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August 26, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Phoenix,
CIA and Maj. Gen. Bruce Lawlor: From Vietnam
to Homeland Security
August 24 / 25, 2002
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Of Clogs and Enron
Falk / Krieger
No War
Against Iraq
Ceylon Mooney
Fasting
for Iraq
Jonathon Wright
Police
Brutality in Atlanta
Ralph Nader
Congress's
Pay Raise Scam
Jeffrey St. Clair
Chainsaw
George
Alexander Cockburn
Alterman
Cheapens Holocaust
August 23, 2002
Dave Marsh
Selling
Out?
Anthony Gancarski
Super-Duper:
Oil, al-Qaeda and a West African Adventure
William Hughes
Lieberman's
Conflict
of Interest?
Kurt Nimmo
The Lapdog
Conversion of CNN:
They Didn't Want to "Criticize" a Popular War
Sean Donahue
Hardline
in Colombia
August 22, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Crushing
Congressional Dissent: The Fall of Hilliard, Barr and McKinney
Gilad Atzmon
The Zionist
Lobby and
American Foreign Policy
Robert Johnson
Right
Wing Doves?
Alexander Cockburn
Taking
Down McKinney
August 21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The Return
of Mani
Romi Mahajan
Bhopal
on $40 a Day
Jerre Skog
Bush and
Europe:
Fun, Profit & Betrayal
Tom Crumpacker
The
Politics of the Cuba Embargo
August 20, 2002
Michael Neumann
The American
Left
and Palestine
William Blum
Chemical
Weapons, Iraq and the US: What the Times Left Out of the Story
Ralph Nader
The Politics
of Bankruptcy
Robert Fisk
The Two
Deaths of Abu Nidal
Philip Farruggio
Junk
School Nation
Edward Said
Disunity
and Factionalism
Kathleen Christison
Israeli
Tilt: the NYT
and Palestine
August 19, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Advance
Draft of Bush's 9/11 Anniversary Speech
Gavin Keeney
Auteur-Driven
Vehicles
Kurt Nimmo
Son of
COINTELPRO
David Krieger
Peace
Declarations from Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 14 / 18, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
CounterPunch Staff
Our Favorite
Films
Jeffrey St. Clair
Usonian
Utopia's:
Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon and the Iron Wall
Uri Avnery
A Phone
Call from Hell
Wendy Brinker
Racism
is Alive and Well in the South Carolina Death House
Hamit Dardagan
The
Unbearable Lightness of Bombing
Ahmad Faruqui
The Legacy
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Philip Farruggio
Leading
by Example
Anthony Gancarski
Union
Jackass: Richard Perle's UK Charm Offensive
Jeff Halper
Fortress
Israel: the Message of the Bulldozer
Robert Jensen
Our Failures
are Borne by the Palestinians
Gary Leupp
An Open
Letter to Bruce Springsteen about Bush's War on Terrorism
Dave Marsh
Sing a
Simple Song
Rashmi Mayur
To Johannesburg
in Search of Hope
Steve Perry
Another Fine Mess:
Martha Stewart and Paul Wellstone
Anis Shivani
What's
Next...Concentration Camps?
Edward Said
Punishment
by Detail
Jeff Taylor
Paul Wellstone's
Legacy
August 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
At the al--Qaeda
Cemetery
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporate
Crime Time
Andrew Cockburn
Bono
Betrays Ireland
August 12, 2002
Messier / Dreier
The IDF
in Nablus:
Shooting at Kites;
Bulldozing Schools
Brian J. Foley
No Iraqi
Surprise: Look Now
at the Dangers of War
Fran Shor
Psychic
and Political Numbing
in Preparations for War
August 10/11, 2002
Bruce Jackson
Buffalo
in Black and White
Robert Fisk
US Bombs
Still Killing Civilians
Lawrence McGuire
How Does
Christianity Work?
Ralph Nader
The Quest
for the
Fuel Efficient Car
Frank Fugate
The Arabs
I Know
Jan Oberg
Visit Iraq
Jill Drier
Dodging
Bullets in Nablus
Walt Brasch
The Bush
2 Legacy...So Far
Poetry
M. Shahid Alam
Death by
Sanctions
Anthony Gancarski
Coin of the Realm
David Krieger
Einstein's
Regret
August 9, 2002
Robert Fisk
Gul Agha:
the UN's Warlord of the Year
Nelson P. Valdés
An Open
Letter to Bush
on Cuba Policy
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporate
Crime:
More Shareholder Power
Not the Solution
Ansar Ahmed
The Waning
of the
Pax Americana
Alexander Cockburn
War,
the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene"
August 8, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Iraq:
The Final Storm?
Dave Marsh
Now Ain't
the Time
for Your Tears
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Tries to Hide Role in Venezuela Coup
Anthony Gancarski
AIPAC,
Congress and Iraq
Robert Fisk
Families
of the Disappeared Demand Answers
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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Weekend
Edition
August 26, 2002
Letter to a Pilot
by Uri Avnery
I have read the interview given by your commander,
Major General Dan Halutz, and, like many others in Israel and
abroad, I was shocked.
On July 23, one of your comrades (or
perhaps you yourself?) dropped a one-ton bomb on a house in a
dense residential neighborhood in Gaza. The aim was to execute,
without trial, Salah Shehadeh, a Hamas activist. Apart from him,
16 neighbors, including 11 children, were killed. Tens of other
men, women and children were wounded.
In school you certainly learned the words
of the famous poem by Bialik, the national poet, "Even Satan
has not invented the revenge of a little child." I assumed
that you are torn by doubt after this act, that you look at your
children and tell yourself: "Children are children. How
are their children responsible for the situation?"
And here comes your commander and says
that you have no pangs of conscience, none whatsoever. I don't
know whether he is telling the truth or slandering you.
The general says that he told you: "Your
execution was perfect...You did exactly what you were told to
do...You did not deviate one inch left or right...You have no
problem."
Those who do have problems with this
action and protest against it (like myself) are called by the
general "bleeding hearts...a insignificant and vociferous
minority..." He accuses us of "daring to use methods
of mafia-style blackmail against fighters...treason is forbidden...a
paragraph must be found in the law in order to put them to trial
in Israel...(this) reminds me of dark time of the Jewish people,
when a minority amongst us informed against other Jews."
He also condemns "the obsession of some journalists...they
are bored...so they jump..."
These extreme utterances do not testify
to the mental tranquility of the general, who says that he has
"a deep feeling of justice and morality." I would say
that on the head of the general, the blue cap is burning.* Each
word betrays hysteria.
* An allusion to the Jewish adage: "On
the head of the thief, the hat is burning," meaning that
his behavior discloses his guilt.
But the style must cause deep anxiety.
The words would have sounded natural if uttered by a general
in Argentina or Chile during the military dictatorship, or by
a Turkish officer about to topple the civilian government. When
an Israeli general uses such words against the media and civil
society, a red light is turned on. The more so since he was not
summarily dismissed but, on the contrary, publicly lauded. Israeli
democracy is losing height.
But I do not want to speak with you about
Dan Halutz, but about yourself.
Who are you? What are you?
One of the pilots explained to the interviewer,
Vered Levy-Barzilai: "(That) is the uniqueness and the beauty
of the world of the pilot. You sit up above, quietly, with your
wide space. There are no noises, no booms, no shouts of people.
You are totally focused on the target, you don't have the dirt
and the horror of the battlefield. You do your thing and head
home."
Dan Halutz, too, describes his feelings
thus: "If you really want to know what I feel when I release
a bomb, I will tell you: I feel a slight bump to the plane as
a result of the bomb's release. A second later it's gone, and
that's all. That's what I feel."
"That's all." Down below horrible
things happen, mutilated bodies fly in the air, wounded human
beings writhe in pain, people buried under the debris utter their
last groan, women scream over the bodies of their children, a
scene of hell, not different from the scene of a suicide bombing
- and "that's all". A slight bump to the plane, and
then home, to a warm shower and bed.
I must confess that it is hard for me
to imagine this experience. I did my combat service in the infantry,
I saw who I was shooting at and who was shooting at me; I could
at any moment have been wounded (as I was) and killed. It is
difficult for me to imagine the experience of a person up in
the sky, sowing death and destruction without being in any danger
himself.
Is this pilot - you! - afflicted by doubt?
Does he sometimes torment himself? Does he ask himself if a certain
action is permitted, moral, right? Or does he - you! - become
a robot, a "professional" who is proud of his perfect
control over the awesome machine-of-death entrusted to him and
of the "exact" execution of his orders?
I know that not all pilots are robots.
I still see before my eyes Colonel Yig'al Shohat reading from
his paper, with a voice trembling with emotion, his historic
appeal to his fellow-pilots and pupils in the Air Force to refuse
manifestly illegal orders, such as precisely this action in Gaza.
Shohat, a war-hero who was shot down over Egypt and whose leg
was amputated by an Egyptian surgeon, is the exact opposite of
Halutz.
You must decide - to be a human being
like Shohat, sensitive to the suffering of others, or a robot
like Halutz, who feels a slight bump while he kills dozens of
human beings.
The Rules of War were born after the
Thirty Years War, one of the most horrible in the annals of Europe,
a holocaust in which a third of the German nation was wiped out
and two thirds of Germany laid waste. The international conventions
are based on the conviction that even in a hard war, when each
side is fighting for existence, the commandments of human morality
must be kept.
Don't make it easy for yourself by adopting
the primitive slogans of Halutz, who justifies everything by
saying that Shehadeh was "evil incarnate", words which
betray his ultra-rightist world-view. Shehadeh was not put on
trial. None of his alleged acts were proven. He certainly believed
that he was serving his people, as you believe that you are serving
yours. But even if it were proven that he was a dangerous enemy,
this does not justify in any way the killing of his neighbors.
The argument that this wholesale killing prevented the killing
of Jews is not valid. When the pilot released his bomb he knew
for certain that he was killing many people, while Shehadeh's
ability to kill us was only an assumption. On the other hand,
it was certain that this killing would lead to acts of revenge,
and that much Jewish flood would flow because of it. Furthermore,
there is a hell of a difference between a guerilla group and
a mighty army acting on behalf of a state.
Under these circumstances, would you
have told your commander: "I refuse to fulfill this order,
because it is manifestly illegal?" Israeli law and human
morality oblige you to do so. But Dan Halutz says: "Refusal
to perform a sortie is not part of the rules of my game."
What about the rules of your game?
Uri Avnery
has closely followed the career of Ariel Sharon for four decades.
Over the years, he has written three extensive biographical essays
about him, two (1973, 1981) with his cooperation.
Weekend Features
Douglas Valentine
Phoenix,
CIA and Maj. Gen. Bruce Lawlor:
From Vietnam to Homeland Security
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