Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

U.S. Britain Harbor Chechen Terrorists

Russia accuses West of double standards

Excerpt:

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 03, 2004 01:28:43 AM ]
NEW DELHI: Russia on Thursday accused the West of adopting double standards in fighting international terrorism and said collective effort was needed to erase the menace from the globe.

“Terrorism is affecting all parts of the world. We hope the international community, particularly the US and western Europe, understands that it has to be fought jointly shunning double standards,” Nikolay Kudashev, first secretary in the mission, told reporters here.

Elaborating on “double standards”, he said the US and Britain were talking about combating terrorism, but two prominent Chechen terrorists were “living comfortably” in these countries and the hosts were not extraditing them.

The official, however, noted that US President George W Bush had called up his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin yesterday to condemn the hold up at the Russian school.

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U.S. Asylum for Chechen Draws Protest From Russia

August 6, 2004

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — The Russian government will protest a U.S. decision to grant asylum to an exiled Chechen leader considered a terrorist by the Russian government, an embassy source said Thursday.

Ilyas Akhmadov, the foreign minister of the exiled leadership of the separatist Russian republic, received asylum Monday after the Department of Homeland Security lifted an appeal filed this year, Akhmadov said in an interview.

"I am very happy this is over and I want to stay here and do what I can to work towards a political resolution to the conflict in Chechnya," Akhmadov said.

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Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.

'In the war against terrorism,' said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.'

Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.

There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush. In his book Rogue State , former senior State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial of three anti-Castro terrorists, who hijacked a plane to Miami at knifepoint. 'Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to testify against the men,' he wrote, 'the defence simply told the jurors the man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting the defendants.'

General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States.

Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism.

In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.


This is a revised extract from The New Rulers of the World , by John Pilger,