Partners
In Crime
By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
03 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Indeed,
there is honor among thieves. Given that the US under President Eisenhower
delivered a coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadeq
to appease the British, the British have since been eager to fulfill
their obligations towards the Americans. Every theft has been mutually
beneficial, although the prize has never been equally divided. The motives
behind the decisions have never been openly discussed and democratically
concluded; thievery and murder requires discretion, especially in democracies,
it would seem.
No doubt most of us have
fresh memories of the famous ‘dossier’, the 284 page intelligence
report by the Blair government that nailed the coffin of almost one
million Iraqis and over 3000 American servicemen and women; the foreword
delivered by Tony Blair warning us that Saddam Hossein had the ability
and the intention to launch WMD in 45 minutes lent support to our government’s
campaign of misinformation in order to invade sovereign Iraq. The pool
of blood from the ongoing death toll must drowned the shameful discovery
that Blair had plagiarized several scholarly papers to make up the false
allegations in order for the partners to take us to war .
It is not the first time
that the two conspirators worked together to cause ruin and steal a
nation.
The Island of Diego Garcia
discovered in the 1500s by the Portugese was a territory of Mauritius
between 1814 and 1965, at which point it became part of part of the
Chagos Archipelago, part of the newly created British Indian Ocean Territory.
In 1970, the British leased the Island to the Americans. The Americans
had asked the British for one of their colonies for a military base.
Britain obliged. In 1967 through 1973, the native inhabitants, known
as the Ilois, or the Chagossians, were forced to leave the island. .
Uprooted and robbed of their livelihood, the Chagossians now live in
poverty in Mauritius’s urban slums, more than 1,000 miles from
their homeland. A smaller number were deported to the Seychelles. All
but the seagulls were left on the island. It is of note that Mr. Cheney’s
company, Halliburton, built the base. Later, the campaign of ‘shock
and awe’ against Iraq was carried out from the stolen nation of
Diego Garcia.
It is equally noteworthy
that during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, while Fox News and other
such media ‘established’ that Saddam Hossein was developing
chemical weapons by showing videos of dogs being injected with chemicals
for the purpose of experimentation and development of chemical weapons,
molding the public opinion for the invasion of Iraq, our own crimes
have always been kept hidden from the public. After the natives of Diego
Garcia Island were expelled from their homes, "officials ordered
their pets to be exterminated. They were gassed with exhaust fumes from
American military vehicles”
Today, the British are once
again facilitating invasion, war, and mass murder.
Britain has sent fifteen
marines into Iranian waters to provoke a reaction from Iran. While it
is rumored in many quarters that this is setting up a ‘Gulf of
Tonkin-style pretext for war’, undoubtedly the British cannot
claim that the sailors were in Iraqi waters as the Shatt-el-Arab waterway
is not clearly identifiable and one has to question how the British
have come up with a maritime boundary.
While internally Iran has
its problems, the threat to the outside world is its lack of good public
relations. It does not have the knowledge, the power, the will, or the
economic strength of the United States to hire Charlotte Beers who was
appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
in October 2001. Beers’ job was to rebrand Osama bin Laden as
a mass murderer to millions of Muslims and win over sympathy. Likewise,
they do not have Turkey’s ‘in’ who in 1985 engaged
Gray & Company at $600,000 a year; a prominent Washington public
relations company with close ties to the Reagan administration to give
Turkey an image make-over. Iran’s poor PR is exacerbated by its
own actions, compounded by the mainstream media. While the display of
the captured sailors is not serving Iran’s national interest,
especially by putting a headscarf on the female sailor – something
not tolerated by the majority of women in Iran, it should by no means
be a distraction of who the real guilty party is. Threat of inciting
war in order to commit mass murder is far graver than that of foolhardiness.
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