Hysteria and hypocrisy mount against "terrorism" in U.S. war

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As hysteria over the "terrorist threat" mounts in the wake of the U.S. assault on Libya, so too does the hypocrisy. The specific targets may have been Tripoli and Benghazi, but the aim of the bombing attack-which had nothing to do with curtailing "terrorism"-goes well beyond the borders of Libya.

The military strikes against Libya are designed to elevate the "terrorist threat" into a catch-all rationale that will justify the increased use of U.S. military force in Central America, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

That was the intent of the attack on Libya-not the Reagan administration's contrived and fraudulent concern for the victims of terrorist assaults.

Did anyone in the Reagan administration suggest, for example, that the United States carry out a "surgical" air strike against Paris after French agents were found guilty of exploding a bomb on the Rainbow Warrior ship in New Zealand last year? The blast killed one man and violated the sovereignty of a U.S. ally, yet the United States refused even to condemn this act of terror.

Two foreign policies This hypocritical deception is nothing new in the annals of American politics. Miles Copeland, a former chief of the CIA's Political Action Staff, recently told Rolling Stone (Jan. 16, 1986) how U.S. administrations have deceived the public time and again.

"We have a domestic foreign policy and a foreign foreign policy," Copeland explained. "The domestic foreign policy, which is the more important one, is what he [the president] has to do to make the American public think he's doing the right thing."

Lyndon Johnson understood this well. He won the presidential election in 1964 with a promise never to send American troops to Vietnam. Privately, of course, he was planning to do exactly the opposite, as the Pentagon Papers later proved. All that was needed was a pretext, and that came with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, where the United States deliberately provoked North Vietnam into firing at U.S. warships.

The official government justification for sending in ever-greater numbers of troops, once the stage was set for a massive escalation, was to defend South Vietnam from an invasion by North Vietnam. That, as Miles Copeland might say, was the domestic foreign policy at work.

But U.S. strategists were keenly aware, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (April 30, 1975) noted in its summary of the Pentagon Papers, that "aggression was something of a cover story and the real enemy was seen as popular revolution."

Once again, in 1986, the real enemy is popular revolution—particularly in Central America—-while the "terrorist threat" has become the cover story.

Some figures to dwell on White House spokesman Larry Speakes, when asked about the numerous casualties resulting from the U.S. attack on Libya, responded: "We're more concerned with the 938 persons who were killed by terrorist acts last year. Those are the figures to dwell on."

Speakes, of course, overlooks a few minor details, Some 400 people at Minneapolis Federal Bldg. on April 15 protest Libya bombing.

"SO MUCH FOR THE INTERNATIONAL NEWS -THE FACTS WILL BE ALONG LATER"

WASHINGTON / NICARAGUA D LIBYA such as the 50,000 people killed in El Salvador since 1980 by right-wing death squads and a pro-U.S. government. Or the 12,000 people killed and 200,000 people driven from their homes by the U.S-run contra war against Nicaragua.

A few other facts are also conveniently ignored. Alexander Cockburn notes in The Wall Street Journal (April 17, 1986) that 282 Israelis were killed by Palestinian violence between 1967 and 1982. Yet by comparison, the Israeli military—with U.S. backing-killed 20,000 Palestinians when it invaded Lebanon in the summer of 1982.

The White House and the big-business media were full of venom for the "fanatics" who drove a "suicide truck" into the U.S. Marine compound in Beirut in October 1983, killing 241 American servicemen. Yet where was a similar sense of outrage when 34 days earlier the battleship USS New Jersey and the nuclear-powered USS Virginia lobbed deadly shells on the Moslem residents of Beirut?

While Libya and Nicaragua face destructive aggression, the apartheid regime in South Africa earns Washington's praise and "constructive engagement." Yet, the police force in South Africa constructively engaged in killing more than 200 Black children last year and uses "frequent and widespread" torture against children as young as 10 years old, according to a study released on April 17 by the New York-based Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights.

White House spokesmen are also not inclined to target Chile in their "anti-terrorist" crusade, despite well-documented evidence of countless atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed Pinochet government. They would rather not remind the American public that thousands of people were slaughtered by the military after the CIAprovoked coup in 1973.

Remember when 54 U.S. Embassy personnel were held hostage in Iran in 1979-1980? Both Democrats and Republicans scrambled to outdo each other in denouncing Iran. Yet where were the protests when the people of Iran were suffering under the regime of the shah, which Amnesty International cited as having the "worst human rights record of any country in the world?" Needless to say, the shah's decades-long terror was made possible not only by American money, but by "advice" of the most gruesome kind.

The chief CIA analyst on Iran from 1968 to 1973, Jesse Leaf, admitted that a senior CIA official instructed the shah's secret police, SAVAK, in torture techniques based on Nazi methods used in World War II. Yet the shah remained an ally of the United States to the very end, lauded by President Carter as his regime crumbled in the face of a nationwide rebellion.

The "anti-terrorists" in Washington are also not likely to refer to the CIA's Phoenix program, which led to the assassination of an estimated 25,000 people in Vietnam from 1968 to 1971, as Congressional hearings on William Colby's confirmation as CIA chief revealed in 1974. Today, in fact, the administration openly acknowledges that it hopes to put a Phoenix-type program into operation in El Salvador.

Even more, wasn't the U.S. war in Vietnam terrorism on a national scale? Consider the results: Over one million Vietnamese dead, 50,000 U.S. soldiers dead, a countryside destroyed by saturation bombing.

To go a step further, aren't the 30,000 U.S. nuclear warheads the ultimate terrorist threat to the world's survival—a threat intensified by the U.S. refusal to disavow the policy of a first strike?

Some commentators in the American media like to explain acts of terrorism by Palestinians and others with statements to the effect that "they don't value human life the way we do" and other equally self-serving justifications of U.S policy. Strategists in the Pentagon and CIA, however, know better.

Straight from horse's mouth Former CIA agent Miles Copeland, who is critical of the agency because it "isn't overthrowing enough anti-American governments or assassinating enough anti-American leaders, " had this to say about the causes of terrorism in his interview with Rolling Stone.

"The Israelis went in to Lebanon and killed tens of thousands of people. They say, "That's exaggerating, we didn't kill but 5000 people.' Okay, let's say they killed only 2000 people, which is a very modest estimate, but they destroyed Lebanon...We, the United States, gave a billion dollars to the Israelis. One billion because it costs a lot of money to destroy someone else's country.

"These guys [Palestinians] are terrorists...because their orange groves have been destroyed and they've got nothing to do. They can't even get to their farms because the Israelis have declared them out of bounds and destroyed a lot of them.

"In fact, I'll tell you quite frankly, if people came into Alabama, my home state, and destroyed my farms and kicked me around and kicked my children around, I'm going to become a terrorist, just as the French became terrorists under the Germans in World War II. It's understandable.

"I've known this one family for the past 40 years. The guy has polio, he's crippled. He has some teenage kids who are nice kids, nice family. The Israelis showed up at six o'clock in the evening and said: 'Everybody out! Everybody out!' They all got out, and the Israelis razed his house. He says: 'I haven't done a damn thing! I'm just looking after my orange groves!' They said, 'You had a terrorist in your house six months ago. First place, he said he hadn't, and I believe he was telling the truth. But the Israelis had no good reason to believe he wasn't—no name, no information at all.

"Now this is information that our embassy reported This is official, not something I heard from the PLO information office. Now those two teenage kids stood there and watched their family being destroyed and their mother kicked downstairs when she refused to leave the house.

"Can you imagine their not becoming terrorists? They don't have an air force or artillery. I had a Shiite ask me: You say we shouldn't use terrorism. What should we use?' Well, you shouldn't use anything, we might say. You should make peace with Israel. 'Make peace with Israel? They've just destroyed my land! I have nothing! My house is flattened! The whole village is destroyed!' This isn't just the Shi'ites talking. Our own embassy says this."

It is those who destroy orange groves and raze houses who inspire acts of individual terrorism. It is those who cite "national interest" to justify assassinations, coups, invasions, covert operations, and air raids who fuel desperate acts of terror.

It is those who define the "free world" to include every brutal dictator and military government that gives free rein to foreign investors to siphon off the wealth of underdeveloped nations-this is what motivates terrorism by oppressed people.

Still, individual terrorism as a strategy to fight injustice is not only misguided, it is counterproductive. That is why the Reagan administration has grabbed onto this issue to justify and win support for its own brand of state-sponsored terrorism.

The way to put an end to the most insidious form of terrorism threatening the world-the kind fortified by a "defense" budget exceeding $300 billion—is to mobilize the power of millions of working people against the system of injustice and exploitation promoted by the state terrorists in Washington and Tel Aviv. SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1986

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