[Peace-discuss] News notes, 12/30/01 (Part 2 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 1]

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2001

Guy Debord born in Paris, 1931.  From his The Society of the Spectacle:
"The world that the spectacle makes visible is both present and absent. It
is the world of the commodity, which dominates all that is lived.  The
world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement
is identical to the estrangement of people -- both among themselves and in
relation to all that they produce, world-wide." [See Marx on alienation.]

US warplanes killed between 25 and 40 villagers and flattened houses
yesterday when they bombed the home of a Taliban commander in eastern
Afghanistan, according to reports from an adjacent area of Pakistan.  The
village of Naka, in the Afghan province of Paktika, was woken by
explosions which wounded up to 60 people and destroyed as many as 25
houses, according to an administrative source in Pakistani frontier area
of Waziristan quoted by Reuters.  [GUARDIAN UK]

Pakistan has turned over 20 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters to the
US, as the administration POWs) will be held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
[WALL ST JOURNAL]

Loony SOD Donald Rumsfeld announces that US "detainees" (it refuses to
call them POWs) will be held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.  [It's a sort of imperialist slap in the face.] The
grammatically-challenged SOD Rumsfeld calls Guantanamo "the least worst
place we could have selected." [LA TIMES]

The draft terrorist tribunal procedures, apparently leaked only to the NYT
and WP, revise several of the provisions that were most sharply criticized
in Bush's initial Nov. 13 order. The draft offers several stipulations
which would expand the rights of suspected terrorists: 1) Suspects will be
presumed innocent and tried under the normal criminal standard requiring
proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. 2) A unanimous verdict will be
necessary to impose the death penalty, though a two-thirds vote will still
be all that's required to convict. 3) Except when classified materials are
being discussed, the trials will be open to the public. 4) Bush's
controversial denial of a right to appeal will be replaced with some sort
of not-yet-clarified review process. The major differences between the
terrorist tribunals and standard courts-martial will be the admittance of
hearsay and other evidence that would normally be excluded. [SLATE] Bush
condemns the leak.

PAUL KRUGMAN:  US SOT Paul O'Neill "contemptuously dismissed proposals for
increased aid to poor nations. And his justification -- that he "would
like to see evidence of what works before making new commitments" -- was
pure humbug.  For the truth is that we already know what works ... saving
millions of people a year from such diseases as malaria and tuberculosis,
are quite reachable, for quite modest sums of money.  That is the message
of a commission report just released by the World Health Organization,
which calls on advanced countries to provide resources for a plan to
"scale up the access of the world's poor to essential health services."
The program would provide very basic items that many poor nations simply
cannot afford: antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, insecticide-treated nets
to control malaria, and so on. The price tag would be about 0.1 percent of
advanced countries' income. The payoff would be at least 8 million lives
each year ... Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard professor, headed the commission
... the US is the least generous rich nation on the planet. One of the
tables in that WHO report shows the share of gross national product given
in foreign aid by advanced countries; the United States ranks dead last,
well behind far poorer countries such as Portugal and Greece. The sums
proposed by the WHO would double our foreign aid budget, not because those
sums are large, but because we start from so low a base -- about a dime a
day for each U.S. citizen ... Americans are apparently willing to give
substantially more foreign aid than the nation actually does. When asked
how much of the federal budget should be devoted to foreign aid, Americans
typically come up with a number around 10 percent -- about 20 times what
we currently spend ... But the key argument here is surely a moral one. A
sum of money that Americans would hardly notice, a dime a day for the
average citizen, would quite literally save the lives of millions. Can we
really say to ourselves that this gift is not worth giving?"

CNN's top stories of 2001: 1. September 11 2. War in Afghanistan 3.
Failing economy 4. Anthrax scare 5. Mideast conflict 6. Stem cell research
/ cloning 7. Timothy McVeigh execution 8. Milosevic handed over to The
Hague 9. Senate switch 10. American Airline crash in NY Nov. 12 10. The
case of Chandra Levy (tie) [omitted: US scrapping of ABM treaty and
militarization of space; War on Terrorism abroad; domestic repression;
Colombia; Iraq sanctions; Timorese revelations; Kissinger suit;
anti-globalization; Argentina/IMF]

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2001

More than 700 Israelis and Palestinians packed into a Jerusalem hotel to
create a new coalition seeking negotiations and an end to violence.  The
coalition is made up of members of the Israeli Labor and Meretz parties
and a broad range of Palestinian representatives.  The rally marked the
creation of the Israeli-Palestinian Coalition, which announced a
declaration of principles calling for "a cessation of violence," "the
return to negotiation" and "the adoption of a two-state solution."  The
unofficial leader on the Palestinian side of the coalition is Sari
Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organization's commissioner for
Jerusalem affairs and the new president of Al-Quds University.

A physicist accused of exporting potential nuclear triggers to Israel
pleaded guilty to two federal counts as part of a deal with prosecutors.
Richard Kelly Smyth, a fugitive for 16 years until his July arrest in
Spain, entered the plea Friday after prosecutors said they would drop the
28 other counts against him.  Smyth, 72, was first charged in 1985 with
exporting devices known as krytrons to Heli Corp. in Israel. The two-inch
devices can be used in photocopying machines, but because of their
potential as nuclear triggers, they cannot be shipped without State
Department approval.  On Friday, Smyth pleaded guilty to making false
statements or false documents by signing or approving invoices to send the
material to Israel in 1982. He also pleaded guilty to exporting the
devices without a license ... At the time of the illegal exports, Heli
Corp. was owned by Arnon Milchan, an Israeli-born arms trader who became a
successful Hollywood film producer. His credits include ``Pretty Woman''
and ``L.A. Confidential.'' In an interview on television's ``60 Minutes''
last year, Milchan denied any involvement in the krytron deal but said he
had allowed the Israeli government to use his company as a conduit for
trading with the United States.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30

Argentine President Adolfo Rodriguez Saa's week-old cabinet submitted its
collective resignations following renewed unrest over economic policy and
unpopular government officials.  However, the Argentine president did
receive encouragement from US President George W. Bush, who telephoned
Rodriguez Saa Saturday from his ranch in Crawford, Texas and urged him to
stick with the IMF plan.

The Sunday NY Times points out that Israel and India are aping US
procedure in the "War on Terrorism": deliver an ultimatum to an enemy
demanding that they deal with terrorist, refuse to negotiate, and then
attack.  Thus Israel in regard to the Palestinian Authority, India in re
Pakistan.

US bombing over the past two days killed at least 15 people in eastern
Afghanistan where an apparently mistaken bombing killed 65 people earlier
this month, an Afghan news service said Sunday.  The Pakistan-based Afghan
Islamic Press (AIP) quoted travelers arriving at the Pakistani border town
of Miranshah as saying the bombing Friday night and Saturday morning hit
Sheikhan village, west of the Paktia province capital Gardez.  Most of the
15 people killed were women and children, AIP said, quoting witnesses.
Three houses were totally destroyed.  The latest bombing report came after
calls by Afghanistan's new interim government that the United States stop
its nearly three-month bombing campaign.  [REUTERS]


 	* * *

FROM NOAM CHOMSKY, "THE WORLD AFTER SEPT. 11" (DEC. 8, '01):

...The new millennium quickly produced two terrible new crimes, added to
the gloomy record of persisting ones. The first was the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11; the second, the response to them, surely taking a far greater
toll of innocent lives, Afghan civilians who were themselves victims of
the suspected perpetrators of the crimes of Sept. 11. I'll assume these to
be Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. There has been a prima facie
case from the outset, though little credible evidence has been produced,
and there have been few successes at home, despite what must be the most
intensive investigations ever by the coordinated intelligence services of
the major powers. Such "leaderless resistance" networks, as they are
called, are not easy nuts to crack.

An inauspicious sign is that in both cases the crimes are considered right
and just, even noble, within the doctrinal framework of the perpetrators,
and in fact are justified in almost the same words. Bin Laden proclaims
that violence is justified in self-defense against the infidels who invade
and occupy Muslim lands and against the brutal and corrupt governments
they impose there -- words that have considerable resonance in the region
even among those who despise and fear him. Bush and Blair proclaim, in
almost identical words, that violence is justified to drive evil from our
lands. The proclamations of the antagonists are not entirely identical.
When bin Laden speaks of "our lands," he is referring to Muslim lands:
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, and others; the radical
Islamists who were mobilized and nurtured by the CIA and its associates
through the 1980s despise Russia, but ceased their terrorist operations in
Russia from Afghan bases after the Russians withdrew. When Bush and Blair
speak of "our lands" they are, in contrast, referring to the world. The
distinction reflects the power that the adversaries command. That either
side can speak without shame of eradicating evil in the light of their
records... -- that should leave us open-mouthed in astonishment, unless we
adopt the easy course of effacing even very recent history.

Another fact with grim portent is that in both cases, the perpetrators
insist on underscoring the criminality of their acts. In the case of bin
Laden, no discussion is needed. The US pointedly rejected the framework of
legitimacy that resides in the UN Charter. There has been much debate over
whether the ambiguous Security Council declarations provided authorization
for the resort to force. It is, in my opinion, beside the point. To
resolve the debate would have been simple enough, had there been any wish
to do so. There is scarcely any doubt that Washington could have obtained
entirely unambiguous Security Council authorization, not for attractive
reasons. Russia is eager to gain US support for its own massive crimes.
China hopes to be admitted to the coalition of the just for the same
reasons, and in fact, states throughout the world recognized at once that
they could now enlist the support of the global superpower for their own
violence and repression, a lesson not lost on the global managers either.
British support is reflexive; France would raise no objections. There
would, in brief, have been no veto.

But Washington preferred to reject Security Council authorization and to
insist on its unique right to act unilaterally in violation of
international law and solemn treaty obligations, a right forcefully
proclaimed by the Clinton administration and its predecessors in clear and
explicit words -- warnings that we and others may choose to ignore, but at
our peril. Similarly, Washington contemptuously dismissed the tentative
offers to consider extradition of bin Laden and his associates; how real
such possibilities were we cannot know, because of the righteous refusal
even to consider them. This stand adheres to a leading principle of
statecraft, called "establishing credibility" in the rhetoric of
statecraft and scholarship. And it is understandable. If a Mafia Don plans
to collect protection money, he does not first ask for a Court order, even
if he could obtain it. Much the same is true of international affairs.
Subjects must understand their place, and must recognize that the powerful
need no higher authority.

Thucydides remarked that "large nations do what they wish, while small
nations accept what they must." The world has changed a great deal over
several thousand years, but some things stay much the same.

The atrocities of Sept. 11 are regarded as a historic event, which is
true, though not because of their scale. In its civilian toll, the crime
is far from unusual in the annals of violence short of war. To mention
only one example, so minor in context as to be a mere footnote, a
Panamanian journalist, condemning the crimes of Sept. 11, observed that
for Panamanians the "sinister times" are not unfamiliar, recalling the US
bombing of the barrio Chorrillo during "Operation Just Cause" with perhaps
thousands killed; our crimes, so there is no serious accounting. The
atrocities of Sept. 11 are indeed a historic event, but because of their
target. For the US, it is the first time since the British burned down
Washington in 1814 that the national territory has been under serious
attack, even threatened. There is no need to review what has been done to
others in the two centuries since. For Europe, the reversal is even more
dramatic. While conquering much of the world, leaving a trail of terror
and devastation, Europeans were safe from attack by their victims, with
rare and limited exceptions. It is not surprising, then, that Europe and
its offshoots should be shocked by the crimes of Sept. 11, a dramatic
breach of the norms of acceptable behavior for hundreds of years.

It is also not surprising that they should remain complacent, perhaps
mildly regretful, about the even more terrible suffering that followed.
The victims, after all, are miserable Afghans -- "uncivilized tribes," as
Winston Churchill described them with contempt when he ordered the use of
poison gas to "spread a lively terror" among them 80 years ago, denouncing
the "squeamishness" of the soft-hearted ninnies who failed to understand
that chemical weapons were just "the application of modern science to
modern warfare" and must be used "to procure a speedy termination of the
disorder which prevails on the frontier."

Similar thoughts are heard today. The editors of the _New Republic_, who
not long ago were calling for more military aid for "Latin-style
fascists...regardless of how many are murdered" because "there are higher
American priorities than Salvadoran human rights," now explain --
correctly -- that "Operation Enduring Freedom is not a humanitarian
intervention," so that "If we leave behind a country in chaos that can no
longer serve as a base of operations against us, then we will have
accomplished a necessary objective," and should "lose the obsession with
nation-building" to try to repair what we have done to Afghanistan for 20
years.

While few are willing to sink to that level, it remains true that
atrocities committed against Afghans carry little moral stigma, for one
reason, because such practices have been so familiar throughout history,
even when there has been no pretext other than greed and domination. And
retribution knows no bounds. For that there is ample historical precedent,
not to speak of authority in the holiest texts we are taught to revere.

Another aspect of the complacent acceptance of atrocities was described
with wonder by Alexis de Tocqueville in his report of one of the great
crimes of ethnic cleansing of the continent, the expulsion of the
Cherokees through the trail of tears "in the middle of winter," with snow
"frozen hard on the ground," a "solemn spectacle" of murder and
degradation, "the triumphal march of civilization across the desert." He
was particularly struck that the conquerors could deprive people of their
rights and exterminate them "with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally,
philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single
great principle of morality in the eyes of the world." It was impossible
to destroy people with "more respect for the laws of humanity," he wrote.

That is a fair enough description of what has been unfolding before our
eyes. For example, in the refugee camp of Maslakh, where hundreds of
thousands of people are starving, dozens dying every night from cold and
starvation. They were living on the edge of survival even before the
bombing, which deprived them of desperately-needed aid. It remains a
"forgotten camp" as we meet, three months after Sept. 11. Veteran
correspondent Christina Lamb reports scenes more "harrowing" than anything
in her memory, after having "seen death and misery in refugee camps in
many parts of Asia and Africa." The destruction of lives is silent and
mostly invisible, by choice; and can easily remain forgotten, also by
choice. The easy tolerance of the "vivid awfulness" that Lamb recounts
merely reflects the fact that this is how the powerful deal with the weak
and defenseless, hence in no way remarkable.

We have no right to harbor any illusions about the premises of current
planning. Planning for the war in Afghanistan was based on the
unchallenged assumption that the threat of bombing, and its realization,
would considerably increase the number of Afghans at risk of death from
starvation, disease, and exposure. The press blandly reported that the
numbers were expected to increase by 50%, to about 7.5 million: an
additional 2.5 million people. Pleas to stop the bombing to allow delivery
of food and other aid were rebuffed without comment, mostly without even
report. These came from high UN officials, major relief and aid agencies,
and others in a good position to know. By late September, the Food and
Agricultural Organization (FAO) had warned that more than 7 million people
would face starvation if the threatened military action were undertaken,
and after the bombing began, advised that the threat of "humanitarian
catastrophe" was "grave," and that the bombing had disrupted the planting
of 80% of the grain supplies, so that the effects next year could be even
more severe.

What will happen we cannot know. But we know well enough the assumptions
on which plans are based and executed, and commentary produced. As a
simple matter of logic, it is these assumptions that inform us about the
shape of the world that lies ahead, whatever the outcomes might be. The
basic facts have been casually reported, including the fact that as we
meet, little is being done to bring food and other aid to many of those
dying in refugee camps and the countryside, even though supplies are
available and the primary factor hampering delivery is lack of interest
and will.

Furthermore, the longer-term effects will remain unknown, if history is
any guide. Reporting is scanty today, and the consequences will not be
investigated tomorrow. It is acceptable to report the crime of "collateral
damage" by bombing error, the inevitable cost of war, but not the
conscious and deliberate destruction of fleeing Afghans who will die in
silence, invisibly, not by design, but because it doesn't matter, a much
deeper level of moral depravity; if we step on an ant while walking, we
have not purposely killed it...

[The full text is at <http://zmag.org/chomskyafter911.htm>.]