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December 17, 2001
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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by Cockburn
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December 17,
2001
Civilian Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
By William Blum
The question is now upon us.
Who
killed more innocent, defenseless people? The terrorists in the
United States on September 11 with their crashing airplanes?
Or the American government in Afghanistan the past ten weeks
with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, their AGM-130 missiles, their
15,000 pound "daisy cutter" bombs, their depleted uranium,
and their cluster bombs?
The count in New York and Washington
is now a little over 3,000 and going down steadily. The total
count of civilian dead in Afghanistan has been essentially ignored
by American officials and the domestic media, but a painstaking
compilation of domestic and international press reports by University
of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, hunting down the
many incidents of 100-plus counts of the dead, the scores of
dead, the dozens, and the smaller numbers, arrived at 3,767 through
December 6, and still counting.
Ah, people say, but the terrorists purposely
aimed to kill civilians (actually, many of the victims were military
or military employees), while any non-combatant victims of the
American bombings were completely accidental.
Whenever the United States goes into
one of its periodic bombing frenzies and its missiles take the
lives of numerous civilians, this is called "collateral
damage" -- inflicted by the Fates of War -- for the real
targets, we are invariably told, were military. But if day after
day, in one country after another, the same scenario takes place
-- dropping lethal ordnance with the knowledge that large numbers
of civilians will perish or be maimed, even without missiles
going "astray" -- what can one say about the intentions
of the American military?
The best, the most charitable, thing
that can be said is that they simply don't care. They want to
bomb and destroy for certain political ends and they don't particularly
care if the civilian population suffers grievously. Often, the
US actually does want to cause the suffering, hoping that it
will lead the people to turn against the government. This was
a recurrent feature of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. US/NATO
officials freely admitted this again and again.
Now let's look at the September 11 terrorist
hijackers. They also had a political purpose: retaliation for
decades of military, economic and political oppression imposed
upon the Middle East by The American Empire. The buildings targeted
by them were clearly not chosen at random. The Pentagon and World
Trade Center represented the military and economic might of the
United States, while the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania may
well have been aiming for the political wing, the White House.
Destruction of these institutions -- powerful both symbolically
and in actuality -- was the purpose of the operation. And the
resulting casualties? In the hijackers' view, these people could
be seen as collateral damage. The best, the most charitable,
thing that can be said is that the hijackers simply didn't care.
In reaction to some awful photos of Afghan
victims of US bombing that appeared in the US media, the host
of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume",
in a November program, wondered why journalists should bother
covering civilian deaths at all. "The question I have,"
said Hume, "is civilian casualties are historically, by
definition, a part of war, really. Should they be as big news
as they've been?"
Mara Liasson from National Public Radio
was direct: "No. Look, war is about killing people. Civilian
casualties are unavoidable."
Fox pundit and U.S. News & World
Report columnist Michael Barone had no argument. "I think
the real problem here is that this is poor news judgment on the
part of some of these news organizations. Civilian casualties
are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is that they accompany
wars."
But, if in fact the September 11 attacks
were an act of war, as we're told repeatedly, then the casualties
of the World Trade Center were clearly civilian war casualties.
Why then has the media devoted so much time to their deaths?
William Blum
is the author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's
Only Superpower. Portions of the books can be read at: http://members.aol.com/
superogue/homepage.htm (with a link to Killing Hope)
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