[Peace-discuss] News notes, Feb. 24 (part 2 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 1]

EVERYBODY'S DOING IT. The Clinton administration provided more than $1
billion in subsidized loans to Enron Corp. projects overseas at a time
when Enron was contributing nearly $2 million to Democratic causes.
Clinton officials refused to finance only one out of 20 projects proposed
by the energy company between 1993 and 2000 to build power plants,
natural-gas pipelines and other big-ticket energy facilities around the
world, according to the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private
Investment Corp., the agencies that provided the subsidies. In addition,
the administration, which lauded Chairman Kenneth L. Lay as an exemplary
"corporate citizen," granted about $200 million worth of insurance against
political risks for nine Enron projects in such politically volatile areas
as Argentina, Venezuela and the Gaza Strip, according to documents the
agencies provided to the Senate Finance Committee. [WASH TIMES]

PROPAGANDA? MOI? The U.S. war on terrorism will soon come to prime-time
television as a new ABC "reality" show called "Profiles From the Front
Line," with the help of the Pentagon and Hollywood action king Jerry
Bruckheimer, the Disney-owned network said. The program, which will focus
on the stories of ordinary men and women in uniform, is being produced
with the "unparalleled support and cooperation of the Defense Department,"
the network said in announcing the show slated for summer airing.
[REUTERS]

ORWELL AWARDS. [1] TO SENATOR TOM HARKIN for adding an amendment to the
pending farm bill that will allow food irradiation to be called
"pasteurization." [2] TO WARLORD DONALD RUMSFELD who claims that a
Pentagon campaign to influence global opinion will not include lies to the
public, but might employ "tactical" deception to confuse an enemy for
battlefield advantage. [PROG REV]

IT WILL GET WORSE UNTIL WASHINGTON STOPS ISRAEL. As the region grew
steadily more nervous about the backwash from the worsening conflict, Mr
Sharon - who is under pressure from Israel's hard right to invade the West
Bank and Gaza - told his cabinet that he was opposed to dragging Israel
into a fully-fledged war. But his spokesman, Ranaan Gissin, said Israel
would increase its use of "counter-terrorism" methods - a euphemism to
describe the work of its death squads, which have assassinated more than
70 Palestinian suspects during the conflict despite widespread criticism.
Those involved in "terrorist activity" would "always have to think about
where they sleep at night", he said. [INDEPENDENT UK]

***Friday, February 22, 2002***

WELL, OK, THEY'RE STUPID KILLERS. The papers announce that Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld has confirmed, as was suspected by many, that the 16
Afghans who Special Forces killed in a Jan. 24 raid were neither Taliban
nor al-Qaida. But, he said, the villagers were killed only after first
opening fire on U.S. troops. Afghan accounts of the raid, reported on Feb.
11, were not clear on how the firing started. The troops also captured 27
villagers who, according to the Feb. 11 accounts, they kicked and beat.
Rumsfeld "defiantly rejected" (WP) those reports. He didn't say much about
the sort of intelligence that had led troops to carry out the raid.
[SLATE]

WAR AGAINST SOMEBODY. The Bush administration is no longer standing by a
24-year-old U.S. pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
states, a senior administration official said. Washington is "not looking
for occasions to use" its nuclear arsenal, John Bolton, undersecretary of
state for arms control and international security, said in an interview.
But "we would do whatever is necessary to defend America's innocent
civilian population," he said. In case of an attack on the United States,
"we would have to do what is appropriate under the circumstances, and the
classic formulation of that is, we are not ruling anything in and we are
not ruling anything out," Mr. Bolton said. "We are just not into
theoretical assertions that other administrations have made," he said in
reference to a 1978 commitment by the Carter administration not to use
nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states unless they attack the United
States in alliance with nuclear-armed countries. [WASHINGTON TIMES]

WE FIXED AFGHANISTAN, AS WE DID 20 YEARS AGO. The seeds of renewed civil
war in Afghanistan have already been planted, the CIA said in a report
made public. The analysis of an increasingly lawless situation backs
Britain's view that more needs to be done to prop up the infant regime of
Hamid Karzai as he tries to stabilize his country. With the CIA and the
State Department both urging a greater effort by America and its allies to
maintain peace, the White House is coming under pressure to launch a fresh
peacekeeping initiative. The rest of the Bush administration, and in
particular the Pentagon, has been reluctant to do anything more than it is
already doing, except in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, his al-Qa'eda
terrorist network and the Taliban. Intelligence analysis suggests that a
return to the civil war that wracked the country after Soviet invaders
were driven out in 1989 is not imminent. But the CIA has identified rising
tensions between the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups in Afghanistan and
areas of lawlessness where the influence of the central government has not
been extended. [TELEGRAPH UK]

AN UNCHECKED EXECUTIVE IS A DICTATOR. A judge dismissed a challenge to the
imprisonment of 300 suspected terrorists at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba,
saying no federal court has jurisdiction over the detention camp because
it is on foreign soil. U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz said the
Coalition of Clergy, Lawyers, and Professors has no standing to file a
petition on behalf of the prisoners, who were captured in the war in
Afghanistan, and that no federal court has jurisdiction over the detention
facility known as Camp X-Ray because it is not within U.S. territory. . .
Erwin Chemerinsky, a University of Southern California law professor
representing the coalition, said he would appeal the decision to the 9th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. "I don't think there can
be a situation where no court can have jurisdiction," he said. [WASH POST]

OLYMPIC GAMES COLLAPSE IN WELTER OF FRAUD, CORRUPTION, AND JINGOISM. The
penny-ante corruption of doper athletes is dwarfed by the bribery and
chicanery that got this tawdry show to Utah (or anywhere else). With any
luck, the stink will make it imposssible ever to present these games again
without their being drowned in derisive laughter.

***Saturday, February 23, 2002***

STATE CAPITALISM. The Washington Post leads with a proposed merger of
defense contractors Northrop Grumman and TRW ... Northrop, maker of ships
and planes, made an unsolicited bid to buy TRW, a leader in space,
satellite, and missile technology, for $11.4 billion. The Post's
calculation of the value of the bid is based on $5.9 billion of TRW stock
and the assumption of TRW's $5.5 billion of debt ... The WP says the
combined company could be the largest in the defense contracting business,
and the LAT puts some numbers behind that assertion, noting that the over
$26 billion in sales the enhanced Northrop would generate would put it in
first, ahead of Lockheed Martin. While the NYT says that Bush's proposed
$379 billion military budget would mean happy times for all military
contractors, no one looks specifically at how much more of the proposed
defense budget Northrop potentially stands to gain by acquiring TRW.
[SLATE]

STATE CAPITALISM (II). The NYT leads with the GAO's filing of a law suit
against Vice President Cheney to find out who attended and what happened
at last year's energy task force meetings, which helped develop national
energy policy. The long-expected suit is the next step in the 10-month-old
battle between the White House and the GAO that officials believe is
likely to end up in the Supreme Court. [SLATE]

TERRORISM IS WHERE WE SAY IT IS. The LAT leads with the assertion that the
administration is considering declaring war-on-terrorism on Colombia's
leftist rebels and making their destruction a policy priority. [ACTUALLY,
THE STATE DEPARTMENT HAS BEEN SAYING THIS SINCE AT LEAST EARLY JANUARY.]
The administration now wants troops to train and accompany the Colombian
military on missions to retake the country from the rebels. [THE
"WE'RE-FIGHTING-DRUGS" COVER IS PRETTY THREADBARE.] The piece's subhed
highlights why the administration thinks it now has a stronger case for
the policy shift. Intelligence has sniffed out a Colombian guerilla-Libya
link-terrorism state-sponsor Libya seems to have supplied them with
weapons. [AMAZING HOW 'INTELLIGENCE' ALWAYS FINDS THESE 'LINKS' WHEN
NEEDED: SEE NICARAGUA/EL SALVADOR, N. VIETNAM/S. VIETNAM, ETC., ETC.]
[SLATE]

***Sunday, February 24, 2002***

HMM ...WHICH MERCENARIES? The WP fronts a story reporting that the
military might not have the necessary resources-equipment and human
power-to launch a strike against the Middle East nation. And the "military
reality" is that it might be up to a year until the U.S. is ready to do
so. [SLATE]

THE DEFICIT WILL BE DIVIDED AMONG THE PEASANTS. The NYT reports that the
Superfund waste cleanup program, the program set up in 1980 to clean up
toxic waste sites under the motto, "the polluter pays," will no longer be
drawing the bulk of its funds from specialized taxes heaped on offending
corporations. Instead, the Bush administration intends to designate fewer
sites for restoration and shift the source of the Superfund to (general)
taxpayers. Since 1995, when the Superfund tax expired and Congress failed
to renew it, the program has been steadily running out of money. [SLATE]

'CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW...' -- BUT IT NEEDN'T. Following the NYT lead
last Sunday that the Bush administration is tightening the nation's
scientific secrets, the WP reports on some of the myriad ways various
departments are tightening public disclosures. The IRS is shadowing
visitors to its reading room, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency is
no longer selling detailed maps over the Internet, and the documents
librarian at George Mason University, "eager to do her part to help
protect the country," is ordering her assistants around, telling them to
get scissors out and start cutting up CD-ROMs filled with info about the
nation's water supply data. [SLATE]

	***

	Daniel Pearl: Should His Editors Have Sent Him There?
	By Alexander Cockburn
	CounterPunch <www.counterpunch.org/>
	February 26, 2002

Daniel Pearl's dispatches reminded me somewhat of Peter Kann's in the days
when he was the Journal's most light-heartedly stylish reporter, before
assuming the imperial purple and becoming the company's CEO. It was Kann,
back in the late 1970s, who traveled to Afghanistan, reported that the
place was a dump covered with flies and that it was hard to understand why
any Great Power would want any truck with the place.

Ironically, since his captors charged him with being an agent of the
American Empire and of Zionism, Pearl was not afraid to file reports
contradicting the claims of the State Department or the Pentagon or even
of the mad dogs on the Journal's editorial pages whose ravings fulfill on
a weekly basis the most paranoid expectations of a Muslim fanatic. Just
about the time they were killing Pearl, had they paused to buy a copy of
the Wall Street Journal, his killers would have found a reprint on the
editorial pages of a particularly feverish article from Commentary,
in-house periodical of the American Jewish Committee, stating flatly that
to be to be opposed to Israel was to be anti-Zionist, and to be
anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic. It's the familiar two-step logic of
the Israeli lobby: oppose the sale of Apache helicopters to Sharon or the
bulldozing of Palestinian homes means you are a co-conspirator in the
Holocaust.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote, the day after news of
Pearl's death was confirmed, that it showed "evil" was still stalking the
world, "evil" being the current term of art for "awfulness beyond our
comprehension". Now, these editorial writers have spent years writing
urgent advisories to whatever US president happens to be in power that the
most extreme reactionary forces in Israel must be given unconditional
backing. It would take any Islamic fanatic about fifteen minutes in a
clips library to demonstrate that if bombs are to be dropped on
Palestinians, peace overtures shunned, just settlement rejected, then the
Wall Street Journal's editorial page is on board, full throat.

Why was it left to Pearl's wife to offer herself to the kidnapers in lieu
of her husband. Why did not the WSJ's editorial page editor, Paul Gigot,
proffer himself, or if he had protested that his credentials were not yet
sufficiently seasoned since he has only recently plumped his behind into
the editorial chair, why not bring Robert Bartley out of retirement, send
him to Karachi for discussion of the relationship of editorial writing in
the Wall Street Journal to overall moral responsibility for US policies in
the Middle East and South Asia?

So if that WSJ editorial writer who invoked "evil" had been honest, he
might have written, "it may well be that Danny Pearl was killed because
his murderers held him responsible for positions on the Middle East
conflict and on Islam oft expressed in these editorial pages. If so, then
he died for principles that we honor and will always uphold", or something
of that sort, while simultaneously emphasizing that reporters are not
editorial writers and that Pearl bore no responsibility for the
editorials.

Might it not have occurred to Pearl's editors, those who assigned him to
South Asia, that the fact that he was an Israeli citizen might have put
him in extra peril, given the fact that he was seeking to contact an
extremely dangerous crowd of Muslim terrorists in Karachi? .The fact of
his citizenship only emerged after his death, in a report, February 24, in
the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, by Yossi Melman:

"Professor Yehuda Pearl, father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl, has told Ha'aretz that he fears that making public his son's
Israeli citizenship could adversely affect investigative efforts by
Pakistani police to apprehend the killers and track down the murdered
reporter's body. In a telephone conversation from his Los Angeles
residence, Professor Pearl expressed regret and anger over the revelation
by the Israeli media of his family's 'Israeli connection.' The U.S. media,
which was aware of the information, complied with the family's request not
to make it public." Then Melman concluded with this minor bombshell: "The
American media was asked to comply with this request after information was
obtained that confirmed reports that the 38-year-old reporter was dead."

It seems to me almost certain that those Pakistani terrorists would have
killed any reporter for a US news organization who had the ill-fortune to
seeking an interview at that particular time. Robert Fisk, of the London
Independent, has probably written more pieces sympathetic to the
Palestinian cause than almost any other mainstream reporter. Yet that
didn't prevent him from nearly being beaten to death by Afghans in a
frontier town a few weeks ago. (The Wall Street Journal editorial page
welcomed the near killing of Fisk with the headline "A Self-Loathing
Multiculturalist Gets His Due", words they may now look at with fresh
eyes.)

On February 23, Fisk wrote: "In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we can be seen
as Kaffirs, as unbelievers. Our faces, our hair, even our spectacles, mark
us out as Westerners. The Muslim cleric who wished to talk to me in an
Afghan refugee village outside Peshawar last October was stopped by a man
who pointed at me and asked: "Why are you taking this Kaffir into our
mosque?'' Weeks later, a crowd of Afghan refugees, grief-stricken at the
slaughter of their relatives in a US B-52 bomber air raid, tried to kill
me because they thought I was an American. .. Over the past quarter
century I have witnessed the slow, painful, dangerous erosion of respect
for our work. We used to risk our lives in wars - we still do - but
journalists were rarely deliberate targets. We were impartial witnesses to
conflict, often the only witnesses, the first writers of history. Even the
nastiest militias understood this. "Protect him, look after him, he is a
journalist," I recall a Palestinian guerrilla ordering his men when I
entered the burning Lebanese town of Bhamdoun in 1983."

After discussing the trend whereby journalists clamber into uniforms (as
US correspondents did in Vietnam,) Fisk continues:

"When the Palestinians evacuated Beirut in 1982, I noticed that several
French reporters were wearing Palestiniankuffiah scarves. Israeli
reporters turned up in occupied southern Lebanon with pistols. Then in the
1991 Gulf war, American and British television reporters started dressing
up in military costumes, appearing on screen--complete with helmets and
military camouflage fatigues--as if they were members of the 82nd Airborne
or the Hussars. One American journalist even arrived in boots camouflaged
with painted leaves although a glance at any desert suggests that this
would not have served much purpose. In the Kurdish flight into the
mountains of northern Iraq more reporters could be found wearing Kurdish
clothes. In Pakistan and Afghanistan last year, the same phenomenon
occurred, Reporters in Peshawar could be seen wearing Pushtun hats. Why?
No one could ever supply me with an explanation. What on earth was CNN's
Walter Rodgers doing in US Marine costume at the American camp outside
Kandahar? Mercifully, someone told him to take it off after his first
broadcast. Then Geraldo Rivera of Fox News arrived in Jalalabad with a
gun. He fully intended, he said, to kill Osama bin Laden. It was the last
straw. The reporter had now become combatant.

"Perhaps we no longer care about our profession. Maybe we're all to quick
to demean our own jobs, to sneer at each other, to adopt the ridiculous
title of "hacks" when we should regard the job as foreign correspondent as
a decent, honourable profession... Can we do better? I think so. It's not
that reporters in military costume ­ Rodgers in his silly Marine helmet,
Rivera clowning around with a gun, or even me in my gas cape a decade
ago--helped to kill Daniel Pearl. He was murdered by vicious men. But we
are all of us--dressing up in combatant's clothes or adopting the national
dress of people--helping to erode the shield of neutrality and decency
which saved our lives in the past. If we don't stop now, how can we
protest when next our colleagues are seized by ruthless men who claim we
are spies?"

Pearl's style was totally alien to the bloodthirsty rantings of his
editorial colleagues. He sent excellent dispatches questioning the claims
of the Clinton administration that it had been justified in the 1998
destruction via cruise missile of the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries
plant in the Sudan. Again, he and fellow WSJ reporter Robert Block entered
some effective reservations about allegations of Serbian genocide in
Kosovo. In fact Slobodan Milosevic might make use of them in mounting his
vigorous defense in the US-sponsored kangaroo court in the Hague against
charges of genocide. Pearl and Block stigmatized the Serb armed forces as
having done "heinous things", while also writing that "other
allegations-indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums,
mutilation of the dead-haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO
troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian
organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide
rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging."

The killing of Pearl was just as monstrous as the September 11 onslaughts
that killed 3,000 innocent people who bore no responsibility for the
actions of their government. But as David North, of the Trotskyist Fourth
International wrote on the World Socialist website on February 23: "On the
very day that Pearl's murder was confirmed, US Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld admitted that US troops had mistakenly killed 16 anti-Taliban
Afghan fighters, but refused to apologize. It does not require exceptional
political insight to realize that in the decision to murder Pearl, the
desire for revenge was a major subjective factor."

North then remarked that the outlook of the Pakistani terrorists is not so
different from that of that Thomas Friedman, the repellent columnist of
the New York Times, also recently recruited as a kind o Kuralt of
globalization by PBS's Lehrer News Hour. North cited a recent Friedman
column which praised Bush's Axis of Evil speech in these terms: "Sept. 11
happened because America lost its deterrent capability. We lost it because
for 20 years we never retaliated against, or brought to justice, those who
murdered Americans ...innocent Americans were killed and we did nothing.
So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more
emboldened... America's enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid
a huge price for that."

North very properly comments: "By changing only a few words, the Pakistani
terrorists could use Friedman's argument to justify their murder of Pearl:
"We have failed to retaliate against America ... innocent Arabs, Afghans
and Moslems were killed and we did nothing ... America took us less and
less seriously and became more and more emboldened." The thought patterns
of the pompous and belligerent American columnist and the Islamic
terrorist have far more in common than either imagine. Both think in terms
of ethnic, religious and national stereotypes. Both believe in and are
mesmerized by violence."

Leave the last beautiful, true words to Daniel Pearl's widow:

"Revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable in my opinion to
address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own
responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism. My
own courage arises from two facts. One is that throughout this ordeal I
have been surrounded by people of amazing value. This helps me trust that
humanism ultimately will prevail.

"My other hope now -- in my seventh month of pregnancy -- is that I will
be able to tell our son that his father carried the flag to end terrorism,
raising an unprecedented demand among people from all countries not for
revenge but for the values we all share: love, compassion, friendship and
citizenship far transcending the so-called clash of civilizations."

	[end]