so (in order to fight a proxy war and/or serve their economic interests). When they later become inconvenient the USA washes its hands of its part in their crimes and like hypocrites denounce the said group as terrorists, drug traffickers, subversives’ etc. Furthermore other groups that have an impulse for social justice and protest, despite the fact they don’t use weapons of death, are also conveniently branded as part of the terrorist network of “Anti Americans.” All we can say is that the USA suffers from extreme paranoia because it is haunted by the dark shadow it has created. This is an extremely unbalanced psychology and because of the size and power it commands, a very dangerous one for all people of this Earth.
In Colombia the paramilitaries (AUC) operate with complete impunity killing anyone that they consider, in their paranoia, to be guerrilla. It is a harsh irony that although the AUC are now defined as a terrorist group by the USA, with the other hand the USA continues to feed a government and military that has known and proven links to the paramilitary. They are allowed, by the Colombian regime, to operate without prosecution or obstruction despite the fact that they are smuggling most of the drugs out of Colombia, not to mention the acts of barbarity that they commit every day against the defenceless people.
As time goes on perhaps the AUC will get out of hand and their interests will conflict with those of the USA and then they will be actively persued for their terrorism, but not before they have fulfilled their current purpose as useful tools in the implementation of USA foreign policy and the crushing of a dangerous popular rebellion that threatens the local hegemony of the Imperialist from the North.

As every US administration for as long as anyone can remember has done, the current one is quietly washing the blood from its hands before taking the platform to “defend peace and democracy.”
Many eyes of the world are not blind to this and surely in the course of time the eyes of history will not ignore the institutionalised terrorism carried out under the cover of a constant stream of propaganda or better put LIES, LIES and more LIES.

When is terrorism illegal?
When it is carried out against the US interests.
When is terrorism legal?
When it is carried out in the interests of the USA.

English Ecologists Against Plan Colombia