 |
| U.S.
“shoot and bomb first, and find out later” policy caused the
death of 5,000 civilians in Afghanistan and 500,000 children in
Iraq
|
LONDON,
July 4 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Prominent British-based
journalist John Pilger took a front-page swipe at Washington Thursday,
July 4, saying that the U.S. is a “rogue state” and charging that
its bombs have claimed more Afghan civilian lives than those lost in
the World Trade Center.
Britain’s
mass-selling Daily Mirror headlined Pilger’s article “Mourn on the
Fourth of July”, in which he accused U.S. President George W. Bush
of undermining international law by his policy of “shoot and bomb
first, and find out later” in Afghanistan.
Pilger,
an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, wrote that the
“systematic murderous way the U.S. military has operated in
Afghanistan… now qualifies it as the world’s leading rogue
state.”
Pilger
quoted a study by the University of New Hampshire in the U.S. saying
that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by American bombs between
October 7 and December 10, an average of 62 a day, Agence
France-Presse (AFP) said.
This
was now estimated to have passed 5,000 civilian deaths, Pilger said,
“almost double” the number who died on September 11.
More
than 2,800 people were killed when the World Trade Center’s twin
towers in New York collapsed after each was hit by separate hijacked
passenger planes, AFP reported.
Pilger
also questioned Washington’s true motive behind its military
interventions in Afghanistan.
“Potential
vast energy resources in Central Asia have become critical for the
deeply troubled U.S. economy, and for the Bush administration, which
is dominated by oil industry interests, notably the Bush family
itself,” he wrote.
“If
there was a map of American military bases established in the region
... what would be immediately striking is that it would follow almost
exactly the route of a projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.”
Pilger
also dismissed the role of Royal Marines from Britain, America’s
closest ally in its war on terrorism, as “a farcical operation as
mercenaries of the United States.”
“There
is no evidence that a single leader of Al-Qaeda (the organization led
by chief suspect Osama bin Laden) has been captured or, to anyone’s
knowledge, killed,” Pilger said of the military campaign.
As
joint U.S. and Afghan team arrived in an Afghan village Wednesday,
July 3, to probe a deadly air raid which Afghan officials say killed
40 civilians during a wedding Monday, July 1, Pilger said the deaths
were a result of the U.S. “shoot first” policy.
Pilger
is a prolific writer, and was among the first journalists to expose
the horrors of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, and point the
finger at Pol Pot’s western backers, AFP said.
His
work on the fate of East Timor after it was annexed by Indonesia also
shook his native Australia.
A
relentless campaigner who has sought to highlight aspects of western
foreign policy that most people would prefer not to hear, he has also
recently turned his attention to the deaths of ordinary Iraqi’s
caused by crippling international sanctions.
 |
| A
map of
U.S.
military bases established
in the region follow almost exactly the route of a projected
oil pipeline to the
Indian Ocean
: Pilger
|
After
the September 11 attacks, Pilger was quick to juxtapose the terror of
ordinary Americans with the daily toll on civilians in Iraq, western
arms sales to repressive regimes, the CIA’s covert funding of
fundamentalists within the Afghan mujahedin, and the planet's
unbalanced distribution of wealth, AFP said.
Two
days after the attacks, he wrote that they were “almost
inevitable”, and lamented what he described as a mass media that has
totally failed to question Washington’s “War on Terror”.
Hundreds,
possibly thousands, of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded
since the U.S. began air raids against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime
last October, according to Afghan sources and humanitarian agencies.
The
United States has acknowledged that a number of bombs have gone
“astray” but has not provided any figures for civilian casualties.
Independent
confirmation of reports of civilian deaths by the Pakistan-based
Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) news agency has been generally unavailable.
