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October
9, 2001
David
Vest
The
Rout That Wasn't
Michael
Mandel
This
War Is Illegal
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombs
Weaken Taliban
Lenni
Brenner
Powell
the Owl
Zha
Marginalization
and Terror
Steve
Perry
It
Begins
October
8, 2001
Zbigniew
Brzezinski
How
Jimmy Carter and
I Started the Muj
Philip Agee
The
USA and Terrorism
Mahajan
and Jensen
A
War of Lies
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance
Builds an Airport
October
7, 2001
John Pilger
Hitchens'
Slurs
Tariq
Ali
Who
Said History
Stopped Being Ironical?
October
6, 2001
Vijay
Prashad
US
War Aims
Kevin
Gray
The
Trap:
Blacks and 9/11
October
5, 2001
Ronnie
Gilbert
Déjà
Vu: The FBI's War
on Civil Liberties
Patrick
Cockburn
Taliban
Cluster Bombs
Dave
Marsh
John
Brown, Woody Guthrie
and the Secret Music of 9/11
Babak
Nahid
A
Suspect's Perspective
October
4, 2001
David
Vest
Send
in the Cons
Robin
Blackburn
Road
to Armageddon
Noam
Chomsky
Chatting
with Chomsky
Tony
Blair
The
Dossier on bin Laden
Norman
Madarasz
Canada
Kow-Tows to US
Lorenzo Ervin
No Palestinian
Ever
Called Me Nigger
October
3, 2001
Peter Bell
Hitchens
and Coulter:
Love at Last?
Patrick
Cockburn
Waiting
Is the Hardest Part
Jeff
Chang
Clear
Channel Fires
Davey D!
John Chuckman
War
on Terror:
Crusade Without a Definition
Mahajan/Jensen
Tough
Talk Won't Solve
Problems of Terrorism
Ariel
Dorfman:
America
the Wounded
Lennie
Brenner
Dr.
Watson in Afghanistan
Steve
Perry:
Ashcroft's
Scare Tactics
October
2, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn:
Inside
an Afghan Hospital
Richard
Manning:
A
Vietnam Vet on Patriotism
St. Clair/Cockburn:
Tarnished
Star,
Tom Ridge in Vietnam
October
1, 2001
Noam
Chomsky:
Memo
to Hitchens
Hizam
Bitar:
Refuting
Michael Kinsley
David Grenier:
The
Good, The Bad,
and the Ugly
Douglas
Valentine:
Homeland
Insecurity
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
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published Oct. 3, 2001
8-Page Special
Issue
Aftermath
Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
on
Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for
Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids
Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
Vietnam
Same as Kerrey's?
A CounterPunch
Journey
to Ramallah
A Word About
God
Nostrodamus
Jam-maker
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CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas
Valentine
Al
Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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October 9,
2001
The Empire Strikes Back
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey
St Clair
As he gave an official debut to the
bombing of Afghanistan (entirely illegal under international
law and the UN charter) with high explosive and food packages
(a day's worth of food for 37,000 was dropped on a land of 20
million people, some 7 million of whom are on the verge of starvation,)
Bush's performance on Sunday was a reversion to his habitual
wooden delivery and inappropriate flaps of the hand. Can't his
people see that like most people W. talks better standing up,
addressing a live audience rather than peering into a camera
while reading the teleprompt. On Sunday evening a couple of the
networks were cross-cutting between Bush and Osama bin Laden,
and bin Laden, offered by far the more compelling iconic presence,
with pithier sound bites.
"America was hit by God
in one of its softest spots. America is full of fear from its
north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for
that. This is something, very little, of what we have tasted
for decades. For nearly 80 years we have been tasting this humility.
"I say by God the great,
America will never dream, not those who live in America will
never taste security and safety unless we feel security and safety
in our lands and in Palestine."
It's easy to imagine millions
of Muslims and other folk who have been on the receiving end
of Uncle Sam's boot thrilling to this kind of stuff. Two Arabists
being interviewed by Peter Jennings on ABC Sunday night couldn't
contain their enthusiasm for the potency of bin Laden's message
to the Arab "street". He's the most popular figure
in the Arab world since Nasser, probably since Saladin.
But in terms of the actual
balance of forces, the bin Laden video looked to us more like
political obituary than a fearsome call to arms. Though there
are plenty of mountain caves for him to hide in and probably
plenty of bin Laden lookalikes roaming the Hindukush as decoys,
it may not be long before he's either sitting up there with Allah
and the houris, or writhing in the seventh circle of hell, depending
on which God you believe in. Included in Dante's seventh circle
are those who offer violence against self (the suicide bombers),
violence against neighbors, violence against God. The eighth
circle was reserved for ordinary fraud and the ninth for complex
or treacherous fraud, meaning that Dante got stung in some bad
business deals. As a seventh circle man, bin Laden is scheduled
by Dante to be buried in burning sand forever which, considering
he comes from Saudi Arabia, is his natural habitat anyway.
We're passing from appalling
human loss and suffering, live in the front yard of the media
capital of the world, to the traditional parameters of imperial
retribution. We switched on the tv Monday morning to hear some
idiot on CNN intone solemnly that Diego Garcia, the island in
the Indian ocean from which the B-52s fly their missions to Afghan
istan, is known as the "footprint of freedom", thus
purporting to conflate its physical shape and its political role.
This tells us everything one needs to know about propaganda in
times of conflict. Diego Garcia is notorious for being one of
the most distressing sinkholes of imperial injustice in recent
history.
"The
Footprint of Freedom"
In the Chagos archipelago Diego
Garcia was not so long ago populated by some 3,000 descendants
of African slaves and Indian labourers known as the Ilois. In
1965, when Diego Garcia was under British control, Harold Wilson's
Labour government made a secret deal with the US. Diego Garcia
was rented to the US to establish a major air and naval base.
In return for handing over Diego Garcia, Britain was allowed
a five million pound sterling discount against the purchase of
a single US-manufactured Polaris nuclear submarine. The US pays
no other rent or charge for its occupation.
In a ghastly saga supervised
by the British, with a mixture of trickery and force, the Ilois
were kicked out of their homeland and transported to Mauritius,
over a thousand miles south-east. People born on the Chagos between
1965 (when the government claimed there was no indigenous population)
and 1973 (when the last Ilois were forcibly removed) have been
refused birth certificates. Lacking skills to cope with a modern
urban society, many succumbed to alcoholism and drug addiction.
Ilois women were forced into prostitution. Thirty five years
later, unemployment among the islanders runs at 60 per cent.
Suicide rates are high. They are one of the poorest communities
in the world and of course they have been struggling to return
to Diego Garcia. In November 2000, the Ilois won a great victory
in the English High Court. Their right to return to their homeland
was upheld. The Ilois' plight has not ended. In defiance of international
law, the US refuse to recognise the court's ruling.
There have been a number of
bold United Nations Resolutions about the illegality of Anglo-American
occupation of the Chagos. Britain also clearly violated Article
9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 at the
time, as: "No-one should be subjected to...exile".
The US military base and associated facilities occupy around
half of Diego Garcia. It would be practical for the Ilois to
live on the other half of the island and also their legal right.
The US now concedes that it cannot prevent the islanders from
returning to the neighboring islands of Peros Banhos and Salomon,
but it will not allow them on Diego Garcia.
So much for Diego Garcia, footprint
of freedom. The bombing of targets in Afghanistan is mostly for
show, to demonstrate US resolve. The Pentagon concedes there
are few worthwhile targets and as with the sorties directed at
Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, there's been the usual
attempt at aerial assassination, striking at Mullah Omar's compound,
the usual claims of attacking "command and control centers"
(any place with a telephone, most likely) and the usual result:
the uniting of previously discontented inhabitants in common
hatred of the assailants from the air. What does the claim of
destroying "a training camp" actually mean in substantive
terms? Blowing up a few huts or tents at enormous expense.
The Bombing
Is Purely Cosmetic
It won't be bombs that settle
the issue, and the Pentagon has small appetite for any substantial
foray into Afghanistan on the ground. Cash will be the lubricant
of victory, and since unlimited supplies of cash are available
to buy support for the US among the Afghan factions, it may not
be long before the Taliban are chased out. The only inauspicious
factors from Bush's point of view are that the bribing will be
the province of the CIA, whose record for screw-ups is ample,
and the intermediaries is be Pakistani military intelligence,
which sponsored the Taliban's triumph and which has its own agenda,
which is not one inclined to peace and reconstruction for Afghanistan.
Much has been been made of
the doom awaiting martial forays into Afghanistan, the British
debacles of the nineteenth century and the Soviets' in the 1980s.
But the British were exceptionally stupid and the Russians didn't
suffer unduly. Across ten years they lost some 13,000 in Afghanistan.
A Russian colonel, veteran of the campaign, recently disclosed
to Patrick Cockburn that about 33 per cent of these mortalities
were due to accidents (tanks falling off roads and so forth),
which brings down the number of Russians actually killed by the
muj to under a thousand a year. (Another numerical perspective
is afforded by the fact the Russians killed at least five times
as many Chechens in the days of the conquest of Grozny, hailed
by Clinton, as died in the World Trade Center, and here we have
Bush arm in arm with his soul-bro, Putin, who knows that in these
days of world solidarity against terror he can do what he wants
to the Chechens without arousing even the pretence of moral reproof.)
The muj, including bin Laden,
held out against the Russians and in the end forced their withdrawal
because they enjoyed the limitless support of the Pakistani military
and of the US, in the form of the CIA running the largest covert
op in its history at a cost of $3.5 billion. Who have the Taliban
got? A starving, discontented domestic population and external
enemies on all sides, wallowing in promises of huge American
dispensations. Their original sponsors in the Pakistani military
have far larger satisfactions than temporary loss of a client
regime in Kabul before a new one can be cobbled together. Pakistan
is now certified as OK to be a member of the nuclear club, with
its debts rescheduled.
The globe-spinners talk about
bin Laden's dangerous appeal to Muslims around the world chafing
at the despotism and corruption of their leaders, the occupation
of Jerusalem by the Jews and their US protector, the starving
of Iraqi children, but if the Arab world is so much of a tinder
box, why didn't bin Laden try to apply the match there? All talk
of fragile Araby notwithstanding, the regimes there have been
astoundingly stable across years of political turmoil.
Impregnable
Bush
Putting grief and horror aside,
emergencies are usually political godsends to the regime in power,
in this case Bush's. Before September 11 he was derided across
the world as the beneficiary of a dubious election, a man out
of step with world opinion on the Kyoto Treaty and on Star Wars.
Domestically his programs were in trouble and the country plunging
into recession on his watch after eight go-go years. Now he's
leader of the planet, with his only vocal foes in hiding in the
mountains of Afghanistan. His presidential authenticity is beyond
dispute and his stimulus package looking propitious in Congress.
Many people have learned to like the guy. Opposition is nervous
and fitful, as Ashcroft pushes his dreadful terror package of
attacks on the Bill of Rights. Dante didn't like lawyers, and
put them in the Eighth Circle. What would he thought of this,
in the Senate version of the Terror Bill:
"(d) UNDERCOVER ACTIVITIES-
Notwithstanding any provision of State law, including disciplinary
rules, statutes, regulations, constitutional provisions, or case
law, a Government attorney may, for the purpose of enforcing
Federal law, provide legal advice, authorization,
concurrence, direction, or supervision on conducting
undercover activities, and any attorney employed as an
investigator or other law enforcement agent by the
Department of Justice who is not authorized to represent the
United States in criminal or civil law enforcement
litigation or to supervise such proceedings may participate
in such activities, even though such activities may require
the use of deceit or misrepresentation, where such
activities are consistent with Federal law.
"(e) ADMISSIBILITY OF
EVIDENCE- No violation of any
disciplinary, ethical, or professional conduct rule shall be
construed to permit the exclusion of otherwise admissible
evidence in any Federal criminal proceedings."
Who else
pays the price?
We imagine Ariel Sharon will,
though not Israel. He's been having a Bad Emergency, as Bush
says for the benefit of the Arab world he's always dreamed of
a Palestinian state. Someone asked Shimon Peres if he could remember
a time when there had been as tart exchanges as those that occurred
when last week Sharon likened Israel's situation to that of Czechoslovakia
in 1938, the White House announced that his remarks were entirely
"unacceptable" and Sharon publicly apologised. Peres
said there had been a time when Menachem Begin had told Jimmy
Carter that Israel was not a banana republic.
He may have done, but the truly
fraught episode in those years was when Carter got mad at Begin
for having lied about withdrawing from Lebanon after the 1978
invasion. Carter sent the deputy US ambassador Richard Viets
to Begin with a letter saying that unless he got out within in
24 hours Carter would introduce a resolution in the UN condemning
Israel and cut off aid. Viets later recalled to Andrew Cockburn
(it pays to have industrious brothers, doesn't it, though the
bin Laden family probably wouldn't agree right now)for his 1991
book Dangerous Liaison that Begin "went over to the sideboard
and poured two large whiskeys and then said, "Mr Viets,
you win."
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