Washington is the Source of Terror

The US government gave the slave
trade a boost by offering money for Al Qaida and Talaban
fighters. Afghan and Pakistani war lords simply rounded
up people who looked Arab or foreign and sold them to
the Americans as captured fighters. The "fighters"
apparently included relief workers, refugees, and Arab
businessmen. The tribunals looking into the
classification of Guantanamo prisoners as "enemy
combatants" have uncovered numerous examples of
hapless victims of a naive US government too flush with
money.

The Bush administration, of course,
denies that it bought its detainees, as it denies
everything. However, on May 31, 2005, Michelle Faul of
the Associated Press

reported that in March, 2002, leaflets and
broadcasts from helicopters in Afghanistan enticed
Afghans to "Hand over the Arabs and feed your
families for a lifetime." One leaflet said: "You
can receive millions of dollars. This is enough to take
care of your family, your village, your tribe for the
rest of your life, pay for livestock and doctors and
school books and housing for all your people."

Najeeb al-Nauimi, a former Qatar
justice minister leads a group of lawyers representing
100 detainees who were sold to the naive Americans. He
says a consortium of wealthy Arabs are buying back
fellow citizens kidnapped by Pakistani gangs before they
can be sold to the Americans.

More is going on here than merely
unintended consequences of a hair- brained policy. The
Bush administration has proven itself to be utterly
irresponsible in the use of power. And it keeps
demanding more power, including the suspension of our
civil liberties in order to better fight "terrorism."

Aside from September 11, an event
of several years ago, the only terrorism the US has
experienced is the terrorism Bush created by invading
Iraq. Why are we worried about Osama bin Laden when the
moronic Bush administration is so adept at creating
terrorism?

Notice the pattern. Bush creates
terrorism and then suspends our civil liberties in the
name of his war on terror.

The real terror Americans
experience comes from their own government. Indeed,
consider the terror the accounting firm,
Arthur Andersen, and its

85,000 worldwide employees experienced as a result
of the

Gestapo tactics of federal prosecutors. Prosecutors
used a stupid jury and a weak-minded judge to convict an
entire accounting firm for the actions of the few
accountants who handled the Enron account. It was
completely clear at the time that whereas a case existed
against a few individual accountants, no case existed
against the firm itself. Arbitrary and capricious
prosecutors grabbed power. The American public was so
whipped up in a frenzy over Enron that it didn`t care
whose blood was spilled. Just as someone had to pay for
September 11—even if it is our own troops and tens of
thousands of innocent Iraqis who had no more to do with
September 11 than the US troops who are losing their
lives and limbs—someone had to pay for

Enron. So the prosecutors destroyed Arthur Andersen,
one of the top ten companies in the world ranked by
market value and one of America`s greatest assets.

Now the US Supreme Court has

reversed the conviction. The highest court says

Arthur Andersen was not guilty. But how do we bring
Arthur Andersen back to life and restore the reputations
and careers of its many thousands of employees? Federal
prosecutors effectively

executed the firm and destroyed the highly valuable
asset.

Don`t expect Bush, who admits no
mistake, to make restitution for the criminal actions of
his US Department of Justice (sic). The remedy is a
civil suit by all the partners and employees of Arthur
Andersen against the US government for damages. I think
one trillion dollars is a good number. It is a figure
demanded by justice. And it will serve the cause of
peace by bankrupting the war-mongering Bush
administration and applying the brake to Bush`s wars of
empire.

Paul
Craig Roberts, a former Reagan Administration official,
is the author of

The Supply-Side Revolution and, with Lawrence M.
Stratton, of
The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice.
Click

here
for Peter Brimelow`s
Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the
recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

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