[Peace-discuss] News notes, 12/23 (Part 1 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

NOTES ON THE WEEK'S NEWS, FOR AWARE MEETING, 12/23 (Part 1 of 2)

[NB: These notes are followed by a longer comment by the John Pilger, on a
subject raised by Susan Parenti at the 12/23 meeting -- the relation of
the anti-war movement to the world economy.  --CGE]

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16

The Committee to Protect Journalists on Thursday condemned Israel's
destruction of the Voice of Palestine radio station broadcasting
headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.  The Associated Press
reported that Israeli missiles hit the building's main transmitter,
knocking the station off the air.  Later, bulldozers flattened the
building while Israeli soldiers detonated explosives that toppled a
90-foot radio and television tower and destroyed the station's
transmitter, which is also used by Palestine TV.  Voice of Palestine went
back on the air using another frequency. Palestine TV reportedly broadcast
with poor reception.  "We are appalled by Israel's military action against
the Voice of Palestine," said CPJ's executive director Ann Cooper. "As
civilian facilities, radio and television stations are protected from
military attack under international humanitarian law. CPJ calls on Israeli
authorities to cease attacking the media immediately" ... This is not the
first time that Israeli forces have targeted the Palestinian media.  In
October 2000, CPJ wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Barak to condemn an Israeli
attack on transmission towers and other technical facilities used by the
Voice of Palestine in Ramallah ... A month later, in November, Israeli
helicopters bombed the offices of Palestine TV in Gaza. [CPJ]

Gangs of Northern Alliance soldiers have unleashed a crime wave of looting
and killing in Kabul which is awakening nostalgia for the Taliban.
Lawlessness is creeping into daily life, after six years of Taliban order,
in the form of robberies, extortion and murder aimed at the few Kabul
residents with visible wealth. Parts of the city have become no-go areas
for taxi drivers after a spate of abductions and roadside executions of
their colleagues by soldiers loyal to the new Afghan government.  Many of
the fighters have not been paid since July and admit they are hungry for
spoils after last month's sweep into the capital. The breakdown in
discipline appears confined to a small minority of the thousands of newly
arrived troops and is nowhere near the scale of banditry that ravaged
Kabul when the mujahidin ruled from 1992 to 1996. But fear that crime will
worsen has induced nostalgia for the ruthlessly effective law-and-order
policies of the Taliban, if not its brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
[GUARDIAN UK]

Members of China's Muslim Uighur population believe that China, inspired
in part by America's focus on Islamic militants, has put Muslims to death
in increasing numbers recently. Twenty-five Uighurs have been executed
this year because the Chinese believed they were Islamic terrorists who
posed a separatist threat. [NY TIMES]

Gun sales are up from 9 percent to 22 percent over each of the last three
months across the United States according to FBI background check data ...
Gun manufacturers are happy to help out by providing guns which at least
sound like they are especially good for home-based anti-terrorism
operations: A new model called the Homeland Security gun is now on the
market; another is being marketed as the "Turban Chaser." [NY TIMES]

Field Marshal Lord Carver, who rose to become Britain's top military
officer and was a persistent critic of nuclear weapons, died Dec. 9 at
home in Wickham, southern England, his family said. He was 86.  He began
moving up the ranks with a commission in the Royal Tank Corps in 1935 and
went on to become chief of the defense staff - equivalent to the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - from 1973 to 1976.  He was chief of staff
in Kenya in 1954 during the Mau Mau rebellion, which led to Kenya's
independence from Britain in 1963. He commanded United Nations
peacekeeping forces in Cyprus in 1964 but later criticized them as
impeding progress toward a political settlement. He was also Britain's
resident commissioner in 1977-78 in Rhodesia, then a British colony and
now Zimbabwe.  As a member of the House of Lords, he opposed Britain's
decision to buy Trident submarines with nuclear-armed missiles.  In a
House of Lords debate on Britain's nuclear weapons in 1997, he tartly
asked a government minister "who is supposed to be deterred by the
deterrent to which she referred, and from doing what?"  Lord Carver, whose
given name was Michael, was a member of the Canberra Commission on the
Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, created by the Australian government,
which released a report in 1996 outlining a plan for nuclear disarmament.
"The destructiveness of nuclear weapons is so great, and their use so
catastrophic, that they have no military utility against a comparably
equipped opponent other than the belief that they deter such an opponent
from using his nuclear weapons," he said at the time.  "Therefore, their
elimination would remove that justification for their retention," he said.
"Their use against a nonnuclear opponent is politically and morally
indefensible."  He was also a critic of NATO. In a Lords debate in
December, he urged abolition of the NATO command, saying it existed only
to camouflage the reality that the United States commands the allied
forces.  NATO, Lord Carver said, was "manned by inflated allied staffs,
most of whom have nothing significant to do, and every expansion of NATO
makes that worse." [AP]

MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2001

A newspaper publisher's commencement speech was drowned out by hecklers
when she mentioned threats to civil liberties posed by the federal
government's investigation of the terrorist attacks. Janis Besler Heaphy,
president and publisher of The Sacramento Bee, was delivering the midyear
graduation address Saturday to about 17,000 people at California State
University in Sacramento. When Heaphy raised questions about racial
profiling, limits on civil rights and the establishment of military
tribunals, the audience interrupted by clapping and stomping their feet
for five minutes. [AP]

Ten Arab prisoners, bloodied and sobbing with shame, were paraded this
morning by their Afghan captors in Agam near Tora Bora. The men were among
19 foreigners fighting for al Qaeda who were trapped in Tora Bora by
Mujahideen led by Haji Zahir. He had spent 30 months in prison under the
Taliban ... The 10 men put on display in Agam came from Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to join Bin Laden ... When they
had been captured, they each carried a grenade which they threatened to
detonate until, after hours of negotiations, they were persuaded they
would not be handed over to American interrogators.  The US has already
taken 50 higher ranking al Qaeda terrorists into captivity and is holding
them at Camp Rhino, the American base in southern Afghanistan. [THIS IS
LONDON]

In France, a startling rise in the crime rate, a wave of violent attacks
on policemen and a series of high-profile murders of young women,
graphically described by the French media, had already turned it into the
most burning issue on the domestic political front ... next spring's
presidential and parliamentary elections will largely be fought - and
probably decided - on the issue of law and order.  Just how mean the
streets of Paris and other French cities had become was confirmed in a
study published in June. It revealed that more criminal acts per capita
were committed in France in the year 2000 than in that traditional hotbed
of crime in the streets, the United States ... Speaking on national
television during the French president's traditional Bastille Day
appearance, the right-wing president Chirac accused the left-wing
government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin of lacking the political will
to fight crime. "Every,aggression, every crime must be punished,'' Chirac
said, ``This is what we call zero tolerance, as applied by Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani of New York.'' This was not quite the first time the phrase
``zero tolerance'' was uttered by a politician in liberal France.  
Several years earlier, a member of the extreme right-wing National Front
had had used the expression while calling for ``a different (law and
order) policy, that of repression'' ... former interior minister and
likely presidential candidate Charles Pasqua declared that France was
experiencing ``a wave of murders in the street without precedence'', and
to call for the re-establishment of the death penalty, abolished in 1981.
[DEUTSCH PRESS AGENTURE
PRESS-AGENTURE-AGENTUR]

Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of the San Francisco-based human
rights organization Global Exchange and was the Green Party candidate for
US Senate from California in 2000. A four-person women's delegation
organized by Global Exchange went to Pakistan and Afghanistan from
November 20 to December 3:  We were concerned that we were not getting the
full picture in the news. We were not getting any reports about numbers of
civilian casualties, stories about what happened to those families ... I
didn't know that massive numbers of people were not getting food aid
because the US was blocking an international force from coming in to open
up the roads so that aid could get in. And I also had no idea to the
extent of innocent victims, who were killed by US bombs, until I realized
that everywhere we went, we found people who had stories to tell of loved
ones who were killed in the bombing. And then, in terms if women, I
realized the issue was not the burqa, but the issue was jobs and
education, which meant that their question was, how much money is the
international community going to invest in rebuilding Afghanistan, rather
than destroying it? ... many of the press people we met on the ground were
extremely frustrated, because they wanted to do stories about these
issues, like the innocent victims, like their colleagues were doing in
Europe and in the Arab and other press, but found that the stories were
not wanted back in the US ... outside of Jalalabad, where dozens and
dozens of villagers were killed in a stray bomb that was meant for the
Tora Bora area, where the caves of Al Qeada are. And a producer for one of
the networks was very anxious to cover that story, actually was there with
a crew, and then was told from headquarters in the US that they didn't
want that story ... when I went to Washington after our trip, I found that
many of the press people were not interested in covering our story because
it was critical of the United States. And in fact, I had one editor of a
major newspaper give back a report that had I handed to him, and said, "If
you are here to tell us that the US is part of the problem in Afghanistan,
we don't want to hear it." I have since been on radio shows, like I was on
one last night, where before going on the show they came and told me,
please tone down anything negative you might say about the US government,
because we've been getting in a lot of trouble here for questioning the US
military campaign ... [So we're left] not knowing how so many people in
the Muslim world feel about the US bombing campaign, feel about the fact
the US feels that it can go in and bomb villages, mosques, kill what is
probably thousands of innocent civilians, and feel no sense of
responsibility for helping these people -- the families go on with their
lives. I think the American people will not understand why there continues
to be a lot of rage against the United States.

USAT describes "misconduct in the upper echelons of the US National
Guard." In the past decade the commanding officers of nine states'
National Guards have misbehaved-including stealing life insurance money
meant for the widows of Guardsmen. Most of the transgressors have gotten
off scot-free, because, says the paper, "the Guard exist in a gap between
federal and state oversight." Some National Guard units have inflated
their troop strength reports by as much as 20 percent. [USA TODAY]

India is considering responding to the attack on its Parliament building
by bombing terrorist camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The NYT says if
that happens, "it could set off a war between the two nuclear-armed
nations." [ALL]

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18

Homelessness is at record levels in major cities across the country as a
result of rising unemployment and high housing costs. [NY TIMES]

German computer experts are working round the clock to unlock the truth
behind an unexplained surge in financial transactions made just before two
hijacked planes crashed into New York's World Trade Center on September
11. Were criminals responsible for the sharp rise in credit card
transactions that moved through some computer systems at the WTC shortly
before the planes hit the twin towers? Or was it coincidence that
unusually large sums of money, perhaps more than $100 million, were rushed
through the computers as the disaster unfolded? A world leader in
retrieving data, German-based firm Convar is trying to answer those
questions and help credit card companies, telecommunications firms and
accountants in New York recover their records from computer hard drives
that have been partially damaged by fire, water or fine dust. Using a
pioneering laser scanning technology to find data on damaged computer hard
drives and main frames found in the rubble of the World Trade Center and
other nearby collapsed buildings, Convar has recovered information from 32
computers that support assumptions of dirty doomsday dealings . . .
Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert at the company, said illegal
transfers of more than $100 million might have been made immediately
before and during the disaster. [REUTERS]

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19

The US Justice Department is now holding nearly 100 Israeli citizens with
direct ties to foreign military, criminal and intelligence services.  The
spy ring reportedly includes employees of two Israeli-owned companies that
currently perform almost all the official wiretaps for US local, state and
federal law enforcement.  The US law enforcement wiretaps, authorized by
the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA),
appear to have been breached by organized crime units working inside
Israel and the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. [NEWSMAX.COM]

In the aftermath of September 11th, the FBI received tens of thousands of
calls on so-called "tip" lines, and folks were broadly rounded up for
questioning. One tip-line caller reported a suspicious-looking billboard
near Times Square in New York. Soon after, a Department of Defense agent
paid a visit to Chashama, the theater and art gallery that had leased
space to Adbusters for its Corporate American Flag billboard. The agent
had a lot of questions: Why were they displaying the billboard? Who paid
for it? Who created it? (One clue might have been the website listed on
the sign.) ... ADBUSTERS has created its own rat line for tales of
anti-terrorism over the top: www.adbusters.org/campaigns/flag/nyc.html.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20

SEUMAS MILNE: Yesterday, Rumsfeld inadvertently conceded what little
impact the Afghan campaign (yet to achieve its primary aim of bringing Bin
Laden and the al-Qaida leadership to justice) has had on the terrorist
threat, by speculating about ever more cataclysmic attacks, including on
London. There will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead,
no newspaper obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime
minister, as there were for the victims of the twin towers. But what has
been cruelly demonstrated is that the US and its camp followers are
prepared to sacrifice thousands of innocents in a coward's war. [GUARDIAN
UK]

Iran lodged a strong protest against the United States after the US navy
intercepted an Iranian oil tanker in the Gulf and wounded at least one
seaman.  US frigates stopped the tanker in the northern Gulf and two
seamen were injured when US forces on speed boats opened fire in the
overnight incident, Iran's state radio reported ... A spokesman for the
Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet confirmed the incident, saying one seaman was
lightly wounded.  A US vessel of the Maritime Interception Force (MIF)
"intercepted an Iranian motorboat after (it ignored) several calls to
stop," commander Jeffrey Alderson told AFP ... The Fifth Fleet, the main
force in the MIF, often intercepts tankers accused of smuggling Iraqi oil
in violation of the UN sanctions regime imposed for Iraq's 1990 invasion
of Kuwait ... Iran has reported several incidents in recent years between
US and Iranian warships in the Gulf, where the United States has
maintained a large presence since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 ...
Iran is OPEC's second largest oil exporter and holds the world's third
largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and Iraq. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

The British-led peacekeeping force on its way to Afghanistan will be under
the authority of the United States. Germany isn't happy about that and has
threatened withhold its troops. By the way, you have a new acronym to
remember: ISAFK. It stands for International Security Assistance Force for
Kabul. Twenty-one nations have offered troops for the force. [ALL]

The NYT fronts an interview with an Iraq defector who claimed that he
worked at "secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons"
(NYT's words) as recently as a year ago. The Times emphasized that the
defector seemed legit but that his assertions couldn't be verified. The
paper says the allegations could provide ammo for White House officials
who'd like to take down Saddam. [NY TIMES]

JIM JENNINGS, President of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid
organization, has just returned from his third trip to Afghanistan. He
said today: "The public is being shielded from the extent of civilian
casualties; if people saw the war close up, they would not be so
enthusiastic about it. I witnessed this 'collateral damage' in the form of
children with legs blown off, eyes blinded, and internal organs damaged --
they were reportedly playing with a US-dropped cluster bomb when it
exploded ... I also saw a great many babies suffering from acute
malnutrition and starvation (marasmus) in the hospital and a few on the
street in Kabul in the arms of burka-clad beggars. It's hard to put
numbers to this, but UN agencies estimate that malnutrition for the
population generally is 70 percent. America must now undertake a major
reconstruction job in Afghanistan." [INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY]

WILLIAM GOODFELLOW, Executive director of the Center for International
Policy, said today: "The administration may attempt a recess appointment
of Otto Reich as head of Latin American affairs at the State Department.
That is the only way they could get him in, given the opposition in the
Senate. This appointment has nothing to do with foreign policy; rather, it
is a payoff to the right-wing Cuban Americans in Miami who take credit for
swinging the election to Bush and are a key constituency for Jeb Bush's
2002 campaign. Reich ran the Office of Public Diplomacy in the mid-'80s --
a propaganda operation shut down by Congress. As ambassador to Venezuela,
he wrote a cable on behalf of Orlando Bosch, a convicted terrorist, to get
him into the United States." [IPA]

MARJORIE COHN, An associate professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in
San Diego, said today: "The Geneva Convention provides that a POW shall be
subject to the laws of the detaining power. Therefore, John Walker is
entitled to counsel during interrogation, and he cannot be coerced by the
interrogators under the US Constitution, the Geneva Convention and the
Convention Against Torture." [IPA]

MARK WEISBROT, Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research,
said today: "Argentina's meltdown is unfortunately the latest example in a
pattern of strategic errors made, funded, and in some cases enforced by
the International Monetary Fund. As in Russia and Brazil in 1998, the IMF
has supported an overvalued currency, saddling the country with enormous
-- in Argentina's case absolutely unpayable -- debt. The biggest problem
in these situations is that once investors believe that the fixed exchange
rate will not hold, interest rates go through the roof. The IMF has poured
even more fuel on the fire by insisting on a 'zero-deficit' budget, which
does not make economic sense during a prolonged recession." [IPA]

University of South Florida president Judy Genshaft yesterday dismissed
Dr. Sami A. Al-Arian from his tenured position at the university. He is a
Palestinian who has been attacked by a number of right-wing US reporters.
The four reasons she cited are: (1) that he did not make clear that his
off-campus speeches reflected his views and not the university's, (2) that
he is insubordinate because he visited the campus once after he was put on
paid leave, (3) that USF fundraising and other activities were hurt by the
national media coverage, and (4) the amount of disruption and security
concerns that the university has to deal with because of the controversy
and the death threats.

[continued in part 2]