[Peace-discuss] News notes 11/25 (part 2 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

NOTES ON THE WEEK'S NEWS, FOR AWARE MEETING, 11/25 (PART 2 OF 2)

[NB: This week's notes are, by request, organized chronologically, day by
day.  Each note is followed by an indication of source.  At the end of the
notes are two longer analyses.]

KEY TO SOURCES: [AFP] Agence France-Presse; [ALL] major papers; [AP]
Associated Press; [AW] Antiwar.com; [BBC] British Broadcasting
Corporation; [BG] Boston Globe; [BH] Boston Herald; [CD] Commondreams.org;
[CHE] Chronicle of Higher Education; [CMW] CBS Market Watch; [CNN] Cable
News Network; [CP] CounterPunch; [DPA] Deutsche Presse-Agentur; [EC] The
Economist; [FR] French papers; [FR2] France 2 (TV); [FT] Financial Times
(London); [GL] Guardian (London); [GM] Globe and Mail (Toronto); [GR]
German papers; [HI] Hindu (India); [HRZ] Ha'aretz (Israel); [HT] Hindustan
Times (India); [IHT] International Herald Tribune; [IL] The Independent
(London); [IPA] Institute for Public Accuracy; [IPS] Inter Press Service;
[LAT] Los Angeles Times; [LM] Le Monde; [MI] Mirror (UK); [MSN] MSNBC.com;
[NA] Nation; [NBC] NBC Network News; [NI] News International (Pakistan);
[NJ] National Journal; [NR] New Republic; [NST] New Scientist; [NWK]
Newsweek; [NY] New Yorker; [NYP] New York Post; [NYT] New York Times; [OL]
Observer (London); [OS] Orlando Sentinel; [PG] The Progressive; [PR]
Progressive Review; [PV] Pravda; [RT] Reuters; [SC] The Scotsman; [SJM]
San Jose Mercury News; [SMH] Sydney Morning Herald; [TEL] Telegraph
(London); [TI] Times of India; [TL] Times (London); [TM] Time Magazine;
[UK] British papers; [UPI] United Press International; [UST] USA Today;
[WP] Washington Post; [WSJ] Wall Street Journal; [WT] Washington Times

*FRIDAY 23 NOVEMBER

(31) US commandos inside Afghanistan have been given historic autonomy to
plan and execute attacks when needed, resulting in "hundreds" of deaths of
enemy soldiers, military officials say. One official described the
special-operations forces' (SOF) rules of engagement as an "unrestricted
hunting license" for Taliban militia and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda
terrorist army now in disarray. Special-operations troops the past two
weeks have conducted their first sustained ground combat in Afghanistan.
Sources say small teams of Delta Force soldiers, and other commando units,
have ambushed the enemy and killed them in small batches. "From the
reports I've seen, they have killed in the hundreds," a senior
administration official said. "There have been no deaths on our side."
This official, and others, said in interviews they credit the success to a
premium placed on special-operations training the past 20 years. They also
praise the freedom granted the units by Gen. Tommy Franks.  Gen. Franks,
who as head of U.S. Central Command is directing the war in Afghanistan,
is part of the "conventional" Army, and thus suspect in the eyes of
hardened covert warriors. But some in the community are applauding the
general's willingness to give SOF their loosest rein since the Vietnam
War. Then, Army Green Berets infiltrated enemy territory and attacked at
will. Commandos are working in small teams at night in southern
Afghanistan, attacking Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers around their
stronghold of Kandahar. U.S. commandos can conduct reconnaissance,
identify the enemy and plan missions to attack without getting approval
from Central Command, officials said. "You've got to give these guys
freedom to plan direct action because the intelligence is so fragile," an
administration official said. "In conventional warfare, you can rely on
older intelligence of enemy positions because the enemy is not as mobile.
In direct action, they're going after people. They have to do their own
intelligence and act on it right away. You have to give these guys some
slack." In some cases, soldiers have used sniper fire, taking advantage of
stealth and superior night-sight equipment. In other encounters, soldiers
used Barret 50-caliber weapons, a heavy sniper rifle that can take out an
armored vehicle, or a person, at 1,500 yards. The administration official
said now that hundreds of SOF soldiers are behind enemy lines they must
act quickly or lose their prey. "It's only when you operate in country
that information becomes minutes old," the official said. Personnel in the
special-operations community say Afghanistan has provided a playing field
for SOF specialists to ply two classic trades at once: unconventional
warfare and direct action. In unconventional warfare, Army Special Forces,
or Green Berets, have worked with the Northern Alliance and other
opposition groups. The U.S. soldiers, trained in indigenous customs and
language, give tactical advice, supply arms and bond with commanders who
will one day run the country. In "direct action" carried out by Delta
Force and other SOF units, commandos find targets for fighter jets to
strike, blow up some targets themselves and conduct hit-and-run raids.
"They're not leaving a footprint," said the administration official. "When
these guys do sleep, they sleep on the ground. They don't have a fixed
base camp." Delta Force is under the control of U.S. Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC), located at Pope Air Force Base, which borders
Fort Bragg, N.C., home to Army Special Operations Command. JSOC not only
oversees the super-secret Delta anti-terrorism unit, but also the Navy's
Seal Team Six. "There are elements of JSOC we don't talk about," an Army
officer said. Under the command of Army Maj. Gen. Del Dailey, JSOC units
train in total secrecy. Few outside the units know who they are or what
they do. Gen. Dailey, an ex-member of the 800-strong Delta unit,
personally briefed President Bush on their missions in Afghanistan before
the war began. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Pope and Fort
Bragg this week to fire up troops on whose shoulders much of the war's
fate now rests. Backed by air power, they must not only kill terrorists,
but also help catch, or kill, the two primary al Qaeda leaders: bin Laden
and his top aide Ayman al Zawahiri. While at Fort Bragg, Mr. Rumsfeld
credited SOF with turning the war in Afghanistan in the United States'
favor. In the first weeks after the air campaign began Oct. 7, opposition
forces made little headway. But once U.S. warriors entered the country in
significant numbers and began finding crucial command and troop targets,
the Taliban began its retreat. "The air war enabled the ground war to
succeed," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "And it turned when we had Special Forces
down there to help with the targeting. And God bless them for doing it."
[WT]

(32) Most children in Afghanistan, lacking toys, play with what they find.
In this tiny, dusty village, they have been finding pieces of a cluster
bomb. Three children were injured this week, and one teenager was killed,
when they picked up undetonated remnants of a bomb dropped by American
planes about a month ago. The bomb's initial impact killed 12 people, most
from the same extended family. The village mourned, thinking it had seen
the worst. But workers from the Organization for Mine and Afghan
Rehabilitation knew better. They are reluctant veterans of detonating
unexploded ordinance - thanks to the millions of land mines in this
country - and each morning they find and detonate a bomb's pieces. An
explosion sounds every few minutes, the signal that one more threat has
been neutralized. But the detonators are finding themselves in a race
against children's curiosity - and their hunger. The pieces of the bomb
are yellow, the same color as the packages of food rations dropped by
American planes this week. And while the Pentagon has said it plans to
change the color of the food packets from yellow to blue to avoid
confusion, it has not yet done so. So it was that 10-year-old Mohebolah
Seraj went out to collect wood for his family, and thought he had happened
upon a food packet. He picked it up and lost three fingers in an
explosion. Doctors say he will probably lose his whole hand. "It wouldn't
matter if my daughter lost a hand," his mother, Sardar Seraj, said,
weeping. "But my son was supposed to help support us." She said that she
cried and told the doctors not to cut off her son's whole hand. "But the
doctors say it's impossible not to." Mr. Seraj and her eight children are
refugees from the drought- stricken Ghor Province. Now they live in one
room in this village. Mrs. Seraj said she was so poor that she could not
even afford a taxi to the hospital in Herat, so she walked the two or
three miles. The hospital where her son is being cared for is a grim
place, lacking power and basic sanitation. In one room lay Muhammad Ayoub,
a 20- year-old who was in the house when the cluster bomb initially
landed. He lost a leg and his eyesight, and his face was severely
disfigured. He moaned in agony. Down the hall, sharing a room with several
adults, lay two cousins, one 9, one 7, who were injured on Tuesday when
they picked up an unexploded bomb while playing. Their grandmother
nervously watched over them, but said she thought that they would be fine.
Hospital officials said that a 16- year-old had been decapitated on
Wednesday after he picked up a piece of the bomb. Back in the village, the
family members who survived the bomb's initial explosion crowded in one
room, refugees just feet from their own homes. One house was destroyed
when the bomb fell; other homes that were damaged were deemed unsafe to
return to until the mine experts finish their work. Bashahmad Ahmadi, 25,
who was at home when the bomb hit, saw three people die. "Suddenly I felt
very hot, then I didn't feel anything." He has had surgery on his foot,
but still walks with a crutch. His father, a teacher, was killed by the
bomb, as were the husbands of three of his mothers' sisters. His mother
has 10 children and 5 grandchildren. Crutch or not, he must now find a way
to support them all. [NYT]

(33) Calls rose for a probe into the deaths of five Palestinian children
in an explosion in the Gaza Strip after reports that they were killed by a
booby-trap laid by the Israeli army.  The daily Maariv said Friday,
quoting military sources, that the bomb was placed a week ago by special
forces seeking to kill Palestinian militants who were firing mortar bombs
from the area at Israeli targets. [AFP]

(34) Somalia's only internet company and a key telecoms business have been
forced to close because the United States suspects them of terrorist
links.  The two firms, Somalia Internet Company and al-Barakaat, both
appear on a US list of organisations accused of funneling money to the
al-Qaeda network.  Both companies have stated they are not linked to
terrorists.  Along with denying all internet access to Somalis, the
closures have severely restricted international telephone lines and shut
down vitally needed money transfer facilities.  Correspondents say the
closure of the companies will have a devastating effect on the country,
which desperately needs the services they provide.  Desperation  Hassan
Barise in Mogadishu told the BBC's Network Africa programme the said more
than 80% of Somalis depend on money they receive from relatives outside
the country He said all internet cafes have now shut down and
international phone lines run by two other companies are failing to cope
with the extra pressure of calls.  He also pointed out that the United
Nations, local and international aid agencies, as well as the government
itself all relied heavily on internet access, now denied.  "I would say it
is very depressing and if I could find any stronger word than that I would
say it," he said.  He added the impact would be felt even more strongly
because the cuts have come during the holy month of Ramadan.  Shutdown  On
7 November, the Bush administration released the list of 62 organisations
and individuals accused of financial links with Osama Bin Laden.  Reports
say the Somali Internet Company was forced to close when it realised that
its international gateway had been cut off.  Al-Barakaat, Somalia's
largest company with interests in telecommunications, banking and postal
services, closed its financial businesses after its assets were frozen.
Its international telephone service was then shut down when its
international gateway - run jointly by AT&T and British Telecom - was also
cut off.  The company, which has 600 shareholders, is the largest employer
in Somalia.  Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Somalis depend on
it to transfer money throughout the world.  Somalis living abroad use it
to send money to their relatives back home as there are no other banking
systems in Somalia since the downfall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991.
Somalia's prime minister has issued a decree appointing a special
committee to investigate al-Barakaat, as well as all other remittance
companies. [BBC]

*SATURDAY 24 NOVEMBER

(35) American Delta Force troops have killed hundreds of Taleban and
al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, according to US military officials.
Under their rules of engagement, the special forces troops, whose
existence is never officially acknowledged by the Pentagon, have been
given an "unrestricted hunting licence".  So far, Delta Force has had a
good war. Having lost some of its highly trained members in Somalia in
1993 during a disastrous peacekeeping operation, when 18 American
soldiers, a mix of Rangers and Delta Force, died in an ambush, the
800-strong unit has been in need of battle glory.  Afghanistan has
provided the right environment, especially because they can operate
covertly and without the prying eyes of television cameras. US military
officials told The Washington Times that small teams of Delta Force
soldiers and other units had been ambushing Taleban and al-Qaeda troops
and killing them in batches. [TL]

(36) Israeli helicopter gunships on Friday killed a senior commander of
the radical Islamic group Hamas who had topped Israel's lists of
most-wanted terror suspects. The assassination inflamed Palestinian
passions just as peace envoys sent by the Bush administration were about
to arrive in the region. Mahmoud Abu Hanoud had survived so many attempts
on his life that some Palestinians called him "the unkillable man." But as
he traveled in a car near the West Bank city of Nablus with two other men,
Israeli helicopters opened fire on the vehicle with antitank missiles,
obliterating it. What was left of his body was so fragmentary that it took
more than five hours to verify his death. In the past 14 months of Middle
East violence, Israel has tracked and killed more than 50 Palestinians
under its policy of assassinating people it considers terrorists. None
proved so elusive as Abu Hanoud, 34, whom the Israelis had been seeking
since at least 1995, saying he engineered repeated attacks on Israelis.
His killing follows the deaths Thursday of five Palestinian schoolboys in
the Gaza Strip, apparently victims of a booby-trap bomb planted by Israeli
troops in a residential area occasionally used by Palestinian gunmen.
Israeli politicians said today they favored an investigation of the
explosion, which security officials were privately calling a tragic
mistake. Two senior U.S. diplomats, Assistant Secretary of State William
Burns and retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, a special envoy, are
scheduled to arrive in Israel Sunday to push hard for a cease-fire. Their
visit is part of the first major U.S. peace effort in five months. Even
before the last few days' events, analysts here say, their task was
formidable. Since Sept. 11, Israel has killed more than 160 Palestinians,
and Palestinians have killed nearly 20 Israelis. "After this, I'd guess
the Americans are wasting their time," said a Western diplomat in
Jerusalem. Mahmoud al-Aloul, the Palestinian governor of Nablus, said the
missile strike was a "new crime" by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"It is clear that Sharon insists on the continuation of his aggression and
. . . in aborting all the attempts to cool down the conflict," he told the
Reuters news agency. A Hamas official vowed revenge. [WP]

*SUNDAY 25 NOVEMBER

(37) THE war on terrorism is to be extended to three new countries as soon
as the campaign in Afghanistan is over.  Targets linked to Osama Bin Laden
in Somalia, Sudan and Yemen will be at the top of the hit list, according
to senior sources in London and Washington.  "We have the wind at our
backs and we don't want to lose it," said a senior Washington source.
Preparations are under way in all three countries. Military preparations
have also begun, though plans to strike specific targets have not yet been
finalised.  The first targets, according to British sources, could be hit
as early as late January if the war in Afghanistan is nearing its final
stages by then.  Yemen, where 17 American sailors died in a suicide bomb
attack on the USS Cole at Aden last year, is considered the country most
likely to feel Washington's wrath. Al-Qaeda supporters, including many
Afghan veterans, have established bases in the northern mountains, where
they run training camps. [TL]

(38) A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and
Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a
leading journal.  Academics who have already received copies of Human
Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them
away. The journal's editor, Nicole Sucio-Foca, of Columbia University, New
York, claims the article provoked such a welter of complaints over its
extreme political writing that she was forced to repudiate it. The article
has been removed from Human Immunology's website, while letters have been
written to libraries and universities throughout the world asking them to
ignore or 'preferably to physically remove the relevant pages'.  [The lead
author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of
Complutense University in Madrid] has been sacked from the journal's
editorial board.  Dolly Tyan, president of the American Society of
Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics, which runs the journal, told
subscribers that the society is 'offended and embarrassed'.  The paper,
'The Origin of Palestinians and their Genetic Relatedness with other
Mediterranean Populations', involved studying genetic variations in immune
system genes among people in the Middle East. In common with earlier
studies, the team found no data to support the idea that Jewish people
were genetically distinct from other people in the region. [OL]

(39) Hundreds of Osama bin Laden's foreign legion were killed after
staging an uprising with smuggled arms in a northern alliance prison
Sunday, officials said. U.S. airstrikes helped quash the daylong
insurrection.  The fighters, about 300 Chechens, Pakistanis and Arabs who
surrendered Saturday from the besieged city of Kunduz, had smuggled
weapons under their tunics into the Qalai Janghi fortress and tried to
fight their way out, the Pentagon said. [AP]

(40) TIME magazine correspondent Alex Perry filed an eyewitness report
late Sunday of 800 Taliban prisoners in armed rebellion at a Northern
Alliance fort near Mazar- I-Sharif. Perry saw 12 Americans and British
soldiers fighting with the Northern Alliance against the rebelling
prisoners who were grabbing weapons from an armory. The Americans were
wearing Air Force uniforms. One of two Americans trapped inside the fort,
according to Perry, is dead. "The mission by the Americans and Northern
Alliance was to kill every single one of them now."  On Saturday, 800
Taliban soldiers surrendered to the forces of Gen. Rashid Dostum, a
leading commander of the Northern Alliance. But on Sunday, the prisoners
decided to rebel, grabbing weapons from an armory at the local fort and
attacking the Northern Alliance. At least two American soldiers were
trapped in the fort when it happened and at least one is dead. [TM]

(41) Police [in Britain] are to set up a secret database of children as
young as three who they fear might grow up to become criminals.
Youngsters who behave badly or commit trivial misdemeanours will be put on
the confidential register so that they can be monitored and supervised
throughout childhood.  The controversial initiative is to be pioneered in
11 London boroughs from March and then expanded nationally. Any child who
is thought to be at risk of committing a crime by the police, schools or
social services, will be put on the database.  Children involved in
cheekiness, minor vandalism and causing nuisances, will be targeted under
the scheme.  Their progress will then be monitored at school and on the
streets by special squads of police officers and social workers, even
though the children have not committed a crime and will not have been
warned that they are being watched. [TEL]

	*	*	*

DENNIS HANS: On the morning of November 10, President George W. Bush
addressed the UN General Assembly and spoke words that warmed the hearts
of human rights activists the world over: "For every regime that sponsors
terror, there is a price to be paid and it will be paid.... [Nations that
support terror] are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to
justice... We must unite in opposing all terrorists, not just some of
them. No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the
deliberate murder of the innocent. Any government that rejects this
principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the
consequences.... The Afghan people do not deserve their present rulers....
I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: The Taliban's days
of harboring terrorists, and dealing in heroin, and brutalizing women are
drawing to a close."  That evening, during a joint press conference with
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Bush described the Northern Alliance
as "our friends." Moments later, Musharraf branded Bush's "friends"
terrorists: "Why I have been recommending that Kabul should not be
occupied by the Northern Alliance basically is because of the past
experience that we've had when the various ethnic groups were ahold of
Kabul after the Soviets left. There was total atrocities, killings and
mayhem within the city. And I think if the Northern Alliance enters
Afghanistan -- enters Kabul -- we'll see the same kind of atrocities being
perpetuated against the people there...."  A reporter followed up by
asking Bush if he agreed with Musharraf's assessment of the Alliance. Bush
replied, "Only, only, I said one question. Now you're going with three."
No other reporter put the question to Bush.  Now that is a disciplined
press corps...
For a sampling of Northern Alliance atrocities, see the October 2001
"Background" report from Human Rights Watch. Since 1992, the various
Alliance factions have killed tens of thousands of civilians every bit as
innocent as America's 9-11 victims; their rap sheets includes rape,
torture, summary executions and "disappearances." "To date," states HRW,
"not a single Afghan commander has been held accountable for violations of
international humanitarian law"...
On ABC, Slammin' Sam Donaldson did indeed hold National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice's feet to the fire on state sponsorship of terrorism.
Outflanking the Bush administration on the right, Donaldson put on the
screen the State Department's list of states that sponsor terror and asked
why we aren't taking it to the governments of Lebanon and Syria like we're
taking it to the Taliban.  Note that Donaldson, in theory, represents
ABC's "liberal" wing. For two decades he's been cast as a counterweight to
George Will, the staunch conservative of "This Week." Donaldson could have
asked why Cuba was on the terror-sponsor list. He could have asked why
Colombia was not, given that its army collaborates with and protects a
right-wing death-squad federation on the State Department's list of
Foreign Terrorist Organizations. ... To ask any of those questions,
Donaldson wouldn't necessarily have to be a liberal. He could just as well
be a moderate or conservative, many of whom disapprove of selective
morality and alliances with cutthroats. But he would have to be informed.
Like most everyone else posing questions on Sunday morning, Donaldson is
bright, articulate and ignorant. All are prerequisites: Smarts and a way
with words lend an air of credibility; ignorance ensures the avoidance of
embarrassing questions about "principles" that seem to be honored more
often in the breach.  To gain a coveted seat as a network foreign-policy
interviewer, you must be incapable of thinking outside the parameters of
bogus State Department lists. Your knowledge must be sufficiently
superficial that you cannot recognize an evasive answer or demolish a
dishonest one. Mix in an abiding faith in the fundamental decency of U.S.
foreign policy and you could be the next Russert, Donaldson or Jim Lehrer.
[CD]

JOHN PILGER: The truths they never tell us. Behind the jargon about failed
states and humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead. 
Polite society's bombers may not have to wait long for round two. The US
vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned last week that America could take
action against '40 to 50 countries'. Somalia, allegedly a 'haven' for
al-Qaeda, joins Iraq at the top of a list of potential targets. Cheered by
having replaced Afghanistan's bad terrorists with America's good
terrorists, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the
Pentagon to 'think the unthinkable', having rejected its 'post-Afghanistan
options' as 'not radical enough'.
An American attack on Somalia, wrote the Guardian's man at the Foreign
Office, 'would offer an opportunity to settle an old score: 18 US soldiers
were brutally killed there in 1993 . . .' He neglected to mention that the
US Marines left between 7,000 and 10,000 Somali dead, according to the
CIA. Eighteen American lives are worthy of score-settling; thousands of
Somali lives are not.
Somalia will provide an ideal practice run for the final destruction of
Iraq. However, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Iraq presents a
'dilemma', because 'few targets remain'. 'We're down to the last
outhouse,' said a US official, referring to the almost daily bombing of
Iraq that is not news. Having survived the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein's
grip on Iraq has since been reinforced by one of the most ruthless
blockades in modern times, policed by his former amours and arms suppliers
in Washington and London. Safe in his British-built bunkers, Saddam will
survive a renewed blitz - unlike the Iraqi people, held hostage to the
compliance of their dictator to America's ever-shifting demands.
In this country, veiled propaganda will play its usual leading role. As so
much of the Anglo-American media is in the hands of various guardians of
approved truths, the fate of both the Iraqi and Somali peoples will be
reported and debated on the strict premise that the US and British
governments are against terrorism. Like the attack on Afghanistan, the
issue will be how 'we' can best deal with the problem of 'uncivilised'
societies.
The most salient truth will remain taboo. This is that the longevity of
America as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists surpasses
all. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the
World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a UN Security
Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law is
unmentionable. Recently, Denis Halliday, the former assistant secretary
general of the UN who resigned rather than administer what he described as
a 'genocidal sanctions policy' on Iraq, incurred the indignation of the
BBC's Michael Buerk. 'You can't possibly draw a moral equivalence between
Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior , can you?' said Buerk. Halliday was
taking part in one of the moral choice programmes that Buerk comperes, and
had referred to the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis,
mostly civilians, by the Americans during the Gulf war. He pointed out
that many were buried alive, and that depleted uranium was used widely,
almost certainly the cause of an epidemic of cancer in southern Iraq.
That the recent history of the west's true crimes makes Saddam Hussein 'an
amateur', as Halliday put it, is the unmentionable; and because there is
no rational rebuttal of such a truth, those who mention it are abused as
'anti-American'. Richard Falk, professor of international politics at
Princeton, has explained this. Western foreign policy, he says, is
propagated in the media 'through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal
screen with positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as
threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence'.
The ascendancy of Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and associates
Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams means that much of the world is now
threatened openly by a geopolitical fascism, which has been developing
since 1945 and has accelerated since 11 September.
The present Washington gang are authentic American fundamentalists. They
are the heirs of John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, the Baptist fanatics
who, in the 1950s, ran the State Department and the CIA respectively,
smashing reforming governments in country after country -- Iran, Iraq,
Guatemala -- tearing up international agreements, such as the 1954 Geneva
accords on Indochina, whose sabotage by John Foster Dulles led directly to
the Vietnam war and five million dead. Declassified files now tell us the
United States twice came within an ace of using nuclear weapons.
The parallels are there in Cheney's threat to '40 to 50' countries, and of
war 'that may not end in our lifetimes'. The vocabulary of justification
for this militarism has long been provided on both sides of the Atlantic
by those factory 'scholars' who have taken the humanity out of the study
of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves the dominant power.
Poor countries are 'failed states'; those that oppose America are 'rogue
states'; an attack by the west is a 'humanitarian intervention'. (One of
the most enthusiastic bombers, Michael Ignatieff, is now 'professor of
human rights' at Harvard). And as in Dulles's time, the United Nations is
reduced to a role of clearing up the debris of bombing and providing
colonial 'protectorates'.
The twin towers attacks provided Bush's Washington with both a trigger and
a remarkable coincidence. Pakistan's former foreign minister Niaz Naik has
revealed that he was told by senior American officials in mid-July that
military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of
October. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was then travelling in
central Asia, already gathering support for an anti-Afghanistan war
'coalition'. For Washington, the real problem with the Taliban was not
human rights; these were irrelevant. The Taliban regime simply did not
have total control of Afghanistan: a fact that deterred investors from
financing oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea, whose strategic
position in relation to Russia and China and whose largely untapped fossil
fuels are of crucial interest to the Americans. In 1998, Dick Cheney told
oil industry executives: 'I cannot think of a time when we have had a
region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the
Caspian.'
Indeed, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were they
welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas, then governed
by George W Bush, and entertained by executives of the Unocal oil company.
They were offered a cut of the profits from the pipelines; 15 per cent was
mentioned. A US official observed that, with the Caspian's oil and gas
flowing, Afghanistan would become 'like Saudi Arabia', an oil colony with
no democracy and the legal persecution of women. 'We can live with that,'
he said. The deal fell through when two American embassies in east Africa
were bombed and al-Qaeda was blamed.
The Taliban duly moved to the top of the media's league table of demons,
where the normal exemptions apply. For example, Vladimir Putin's regime in
Moscow, the killers of at least 20,000 people in Chechnya, is exempt. Last
week, Putin was entertained by his new 'close friend', George W Bush, at
Bush's Texas ranch.
Bush and Blair are permanently exempt -- even though more Iraqi children
die every month, mostly as a result of the Anglo-American embargo, than
the total number of dead in the twin towers, a truth that is not allowed
to enter public consciousness. The killing of Iraqi infants, like the
killing of Chechens, like the killing of Afghan civilians, is rated less
morally abhorrent than the killing of Americans.
As one who has seen a great deal of bombing, I have been struck by the
capacity of those calling themselves 'liberals' and 'progressives'
wilfully to tolerate the suffering of innocents in Afghanistan. What do
these self-regarding commentators, who witness virtually nothing of the
struggles of the outside world, have to say to the families of refugees
bombed to death in the dusty town of Gardez the other day, long after it
fell to anti-Taliban forces? What do they say to the parents of dead
children whose bodies lay in the streets of Kunduz last Sunday? 'Forty
people were killed,' said Zumeray, a refugee. 'Some of them were burned by
the bombs, others were crushed by the walls and roofs of their houses when
they collapsed from the blast.' What does the Guardian's Polly Toynbee say
to him: 'Can't you see that bombing works?' Will she call him
anti-American? What do 'humanitarian interventionists' say to people who
will die or be maimed by the 70,000 American cluster bomblets left
unexploded?
For several weeks, the Observer, a liberal newspaper, has published
unsubstantiated reports that have sought to link Iraq with 11 September
and the anthrax scare. 'Whitehall sources' and 'intelligence sources' are
the main tellers of this story. 'The evidence is mounting . . .' said one
of the pieces. The sum of the 'evidence' is zero, merely grist for the
likes of Wolfowitz and Perle and probably Blair, who can be expected to go
along with the attack. In his essay 'The Banality of Evil', the great
American dissident Edward Herman described the division of labour among
those who design and produce weapons like cluster bombs and daisy cutters
and those who take the political decisions to use them and those who
create the illusions that justify their use. 'It is the function of the
experts, and the mainstream media,' he wrote, 'to normalise the
unthinkable for the general public.' It is time journalists reflected upon
this, and took the risk of telling the truth about an unconscionable
threat to much of humanity that comes not from faraway places, but close
to home. <www.johnpilger. com> [NS]

	*	*	*

The Onion reports:  In a strongly worded ultimatum Tuesday, President Bush
warned the Arab world to "stop hating the United States or suffer the
consequences." "You have exactly 10 days to put aside your deep-rooted
resentment and rage toward America and learn to like us," said Bush in a
message broadcast live to 17 Arab nations via Al Jazeera. "If you fail to
comply, prepare to have the full might of the U.S. military brought down
upon you." Bush also threatened to carpet-bomb any Arab region whose
populace continues to be angry about America's longtime bombing campaign
against Iraq and the decade-long U.S. sanctions that have led to the
malnutrition deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children.

AND FINALLY it is reported that in negotiations between the US and the
Taliban last summer -- well before 9/11 -- the US representatives told the
Taliban, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you
under a carpet of bombs."  DC DAVE writes, "I wonder if we learned this
negotiation/intimidation technique from the Medellin Cartel. They call it
'plata o plomo,' silver or lead."

Regards, Carl
	==============================================================
	C. G. Estabrook
	Visiting Professor of Sociology
	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
	109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
	office 217.244.4105 / mobile 217.369.5471 / home 217.359.9466  
        <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>