[Peace-discuss] News notes, 1/06/02 (Part 1 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

NOTES ON THE WEEK'S NEWS, FOR AWARE MEETING, 1/06/02 (Part 1 of 2)

"These sudden ends of time must give us pause. / We fray into the future,
rarely wrought / Save in the tapestries of afterthought. / More time, more
time. Barrages of applause / Come muffled from a buried radio. / The
New-year bells are wrangling with the snow."  --Richard Wilbur

Happy New Year. --CGE

[NB: this week's notes are in two parts and are followed by a column from
conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, whose criticism of the war is a good
bit more serious than that of most self-styled liberal commentators.]

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2001

WM. PFAFF. The world begins 2002 in a situation without precedent in human
history. A single nation, the United States, enjoys unrivaled military and
economic power, and can impose itself virtually anywhere it wants. Even
without nuclear weapons, the United States could destroy the military
forces of any other nation on earth. If it should so choose, it could
impose complete social and economic breakdown on almost any other state.
Its own weapons are mostly invulnerable, deployed under and above the
oceans, or in hardened sites inside the United States. The nation's
cities, if Washington's current ambitions are gratified, are to be
defended by anti-missile systems... [INT HERALD TRIBUNE]

GUANTANAMO KEEPS MEDIA AND JUSTICE AT BAY The decision to house Afghan war
prisoners at the US naval base in Cuba offers clear advantages to a US
government seeking to maximise security while minimising public scrutiny,
say analysts in Washington. Just 850 kilometres from Miami, Guantanamo
provides proximity while being beyond the convenient reach of the US legal
system and journalists. "They chose Guantanamo because it's out of the
way, where reporters and the attention of the media will be less," said
Ivan Eland, the Cato Institute's director of defence policy studies. "It's
close to US shores but is not part of the US." "Guantanamo has the
advantage that it is a totally controllable facility. No-one gets in,
no-one gets out without US controls," said Anthony Cordesman, a defence
and security expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies
"It is a sovereign enclave which means that the tribunals can operate in
this area, and the problems of having constant, unauthorised media
presence, leaks and all other issues that can turn any kind of treatment
of prisoners of war into a political circus are avoidable." The presence
of the US base on Cuban soil has always been a sore point for Cuban
President Fidel Castro, who has never relished the fact that his
predecessors leased the bay to the United States in perpetuity. US
Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, indicated that Washington was
indifferent to Cuba's sensitivity about the base. "We don't anticipate
trouble with Mr Castro in that regard," said Rumsfeld. The US history with
the base, home to some 500 US troops, is as complicated as its tortured
relations with the government in Havana. President Theodore Roosevelt
signed an agreement with Cuba on February 23, 1903 to lease the military
post at Guantanamo Bay. Washington agreed to pay Cuba 2,000 gold coins a
year for the base, a sum now valued at US$4,085. The Cubans however have
refused to cash the cheques from Washington. Officials also said there
were no plans yet to use the base for any trials of the detainees. The
United States currently holds eight suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda
fighters aboard the USS Peleliu, and 62 more at a US Marine base near
Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

Birth in 1847 of John Peter Altgeld, Niederselters, Prussia. Reformist
Democratic governor of Illinois (1893-97) known principally for his pardon
(June 26, 1893) of anarchists "involved" in the Haymarket Riot where seven
police were killed.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2001

The Palestinian Authority accused has Israel of "fanning the flames" with
the killing of six Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while Israel said at
least three of the men were suicide bombers trying to sneak into Israel
and cause fresh carnage. The Israeli army admitted to killing the six late
Sunday in two separate incidents close to each other in the northern Gaza
Strip, where a number of Jewish settlements sit on the boundary with
Israel. Military sources initially said the three men killed by a tank
shell near the settlement of Alei Sinai had opened fire on one of its
armoured vehicles, but then retracted that statement, saying no weapons
had been found near the bodies. [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

Hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters have made their way east across the ice-
slicked rocks of the White Mountains and into the untamed tribal areas of
Pakistan ... On Dec. 9, acting under American pressure, Pakistan finally
sent the first of 6,000 soldiers to monitor its border with Afghanistan.
About 15 miles of mountainous landscape requires intense surveillance, and
the army has taken positions at the crossing points. Nearly 200 Al Qaeda
fighters have since been captured, according to army officials ... This is
the first time in Pakistan's 54-year history that the army has been
deployed within the more than 10,000 square miles of the tribal areas ...
"The army is not good for our traditions," said Haji Kuchkool, a leader of
the Abdal Khel subtribe. He stroked his long white beard. His bandoleer
was heavy with bullets. "The army men are Punjabis, not Pashtuns," he
said. "They don't understand our ways, and we must be concerned now about
protecting our assets - our trees and our women and the hashish plants and
poppies ... Surely everyone must know that Pashtuns can protect
themselves." However much they may welcome those seeking asylum, people
here are suspicious of anyone foreign. Five years ago some Arabs asked
permission to open a guerrilla camp in Tirah, similar to the ones
operating in Afghanistan. Tribal elders deliberated in a series of
informal councils. Finally their decision was no. One local man persisted
in supporting the idea. He was killed in a skirmish, as was one of the
Arabs. The outsider's body was then set afire, which is against the tenets
of Islam. But the people were unused to Arabs. They considered him an
infidel. "Decisions of the councils must be obeyed," explained a farmer,
Khan Sattar, a man who emerged from his wheat and poppy fields to greet a
stranger. [AP]

TUESDAY, JANUARY 01, 2002

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Tuesday vetoed a plan by Israel's president
to declare a year-long truce with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli
troops seized four suspected militants in two incursions into Palestinian
territory and a senior Palestinian official said U.S. mediator Anthony
Zinni is to return to the region on Thursday. Israeli officials said they
were not aware Zinni was set to return. [AP]

In Anniston, AL, people eat "Alabama clay," i.e., dirt, because they are
so poor -- and it's not even good dirt at that, contaminated with PCBs for
over 40 years by the Monsanto Corporation. Thanks to a lawsuit -- with
3,600 plaintiffs -- an unusually detailed story of secret corporate
machinations" has emerged. In 1966, Monsanto execs discovered that fish
submerged in a west Anniston creek "turned belly-up within 10 seconds,
spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked in boiling water." The
managers kept this information to themselves. The WP story is littered
with similar examples of Monsanto's reprehensible behavior. An examination
of Monsanto's internal documents reveals decades of deceit over the
dumping of PCBs. "Monsanto did a job on this city" said one resident.
"They thought we were stupid and illiterate people, so nobody would notice
what happens to us." [WASH POST]

Fresh controversy over American bombing flared last night after Afghans
claimed more than 100 people died in an air strike. US officials hotly
denied that any civilians died during the attack against what it said was
an al-Qaida compound from which surface-to-air missiles had been fired.
Reports from the village of Qalaye Niazi, in Paktia province, which
borders Pakistan, yesterday said human remains were scattered among
craters. Two days earlier, the Afghan defence minister - a leading
Northern Alliance commander who wants minimal foreign military involvement
in the country - called for an end to the air strikes. [GUARDIAN UK]

Pervez Musharraf is rounding up Islamic militants who see themselves as
Kashmiri freedom fighters. "I want to eradicate militancy, extremism,
intolerance from Pakistani society," says Musharraf, who took office in a
military coup in 1999. [WASH POST]

PAUL KRUGMAN urges Americans to acknowledge that U.S. economic
"neoliberalism" and I.M.F. monetary policies lead to the political and
economic crisis in Argentina. The rest of the world stamps "made in
Washington" on this crisis. [NY TIMES]

For the first time since 1973-74, major stock indexes have reported losses
two years in a row. (The WSJ calls it a "brutal" year for the markets,
with the Dow losing 7% and the Nasdaq down 21%.) There haven't been three
consecutive down years since World War II. Bears maintain that "many
stocks still trade at historically expensive levels relative to companies'
underlying earnings potential." [LA TIMES]

Judicial executions in the US are declining. Only 66 people were put to
death in 2001, down from 85 in 2000 and 98 in '99. Texas alone dropped
from 40 two years ago to 17 last year, sans George W. Oklahoma, Texas,
Missouri, North Carolina and Georgia, the top five death penalty states,
accounted for 77% of all executions, and no other state killed more than
two people.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 02, 2002

VINCENT BROWNE. More than 100 civilians were killed in a small village,
Qalaye Naizi, in eastern Afghanistan by bombs dropped from US aircraft on
Sunday. A cameraman who visited the village after the bombing said he
could see huge craters blasted by bombs. Amid the destruction were scraps
of flesh, pools of blood and clumps of what appeared to be human hair. On
Thursday last, US warplanes killed 40 civilians in Ghazni, south-west of
Kabul. Also recently, 65 people, including tribal elders, were killed by
US bombing while they were travelling in a convoy to Kabul to take part in
the inauguration ceremony of the Afghan interim government. On October
11th, more than 160 civilians were killed in a bombing raid in Karam, west
of Jalalabad. Of the 60 mud huts in the village, 40 were destroyed. On
October 18th, the central market place, Sarai Shamali, near Kandahar, was
bombed and 47 civilians were killed. On October 23rd, low-flying US
gunships fired on the farming villages of Bori Chokar and Chowkar-karez,
north of Kandahar, killing 93 civilians. On November 10th, villages in the
Khakrez district were bombed and more than 150 civilians were killed. On
November 18th, bombing by US B52s killed again more than 150 civilians. On
the morning of Sunday, December 1st, B52 bombers made four passes over the
village of Kama Ado, south-west of Jalalabad. The planes dropped 25 bombs
each of 1,000 pounds ... Assuming that the average killing rate has been
maintained since December 7th, the total number of civilians killed in
Afghanistan is now (as of New Year's Day) 5,317. Prof Herold acknowledges
that his tabulation is based only on killings reported in the mainstream
media. What of killings in remote areas of Afghanistan which never got
recorded in the major news outlets? What of the people who have later died
of wounds inflicted by the bombing? And how about the number of people who
have died as a direct result of the war; people denied access to food aid
(over one million people were said by the aid agencies to be at risk at
the outset of the bombing), people who have died because electricity was
cut off, because hospitals were bombed, because their access to food was
shut down? For the most part, the media in the US, Britain and here have
been indifferent to this slaughter. It is not that these atrocities have
got no coverage, although precious little, it is that they are rarely
highlighted and never drawn together to present the full awful picture of
what is going on. For instance, yesterday's New York Times carried no
mention of the killing of the 100 civilians in Qalaye Naizi on Sunday
night. The Washington Post carried the story in an inside page, as did the
Los Angeles Times. There was no mention in the Boston Globe. Sky News and
CNN carried the story in its news bulletins on Monday but in secondary
slots after reports of the launch of the euro (which was hardly news at
all since we all knew about this for years) ... When stories of these
slaughters are carried at all they are prefaced by denials by the US
military. And even when the US military acknowledge a slaughter, it is
carried as though it was of no consequence. When a Pentagon spokesman was
asked about the bombing of Chowkar-karez on October 23rd when at least 93
civilians were killed, he said: "The people are dead because we wanted
them dead." When asked about the incident, Donald Rumsfeld said: "I cannot
deal with that particular village." And that was that. And, of course,
nobody in government or in politics has a word to say about it, not in the
US, not in Britain, and certainly not here. This is not quite a new
barbarism as the obscenities engaged in by both sides in the second World
War, and then carried to a refinement in the Vietnam war, were the
precursors of all this. But there was a hope (wasn't there?) after the
Vietnam war that we had entered into a more civilised era; that no more
would the slaughter of innocents be condoned or acquiesced in. But we
should have known. We remained silent while Iraq was bombarded in 1991 and
Yugoslavia in 1999, and the new canon of "humanitarian bombing" was
sanctioned. Where next? Iraq again? Or Somalia? Or Sudan? What matter.
Have a happy new year. [IRISH TIMES]

Demands by the Security Council that UN members act against global
terrorism are being used by some regimes to justify repression of domestic
dissent, UN officials and independent human rights advocates say. The
anti-terrorism campaign has been used by authoritarian governments to
justify moves to clamp down on moderate opponents, outlaw criticism of
rulers and expand the use of capital punishment ... In a joint letter to
Bush early last month, eight leading American human rights groups said his
order authorizing the tribunals--which could impose the death
penalty--will be cited by foreign dictators "for decades to come" as a
justification for summary executions. The credibility and effectiveness of
the United States in opposing such repressive procedures will be seriously
harmed by this precedent. [LA TIMES]

R. SCHEER. Those early Bush years were crucial for Enron, beginning with
the passage of the 1992 Energy Policy Act, which forced the established
utility companies to carry Enron's electricity sales on their wires. At
the same time, Wendy Gramm, who served under the elder Bush as chair of
the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, allowed for an exemption in the
trading of energy derivatives, which, as the Washington Post reported,
"later became Enron's most lucrative business." Once that was
accomplished, Gramm, wife of Texas GOP Sen. Phil Gramm, resigned from her
government post to take a position on the Enron board. As one of the
members of the board's audit committee, she now is expected to be a key
figure in the lawsuits and federal investigation revolving around Enron's
collapse. Recently, the chief executive of Arthur Andersen, Enron's
outside auditor, told a congressional committee that the accounting firm
had warned the Enron audit committee of what he termed "possible illegal
acts within the company." Wendy Gramm is also mentioned in a bank lawsuit
alleging insider trading as having sold $276,912 in Enron stock in
November 1998. Her response is that she sold the stock to avoid the
appearance of a conflict of interest, given that her husband was chairman
of the Senate Banking Committee. Yet she was still very much on the Enron
board and being rewarded with future stock options when her husband last
year pushed through legislation that exempted key elements of Enron's
energy business from oversight by the federal government. Phil Gramm had
obtained $97,350 in political contributions from Enron over the years, so
perhaps he was acting on his own instincts and not his wife's urgings. The
exemption was passed over the objection of the Clinton administration.
Wendy Gramm also directs the regulatory studies program at George Mason
University, which has received $50,000 from Enron since 1996. Her academic
institute is highly influential in arguing for deregulation, conveniently
joining her corporate and academic interests. Unfortunately for
true-believer deregulators, the Enron collapse shreds their panacea.
Surely no one, least of all Wendy Gramm, who has said she was kept unaware
of the company's chicanery in hiding debt and conducting secret private
deals to the detriment of stockholders, could argue today with a straight
face that Enron was in need of less government oversight. The fact is that
there would be no Enron as we know it were it not for
Republican-engineered changes in government regulation that permitted
Enron its meteoric growth. It's true that the corporation had its allies
among the Democrats; campaign finance corruption and influence peddling
are generally a cover-all-your-bets bipartisan activity. But in this case,
the amounts given to Democrats were puny and late, and there's no doubt
that Enron rode to power primarily on the strength of Lay's influence with
the Bush family. This fact is not mitigated by Enron now hiring Clinton's
former lawyer and various top Democratic lobbying groups, except to note
that these hired guns have no shame. [LA TIMES]

THURSDAY, JANUARY 03, 2002

M. KINSLEY: "The U.S. political system protects freedom of speech from
formal suppression better than any other nation on earth. But American
culture is less tolerant of aberrant views and behavior than many others,
and that tolerance has eroded further since Sept. 11. And as conservative
culture warriors like to point out-or, indeed, complain (as in the
political correctness debate)-a society's norms are set by the culture as
much as by the political system. In a country like Great Britain, the
legal protections for free speech are weaker than ours, but the social
protections are stronger. They lack a First Amendment, but they have
thicker skin and a greater acceptance of eccentricity of all sorts."
[SLATE]

Neither Clinton nor his wife was at their home in Chappaqua when 4-year-
old Buddy was killed Wednesday afternoon after bolting out the open front
door of the home on Old House Lane. . . The dog scampered about 600 feet
down the road, turning south onto heavily traveled Route 117 in hot
pursuit of the car.  Dog owners in Chappaqua are barred from letting them
off their property unless they are on a leash or "under the owner's voice
or visual control." [NY POST] "What did Buddy know? Was he killed first
and then thrown into traffic? He had a strange wound resembling a .45
calibre bullet hole in the head." --poster to Free Republic.

The Guardian and Telegraph dispatch reporters to the "slaughterhouse," a
refugee camp in western Afghanistan that few journalists have visited and
where an estimated 100 people are dying each day from exposure and
starvation; [a] Maslakh camp, translated as Slaughterhouse in English, is
on the brink of an Ethiopian-style humanitarian disaster, aid workers have
warned. Situated 30 miles west of Herat city, the camp is home to more
than 350,000 displaced Afghans, of whom 100 die each day of exposure and
starvation. [GUARDIAN UK]; [b] Christina Lamb has seen death and misery in
refugee camps in many parts of Asia and Africa, but she has never seen
anything as harrowing as the 'forgotten' camp at Maslakh outside Herat,
where up to 800,000 people are starving ... It is more than a week since
[Bibi Gul] and her five children had their last meal - a begged bowl of
rice - and on Friday she woke to find her two-year-old son Tahir stiff and
cold, frozen to death in the rain ... Hundreds of thousands of people are
sleeping in the open, having fled drought and famine in the north and
central parts of the country that before the war were completely reliant
on foreign aid but are now cut off by the winter. [TELEGRAPH UK]

FRIDAY, JANUARY 04, 2002

UNARMED women and children were chased and killed by American helicopters
during an attack on an Afghan village that left 52 dead, the United
Nations suggested yesterday ... Some of the victims, who included ten
women and 25 children, were said to have been killed by the initial
airstrike on Niazi Qala village in Paktia Province, others as they fled to
shelter and a third group as they tried to rescue survivors, Stephanie
Bunker, a UN spokeswoman in Kabul, said. She said that about 15 villagers,
including more women and children, fled north towards a water source. They
were attacked and none survived. [TIMES UK]

The Labour MP Donald Anderson, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs
committee, has called for an inquiry into the reported death of more than
100 civilians in a US bombing raid ... near the village of Niazi Qala, 60
miles south of Kabul, last weekend. His call came on the day that the UN
said it had unconfirmed but reliable reports that 52 civilians were killed
in the incident. It said there was no evidence that Taliban or al-Qaida
fighters were in the village when it was hit. US defence officials said
the bombs were aimed at a weapons store used by Taliban and al-Qaida
supporters. A BBC reporter who visited the site said that although two
arms dumps had been destroyed, there was other debris which appeared to
have come from houses. Bloodstained clothing, children's shoes and school
books lay among the debris, Richard Myron said. [GUARDIAN UK]

Marc Herold, the University of New Hampshire professor who charges that
the U.S. military has killed more than 4,000 civilians in Afghanistan,
says that the U.S. media have largely ignored the toll of the war on
terrorism ... For the past three months, Herold has spent 12 to 14 hours a
day cruising the Net to compile figures on civilian casualties in
Afghanistan, using sources as disparate as the radical Revolutionary
Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and the BBC. He said he
discovered that Washington's anti-terrorism campaign has killed an average
of 65 Afghans a day, information he charges has been blithely dismissed by
the American mainstream press ... His analysis, published on the
independent news site cursor.org, also contends that the Department of
Defense has downplayed civilian deaths in order to maintain popular
support for the war effort, an allegation department officials refused to
address. "We don't respond to spurious charges as a matter of policy,"
said a Department of Defense spokesman. Among his more serious allegations
is the accusation that the U.S. government has tried to create a news
blackout in Afghanistan. In October, Washington bought exclusive rights to
all the commercial satellite images of Afghanistan and pressured the
independent Al-Jazeera television station to tone down anti-American
rhetoric. The station scoffed at the request and a month later, U.S.
missiles destroyed Al-Jazeera's Kabul offices. Herold and Al-Jazeera
officials allege the hit was a deliberate attempt to snuff out negative
news reports, an accusation a Department of Defense spokesman denied "We
hit an al-Qaeda facility, we don't know what Al Jazeera was doing there,"
said Lt. Colonel Dave Lapan ... In a December press conference, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded that accurate casualty figures were
hard to come by in Afghanistan and implied that the United States was not
responsible for non-military deaths. "We did not start this war," Rumsfeld
said. "So understand, responsibility for every single casualty in this
war, whether they're innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the
feet of al-Qaeda and the Taliban." [WIRED]

P. KRUGMAN: "... the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently
found: Adjusting for inflation, the income of families in the middle of
the U.S. income distribution rose from $41,400 in 1979 to $45,100 in 1997,
a 9 percent increase. Meanwhile the income of families in the top 1
percent rose from $420,200 to $1.016 million, a 140 percent increase. Or
to put it another way, the income of families in the top 1 percent was 10
times that of typical families in 1979, and 23 times and rising in 1997.
It would be surprising indeed if this tectonic shift in the economic
landscape weren't reflected in politics ... [But] the Democrats haven't
moved left, the Republicans have moved right. Indeed, the Republicans have
moved so far to the right that ordinary voters have trouble taking it in;
as I pointed out in an earlier column, focus groups literally refused to
believe accurate descriptions of the stimulus bill that House Republican
leaders passed on a party-line vote back in October." [NY TIMES]

But the war brings bipartisanship. Leon Fuerth, "national security" (=
foreign policy) adviser to Al Gore, writes, "... Saddam Hussein and his
government must be ripped out of Iraq ... [But] the next phase needs to be
a sustained assault on the broader network: attacking its individual cells
by working in concert with intelligence and police services around the
world ... We should take the position that if Mr. Hussein blocks
inspection of facilities suspected of being used for manufacturing weapons
of mass destruction, the United States will destroy those sites. Further,
we should develop the capabilities of the Iraqi National Congress, help
the Kurds while making clear that we are not supporting a Kurdish state,
and use covert action across its full potential..." [NY TIMES]

[continued in part 2]