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October
13, 2001
Alexander
Cockburn
War
Can't Save the Economy
October
12, 2001
Imran
Khan
Try
Them in Court
Vijay
Prashad
War
in a Passive Voice
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombing
the Taliban
October
11, 2001
David
Vest
Bob
Dylan and 9/11
Amb.
Edward Peck
Bush
War Plan "Dumb"
Hani
Shukrallah
West
Is As West Does
Patrick
Cockburn
Looming
Humanitarian Crisis
October
10, 2001
Tom
Turnipseed
Earth
is Our "Homeland"
Steve
Perry
What
Is To Be Done?
Simon
Jenkins
The
Dumbest Weapon
Tariq
Ali
The
Pakistan Maelstrom
Cockburn/St.
Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
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
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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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
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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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Reviews of Gore:
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New Stories:
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October 13,
2001
Letters to Editors
By Carl
Estabrook
What follows
are a series of letters I sent to my local, remarkably rightwing,
paper in Champaign/Urbana.
[01.09.29]
One of the worst lies offered
by pundits and professors since the atrocities of September 11
is the insistence that any attempt to understand the causes,
reasons or motives for those crimes is to justify or excuse them.
The assertion is dishonest nonsense.
The outrages that draw people
to terror networks to the point of being willing to kill and
be killed, are also resented by people of all social classes
and backgrounds throughout the Middle East. It is the fault of
those pundits and professors that Americans are largely unaware
of them -- (1) US support for corrupt family dictatorships across
Arabia, support that is the result of US insistence on control
of Mideast oil; (2) US sanctions on Iraq, which have killed a
million people, half of them children; and (3) US support for
Israel's murderous occupation of Palestine, now in its thirty-fifth
year and declared illegal by the United Nations.
Until we end these crimes,
for which we as US citizens are responsible, we will be unable
to stop crimes like those of September 11, for which we are not
responsible.
[01.10.01]
On Monday, October 1, the local
daily chose to feature on its editorial page a frantic attack
by one Michael Kelly [of the Washington Post] on "pacifism"
as "immoral." Kelly doesn't bother to distinguish the
various views to which that term might refer, up to and including
the position that the US should employ international law to apprehend
and prosecute the criminals responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks,
rather than launching military assaults on impoverished countries.
No, he just knows that "the pacifists' position ... is evil,"
and, although "their arguments are not being taken seriously,"
he seems very afraid that they will convince "Americans
to not fight."
Kelly seems to want (other
people) to split heads as if they were infinitives, and he enlists
George Orwell to help him make the Hitler Rhetorical Transposition
-- i.e., the standard assertion that all our enemies, whoever
they may be, are always like Nazi Germany -- and therefore of
course justify any enormity practiced upon them.
Instead of this mad persiflage,
we might get a better idea of the motivation for Kelly's attack
on peacemakers of all sorts from another recent column of his,
in which (before September 11) he advised Israel to reject American
advice on restraint: "Why shouldn't [Israel] go right ahead
and escalate the violence? ... It can win only by fighting the
war on its terms, unleashing an overwhelming force ... to destroy,
kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces..."
Machine-gun Kelly is at one
with Osama bin Laden in wanting to bring about a war between
"the West" and Islam. "That is [their] position,
and it is evil."
[01.10.03]
Suppose that, after the Columbine
High School shootings, the government's policy had been to go
to the homes of the shooters and kill the parents who had "harbored"
and "succored" them; locate the friends who agreed
with their ideas and maybe even had some knowledge of their plans
and kill them; and then burn the entire suburb to the ground.
The media, while applauding the infinite justice of this response,
would then excoriate as a justification of the original atrocity
any suggestion that the motives or causes for the events should
be examined.
We would of course condemn
these responses as criminal and psychotic. Yet equivalent policies
are being undertaken and applauded in response to the killings
of September 11. What is the difference? The answer is short,
sharp, and nasty: racism. Arabs and Afghans living half a world
away are simply considered not quite so human as Colorado suburbanites,
and therefore they may be attacked in ways that are inconceivable
for people like us.
If we could put aside the "bloodlust"
that the president rather surprisingly referred to last weekend,
we could recognize that the proper course is to use rather than
to flout the instruments of international law -- the UN Security
Council and the World Court -- to apprehend and prosecute those
responsible for the September 11 crimes, and to try to understand
why they happened, in order to see that they do not happen again.
And it would be good idea to avoid more killing, even if it makes
us feel better. CP
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