By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty, ( http://www.bannerofliberty.com)

October 30, 2001

Based on some of the claims being made in the last week by left wing journalists, I believe we are having more success in the war on Terrorism that the Bush administration is prepared to claim.

For example, John Pilger, former chief correspondent for the Mirror of London, announced, incredibly, that the


"The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.
Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.

He then claims that the Taliban "is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.

Really? First we are told that it was Osama Bin Laden that funded the Taliban. Then we are told that the Taliban was created by the Pakistanis who did not want a strong government next door to them. Now, we are to believe that it was the CIA and the British intelligence that funded and trained them?

Next Pilger claims, after setting his stage that the evil Americans are picking on "one of the poorest, most stricken nations," that the hypocritical Americans:

"When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal. With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan."

Now, that is merely a statement. I don't know if there is a shred of truth to it. But, if it is, it sure would reverse his first whining complaint, that the problem is that Afghanistan is "one of the poorest, most stricken nations" on earth, wouldn't it?

Or, would it? Why, do you suppose, are there so many people in these oil rich nations, run by billionaires, who are among the "poorest" people on earth in the first place? Could it possibly be that they have harshly eliminated one half their population, women, from the nation's economic base, moved their entire economy to dependency on opium poppies for the European heroin trade and gathered up most of the rest of the population, the males from ages 10-12 up to train for killing others? War is all many of the men know.

Have Americans been the source of their poverty? No. They made that choice for themselves.

Pilger ends his diatribe with:


"There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage.
Pilger is not defending the poor, as he would have you believe. He is a defending a multi-millionaire, Osama Bin Laden, who wants to destroy America - and other Western nations, including his own nation of Great Britain. This kind of report in the British press, has caused many, in the words of one British reporter, "to forget the people who died in the World Trade Center." Far more sympathy is going to the handful of civilian casualties claimed to have died in US Bombing raids on military targets than for the nearly 6000 who died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Then, of course, we also are hearing a drumbeat of demands that we halt the bombing when Ramadan begins in mid-November, even though the Afghans themselves have never halted their civil war during Ramadan.

Furthermore, in 1973, in what one report called "a rare moment of flabbiness in Israeli intelligence and in the government" Muslim neighbors attacked Israel on the holiest Jewish day, Yom Kippur, which coincided with Ramadan, the holiest religious observance of the Muslims.

After 1973, when Muslims chose, for surprise purposes, to ignore Ramadan in order to attack the Jews on Yom Kippur, their holiest day of the year, they can't reasonably expect us to take them seriously in demanding an end to bombing during the month of Ramadan.

So, what can we deduce from all this? I think it means that we are having a major impact on the terrorists headquartered in Afghanistan. We have been told, repeatedly, that there is a "plan" which has not been described to a frustrated media. However, if reporters would stop talking for awhile and listen, they might learn something.

They want carpet bombing, and what they are seeing in Afghanistan is methodical, targeted bombs dropped at what appears to be a leisurely rate. Some have even gone so far as to complain about the number of bombs dropped, compared with the number of bombs the Russians, who, of course, lost in the end, dropped.

While some U.S. planes seem to be finding, and dropping guided bombs on tanks and military convoys, other planes are dropping food to starving Afghans. Of course, as is being hysterically pointed out, we DID bomb the Red Cross warehouse three times. Accidentally? Probably not. Those supplies have been available to the Taliban. In fact, we were told, they removed the supplies, then brought them back. Why, do you suppose, did they do that? Did they have some left over anthrax to add to the bags, perchance?

If that food had been under the control of the Taliban at any point, it SHOULD be destroyed. It should be obvious by now, considering what they have done in the past to their own culture and their own people, that they are perfectly capable of poisoning food in Red Cross warehouses, and giving it to Afghans and then blaming it on the Americans.

As George W. Bush said in the beginning, there are two sides in this war. You are either for the terrorists, or you are against the terrorists. Pilger is clearly an apologist for the terrorists.

President Bush gave the Afghans three weeks time to surrender Osama Bin Laden. They refused, clearly thinking that President Bush would be as big a pushover as President Clinton. They were wrong. It is their own miscalculation about George W. Bush that is causing them to see death and destruction reigned on their heads.

What the Taliban wants is for the bombing to stop and for the Americans to come in on their turf to fight in hand-to-hand combat. Strangely, there are Western journalists who seem to be supporting this recipe for disaster.

To comment:  mmostert@bannerofliberty.com