[Peace-discuss] News notes, 12/9 (Part 2 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

NOTES ON THE WEEK'S NEWS, FOR AWARE MEETING, 12/9 (Part 2 of 2)

[NB: This week's notes are organized chronologically, day by day.  Each
note is followed by an indication of its source.  At the end of the notes
is an article on how assumptions about a liberal/conservative division
don't apply to the anti-war movement.]

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 08, 2001

The executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund says that the
organization is striving to provide the basics of food and water to ensure
the survival of an estimated 1.5 million children in Afghanistan who are
at the greatest risk. "The basics are the primary issue," said Carol
Bellamy, Unicef's executive director, who stopped in Geneva on Friday on
her way from a trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan to assess the needs of the
estimated 10 million children in the country. The neediest are 1.5 million
children under 5 years old, of which 150,000 are considered seriously
malnourished, she said. [NY TIMES]

The talk on Thursday of an accord in Kandahar means little to Rukia. She
has given up on peace in Afghanistan. She has five reasons, one for each
of her dead children. Rukia, 39, who like many Afghans uses only one name,
lost her family five days ago when she says a United States bomb hit her
Kandahar neighbourhood. Wounded in the stomach and with her left arm
shattered, she had to flee before she could bury her children. "They're
bombing anything that moves," she said. "It's not true that they bomb
civilians by accident. They're targeting the innocent people instead of
Osama bin Laden" ... Earlier this week three US servicemen died and 20
were injured near Kandahar when a "smart" bomb from a B-52 went awry. Six
allied Afghan fighters also were killed and 17 injured. The international
aid agency Médicins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) said on
Wednesday that its workers picked up more than 80 dead in villages of
eastern Afghanistan, near Jalalabad, heavily bombed by US planes ... What
is clear in the Sandeman Provincial Hospital in Quetta, near the Afghan
border, are the raw emotions and anger directed at the US. Rukia covered
her face and started to cry when asked what she wanted to tell the
Americans about the loss of her five children. She thought a while before
responding: "Destroy, finish, terminate America." "It is our wish - the
elders, the women, the children - to have peace, but it is impossible.
First we had the war with Russia, then the Taliban came and now the United
States attacking us again and again," she said. Rukia shares a hospital
room with a 10-year-old girl who lost half her leg in a US bombing attack.
In another room, another Kandahar victim, Abdul Qadir, 33, writhes in pain
with stomach wounds from bomb shrapnel. "I'm very angry against America,"
said his brother, Rahmat Ullah, 28. "What was his fault? He was an
innocent man working in his shop." [SYDNEY MORNING HERALD]

The hunt for Osama bin Laden has come down to this: two men in two caves
half a world apart, conducting the first subterranean war of the 21st
century. One commands the most advanced weapons and technology on Earth.
The other, little more than the ancient tools of the hunted--stealth and
cover. As US military operations focus on the Taliban's mountainous
redoubts near Tora Bora in northeastern Afghanistan, Vice President Dick
Cheney is presiding over the hunt for Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda
lieutenants from a secret command center drilled hundreds of feet down
into the super-hard granite of a mountain on the East Coast. A honeycomb
of chambers with room for 3,000 workers, it has its own power generators,
air conditioning and water purification systems. Shielded by steel blast
doors and concrete reinforcements, Cheney's bunker was built to withstand
a direct hit by an atomic bomb. There, the vice president and his aides
receive all dispatches from US military commands and intelligence agencies
worldwide. At their fingertips is a communications system with global
reach, plus computers designed to replicate crucial Defense Department
databases and files. Indeed, as a hauntingly prescient test demonstrated
in a mock war last April, the command and control facility is capable of
serving as backup if the entire Pentagon goes down. More than 7,000 miles
away, as autumn snows settle onto Afghanistan's White Mountains, Bin Laden
and the surviving members of his inner circle are believed to have taken
refuge in a far more austere underground retreat. "He's got what he
believes to be a fairly secure facility," Cheney said of Bin Laden's cave
network. "Believes to be" has turned out to be the operational phrase.
According to administration and military sources closely involved in
operations around Tora Bora, Afghanistan's vaunted caves and secret
tunnels are turning out to be surprisingly vulnerable to air attack.
Located about 45 miles south of Jalalabad along the rugged Afghan border
with Pakistan, the vast network of natural and man-made tunnels and
caverns are often portrayed as impenetrable. That turns out not to be
true, at least not against modern-day warfare. Moreover, with the Taliban
a shambles elsewhere, the focus of US military efforts--which have put
considerable emphasis on the caves for some time--has become more and more
intense. And every day, the United States works with more and better
intelligence information. Afghanistan's rugged terrain and cave networks
have long been a focus of military attention. A US Army specialist on the
moujahedeen campaign against Soviet occupiers in the 1980s described the
famous Zhawar Kili al Badr base built into Sodyaki Ghar mountain. Eleven
huge tunnels were carved 1,600 feet into the earth. Zhawar contained "a
hotel, a mosque, arms depots and repair shops, a garage, a medical point,
a radio center and a kitchen," the Army analyst reported. In other words,
facilities like those around Tora Bora are well known to the CIA. From the
very beginning of the war, "we have had an active campaign underway to
take out some of these underground facilities," Cheney said recently. That
was only partially true in the earlier stages of the war. Initially, Tora
Bora and similar complexes had to compete with other targets for the
attention of US war planners. Between Sept. 11 and the initiation of
Operation Enduring Freedom, for instance, there were numerous intelligence
sightings of Bin Laden in Kandahar, then the Taliban's stronghold. As the
bombing accelerated, however, and the war progressed, the situation
changed. Afghanistan is the size of Texas. But the rapid erosion of
Taliban control of the countryside meant that the amount of enemy
territory US intelligence agencies had to watch began to shrink. US
reconnaissance, led by Predator and Global Hawk drone aircraft that are
capable of flying missions more than 30 hours long, allowed almost
constant "staring" coverage of ever more limited terrain. Meantime, the
Taliban's retreat made it easier for special operations units on the
ground to get closer to the mountains and valleys near suspected cave
systems. Working with laptop computers and radio relays, these units could
pass higher-quality targeting data directly to command centers in Saudi
Arabia and Florida. Most crucially, as Afghanistan imploded, the "take" in
human intelligence--information gathered from village residents, refugees,
deserters and prisoners--exploded. "We have worked through all of the
intelligence capabilities that we and our coalition partners have," said
Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the operation, in describing the process
of focusing on the caves. "We have been able to watch a variety of terrain
and undertake review of a whole variety of imagery and talk to an awful
lot of people." Franks' prosaic words belie the drama and danger of the
missions behind them. As the knowledge base has expanded, attacks on the
underground facilities have unfolded in a way that might surprise military
experts and others who have portrayed the caves as impregnable fortresses
that only ground troops could breach. Though the systems are vast in
scope, knowledgeable sources stress that Afghan caves--unlike Cheney's
command center--are individually quite vulnerable. They are carved out of
porous limestone. They are not reinforced. They have poor ventilation and
little fire-control equipment. In fact, the notion that only the heaviest
of "bunker busting" weapons could be effective is completely at odds with
the actual task at hand, sources say. Just a handful of deep-digging,
5,000-pound, earth-penetrating weapons have been expended in the past
eight weeks. As US aircraft began to hit Tora Bora around the 10th day of
bombing, damage assessors watched 2,000-pound bombs with delayed fuses
penetrate deep down into the mountain, causing caves to collapse and
deadly fires to break out. Some 400 satellite-guided, 2,000-pound bombs
with hardened casings have been expended in this task, but even
traditional "dumb" bombs have proved useful in attacking cave entrances.
"This is not going after some sort of Saddam Hussein buried-concrete steel
bunker," said a military officer. These White Mountains are not
Appalachian granite. This is not to say that the task of bringing justice
to Bin Laden is just a matter of time. Even in a conflict that pits the
Space Age against the Stone Age, there is no guarantee of success. Indeed,
many war fighters say privately that, as good as US weapons are, it will
take what they call "the golden BB" to hit Bin Laden--the military
equivalent of a kid getting lucky with his air rifle. The first difficulty
is assessing what detonations inside mountains have accomplished in terms
of ultimate American goals. Reports this week of the death of some 10 Al
Qaeda lieutenants in cave bombings illustrate the problem: Reports filter
out from local warlords and commanders but cannot always be confirmed by
US intelligence. For all its eyes in the sky, the United States cannot
always tell whether it has been successful. Given this uncertainty about
individual outcomes, US targeters and planners systematically move down
their lists, attacking complex after complex. At the same time, they try
to play games inside the head of Al Qaeda--"Chinese water torture"-style,
as one officer put it. "They never know when we're going to figure it
out." Still, not all the advantages go to the attackers. Cheney and other
US officials may have reinforced bunkers filled with state-of-the-art
computer systems, secure video-teleconferences and bandwidth enough to
make an Internet junkie drool, but they also don't know everything in the
fight against a pre-21st century opponent. "We might have been pretty
successful so far," says one source, "but who knows?" Given the number of
potential hiding places, and the difficulty bomb damage assessment
specialists have in determining just who or what was destroyed, pressure
increases almost daily from inside and outside the Pentagon for US special
operations forces and British SAS Sabre commandos to get in there and
finish the job. [LA TIMES]

Weapons convoys from Pakistan were still entering Afghanistan unhindered
in October, a month after that country agreed to stop aiding the Taliban.
The NYT fingers Pakistan's spy agency, which has a large pro-Taliban
faction. The most vocal critic in the story is former Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto, who believes that Pakistan's spies conspired to topple her
regime. [NY TIMES]

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2001

Cheney announces that a video shows bin Laden Guilt. Osama bin Laden says
in a videotape he was pleasantly surprised by the extent of damage from
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, US officials disclosed Sunday. The tape
also suggests that some hijackers did not know they were going to die.
Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed the tape's existence, and officials
who spoke on condition of anonymity described the contents. It was
obtained by Americans in Afghanistan, though the officials declined to say
how.  Cheney said it provides clear proof the leader of the al-Qaida
network was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that
killed about 3,300 people."  He does in fact display significant knowledge
of what happened and there's no doubt about his responsibility for the
attack on September 11," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press." The tape
shows bin Laden being interviewed or meeting with a cleric. He speaks in
Arabic and discusses the terrorist attacks, according to Cheney, who said
he had seen parts of the tape.  Bin Laden appeared relaxed on the tape,
Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, said on CBS' "Face the Nation." Myers is
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  President Bush ignored reporters'
questions about the tape as returned to the White House from Camp David
early Sunday morning.  On the tape, bin Laden recalls tuning in to news
shows hours before the attacks, waiting to hear reports about the
destruction, a US official said. Bin Laden also says that after the first
plane struck, he told those who were with him that more destruction was
coming.  The al-Qaida leader expressed surprise and pleasure at the amount
of damage done to the World Trade Center, the official said. Another
government official said bin Laden indicates on the tape he had expected
the twin towers only to collapse down to the level of where the planes
struck the buildings. Bin Laden's comments show he had specific advance
knowledge of the time, method and location of the attacks, the officials
said.  A third official said Sunday that the tape suggests the ringleaders
of the attacks did not tell all the hijackers that their mission would end
in death.  US officials declined to say how the United States obtained the
tape, which one described as amateurish and apparently made with a
handheld video camera. The Washington Post, which first reported the
existence of the video, said it was discovered during the search of a
private home in Jalalabad.  Bin Laden has not publicly taken
responsibility for the attacks, though he has praised them. US officials
have said they intercepted communications tying bin Laden or associates to
the attacks, but have refused to release any materials, citing
intelligence concerns.  British and Pakistani government officials have
said the Bush administration provided them with evidence they say shows
bin Laden's role in the attacks.  Many in the Muslim world doubt the
veracity of US claims. Releasing the tape could help win over some Muslim
skeptics, said Sens. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Joseph Biden, D-Del.  "The
world needs to see this," Hagel said on "CNN's Late Edition."  Gehad Auda,
a professor of political science at Cairo's Helwan University, said
broadcast of the tape would create a "propaganda splash" but would "not
cause any turnover in public opinion."  "It won't make a difference to
those who are hostile to America whether the tape is made public or not,"
he said. "This is a matter of belief, not a matter of clarifying
information."  Cheney said it is not his decision whether to release the
tape, but indicated there would be reluctance to do so. "We've not been
eager to give the guy any extra television time," he said.  Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz expressed irritation that anyone would doubt bin
Laden's guilt.  "I don't know what it takes to convince some people," he
said on "Late Edition."  "We had absolutely clear-cut evidence before that
tape turned up." [AP]

US warplanes rained bombs on the Tora Bora mountain fortress Sunday where
Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding, as Afghan commanders
acknowledged they have a tough fight on their hands in trying to capture
the world's most wanted man. [AFP]

Leftist rebels kidnapped 13 people from a resort area in Antioquia,
northwestern Colombia, and shot one hostage who refused to go with them, a
military official said. [AFP]

US special envoy Anthony Zinni on Sunday gave Israel and the Palestinians
48 hours to shape up or see him quit his truce-brokering mission.  [I
wonder if anyone noticed?] [AFP]

The next possible targets in the US campaign against terrorism: terrorist
recruitment and training facilities in the Aceh region of Indonesia, the
valley of Hadhramaut in Yemen, the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden's father,
and Ras Komboni, a port in Somalia. According to US officials, prisoner
interrogations and materials seized in Afghanistan are giving the United
States good information about how al-Qaida works and where it is located.
Already, American forces have raided al-Qaida assets in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. [LA TIMES]

A British journalist is recovering after being beaten and pelted with
stones by Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Veteran foreign correspondent
Robert Fisk, 55, who writes for The Independent newspaper, was set upon
after his car broke down as he drove near the border city of Quetta. Mr
Fisk, who suffered facial, hand and head injuries, said: "It was a very
frightening experience and I am in a lot of pain but I am glad to be
alive. "I'm going to bear the scars for the rest of my life - sadly I
broke down in the wrong place at the wrong time." The Middle East
correspondent was attacked when his car overheated and broke down close to
a village housing refugees from Afghanistan He got out of the vehicle and
was attempting to push it to the side of the road when a group of 40 to 50
people gathered. "At first they were reasonably friendly but then a little
kid threw a stone at me. More stones followed and then I find myself being
punched and beaten in the face. "My glasses were smashed and my spare
glasses were ripped away from me. I was covered in blood and couldn't see
anything. I was obviously frightened." Mr Fisk said he fought back and
began lashing out at the mob, whose numbers had now swelled to about 100.
He knocked a couple of his attackers to the ground but was then rescued by
a Muslim religious leader, who forced the mob back and guided him to a
police wagon. "Without his intervention I would now be dead," he said.
But Mr Fisk said he could understand the refugees' anger, as many had
relatives who had been killed by the US bombing of Afghan city Kandahar
last week. "It doesn't excuse them for beating me up so badly but there
was a real reason why they should hate Westerners so much. "I don't want
this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. They
had every reason to be angry - I've been an outspoken critic of the US
actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me." Mr Fisk is
not the first UK journalist to be injured since the US-led action in
Afghanistan began. Last month ITV news correspondent Andrea Catherwood
sustained minor injuries in a Taleban suicide attack near the Afghan city
of Kunduz, which killed three people and seriously wounded a Northern
Alliance commander. [BBC]

American forces have already flown surveillance flights over Somalia
looking for al-Qaeda forces to target in the next stage of the global war
on terror.  Navy pilots have flown waves of missions to map two al-Qaeda
camps near the Kenyan border with a view to launching air strikes,
Pentagon sources said. US warships have positioned themselves off the
coast near the capital, Mogadishu, to stop Osama bin Laden from hiding
there, and to prepare for an attack if necessary. Sensitivity over the
killing of 18 Army Rangers in Somalia in 1993 is being overcome by the
new, emboldened Pentagon which wants to 'exorcise that ghost', said a
source. The flights have intensified over the past few days. Relief
workers in Somalia are reported by the State Department to be bracing for
action, and the Kenyan government has said it fears a flood of refugees.
[US sources don't mention that estimates of Somalis killed by American
forces in 1993 number 7,000-10,000.] [OBSERVER]

An outbreak of fever in the west African nation of Gabon has been
confirmed as the deadly disease Ebola, the World Health Organization said
Sunday. It is the world's first documented outbreak of Ebola since last
year in Uganda, where 224 people -- including health workers -- died from
the virus. Ebola is one of the most virulent viral diseases known to
humankind, causing death in 50 to 90 percent of all clinically ill cases.
[AP]

			***

THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT LOOSES SUPPORTERS IT SHOULD HAVE, AND GAINS SOME
UNEXPECTED ONES -- an article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
from their website <counterpunch.com>:
	It had seemed to us that one absolutely certain fact, beyond all
dispute or question, is that the terror attacks of September 11 had no
silver lining, no unexpectedly beneficial fall-out. September 11 was, is
and will be a terrible business with endlessly terrible consequences. It
killed thousands, impelled a punitive expedition which will almost
certainly procreate further martial forays. The war party is agitating for
an onslaught on Iraq. Here in America the backwash of September 11 has
shriveled civil liberties and political dissent and we will spend the rest
of our lives trying to recapture lost ground. 
	But no. The editor of the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, (whose
periodical has promoted the notion of a "just war" in Afghanistan) has now
coauthored a column with Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin,
published in the Los Angeles Times on November 25, proposing the
following: 
	"If anything, the war on terrorism creates an opening for
progressives, not closure-indeed, it presents the opportunity of a
lifetime. 
	"It is a truism of modern politics that war generally mobilizes
and helps the democratic left. It does so in part because of the
short-term repression wartime often brings, but also because war raises
the stakes in politics and invites consideration of wider goals, including
justice. War's mobilization of the populace against a shared threat also
heightens social solidarity, while underscoring the need for government
and other social institutions that transcend or replace the market. And
war's horrors daily press the question of how military action can be
avoided in the future without abandoning core principles of domestic order 
	"All this shifts the playing field of political debate away from
those who counsel "let's leave it to the market or the military" as the
answer to all human concerns. Far from seeming hard-nosed and realistic,
they suddenly appear beside the point, if not immoral. Those who believe
in social justice and shared democratic effort in problem solving, by
contrast, seem onto something important and even admirable. 
	"And the hot Christmas dolls this year are firefighters, emergency
medical personnel and municipal police. 
	"In brief, Sept. 11 has made the idea of a public sector, and the
society that it serves, attractive again. It enlarged the public's view
that unilateral military action is a bad recipe for international peace.
This doesn't describe a political space from which the left is forever
excluded, but one in which it is virtually invited to reenter mainstream
politics." 
	So here's the supposed silver lining, comrades: the return to
favor of Big Government. You want to be reminded of what Big Government
has been up to in the past few weeks? The Antiterrorism Act passed by
Congress at the President's request in late October guts the
Constitution's guarantees of habeas corpus, presumption of innocence, and
due process. 
	It allows the federal government in the form of the Justice
Department, CIA, FBI, and INS to detain non-citizens on nonexistent or
secret evidence, conduct wiretaps and surveillance without evidence of
wrong-doing, conduct searches and seizures without warrant, eavesdrop on
private conversations between defendants and their lawyers in violation of
attorney-client privilege, and investigate private citizens without
'probable cause'. The bill also allows the government to wield the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as a weapon to harass dissident
organizations under the guise of fighting terrorism, subjecting them to
unconstitutional search and seizure. Add to this trashing of the Bill of
Rights the president's order for military tribunals. All this, and the
liberal Democrats see this as a time of opportunity to invoke the benefits
of big government! On this form, these people would hail concentration
camps as encouraging pointers towards a "new sense of collectivity". This
is crackpot realism on an epic scale, and we have by no means exhausted
the malign idiocy of the vanden Heuvel/Rogers manifesto. For example:
"Americans also got a crash course in the unsavory aspects of US foreign
policy." Does this mean that because the amiable national discussion of
the benefits of torture elicited we should hail September 11 as the
instigator of a useful history lesson? 
	More from vanden Heuvel and Rogers: "[September 11] enlarged the
public's view that unilateral military action is a bad recipe for
international peace. This doesn't describe a political space from which
the left is forever excluded, but one in which it is virtually invited to
reenter mainstream politics." We can imagine that just such nonsense was
written by Europe's social democrats when, in 1914, they abandoned
collective, internationalist opposition to the madness that was about to
kill millions, and separately made haste to vote war credits to their
various governments. What "mainstream politics" is the left (at least as
represented by vanden Heuvel and by Rogers) excitedly joining? The
political mainstream has given easy passage to the Patriot Act and in
Congress, with just one dissenting vote from Rep Barbara Lee of Berkeley,
it handed Bush all the war-making powers he craved. 
	Years ago we learned that most mainstream liberals don't give a
hoot about the Bill of Rights, or about the paramount importance of
independent, 12-member, unanimous juries, whose central role pervades the
Bill of Rights. The liberals' vision of big government is coercive to its
core. Eric Hobsbawm showed that the model for the organization of their
desired society used by many social democrats in the interwar period was
the German War Plan of 1914. FDR's New Deal was basically cribbed from
Mussolini's New Order. 
	So who are our allies then? Who's raising a ruckus amid these
devastations of the Constitution? The mainstream isn't raising a ruckus,
even against the notion of torture. For voices of conscience and sanity we
have to turn to a thin red line of anti-imperial leftists, to the radical
bar whose overworked members toil for the immigrants and the poor. We can
turn to the libertarians, such as Rep Ron Paul of Texas who has delivered
powerful speeches in Congress denouncing Ashcroft's jihad against the
Constitution. Ron Paul alone spilled the beans on how a cabal of House
Republicans and Democrats rammed through the final version of the Patriot
Act without it even being read by House members. 
	The strongest journalistic voice against the military tribunals
has been William Safire, even more forceful than Nat Hentoff whose own
denunciations of the rape of the Constitution have been appearing in the
Washington Times. From Italy, Gore Vidal has been equally robust, and the
only question for us is when Vidal will recant on his announcement last
year that Christopher is his "anointed" heir, his "Dauphin". Hitchens of
course has been gung-ho for bombing, while simultaneously libeling Noam
Chomsky and others, with the assertion that it "no longer matters" what
Chomsky thinks. 
	Ralph Nader delivered a powerful speech against the war and the
various green parties have all issued decent statements. The ACLU has
shown understanding of the necessity for broad coalitions of left and
right to defend the Constitution. It has brought together left civil
libertarians with such icons of the far right as Paul Weyrich, Grover
Norquist, Phyllis Schlafly, Bob Barr and the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, recruiting all these names to the terms of its opposition to
the Patriot Act. 
	That said, we would add that the work of such bodies as the ACLU
has so far been reactive. Yet we are confronted with a situation where FBI
agents have been sent to "interview" a projected total of 5,000 immigrants
who have entered the country in the last two years. We have been told that
the FBI agents are under instructions to immediately arrest anyone
disclosing evidence of any violation of law, on the spot. So these
interviews are fraught with peril for the uninformed, who may make an
innocent misstatement and end up facing perjury charges. So why haven't
groups like the ACLU distributed "know your rights" cards for those who
have been profiled and are now in the FBI's sights. 
	Only one US senator, Feingold of Wisconsin, voted against the USA
Patriot bill. Though Rep Dennis Kucinich voted for war-making, he has
since tried to get the "left" in Congress to pull the plug on Bush's
military tribunals, but as of November 28, could only find 37 colleagues
to agree with him, one of whom is Bob Barr, the conservative former
prosecutor who also was among those attacking from the earliest days the
provisions of the USA Patriot Act. And guess who wrote this: "Today,
America is being stampeded into a new undeclared war, against Iraq. This
is a time for truth ? a time for Congress to do its duty, and debate and
decide on war or peace. We do not need to have our politics poisoned for
yet another generation by the mutual recriminations of a War Party and a
Peace Party in the aftermath of yet another undeclared war No more
undeclared wars. No more presidential wars." It was Patrick Buchanan who,
like Safire, wrote speeches for Richard Nixon. 
	We've always said that the true contours of American politics are
in no way reflected by the conventional political maps. The post-Sept. 11
events have confirmed that analysis with acid clarity. 

				--end--