LONDON, July 4: Prominent British-based journalist John Pilger took a front-page swipe at Washington on Thursday, labelling the US a “rogue state” and charging that its bombs have claimed more Afghan civilian lives than those lost in the Sept 11 attacks.

As Americans celebrated their Independence Day under huge security and in fear of fresh attacks, Britain’s mass-selling left-of-centre Daily Mirror headlined Pilger’s article “Mourn on the Fourth of July”.

Pilger, an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, accused US President George W. Bush of undermining international law by his policy of “shoot and bomb first, and find out later” in Afghanistan.

The United States “now qualifies it as the world’s leading rogue state” given the “systematic murderous way the US military has operated in Afghanistan”, he wrote.

Pilger quoted a study by the University of New Hampshire in the US saying that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by American bombs between Oct 7 and Dec 10, an average of 62 a day.

This was now estimated to have passed 5,000 civilian deaths, Pilger said, “almost double” the number who died on Sept 11.

Then, 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.

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 US 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 has been captured or, to anyone’s knowledge, killed,” Pilger said of the military campaign.

As a joint US and Afghan team arrived in an Afghan village on Wednesday to probe a deadly air raid which killed 40 people last week, Pilger said the deaths were a result of the US “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.

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.

After the Sept 11 attacks, Pilger was quick to juxtopose 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 extremists within the Afghan Mujahideen, and the planet’s unbalanced distribution of wealth.

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 US began air raids against Al Qaeda and the Taliban 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.—AFP