It has been a long time since Watchdog has run articles about Intelligence or military matters. The events of the past six months and the current "war on terror", which counts New Zealand as an enthusiastic participant, has changed all that. CAFCA grew out of the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 70s, so we are quite happily returning to our roots.

We have tended to leave such matters to our sister organisation, the Anti-Bases Campaign (for whom Murray Horton also works as its Organiser and co-editor of its newsletter, Peace Researcher.). We believe that the below article, which was published in Peace Researcher 24, December 2001, deserves a wider audience.

As does Peace Researcher itself. If you would like to subscribe (and thus also join the Anti-Bases Campaign), send $20 to Peace Researcher, Box 2258, Christchurch. If you live in Australia it costs $NZ25; if you live elsewhere overseas it costs $NZ30. Make cheques to Peace Researcher. We are not registered for GST.

This is our first opportunity to comment on the dreadful atrocities of September 11, so let’s make it clear from the outset that the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) abhors acts of mass murder such as occurred in New York and Washington DC (as does CAFCA. Ed.). Terrorism against civilians using weapons of mass destruction is abominable, whether it be the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the use of commercial airliners (and their illfated passengers) as flying bombs on American cities (to put things into perspective, the World Trade Center explosions were estimated to have had 2% of the force of the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bomb. But, on the other hand, this one incident killed more people than have died in the whole 30+ years of the current Northern Irish "Troubles"). Not only is terrorism abhorrent, but from the political point of view of the global progressive movement, it is counter-productive – as has been amply borne out by everything that has happened since.

Having made that clear, we need to equally state that we oppose utterly the response to those atrocities. Undeniably, these attacks delivered a profound psychological, as well as physical, blow to the US (not to mention global capitalism, whose physical headquarters is downtown Manhattan). The Bush Administration has milked it for all it’s worth (and it’s noticeable that all the post-attack propaganda has been focused on the New York attack. It’s rather harder to sell the line of "innocent civilians" when the target is the Pentagon, the very nerve centre of the American military empire). Bush, only a few months after effectively stealing the 2000 Presidential election and deeply dividing the American people, has seen this as a godsend. Ever since taking office he had been disengaging from the world and aggressively practising a policy of unilateralism, exploiting the United States’ position as the world’s only superpower.

For instance, he has scrapped the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union and continues to push for the construction of the bizarre Star Wars missile defence system. In December 2001, Bush gave the necessary six months formal notice for the US to withdraw from the Treaty (he reckons Star Wars is necessary to protect the US from "rogue States". It would have been completely useless against hijackers using US commercial flights as missiles. And although he proclaimed as a success the 2001 test of the ability to use a US missile to intercept and destroy an incoming enemy missile, it later emerged that the incoming missile was fitted with a location device, so that it could be found. "Rogue" missiles are unlikely to be so helpful).

September 11 presented the opportunity to reinvent a desperately needed global enemy (which had been missing since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a decade earlier). Thus an obscure group of Islamic terrorists and the States that allegedly back them were hastily elevated to the status that world Communism had occupied in the earlier Reagan and Bush 1 Administrations. The present Administration is full of retreads from Reagan and Bush 1 – men such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armitage, Perle, Powell. These guys need an enemy figure – Osama bin Laden became the Saddam Hussein of 2001 (although good old goddam Saddam is still there, a useful irritant to remind them of the "unfinished business of 1991").

Post-September 11, attention swung rapidly to Afghanistan and its grotesquely obscurantist Taliban regime. Fundamentalists and fanatics are the logical end product of war and superpower meddling. Exactly the same thing had happened in Cambodia in the 1970s, spawning the genocidal Khmer Rouge as a response to the years of American bombing, invasion and meddling, all as a by-product of the wars next door, in Vietnam and Laos. The Taliban are the same holy warriors hailed as heroes by the Reaganauts when they successfully fought the invading Russians in the 1980s. They were trained, armed and financed by the US Central Intelligence Agency and its Pakistani proxies. Men such as bin Laden are the children of the Cold War, which became a hot one in Afghanistan. The Taliban are the very same men (and they are all men, very deliberately) hailed as heroes for restoring order in 1996, when they chucked out the same warlords and opium dealers now restored to their fiefdoms by the current American war. So one bunch of cutthroat murderous misogynists and fanatical theocrats has been replaced by another collection of exactly the same hue.

One could be forgiven for thinking, after being bombarded by the uncritical propaganda being dropped on us like daisy cutter bombs from B52s, that the US had gone into Afghanistan to liberate its long suffering (and literally invisible) women from oppression, to give one example. Nonsense – for the several years the Taliban was in power, the US had no problems with it. It was seen as instrumental in eradicating opium growing (the source of the global heroin scourge) and was cultivated as being a likely protector of a proposed Central Asian oil pipeline, which is being promoted as a safer and more profitable alternative to pipelines running through Iran or the unstable former Soviet republics. It was a regime with which the US could do business, and more importantly it promoted stability on one of the wilder edges of empire, always an important consideration when you’ve got an empire to run.

If the US had objections to murderous, misogynistic feudal dictatorships run by corrupt princes and reactionary mullahs then it would have long ago done something about its staunchest ally in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia. Instead, it has devoted countless billions and its entire military might to protecting that most revolting of regimes, the biggest supplier of America’s oil. Never forget that bin Laden comes from a fabulously rich Saudi family; the majority of the September 11 suicide hijackers were Saudis – not one was an Afghan. In the words of the old saying, the Taliban et al. may have been "sons of bitches but they’re our sons of bitches". But the Taliban outlived its usefulness to the US when it became "out of control" and offered an operational base to bin Laden, who had taken to gnawing on the hand that had fed him. He, in turn, overplayed his hand by punching the Emperor right on the nose (and in broad daylight too). It was inevitable that the US, given its entire 20^th Century history as a lumbering military behemoth (it reminds me of the mountain troll in the "Harry Potter" movie) would go to war, motivated by hysteria bred of a mixture of fear, panic and the desire for revenge. Plus the Bush Administration, full of the most reptilian specimens of the most reactionary tendencies in American society, seized on this as a perfect excuse to mount a war with neither end nor borders, under the pretext of rooting out bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. If that isn’t enough, there is talk of "unfinished business", involving States from North Korea to Iraq. All the American humiliations of the past decades – such as the ignominious exit from Somalia in the early 1990s, after a warlord’s ragtag militia humbled the much vaunted US Special Forces – might now be avenged.

Never mind that there are other, non-violent ways of rooting out terrorists and criminals. Several years of global pressure on Libya led to Colonel Gaddafi (who once occupied the top spot in American demonology, now supplanted by Saddam and bin Laden) surrendering the two men wanted for the 1988 terrorist bombing of the US passenger airliner over Lockerbie (Scotland). They were tried in a special Scottish court convened in Holland; one was convicted and is serving a life sentence (whether these men or Libya per se had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing is a whole other issue). To give another example, Slobodan Milosevic, erstwhile leader of what’s left of Yugoslavia, was arrested by his own people and turned over to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to face trial for genocide and other grave charges. Ironically, it is the US which has fought tooth and nail against the creation of a permanent international war crimes court, because it won’t countenance any of its own standing in the dock. When you’re the Emperor and only your side of the story is being told, everybody else are the war criminals. Never you.

It’s worth noting, in passing, that New Zealand has recent experience of international State terrorism – namely the fatal bombing of the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" in Auckland Harbour, in 1985, by French Intelligence agents. That case was solved and dealt with by routine NZ Police work (no Cruise missiles or B52s were needed) and international negotiation. There was a conspicuous silence from the "anti-terrorist" Reagan and Thatcher governments when nuclear free New Zealand was the victim of State terrorism from a major "friendly" Power.

And what about little old New Zealand, the smallest but traditionally most eager of all the minor satraps of whatever Empire was in the ascendancy? Well we might have a "Centre Left" Labour/Alliance government, but our Cabinet, full of anti-war protestors from the 1960s and 70s, fell over themselves to follow the US to war. Before the smoke had even begun to clear from the twin towers and the Pentagon, our Prime Minister, Helen Clark, was one of the first world leaders to make a military commitment. The same Government that has scrapped the hapless Air Force combat wing (mothballing the Skyhawks) and committed a large chunk of the Army to commendable United Nations peacekeeping duties in East Timor, committed NZ to sending over our SAS and increased Intelligence cooperation with the US. Plus there has been the unseemly haste to bring in the war hysteria-induced Terrorism Suppression Bill (read the ABC’s submission on it at the "Submissions" page, www.converge.org.nz/abc. Ed.). Everything the SAS does is shrouded in mystery, which seems to be a wise move on its part – revelations about it from ex-members show it to be a bunch of blokes with a propensity for alcohol abuse and a penchant for killing, whose post-military job prospects are basically confined to working as mercenaries or glorified bouncers. So we’re never likely to know what, if anything, the NZ SAS contributed to the war in Afghanistan (or any of the other targets of the US "war on terror"). For all we know they might have gone on an extended pub crawl. Matt Robson, Associate Minister of Foreign Affairs, publicly complained that he learned nothing from the Government of the SAS’ activities, but only from his nephew, who is in the regiment.

The Intelligence angle is far more significant. In the early days after September 11 Clark stressed repeatedly how vindicated she felt that she champions NZ Intelligence ties with the US and how this proves wrong the critics (such as the ABC) of such ties. Quite the contrary – this war proves, yet again, how right we are to denounce those ties, principally in the shape of the Waihopai spybase, as just making us minor accomplices in whatever policies and wars the US might require us for. The whole Echelon "keywords" communications interception programme, of which Waihopai is but one part, completely failed to detect or prevent September 11. Yet we are being asked to pour yet more money and resources into this spectacularly unsuccessful system. Waihopai and its sister spybases around the world are part of the problem, not the solution.

Nor are the "New Zealand" spybases (which are actually American bases in everything but name, run by New Zealand sub-contractors) our only "Homeland" contribution to America’s latest war. To quote from the ABC leaflet distributed at the December 2001 anti-war protest at the US military base at Christchurch Airport:

"The American war in Afghanistan is no further away than Christchurch Airport (Harewood). How come? Because the US maintains a military base there and has done so for nearly 50 years. It’s not a nuclear base or a combat base, but it is a military base nonetheless. It’s one of a chain of US military bases right around the Asia/Pacific region. Harewood is a medium level multi-purpose military transport base. All year round it is a vital cog in the machine that services the massive US spybases in Australia, specifically the key one of Pine Gap (near Alice Springs), which has been described as the ‘Intelligence vacuum cleaner of the skies’.

"Pine Gap has played a major role in every recent US war you can name. When Ronald Reagan tried to kill Libya’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, in 1986, Pine Gap provided the targeting information to the US warplanes. Pine Gap was heavily involved in the Gulf War and the various 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. It will be playing its usual role in the current war in Afghanistan..."

Not that this war and New Zealand’s collaboration in it has gone unopposed amongst New Zealanders. There has been a small but growing anti-war movement since the outset, but you wouldn’t know that from the mainstream media. And within the ruling parties, all is not well. The Alliance national conference nearly tore the party apart over the issue, with the Ministers and MPs, led by Deputy Prime Minister, Jim Anderton, defending the war and the rank and file, led by Party President, Matt McCarten, attacking the Parliamentary caucus and demanding that the SAS be withdrawn. The caucus eventually agreed to conduct a fairly meaningless review of NZ’s role in the war, fully intending to change nothing. This did not mollify the grassroots (some of whom resigned from the Party).Indeed it has played a major role in the turmoil that is gripping the Alliance as we go to print. Ed. Labour’s national conference was a much more sanitised and stage managed affair. There was one very public dissenter – Nick Kelly, who had already been sacked as Chair of the Rimutaka Electorate Committee for publicly excoriating Labour’s pro-free trade policies. As Kelly stated in his own press release (3/12/01):

"Helen Clark and any other Labour MP that supports this so-called war on terrorism should resign from Parliament, as they do not represent the people who elected Labour to government. At this weekend's National conference of the New Zealand Labour Party, our Government's support for the American bombing of Afghanistan wasn't even on the agenda for debate. Believing this to be totally unacceptable I decided to stand up and say a few home truths during Helen Clark's main conference speech. I stood up and said ‘What about the bloody war? Stop the War! In 1999 you (Helen Clark) opposed the bombing of Kosovo. Why aren't you doing the same now? It is unacceptable to support murder in Afghanistan to get a free trade deal with America’. I was then grabbed by Party President Mike Williams, Engineers union official Paul Tolich and a few other party hacks and was handed to a security guard. This guard who nearly broke my arm dragged me out the hall and handed me over to a dozen police officers, who served me with a trespass notice, supported by a Labour Party official who took away my delegate card…". So much for democracy in the Labour Party.

We’re at the start of a long and daunting journey, as the world’s sole remaining superpower goes into full blown war mode (which is always the logical outcome of empire). New Zealand is only a bit player in all of this but we’re fond of punching above our weight. The best thing we could do in this so-called war is to take off our gloves and get out of the ring.